I liked to sets from R-Type’s before, containing some hardcore and breakcore goodness. This time however, it’s something completely different. This is more of a grime and dubstep set, although there are so much different tunes in there that labeling it is hard. But that is a good thing in my book.

It contains some of the great names of dubstep, and some names I don’t know because I don’t know the tracks at all. Still, I’m always up for fresh sounds, and this qualifies as that. There’s that completely awesome “I Luv U” tune from Dizzee Rascal in there as well, which is worth the download alone IMO. R-Type (pluging again, so he gets some more hits pointing to his myspace in Google , and less of that arcade game) also mixes in some drum’n'bass tracks at very low speeds. In fact, I sped the mp3 up at some points, cause I felt it was a bit too slow at times. Then again, I usually like my beats at hyperspeed, but thanks to modern mp3 technology, anyone can adjust the pace at your own preference. Gotta love that!

So check it out, it’s called Cashing In even though it’s for free, and it’s about 87 MB of grimey goodness.

Photo by LD PIX, cc-licensed

I was going to keep this thing a little secret, though it isn’t a secret really, but the lads over at the Musicmania record store in Ghent are open every Thursday, Friday and Saterday and are selling some new and second hand CD’s and vinyl stocks. If you are a collector, vinyl junky or you want to pick up some older albums that you didn’t want to pay full price for when they where just released, now is your chance.

The selection changes every week or so as new stuff comes in and the shelves are replenished. So it’s worth dropping in now and then and browse the collection to see if there’s anything fresh you like in there. I noticed a nice collection of drum’n'bass vinyl albums and some dubstep last Saterday in the racks. I got myself a Dizzee Rascal CD there for only 6 euro, and it rocks. There’s still some proper techno and other dance oriented albums in teh CD collections as well, all around that same price.

Cheap plastic is full of awesome!

Photo by wok, cc-licensed

Over at the excellent Flickr photo sharing service they now have a new category of pictures called The Commons. It’s not the Creative Commons searchable pictures database I talked about before. This is a collection of copyright free images which are also publicly available from libraries or other archiving organisations around the globe.

It makes me think of what they are doing over at archive.org, which also contains a vast collection of public domain material ranging from texts to sound and video. Flickr is taking a step into the same direction by letting Institutions archive their photographic collections online, and allow people like you and me to interact and help describe the collection by adding comments and tags to the photo’s.

For now only a handfull of institutions are actively submitting content, but I’m sure more will follow worldwide. Something to look forward to if you’re interested in history and photography, and a nice resource for copyright free pictures to use in your research, blogs or whatever.

One of the top hits I’m getting on this blog is that post I did once on Aphex Twin wallpapers. In a way I thought this was odd, as there are tons of wallpaper sites around which I guessed where getting more hits than me about this kind of thing right?

But when you do a quick Google search you’ll notice that most of the sites that claim to have some wicked Aphex Twin wallpaper goodness are dummy sites that want to have you download some odd executable to get the wallpapers. Odd, and damn fishy if you ask me! Apparently there isn’t a lot of AFX wallpaper goodness out there, so I dug a little deeper and found these sweet gems deep in the bowls of the interwebs. Well, not that deep really, but they are quite nice anyway.

• A nice blue logo with an ascii flavour at 1280×1024
• A range of good looking 1024×768 sized images with the known logo and text on various material backdrops.
• A big album cover scan here. Not super, but ok. Something from Squarepusher as well.
• The famous AFX logo on a black background always works right? Well, it works even better with a little effects on the logo. Sweet.
• Or on white. Not bad either.
• Tile this one, if you just can’t get enough of that logo.

So there you have it. A fresh load of AFX for your monitors in various resolutions. If you feel like flexing your Photoshop muscles and create some more dazzling Aphex fan-art, feel free to let me know cause I should be getting a few more hits on this topic right after this post.
Sweet!

Image by pollas, cc-licensed

Fight Club rocks. If you haven’t seen the movie, or read the book, you should. Really. In fact, the movie is better than the book, which is an exception to the rule, and talking rules, via WordPress Matt’s blog I came across these 8 rules of innovation as they could have been said by Tyler Durden.

They rock. You can apply these rules to a lot really, and I find I’m not applying them enough myself.
After reading this, I think it’s time I check out the movie again as well, cause it rocks so damn hard.

So don’t forget check out these rules.

This is something I’ve been running into a few times by now, and it’s getting a bit annoying. This is a tip to everyone who builds a website and who wants to present localised pages to it’s users. This is a tip in particular to deal with Belgians.

Some think Belgium is a made up country, that is used as a scapegoat to explain European drug and illegal arms trafficking, but nothing is further from the truth. What is the fact however, is that Belgian is a small fucker of a country, but it’s also a very complex one. How else would you explain a country of only the size of Maryland which has 1 federal government, 5 regional governments and 3 official languages. Yes, that’s right! 3 whole official languages, and a shitload of dialects too.

So if you get a Belgian on your website, what language do you give them? “French” is not the right answer! But for some reason, and I’m looking at you Yankees here, people tend to think we all speak French over here. To make matters worse, the wealthiest part of Belgium (Flanders) has Dutch as the official language, so you’re bound to have one of those hit your site anyway, and so you present him the wrong language. Boooh!

Honest mistake? Well, there’s another thing you should know about Belgians. We don’t like being addresses in the wrong language. You might have heard about those communitarian issues we’re having between the French and Dutch part, and so we don’t really like to be “mistaken” for being a part of the other side of the country. Don’t get me wrong though. I don’t have anything against our French speaking neighbours. In fact, I love going over there and enjoy the countryside and the quarries for an occasional dive. But I just don’t like being addresses in French. You should study Belgian history to figure that out. Start around 1302 and you’ll get a clue.

So what I’d like to do, is choose my own language from now on. So I can pick Dutch, or English, whatever I want. But don’t force feed me French kthx.

Oh, and don’t mistake us for the Dutch either. They might speak the same language, but live in a completely different country to the North, and love to paint everything orange at certain times of the year.

I haven’t been checking out a lot of new and fresh dj sets lately because not so long ago I got myself a fresh load of plastic containing some of the latest Venetian Snares mixes and I’ve been mainly enjoying those over the last weeks.

Snares is one of my breakcore favourites, and his latest Detrimentalist album is definitely another one that goes on my mindhole-blowing-sweet-ass-record list. If you are familiar with his stuff, I’d say this one is closest to Higgins Ultra Low Track Glue Funk Hits 1972-2006, because of the amount of jungle and drum’n'bass influences. It contains more breakbeats than you can shake a tracker at, and the use of those typical ragga vocal style samples to give it an oldskool jungle without sounding oldskool. Nothing too serious though. As usual you can expect the funny sample  now and then, which he pulls of nicely without making it all too damn silly anyway.

Funk manages to restyle jungle on this one with his ultrasnipped rhythms, which have been perfected since the Higgens etc album. It bloody rocks, and if you’re into heavily drum oriented jungle and breakcore this album is one for the wish list for sure. In fact, drum’n'bass DJ’s should also give this one a listen, maybe at a slightly lower pitch, because I’m sure some of these tracks would fit perfectly in the more rougher breakage set, or into a slightly more ballsy DJ’s set who isn’t afraid to experiment with the odd record.

A damn fine album if you ask me.

Photo by Sarah Sitkin, cc-licensed

One thing that can be so annoying when you’re planning a trip on the fly is finding a hotel or a nice bed and breakfast to sleep over. Usually it means you throw down the location and the obvious keywords in Google and hope for the best. Usually you’ll also end up wasting time on tons of hotel-booking sites which don’t even show you places near where you are looking for. Those sites get indexed anyway because they function like a crappy online phone book full of advertising banners. Blegh.

So this one time I was using Google Maps to plot out the location of quarries we where going to end up diving in, when I noticed it actually knew some of them by entering “quarry”. Then I tried looking for “hotel” and “bed and breakfast” ét voila, a whole bunch of those reddish balloons appeared on the map, indicating places and phone numbers to sleep over. Awesome!

The cool part is that you can see right away which ones are interesting geographically, and which ones aren’t. Some of them might be in a town you didn’t even know was there. In fact, we ended up just over the border in France in a sweet little B&B and had an excellent weekend. There’s no chance I would have ever found that one without Google Maps for sure.

It just makes so much sense to put places on a map isn’t it? Funny nobody really thought of it before, or executed it properly. So no more dull searches on badly designed websites for me. It’s Google Maps from now on when I’m planning trips.

So if you’re a hotel or bed & breakfast owner, you might want to get your data in there. Resistance is futile, after all.

Photo by Face it, cc-licensed

I can’t remember which blog tipped me off on this one, but I started reading the freely published online  Freakangels comic book online and I got hooked pretty soon.

If you like futuristic, well drawn, apocalyptic story lines containing freaks with extreme psychic powers, this comic is something right up your alley. A new episode is published on the blog for free every Friday, and they are up to 29 so far and counting.

To put it short, it plays in a drowned London city after something destroyed the world as we know it. I like apocalyptic stuff because it opens up huge possibilities for the story, and the fact that it doesn’t take place in the USA for a change is refreshing already. The graphics are excellent, and the characters compelling, so I’m looking forward to the appearance of a new episode weekly for sure.

So start reading at episode 0001, or the promo pics to see if this is something for you. Enjoy!

Time for some new and fresh drum’n'bass again. Esb, who spins at jungletrain.net, is a fan of the German producer Martsman. I’ve been hearing his tunes a lot on his show the last year or so, and frankly I understand why. Marsman manages to bring back the drums and bass in drum’n'bass. If you’ve heard a Pendulum tune lately you know what I’m talking about. His tunes are beat-driven like the tunes from the good old days, and his basslines are more alive than a squirrel with a firecracker up it’s arse.

To promote and spread the word Esb dedicated one of his DJ sessions to the man, and called it Martsmania. Get ready for 120 minutes of drum’n'bass packed with his freshest tunes and dubplates. You can get the mp3 for free right here from bitterbrew.com, and you can drool over this setlist as well, because most of these tunes you can’t even get yet:

01 - martsman - bluetone - warm communications forthcoming
02 - martsman - road (sileni remix) - exegene
03 - cycom - kingsnake - (martsman remix) - cdr
04 - martsman - halow - med school forthcoming
05 - martsman - the hack - cdr
06 - martsman - step up (berlin) - hotshore
07 - martsman - untitled - cdr
08 - martsman - worst case scenerio - hospital forthcoming
09 - martsman - 8 bit bouncer - cdr
10 - martsman - ago - offshore/commercial suicice
11 - bad matter & martsman - cold love v2 - cdr
12 - martsman - jumpfunk - alphacut
13 - martsman - kontamin - trust in music
14 - angel zero - recess (martsman remix) - warm communications forthcoming
15 - sileni - twitchy droid leg (martsman remix) - offshore
16 - martsman - aeiro vip - breakin’
17 - martsman - antifunk - counter intelligence
18 - martsman - klikoucha - offshore forthcoming
19 - macc - boomer (martsman remix) - cdr
20 - hi-lar - sunstate (martsman remix) - plain:audio
21 - martsman - assemblyp - cdr

I also found out that Marstman uses Jeskola Buzz to produce these wicked tunes. Not that it matter though, cause it’s not about the tools in the end, but it’s kinda cool to find out people can truely create great music using a 100% free (as in beer) tool.

Photo by tricky, cc-licensed