Modern Toss

From season 2 episode 2:
Cheese and Wine
Tree Toucher

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Since mp3 was invented I’ve been collecting music and have over 1500GB of music on my server. The music was collected from many sources: ripping CD’s, raiding other people’s collections, downloading torrents etc, but something has always bothered me about it. The artists aren’t getting paid for their work, and that’s wrong. Much as my conscience bothers me, there’s obviously no way I’m going to actually pay for something I can get for free and in most cases I can get it quicker and easier for free than I can by buying it.

I’ve been waiting for something like Spotify. Finally, someone has come up with a way to sidestep the problem, making music easily available to all for free but without ripping off the artists in the process. Music is added to theSpotify system with the artists permission and the clever Swedish company share the revenue from advertising and Premium services according to the number of times the artist’s tracks are played.

The Premium Service is EUR 10 per month (EUR 120 per year) and gives the subscriber the ability to use Spotify Mobile. The mobile service runs on an iPhone (and other good phones too), and the 3G mobile networks are currently good enough to stream music over. This means you have mobile access to an enormous amount of music whilst yourplay lists are synced between your computer and phone meaning you only have to find it once.

I consider 120EUR per year a very fair price to listen to whatever I want, whenever and where ever I want to listen to it.

The service is so popular at the moment that it’s invite only in the UK, but that will change. Hopefully Spotify and the companies that follow will create a fine business model which is fair to all. Here’s a selection of Spotify’s own FAQ’s if you’re not yet convinced.

What is Spotify?

Spotify offers you legal and free access to a huge library of music. All you need to do is create an account and download our streaming music player. For more details have a look at our video or introduction page.

What is Spotify’s goal?

Our dream is to let everyone listen to whatever they want, whenever and wherever they want.

What countries is Spotify available in?

Spotify is currently available in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, France and Spain. We hope to launch in more countries in the future.

Do I need to pay to use Spotify?

No, the advertising-funded version of Spotify is free of charge, however, for now it requires that you receive an invite to register unless you are in the UK. Visit our invitation page to sign up to the waiting list. Alternatively, you can pay for an ad-free premium subscription to Spotify.

What bandwidth does Spotify need?

We recommend 256 kbit/s. Spotify usually works well on a 3G connection. Plenty of free disk space also helps keep the network requirements down as it enables more caching.

How much advertising will I be exposed to?

There should be significantly fewer ads in Spotify than you’d find on commercial radio. We are trying to strike a balance between artists who want to be paid and providing the best possible user experience.

Why do I have to install Spotify?

By installing Spotify as a stand alone application you get a much better user experience and audio quality compared to web-based sites.

On what platforms can I use Spotify?

Mac OS X 10.4 or later and Windows XP or later. You can also run Spotify in Wine on Linux.

Can I use Spotify from multiple locations?

Yes, you can install Spotify on as many computers as you like. You may be logged in to Spotify from several computers simultaneously, but you can only play music on one computer at a time. The music at your other computers will automatically be paused. If you want to install Spotify on more than one computer simply download the program again and login with your existing username and password, there is no need for an invite token.

Can I share music with my friends?

Yes, you can drag and drop any track, album, artist or playlist to your email or instant messenger which creates a link to your favorites that you can send to your loved ones. They need to have Spotify to listen, though. Read more about sharing and collaborative playlists in our blog.

Why do you have two different link formats?

The spotify: URIs are the real Spotify addresses. The http://open.spotify.com/ URLs are a workaround to give you clickable, blue and underlined links in instant-messenger and email applications that don’t yet recognize the Spotify URI format. When there is a choice (such as when you are creating your own hyperlinks on the web), always use the spotify: addresses. What happens when you click an http://open.spotify.com/ link is that a page is opened in your web browser that redirects you to the real address (the spotify: equivalent). When you have control over the links, that’s a redundant step. And if you’re a software developer, please consider auto-detecting the spotify: URIs in your applications.

Can I make more advanced searches?

Yes, you can search for genres by writing genre: followed by the genre you want to find, like genre:Trip-hop. You can do the same thing with release years for albums by writing year: and the year you want. You can even specify a range, like year:1979-1982. Other searches to play with are artist:, album: and track

Can I use Spotify to play music in my bar, restaurant, store, etc?

No, the Terms & Conditions that you agree to when registering for Spotify states that Spotify is for personal, non-commercial use

Can I stream Spotify music to speakers with Airport, Logitech Squeeze box, Sonos, etc?

Currently there is no built-in support for this but some of our users have found ways to make is possible. For more info read here about Apple Airport and Logitech Squeezebox

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There were 10 of us biking in Les Houches this morning. Ruth’s birthday you see, so we thought we’d celebrate by booting it down from the Prarion lift on our bikes.

Mel from the Office bar showed up on a bike she’d borrowed from a mate which looked like a toy compared to the full suspension downhill rigs we’re all riding. Watching her come off it a few times made us all consider giving her our body armour, but that would be a chivalrous step too far. She did well, though and even went up for another run.

It’s fun biking in a large group like that, although with a lot of bikes the chances of something breaking is quite high. We got away with a single puncture between us, no broken bones and a bit of a tan.

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There’s been quite a lot of hype about these three dodgy looking geezers in the in the UK media over the last two days.

(L to R) Tanvir Hussain, Abdulla Ahmed Ali and Assad Sarwar were found guilty

These are the twats who got caught planning to mix two inert, innocent looking liquids into something very explosive and therewith board an airoplane and knock it out of the sky, killing everyone on board.

Obviously that’s not very nice and a lot of nice people would have their innocent lives ended, but that’s not my beef with these idiots.

It’s the fact that through their stupidity – and you only have to hear their suicide tapes to be sure they’re not the sharpest tools in the box – you can no longer take liquids onto planes.

What a mess that was. No shampoo in your hand luggage. Aside from the extra time and bullshit going through customs to get on a damn commuter flight from London to Geneva, I also had to watch those jobsworth airport security wankers throw my shampoo, toothpaste and deodorant in the bin, forcing me to buy more of the stuff at my destination.

For that transgression against human rights alone, I think Messers Tanvir Hussain, Abdulla Ahmed Ali and Assad Sarwar should be given the strongest punishment UK law allows.

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The vegetable garden has been looking a total mess for the past few weeks and I finally sorted it out today.

I’ve cropped all the rest of the lettuce, onions & potatoes and generally removed a load of the overgrown weeds and overgrown veg.

There was enough produce to make up 3 pretty hefty boxes. One box for me, and 1 each for the other two families who live in my chalet. I left the boxes on their porches for when they get home from work.

Hopefully they’ll remember that when I ask them if they would mind if I dig up more garden and do some raised beds next year.

Last of the summer veg

Still left is a row of Berlotti beans at the back, which I’m waiting to crop till my girlfriend’s back home.

There’s quite a few cabbages which might or might not grow into a solid head (I think they’re too close together).

The pak choi has long since bolted, but because it’s a variety my Dad brought from the UK and you don’t find it here in France, I’m waiting to collect the seeds.

There’s also quite a mad looking pumpkin plant with 4 or 5 fruits starting to grow. If they get their arses into gear, they might get quite big in time for halloween. If we don’t get a frost which kills them before that.

I’ve loved growing veg this summer. I’ve learned a lot of lessons and I can’t wait to expand the garden next year and put all those lessons to good use.

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It feels like autumn has started up here in the mountains. The temperature has dropped 10 degrees and suddenly it’s time to wear a jumper. As usual with the change of season I’ve got a cold & a nasty cough. Still – the sun is still shining and September is always lovely here in Chamonix. The tourists have mostly gone and us who live here can enjoy the end of the summer in peace.

It’s time to start winding up the gardening project in readiness for the coming winter. Not quite time to start getting the ski gear together yet – there’s still 3 months at least before we can ski, but my thoughts are starting to turn to snow. And booting it.

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Last time I did a big supermarket shop, I bought some fish for the freezer. Bored with the usual farmed salmon, trout & whatnot I came across a packet of 4 fillets of a fish called Panga (Pangasius Hypophalmus). Never heard of it, but it looked like any other white fish, wasn’t expensive so I thought I’d give it a try.

Filets De Pagnas, Advertised by French Supermarkets

So yesterday I came to cooking it. As I was defrosting the fillets I thought I’d have a look on t’interweb and find out about the fish & maybe find a recipe.

I immediately found these two pages. Buying Fish in France – A Warning & Don’t Eat this fish: Pangas (Pangasius, Vietnamese River Cobbler, White Catfish, Gray Sole)

Even though I did actually end up cooking the fish (which a few fresh onions and herbs from the garden, a bit of butter & some white wine, by the way), I couldn’t really stomach it after what I’d just read, so most of it went into the cat’s bowl.

Here’s a few of the things which really put me off.

1. Pangas are teeming with high levels of poisons and bacteria. (industrial effluents, arsenic, and toxic and hazardous by-products of the growing industrial sector, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), DDT and its metabolites (DDTs), metal contaminants, chlordane-related compounds (CHLs), hexachlorocyclohexane isomers (HCHs), and hexachlorobenzene (HCB)).
2. The Carbon Jackboot
   Pangas are raised in Vietnam. Pangas are fed food that comes from Peru (more on that below), their hormones (which are injected into the female Pangas) come from China. (More about that below) and finally, they are transported from Vietnam to France.
3. Disgusting Diet
   They’re fed dead fish remnants and bones, dried and ground into a flour, from South America, manioc (cassava) and residue from soy and grains. This kind of nourishment doesn’t even remotely resemble what they eat in nature. But what it does resemble is the method of feeding mad cows
4. Pangas are Injected with Hormones Derived from Urine
   They’ve discovered that if they inject female Pangas with hormones made from the dehydrated urine of pregnant women, the female Pangas grow much quicker and produce eggs faster (one Panga can lay approximately 500,000 eggs at one time)

Who knows if this information is correct? Perhaps a trout farmer disgruntled with the cheap imports from vietnam wrote those pages. What I do know is that I still faintly disgusted to have even tried some pangas, and I certainly won’t be buying it again.

I wonder if this is how those rabid, evangelical, hairy toed vegans get started.

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The lifts are coming to a close for the summer, and I’ve finally finished my first headcam film. I haven’t quite got the hang of it yet – I need to mount the camera on the helmet better. I’m looking forward to using this technique for skiing this winter. Skiing is much smoother and should yield much better results. Having said that, this little vimeo film isn’t too shabby for a first attempt.

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I spent the first part of this morning giving my van a bit of tender loving care before the heat got up.  A 12 year old Volkswagen Transporter is a 12 year old Volkswagon transporter and you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

But you can scrape off the rust on the wheel rims and give them a fresh coat of hammerite, tidy up the loose cables hanging out of the back and refit a couple of bolts back onto the mudflaps so they don’t look broken.

I’m off camping again at the weekend. Les Carroz again with a bunch of mates for someone’s birthday. Some VTT, a nice outdoor pool & a blinged up van to make the pikey camping bit a pleasure.

Bling Van

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