You might have noticed lately that the colour-​scheme of this site changes each time you click a link or reload a page (cur­rently we have blue, pink, and green). This is some­thing easily accom­plished with just an extra 2 tiny CSS files, and a little bit of PHP.

If you’ve read my pre­vi­ous art­icle – Word­Press And A Hori­zontal Baseline Pt.1 – you are already famil­iar with the CSS that forms the found­a­tion of this site. What we’re going to do first is strip out any­thing to do with colour from the CSS and put it in it’s own sep­ar­ate file that we’re going to call blue.css.

a:active, a:hover, .commentlist a:hover, .commentlist a:active, .commentlist cite a:hover, .commentlist cite a:active, #recent-comments a:hover, #related-posts a:hover, .lastfm a:hover, #footer a:hover, #footer a:active, .commentlist pre a:hover, .commentlist pre a:active {color:#34B0F8;} 

#menu ul li a:hover, #menu ul li a:active {background:#34B0F8;}

.entry p a:hover img, .entry p a:active img {border:1px solid #34B0F8;}

a.feature:hover	{border-color:#34B0F8;}

Con­tinue read­ing: Random Stylesheets in WordPress

The aim of the Echo Nest Remix API is to let you manip­u­late and remix music and video through code. Execute the few lines below:

import echonest.audio as audio
audio_file = audio.LocalAudioFile("input.mp3")
beats = audio_file.analysis.beats
beats.reverse()
audio.getpieces(audio_file, beats).encode("output.mp3")

And you have now reversed a song by ‘playing its beats for­ward from the end of the song’. The output of which would look a little some­thing like this.mp3.

First off, you’re going to need to grab an API key by regis­ter­ing an account. If you’re using OS X you can follow this install pro­cess (here’s Linux and Win­dows). Make sure to run the example at the end of the install­a­tion pro­cess to con­firm that everything works.

Con­grat­u­la­tions! You can now mess around with beats and manip­u­late all your mp3s and videos. Try out the rest of the examples to get an idea for just what the Echo Nest Remix API can do. To get an idea of just how power­ful the (upcom­ing) video manip­u­la­tion is, check out Where’s The Pow by Paul Lamere in which he remixes the Black Eyed Peas – Boom Boom Pow.

41st Best Stand up Stew­art Lee sug­ges­ted during his recent BBC pro­gram that once upon a time in his­tory a man who could lay claim to having read all the books in the world would be con­sidered to be extremely intel­li­gent. This is fact that’s hard to dis­pute. How­ever, it’s equally hard to dis­pute the fol­low­ing point he put forth – that a man who could claim to have read all the books avail­able today could be con­sidered to be per­haps the stu­pid­est man alive.

The idea I took from this is the per­haps con­tro­ver­sial phrase “all of us are not as smart as one of us”.

This is a common idea on the inter­net – that there more people there are on it, the worse it actu­ally gets – and has been wit­nessed first hand through the mass move­ments of people from one social net­work­ing site to another. Myspace for instance, once the happy home of every­one every­where was aban­doned for bebo at the point where it launched Lilly Allen’s career and every other ass with a guitar decided to net­work them­selves to per­fect strangers. Bebo was aban­doned for Face­book when every­one we hated ended up there. Face­book has been aban­doned for Twit­ter by idiots.

Basic­ally as soon as every­one knows about a site and joins up to it it’s poten­tial use­ful­ness, fun and even­tu­ally cred­ib­il­ity is des­troyed. For an example of this just look at Trent Reznor and Ashton Kutcher’s per­sonal use of Twit­ter to trum­pet noth­ing other than their own egos and how this might affect a per­sons decision to use it,

So where then does this leave Hunch the new site which offers you your very own web based decision making robot?

Con­tinue read­ing: Hunch

It was this art­icle on A List Apart that first got me star­ted on the idea of using a hori­zontal grid on my latest Word­Press theme (the very one that you’re look­ing at right now). The best example of what align­ing your type to a baseline grid means, can be seen here. Note how all the text falls within the lines, no matter the sizing or images. It took quite a few months of work to try and get it to look the same in all browsers using the very min­imum of CSS hacks, but is now 99% done (more in the next post on how IE6 and IE7 deal with text-​boxes differently).

The very first part is set­ting up a CSS reset. I’m using a reset that has been slightly cus­tom­ised from one I found a few years back. The more import­ant changes were to do with how <table> is treated, as I found quite a few con­flicts with WP-​eCommerce (more on how heav­ily I have had to hack up that piece of junk in another post).

Con­tinue read­ing: Word­Press And A Hori­zontal Baseline Pt.1

Welcome to Edi­tion Two. I haven’t done one of these in a while because I’m lazy, so I sup­pose I better get right into it.

THEM THANGS is the photo blog of Justin Blyth. There are rarely any words, and def­in­itely no explan­a­tions, so I’m going to have to make some assump­tions here. THEM THANGS is a col­lec­tion of cool photos/designs/pictures/lyrics/words that Justin has found in his travels through­out the inter­net, and there is cer­tainly a lot of them (over 10 pages now). Make sure to wait for the long load times, and beware of the slightly NSFW con­tent that lurks within.

Scott Pom­mier takes cool pic­tures of cool things, there really isn’t much more to be said than that, but make sure to click on through to his inter­view with fea­ture shoot and read about how he got started.

The Beard­more Bros are legends in auto­mot­ive circles. Having worked for dec­ades, and with an almost unhealthy obses­sion of Morris Minors, they have cre­ated some of the coolest custom cars and sleep­ers in the UK. Make sure to read about their latest pro­ject: A space framed, 2000cc 16v Fiat engined, 178mm widened, Morris Minor con­vert­ible that they use for hillclimbs and sprints.

Win­dosill is a beau­ti­ful point-and-click adven­ture from Vec­tor­park – cre­at­ors of a bunch of bril­liantly simple down­load­able games for the Mac and PC. You can play the first part of the game online here but will have to pay US$3.00 to play the remainder.

And lastly I’m going to intro­duce you to the way that I’ve been spend­ing the last 3 days: read­ing Full­metal Alchem­ist. A manga about two broth­ers who are trying to restore their bodies after an attempt to bring their mother back to life went very wrong. Full of ter­rific action, great comedy, and an enthralling plot, it will suck you in. I’m sure that if you search hard enough you’ll find a vari­ety of ways to read it online.

It doesn’t matter that we’re halfway through June already – there’s still time to gather up all the stuff we’ve been look­ing at at SPK and throw together a post of to let the inter­net know about it. So to make up for our extreme late­ness, we will be doing two edi­tions, one from each of us.

For the most part the reason that this post is late has a lot to do with comics. Spe­cific­ally Seinen Manga which I can’t seem to get enough of right now. Since there are so many of the things out there it’s proven dif­fi­cult to stop

Luck­ily (or unluck­ily) for me, as I am not Japan­ese and some­times find it hard to tell which title will be what I’m look­ing for, recom­mend­a­tion sites like Anime Planet exist and their easy to use data­base system, though small right now, makes it very easy to pick out some­thing new.

Just to get you star­ted here are a few of the things it’s poin­ted me towards this month:

Dragon Head is post-​apocalyptic, dark and creepy but oth­er­wise dif­fi­cult to cater­gor­ise but def­in­itely worth a look.

Ber­serk requires a word of warn­ing: there are just over 20 years of it to read so it could take a while to trawl through it. It’s also a fairly brutal read focus­ing as it does on evis­cer­a­tion and sexual viol­ence towards almost everything so if these things are not to your taste it may be best avoided. How­ever it is a bril­liantly drawn, engross­ing and stun­ning in it’s scale and ima­gin­a­tion. There are also a lot of draw­ings of horses.

Hotel is a short but beau­ti­ful one-​shot comic. If it doesn’t make you cry a little you are prob­ably not human.

If you’re inter­ested in any of these titles, or any manga at all and you’re look­ing for a place to try them out for your­self then you can head over to Manga­Fox which is easily the best site of it’s kind I have found so far.

Con­tinue read­ing: Really Late Monthly Links Round Up

We all know my his­tory with Twit­ter – I hate it. Unre­lent­ingly. But I leave it alone, it leaves me alone and we’re quite happy ignor­ing each other. Occa­sion­ally I use it to to shout at this man as he is an old acquaint­ance I don’t get much of a chance to talk to any­more. On the whole I am aware of the dangers of Twit­ter and am happy to leave them the hell alone.

Not so for one Mr Trent Reznor, lead singer of Nine Inch Nails who has recently taken his huffy little ball and stomped all the way home. You see Trent Reznor does not under­stand the most import­ant thing about the inter­net in that it is much like the abyss – when you stare at it, it is star­ing right on back.

Now I’m not a Trent Reznor afi­cion­ado. Apart from know­ing that he is pretty short (5 foot 7 and 1/2 accord­ing to Yahoo answers) and that a guy I knew once whored him­self out to a fat chick for tick­ets to one of his shows I am pretty clue­less as to gen­eral Reznor facts. Which is why I have had to do some appro­pri­ate research before taking the time to write this art­icle and what I deem appro­pri­ate is around 5 minutes scan­ning his Wiki­pe­dia art­icle and check­ing out his now famous Twitter.

Con­tinue read­ing: Trent Reznor Rage Quits Twitter

A col­lec­tion of things. Expect some art­icles in the coming months about the Yash­ica Min­is­ter 700, FED1f NKVD, Niko­mat FT2, and Polar­oid SX-70 in the same vein as the Olym­pus Chrome Six. The hammer, wrench, paper bag, and girls diary will not be get­ting art­icles however.

Nico Nico Douga is the You­Tube of Japan. I’d love to link you some of the bril­liant videos they have over there, as well as the great inter­face and the way that the com­ments can fly across the video in rela­tion to the point they are talk­ing about, but you can’t see any of the videos on the site without regis­ter­ing. So today we’re going to walk you through the rel­at­ively simple regis­tra­tion process.

Con­tinue read­ing: Nico Video Regis­tra­tion in English

Des­pite look­ing like a solo act La Roux is actu­ally a duo com­pris­ing of Elly Jack­son and Ben Lang­maid who, at the begin­ning of the the year were tipped to become one of the big names of 2009.

Sound­ing as fresh and enga­ging as they do it’s very hard not to like them.

Sim­il­arly it’s def­in­itely dif­fi­cult to not be thank­ful for them – after all we’re being inund­ated right now with a suc­ces­sion of female led elec­tron­ica pro­jects whose names begin with L and who mostly sound the same:

Little Boots who’s been famous forever but now she’s been removed from her bed­room seems awk­ward and re-​hashed, Lady­Hawke who I genu­inely like but for some reason just doesn’t do it for me and Lady GaGa. The least said about Lady GaGa the better.

Clas­si­fied as part of the Wonky Pop move­ment La Roux’s music is cred­ible, andro­gyn­ous, 80s influ­enced and mind-​bendingly catchy work­ing together addict­ive synth hooks, clear, pier­cing vocals and heart felt lyrics. Add their videos – which are in turn 80s camp, decept­ively simple, and visu­ally stun­ning – and you have a fant­astic pack­age that reeks of David Bowie, Annie Lennox and everything that was good about the 80s.

La Roux’s debut album is set for release on the 29th of June and prom­ises to be some­thing very special.