David John Mead

That old Hammer feel…

British band Kasabian have a new single out called “Vlad The Impaler”. They offered a free download of it from their website this month for a couple of days. Its a pretty good song, and even though the deadline has passed you can still see the video up at the site.

Kasabian – Vlad the Impaler from Kasabian on Vimeo.
It really captures the look and feel of the Hammer Horror films I remember watching late at night. Very cool.

Finally listening to my iPod in the car…

Julie really out did herself on the gifts front this Xmas. One of the great ones she got me was the iTrip FM transmitter from Griffin.
She later told me she had phoned Apple and walked through what kind of iPod I have and what I wanted out of the connector, and they were very helpful.

This lead is a lot better than some of the others we’d borrowed as it connects straight to the docking port as opposed to the headphone socket.  This means that my iPod is charging whilst I’m driving.  Also, whatever I am listening to is paused as soon as I turn off the engine, and I’ve found it pushes out at a set volume so I can use the controls on the car stereo to adjust the levels, rather than fumbling for the iPod.

Although I now have a relatively short commute, I can get through some podcasts in the car and finish them in the office later on.

I’ve had no problems with interference using the preset FM frequency either.

All in all a fantastic gift and great product.

Technorati tags: ipod, accessories, griffin, charger, transmitter

Nice touches at Huffduffer…

Catching up on my early morning tweets I saw one from Jeremy Keith about the launch of a new site, Huffduffer.

Its an interesting premise. Build your own RSS feed of sounds that you’ve find whilst traversing the Internet. You can then podcast your finds and subscribe to others.

Not so much as of a social network, more a network of social sounds. I could see @disquiet and @warrenellis making interesting use of this.

One nice touch of the design was the sign-up form.

I like the way its laid out, working like I’m filling it in on paper rather than just a series of HTML form fields. The choice of fonts for the filled in information is nice too.

One other thing I noticed. From the minimal information I gave at sign-up, virtually all of my other Internet places showed up in my profile. There is at least one that is not mine, but someone I worked with who took over my work blog, which could explain it.

Jeremy has said that By its nature, this will never be a popular, mass-market site. But, as is the case with most things built to scratch a particular itch, which is sometimes the best thing.

For the coders out there it shows what you can do with some PHP, HTML5 and microformats.