getting my summer on?

On the way to a nearby town, the main motorway is coned for most of its length, whilst it is made into a Smart Motorway. Then a short gap of normal motorway (no cones) and then another set of cones for the last 4-5 miles. Turn off the motorway and the route towards the exit has a separate set of cones because of a separate roundabout upgrade. I don't think it will be a smart roundabout, but who knows?

Anyway, eventually I arrive in the actual town centre (with its confusing multi storey parking) and finally emerge on foot into the shopping area.

"This is the place to get your summer on" proclaim the signs, although the actual mall appears to be suffering from the traffic blockade. I idly counted nine closed shops in the first few minutes walkabout. An area on the floor which once sported a concession stand now has a kind of green stain, left behind when stand holders had moved away. Adjacent, the bank has gone and next door the opticians proclaims in large print that it has moved.

Amazon Prime and internet shopping march on, whilst this mall becomes troubled with a combination of the current poor road access and the general economy. Yet, curiously, across the road there's a massive hole where another new store is supposedly being built.

wheat and poppies

Something I notice if I'm out on my regular bike routes is the way that the landscape changes. Both the street scenes as people wear different clothes but more dramatically the fields which entirely change according to where they are in the seasonal calendar.

This field still has wheat growing, but a couple of other recently abundant large fields I pass are now populated mainly by crows, scavenging the aftermath of the farmer's tractor.

And this year, along the edges, someone seems to have turned the poppy count up to a particularly high setting just about everywhere.

the opposite of lightning

Here in rashbre central we've a fair collection of iPhones, iPads and similar. There's some of the old kind with the long connector and also the newer type with the small connector.

What is annoying is that even the small connector type doesn't always work to recharge or communicate.

We get those 'accessory won't charge' messages sometimes or the device just sits on a connector without showing the lightning flash symbol.

There's various reasons - a few of the cables are probably emergency purchases from 'non Apple' suppliers and so they don't have the right microchip built into them.

Then there's the charging from a USB strip, which won't provide as much power as one of those little power blocks provided with a new device.

I'm sure Apple would say its all because they have made the cable intelligent, with digital signalling multiplexed via a micro controller in the cable. I'd have thought that the two basic functions of charge and sync (the basic four wire connection) would have been made persistent, but apparently not. Default connection is 'Fail Dumb'.

It's plain annoying though, having to retry various cables and power chargers to find a combination that works.

a few ants short of a picnic

Inevitably, a few days of bright sunshine here and the wildlife comes out in force.

The bees that enjoy one of the bright areas of our garden provide a continual hum from their contented buzzing. But it's indoors that we have had a small ant incident.

They have become very organised and somehow managed to drill their way through a window frame, making a small gateway from their outdoor world (acceptable and probably aerating the soil) to the indoor world (no, no, no) where they had started some so far fruitless expeditions.

I've had to discourage them, creating a small amount of ant carnage, and it does seem to have worked.

The thing I can't understand is that slight sensation on the skin after they've been around.

It's like an ant is walking around on me, but when I look there's none there.

Well, most of the time, anyway.

I suppose I should call it a manual?

It's ages since I read an actual computer manual. It was always considered something of a last resort.

It used to be an indication of the cost of the software purchased that there would be one, two or even more manuals included. I seem to remember that Avid's video editing software came with about five and the option to buy another four or five for the more advanced functions. Even Apple's Logic Pro had a good kilo of paper in the box.

It probably goes back to the original IBM PC, which came with several big manuals. Each was provided in a slip box and with a ring binder so that the pages could be easily updated.

Nowadays an Apple Watch has more raw compute power and connectivity, yet comes with a mere leaflet to explain the use.

Back to my current manual reading.

I've been using Adobe Lightroom for at least six months and consider myself pretty adept at most of its functions. But I splashed out on a real paper guidebook by Scott Kelby for around £30, which has a kind of old-school heft in its 500 or so pages.

And I've found it to be genuinely useful. It's not set out like a reference manual, more a guide to use, with some quite chatty sections explaining the clever bits.

I keep finding out little shortcuts that actually save me time and it somehow doesn't feel quite like reading a - you know - manual.

revisiting Dada-ist album covers

Even the new Apple service still uses the word 'Mixtape' to describe some of its generated playlists.

There's a couple of things missing now, compared with the old days of physically recording each track so that they could be played sequentially.

One was sitting listening to the recording process. Now it's just drag and drop.

Another was designing a cover for the tape. Some just had scribbled track listings whilst others might get the full graphics and Letraset treatment.

Increasingly physical media just shows a picture of the artist but I thought here I'd resurrect the old random Dadaist Rock Album creation method, last used here in 2008.

Wikipedia
1. Go to Wikipedia and hit "random".The first article title is the name of the artist.

Random Quotations
2. Go to "Random Quotations". The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page will be the title of the new album.

Flickr
3. Go to Flickr and click on "Explore the Last Seven Days". The third Creative Commons picture will be the album cover.

So, here for a laugh, is one of the old Dada-ist ones...although some might prefer the term anti-art for this particular not-even-square design.

Udderbelly in the sunshine in preparation for @FollowTheCow

As well as the moody street pictures, we at Mixtape took a few at the Udderbelly on the South Bank the udder day. It was a kind of pre kickoff fest in the Love Shack bar.

For anyone that hasn't visited the Udderbelly in the South Bank, it's good fun, even to go there for a drink in the Beach bar or other areas. We were able to meet a few other shows too, and took a few joint pictures. Here's a few:

First of all, the Houses of Parliament, with a Golden Mixtape, naturally.

Maybe to add a piece of blatant Mixtape advertising outside the London Eye. We did take some others too where we'd ahem replaced the C*ca C*la signage,which is the Eye's current sponsor.

Then there's the actual shows:
64 Squares

Brute:

The Eulogy of Toby Peach:

And an early sighting of a purple cow with a golden mixtape. There will be others, I'm sure.

@ukmixtape is staying 6mm from the bleed line for #edfringe

It's surprising how the #edfringe deadlines are rapidly approaching. Today was another one for a leaflet insert. We'd got one kind of graphic and needed another one, so some hasty editing was required. At least there's plenty of pictures from the photo-shoot last Sunday, and most of them are respectable.

We've got some moody indie band shots:

Some well-behaved '50s pub scenes:

Oops, I meant well-behaved and 1950s.

A few cake shots:

Until it started to get out of hand:

So we moved to the boy band pictures:

And formed the girl band as well:

It will take a little time to get to the location shots from the river's bridges and the seaside, so here's one of those wall shots to keep things going:

Next is the fun of A5 leaflet production. We must remember to allow for the 3mm bleed line on all margins and another 3mm for the edge line as well as setting the output to CMYK. Print ready PDFs will be produced.

Now it's time to break open Indesign.

Get tickets to see your new Mixtape friends:
Underbelly Booking Office
Edinburgh Fringe Booking Office
Live Theatre Preview

Using Olympus OM-Ds for Mixtape photoshoot

We've started sifting through the various pictures from the Mixtape Photoshoot last Sunday. We are in main marketing mode at the moment, with leaflets, posters and social media publicity being released.

For the snaps I used a couple of Olympus OM-Ds, one with a 45mm lens for basic portraiture (=90mm at 35mm) and another with the very useful 9-18mm wide-angle (=18-36mm at 35mm), which works well in the enclosed spaces.

I've pretty much moved from Aperture to Lightroom now and it handles most adjustments I need. By comparison, I only use Apple Photo to extract pictures from my iPhone.

Lightroom is much quicker to use than Photoshop for most of my photo edits and I only used PS for pictures requiring people to be moved around in the frame (Don't ask).

Since I started using Olympus OM-Ds a couple of years ago they have progressively become my go-to camera.

in which I discover I have 10 days worth of iTunes duplicate tracks

I seldom look at the inner workings of things like iTunes, but following its recent change I decided to press a few of the control buttons.

The one that surprised me was 'View Duplicates', which showed me the various duplicates that have piled up inside iTunes over the years.

A quick peek at the total running time of just the duplicates is - gulp - 10 days, 21 hours, 12 minutes and thirty three seconds. That's 3769 tracks and takes 20Gb of disk.

Randomly I noticed that I had 37 variations of remixes of Bjork's 'Army of Me', for example. Worryingly, they are also often of different lengths.

I haven't started chopping any out yet, because in some cases there's a difference between, say, a live version and an album cut. And what about when a track is also part of a compilation? Should I keep both versions?

I've also tried that 'View/Show Exact Duplicates' - which cuts the number down to 825 tracks (2 days worth), but for example still lists a 2:57 track and a 5:42 track as exact duplicates.

Maybe I'll just pretend I never pressed the button.

Decisions, decisions.

cone-y island

The 'Operation Stack' road-signs have been switched on around the routes I've driven over the last few days.

I've been delayed in previous Operation Stacks when on my way to France by road. That's when they close the motorways in Kent to use as a giant lorry park until the Channel crossings re-open.

Even more it's the sheer amount of the UK road network covered in cones. My regular route from London to the south-west has had cones for the last year and they continue until December 2016. They are just adding another section beyond the current 16 or so miles. I was stopped in a traffic jam after midnight on one stretch.

Similarly on my recent 300 mile route to the north east. It is mainly motorway, but between 30%-40% of it is coned. More than 100 miles is under special traffic management including single lane and even a stretch that was closed.

That old drawing of a country lane, a replacement motorway and then a coned motorway emulating the original country lane still applies.

setting up the @ukmixtape photoshoot for #edfringe2015

We'd planned to run a flexible Mixtape photoshoot on Sunday afternoon.

It meant clearing a big enough space and finding a plain wall for individual pictures, to feature various types of band.

We also needed some external shots, requiring the inevitable railway arch wall, the obligatory closed and shuttered shop and a broken down hotel. Some beach would also be useful.

We found all of these within easy walking distance and also adjacent to a useful pub.

A quick bit of furniture rearrangement, a cleaning of wall that had somehow gained mysterious tea stains and we were ready for business.

I'd brought my little Olympus cameras to take the pictures and we'd found an angle-poise lamp to add some illumination/toning without resorting to flash guns.
The plan was some colourful 80's pictures, some grainy indie pop and some rock'n'roll which we'd set in the pub.

We also needed a few headshots and some Mixtape identity shots with wristbands, actual cassette tapes and even some pulled out tape which could be wrapped around things.

Next stage is reviewing the photos and selecting a few for publicity.

Get tickets to see your new Mixtape friends:
Underbelly Booking Office
Edinburgh Fringe Booking Office
Live Theatre Preview