Posterous theme by Cory Watilo

Dubber's New Thing


What I'm excited about right now

Sketch by Dylan Horrocks

Pcynn

New Zealand comic artist Dylan Horrocks offered to take some sketch commissions last week, and I suggested something about Auckland, jazz and coffee. I told him a bit of a tale about how I ran a jazz label in Auckland in the late 90s, and how most of the time was spent in cafes. I connect those things together in my head now.

This brilliant picture is what he's come back with and it's in the post to me now. I'll definitely be framing this and hanging it on the wall. I've loved his work for an awfully long time. So excited. Check out http://hicksvillecomics.com

Speed-reading articles on the iPad

I've been looking for a way to read articles quickly on the iPad. Today I came up with the combo that makes it work.

I'm a big fan of Spreeder on the web, and simply copy and paste text into that when I want to go through large chunks of text quickly. But today I stumbled across an iPad & iPhone app called QuickReader, and I really like the way it works.

Here's the video demo:

Of course, most of the articles I read and have stored in Mendeley are in PDF format, and this doesn't cope with PDFs... but you can manage an ePub collection via the App FileSharing system in iTunes. So of course I needed a good PDF to ePub converter.

"Calibre!" I hear you cry. "No," I reply. "Calibre is nonsense."

I found PDF to ePub in the Mac App Store (currently £20 cheaper than usual, at £5.99) and that does exactly what I want it to do: batch convert PDFs into ePubs and put them in a folder.

Converting them, then dragging them into QuickReader, then syncing the iPad works brilliantly about 90% of the time. When the PDFs are single page images, it doesn't work - but if you can select the text, it can make an ePub.

Really impressed - and I have done A LOT of reading today as a result.

It's my new thing.

Coming to a close

I’ve been retiring some services I don’t use recently. I’m out of Spotify, Last.fm, Facebook and a few others. It also occurs to me that I haven’t been using Posterous very much either. I’m going to keep this account open and I might find a use for it again at some point in the future - but for now, everything’s going on elsewhere.

My personal blog is a good starting point…

Don't make me angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry.

I was sent an email inviting me to try out a new online service for musicians. 

Here's a graphic from the blog post describing the new service:

Fz_imageweb1

No, that's NOT how it "should be". 

Normally I would just delete an email like this (I get them all the time) - but the site's co-founder finished his email with "Please let us know what you think."

Here's what I replied:

You probably don't really want to know what I think.  However - since you asked:

I think this sort of thing is part of the problem. I think the quest for fame is psychotic. I think this sort of thing builds false hopes and expectations for musicians and perpetuates the myth that all that needs to happen is for a band to be discovered and then all their problems will be over. I think that usually this sort of website is designed simply to make money by exploiting people's stupidity, ego and greed. I think the world would be a better place without it.

Sorry that's probably not the answer you were hoping for.

Dubber

As Jon Hickman put it on Twitter, this is exactly the sort of thing that I "Hulk out" over. If you want to make me uncontrollably angry, simply invite me to your new website for unsigned bands that helps them get famous. 

To be clear - I want bands to be successful. Really, massively successful. But I do not wish them fame, and anyone who tries to help them achieve it is enabling psychotic behaviour, feeding narcissism, and encouraging mental illness.

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