I'm Hijacking My Audio...

Gonna get all geeky on yo' ass now and say how much I love Audio Hijack Pro! You see, it allows you to not only hijack any audio stream on your Mac (DVDs, internet radio, anything with an audio stream really), but it's also the easiest way of recording old vinyl LPs and tapes that I've found.

I used to have to record the audio as one long file and then edit it, which took forever, but Audio Hijack Pro allows you to chuck the audio at it, it then listens out for suitable silences in the music and slices it into separate files ie. songs!

It also encodes it as either an MP3, or AAC file - whatever you want, so you don't have to encode it when you've finished. And then it chucks it into iTunes for you as well!

I had one long file with two songs in it (the silence wasn't long enough), but then I chucked it into AHP's sister program Fission, and sliced it and named the files in a couple of minutes. Brilliant. (As Danny Dog would say...)

I'm not paid by Rogue Amoeba the creators of Audio Hijack Pro and Fission, but I wholeheartedly endorse them!

I knew ITV1 shouldn't mess with these things...

So, ITV1 buys the rights to screen Pushing Daisies, the new series from Dead Like Me and Wonderfalls creator, Bryan Fuller. They showed the first episode last Saturday and it pulled in a reasonably respectable 5.7m viewers. I loved the show, and look forward to seeing the rest of the series...

...except we won't get to see all of it, because ITV1 only have 8 slots to show the programme before Euro 2008 coverage starts. Therefore they've taken the decision to drop Episode 2, as they figure it was the one we could live without - after all it only shows the early life of the main character, Ned, and how he discovered his resurrection power - nothing really important, I'm sure...

I wouldn't mind, except no home nation is taking part in Euro 2008... Oh, wait, I still wouldn't care!

The Curse of Facebook

That's it, I've been sucked in... Facebook has grabbed me and dragged me under. I'm even writing this blog entry in Facebook....

Must check profile, must look at friends' photos, must add applications, must... play... Pirates!

Must see if there is a Facebook addict group...

Matinée Club

Once upon a time, there were a bad called The Modern, and I thought they were rather good, when I heard their song "Suburban Culture" which was given away by iTunes as their Single of the Week. Eighties electro-pop, very Human League, with a diva-esque front woman called Emma (who once played the young Pat Butcher...) and a bloke with an odd voice called Chi.

Time went by, the band released a couple of singles, but the album never appeared, and their website seemed frozen. "Oh well," I thought, "another great band down the dumper before they've gone anywhere..."

And then today I checked their website to find that it had disappeared altogether. So I Googled them to find out what had happened, and it turns out that they've renamed themselves Matinée Club and have a new website (except it's a lot like the old The Modern website) at www.MatinéeClub.co.uk!

Not only that, but they've finally got around to releasing their album on iTunes, called Modern Industry. It contains most of their tracks as The Modern, plus some new ones (and a cover of David Bowie's "Modern Love")

There's more to the story, which you can find at Wikipedia if you're interested, or check out their MySpace page.

Back in Business!

The kinkyMachine is back!  Yes, I've got a brand new MacBook, and I'm gonna use it (for good and possibly for naughty, but probably not for evil.  That'd be wrong.)

It's soooooo cool!  I mean, my old iBook (500MHz Power PC) was about 6 years old, and compared to that, this new MacBook (2.2 GHz Core 2 Duo) is like hot poo!  Everything's so quick, from something simple like System Preferences, to the speed it took to import umpteen thousand photos into iPhoto (which is so much better than the older version I was using).

And the built-in Bluetooth actually works with my RAZR, so that's an added bonus.

Plus, I managed to set up a wireless network without even really trying.  Still not sure how I did it...

Plus Photo Booth is a laff!