Low vs Diamond, originally called "1984" and then "Colored Shadows" (which I personally think is a much better name than the current one) are another American indie band. They've been compared to Air and Morrissey, I'd say they have a hint of The Killers in there as well and I'm tempted to compare them to Maximo Park, but I wont. It's also interesting to note that "1984" was also a band formed by Brian May before he went onto form Queen. Ok I lie, it's not that interesting, but it's a little factoid for the day.

The new name is apparently due to the band recieving a lot of "lows", and the drummer being named Howie Diamond. I think the name is retarded, but we're here to discuss music, not names. Even though it's a stupid name. Why did they pick such a retarded name?

The video is taken from some French dude who strapped a camera to his car and hurtled around Paris at 6.30am, reportedly reaching speeds of up to 140mph. It's a pretty cool, though I'm not sure it has any relevence.. but it does seem to fit with the chord progressions.

The general music of the band itself is very light on the guitar compared to others, and favours synthesisers with drums, this is reflected especially in "Stay Awake", which you can listen to on their MySpace. Life After Love favours the guitar a lot more, but it's not particularly intrusive I find.

The whole feel to the track is kind of eery, a bit dark and one of those songs that is not quite "chillout background" music and not quite "stand up and listen to me" music. It's hard to put a finger on it, but that aside, I like what they have done with the track.

Rating:6.4/10


Let me know what you think of the track here

Labels: Life After Love, Low vs Diamond, Music, Review, Video

Mika, probably one of the hottest names of 2007 so far, exciting all the critics. You've got to admit, it's a damn catchy song, and it's not only myself that thinks so. Mika charted Number 1 with his single Grace Kelly in the UK's Top 40 Chart on Sunday 21st.


All I hear about Mika is that is a mix of The Scissor Sisters and Freddie Mercury. Well, to some extent that's true, but to be honest, the Scissor Sisters suck ass, and this doesn't suck much at all. I'm going to go more with it's just a brand of joyous pop with Freddie style vocals.


The single is characterised by sparkling melodies and a hell of a lot of harmonised piano making for something I consider more like The Feeling than Scissor Sisters.


What's nice about Mika is that he's actually good at singing. Classically trained, his live performances match those of his vocals on the actual mastered single.


Admittedly it's kind of gay (just look at the video, and listen to the lyrics ("should I bend over?), yeah, yeah he's pretty gay) but don't let that put you off, let the peadophilia put you off. "Humphry, we're leaving," says the 7 year old girl. "Kerching!"

Well, ok, ...

Anyway, overall I like this song, the video to me, doesn't really fit at all, but then I guess it's considered "arty", I don't really know what that implies but to me it implies not having to think of anything in particular so grab a prop and wave it around for a while.


Mika will certainly be a big artist this year, we'll see just how big when his debut album, Life in Cartoon Motion, is released on the 5th of February.

Rating:9/10

Labels: Grace Kelly, Mika, Music, Review, Video

Sitting here eating a bowl of noodles, contemplating the failure that will be tomorrow's Key Concepts in Politics exam because I spent all day sleeping instead of revising, I was struck by a moment of absolute genius.

Taking my previous idea of a music blog, my mind expanded on that.

A music blog .. with youtube/dailymotion/othervideohostingsitehere videos.

Awesome.

Just .. damn I'm a genius.

I know this has probably been done before, and, if it has, it shall be done again! Of course I will continue with occasional linux/scripting/humour updates, but I find these are harder to come by these days as I'm settling into Linux, and not many people are in the same situation.

Labels: Blog, Direction, Genius, Linux, Music, Video

I must say, I'm impressed.

I've loaded up the LiveCD Beta 1 of version 5.8. I've also already downloaded and burnt the VectorLinux 5.8 install just in case I like it enough to switch, and damn do I like it. It's like Christmas but with Easter Eggs instead of Brussel Sprouts and when you open an Easter Egg a fluffy bunny hops out and does some cool magic tricks. That's possibly the only way to describe this experience right now.



Gripes from a Ubuntu Gnome point of view:
It's slackware - so instead of apt-get, it's slapt-get, one minor change, but this changes quite a lot of the terminal commands which is a little bit annoying because you have to think about what it's changed to after you get it wrong the first time. I sure this wouldn't matter after about a week though.


Gripes from a Windows point of view:
Can't .. really .... think of any...


Gripes that affect both Gnome and Windows users:
Click and Drag doesn't work on the desktop
The buttons on the taskbar become very small when you resize the bar because it's a giant thing that takes up too much screen space when you first start

Plus Points:

• Shade. I love this feature. Admittedly it's with all Xfce desktops, but it would be nice to have this in Ubuntu Gnome. I'm going to try and find a way to get this feature in my Ubuntu Gnome desktop.


• Menu Configuration - You can configure the start menu to show whatever you like with the menu configuration. Likewise this menu can be displayed when you right click the desktop, this menu configuration just feels a little bit more advanced than that in Gnome.


• Ease of customisation - loads of skins/icon sets etc. are already included, you can have it looking how you want with ease in a matter of, well, seconds.


• It seems extremely fast. Minimising windows, even browser history seems to be faster. This is part of the Xfce desktop system, it's designed to be lightweight and fast. Anyone with a low-end PC would find their performance increased dramatically with this desktop, especially as VectorLinux is touted as the faster non-source desktop in the world.

I could go on forever listing the great points about Xfce and especially VectorLinux, but I wont. Instead, I shall simply sugget that you download the LiveCD version and try it out for yourself. Just burn the ISO to a CD and pop it in the tray, restart, and VectorLinux will boot up (provided you have CD set to be the first boot device).


Rating: A

Here's a screenshot

Labels: Linux, Review, VectorLinux

Labels: Humour, Linux

So I've just booted up DreamLinux from the LiveCD for the first time.

If you decide to switch from Windows to Linux, DreamLinux might be a viable option, though there are some snags you will encounter straight away.

The first thing I noticed is the keyboard layout is American, or perhaps even Brazillian. With the LiveCD I can't find a place to change this. It's kind of annoying.

Another gripe is the Mac-Like taskbar launcher, called "Engage". At first it looks pretty cool, but after a while you realise it's really just eye-candy that prevents you from getting anything done because you're trying in vain to get rid of it. You can set the bar to autohide, but this doesn't really help anything because the windows that you want to maximise still don't go down over the whole screen. Here's a few screenshots to help you understand the problem.
Oh, and by the way, in trying to take a screen shot I encountered even more problems. HOW THE HELL DO YOU TAKE A SCREEN SHOT!? Damn, in Gnome it's just the Print Screen key, which takes the shot and asks you where to save it. XFce, doesn't seem so simple. One option is to open GIMP, the image editor in Linux, and use that to capture a screen shot. It seems fairly .. long winded.

So anyway, here's how it's supposed to look, when you're hovering over the bar, everything looks pretty, all very nice.


If you want to auto-hide the bar you can, but don't think it will increase your screen space for other windows. Oh no, the windows don't go further than the bar will allow. So I ask, what the hell is the point in auto-hide?



Then, if your windows are maximised, and you want to select something from the bar, don't think you'll be able to see the name of what you're selecting! Oh no, that would make life waaaay too uninteresting and predictable.


Also you can't click and drag on the desktop, meaning you can't select multiple icons/shortcuts unless you shift/ctrl click. Lame.


So those are the main problems I've encountered within the first few minutes of running DreamLinux.

On to the good, perhaps?
There are some nice aspects of DreamLinux.

• One, for some people, might be the fact that XMMS, a media player for Linux, starts up and sits quietly in your system tray until you want to use it.


• It comes shipped with Firefox 2 as the default browser.


• The buttons in webpages and the desktop are more 3d and windows/mac-like. In Gnome everything seemed very flat and grey and, well, boring. XFce attempts to be a bit more eye pleasing


• It comes with Flash Player 9 already installed, something Ubuntu lacks


• As it's Debian based, the transition from Ubuntu to DreamLinux in terms of the terminal will be nice and smooth


• It has a very Mac-Like feel to it, the skins, the colours, the launchers. Windows and Mac users would probably feel very at home with how the desktop looks


• Right-click on the desktop brings up the Applications menu


• Middle-click on the desktop brings up a list of open windows to switch to. That's pretty snazzy


• sudo apt-get remove engage -- Ahh bliss. Windows using all the available screen space!

So that's my preliminary report on DreamLinux. Maybe with an install it would be more configurable, but as it stands from the LiveCD, I think for now, I shall stick with Ubuntu.

If you are moving from Windows and have a bit of computer knowledge, this might be a nice desktop for you, but if you've had experience elsewhere with Linux, you'll probably be slightly annoyed at the usability aspect. Although once I got rid of that damn engage bar I did calm down slightly, I'm still highly pissed off that I can't change the keyboard layout.

Rating: B-

Labels: DreamLinux, Linux, Review

The labels feature of this new blogger does look pretty cool, I wish Flock could utilise this because I love blogging from my browser.. anyway, anyway...

So I'm still stuck on what to blog about. Sam suggested university but, to be honest, there isn't much to say .. that would basically be blogging about my life and I can't usually be bothered to write what's happened in a day. To me that's more like keeping a diary, which I'm not really into; I have testicles.

If I had my camera I'd like to do more photowork for my blog, but that's kinda out of the question at least until Easter because my camera is still in Plymouth with Emily. So .. fantastic.

Another option is blogging about new toys, and I don't mean Barbie. Maybe gadgets I want to get, or new distro's of Linux which have caught my eye. Something computer based maybe .. but then there are already millions of blogs like that which are doing a much better job than I could. It's a shame I don't really have a speciality I guess.

Damn I'm so...un-unique, and un-unix.

So anyway, I'm currently downloading another Linux Distro, this one is called DreamLinux and I recommend anyone interested in Linux to at least visit the site. I'm currently using Ubuntu, based on the Gnome desktop, DreamLinux is different most noticeably in that it is based on XFce. So yeah, I'm currently downloading the LiveCD version of that, and will get back to you when I decide whether I like it or not, and whether it could ever replace Ubuntu. I just hope DreamLinux doesn't have a gay community.

Labels: DreamLinux, Linux, Ubuntu