Posts by Scott

Since it’s Labor Day tomorrow I’ll be staying out of the studio and trying to enjoy what’s supposed to be a beautiful day here in San Francisco. So, on a completely unrelated note I thought I’d post these nested Klein Bottles because I’ve had the pictures laying on my desktop for months and never found a good reason use them. I built something like the second one out of clay back in ceramics class; it was the ugliest thing ever, exploded in the kiln, and I got an F. Happy Labor Day…

This is one of a series of glass Klein bottles made by Alan Bennett. It consists of three Klein bottles, one inside another. A Klein bottle is a surface which has no edges, no outside or inside and cannot properly be constructed in three dimensions. In the series Alan Bennett made Klein bottles analogous to Mobius strips with odd numbers of twists greater than one.

A single surface model made by Alan Bennett. It consists of three Klein bottles set inside each other to produce, when cut, three pairs of single-twist Mobius strips. A Klein bottle has no edges, no outside or inside and cannot be properly constructed in three dimensions.

Via ZURRANO

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOZqRJzE8xg
Dusty sent me this video the other day and a quick image search yielded some pretty interesting stuff. It’s incredible to see the Sketchpad system in action; remember it’s 1963 and this is basically Illustrator or AutoCAD 0.01a. Here’s the video description:

“Alan Kay presenting Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad, one of most influential programs in the history of graphical user interfaces.”

I love when the narrator says that light pens have since been discovered to be terrible input devices, leaving your hand numb. The funny thing is that the first mouse was invented the same year that Sutherland developed the Sketchpad system. It’s crazy that our primary input device is still the mouse, that’s almost a 50 year run. In computer time that’s just too long and I want my Minority Report screen asap. Although I often wonder if a big touch screen would really be that great. The fact that Microsoft seems to be the front runner in the field (multi-touch) doesn’t bode well for it either.

Video Link

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq0fi_tZSSc
Our Danish friends Joaquim Marquès Nielsen and Anders Baden Nielsen have put together a very thorough and insightful process piece on the creation of the poster for the movie “Connected”. You can check it all out at Joaquim’s blog.

The New York Times’ T Magazine often comissions artists to create their own version of the iconic T that is the magazine’s logo. There’s a great collection of the work over at the T Magazine blog featuring some of the standouts. Interesting to see so many fresh takes on the same theme, they should make a coffee table book out of these if they haven’t already. My personal favorite is that first ceramic one; the negative space is so perfect. Unfortunately, whoever did the type layout decided that neon green in the title would somehow work with the vibe. Clearly it didn’t.

Link

The September issue of the ISO50 newsletter is up. Get them while they’re hot! To have the newsletter conveniently delivered straight to your inbox, sign up here.

The latest playlist is live, just click the cover above to load or click “play” in the Player (top of middle column — RSS readers must visit site). Listen in as Jakub waves goodbye to summer with this gauzy collection of slow burners. Enjoy.

ISO50 Playlist 5 – Compiled by Aarnio

Track Listing:
Casino Versus Japan – It’s Very Sunny
Bullion – Caroline, No
Ducktails – Landrunner
Atlas Sound – Walkabout
THE DRUMS – Submarine
The xx – Shelter
Washed Out – Feel It All Around
Dam Funk – Sunset
Fleetwood Mac – Dreams (Mingus Rude edit)
Gold Panda – Quitters Raga
Fever Ray – Triangle Walks
Kings Of Convenience – Mrs Cold
The Radio Dept. – David
The Canyons – Apples and Pears
Bibio – Fire Ant
Burial & Four Tet – Wolf Cub
Manuel Tur – Stay Feat. Larissa Kapp
Adelaide – Bombardiers
Sorcerer – Distort Yourself
Lindsey Buckingham – Trouble
STL – Silent State
Broker/Dealer – To Hear the Fires
Coma – Sum

Just a quick reminder that tonight I’ll be playing in Austin at The Parish Room. This will be an all ages show (my first in a while), you can get presale tickets here.

On a side note, looking forward to making it through my first successful set with the new SSD running things.

Time to head out to the airport, see you tonight…

It’s been a hectic past month, I feel like I’ve been all over the place and I’m really looking forward to getting some time at home to focus. I head out to Austin tomorrow to play The Parish Room for the final show in this recent set and then I’ll have a few weeks until Seattle to get work done.

Luckily, during this time I’ve been able to get the new Tycho 12″ wrapped up and I finally got the test pressing in (shown above). The 12″ will feature a new single — “Coastal Brake” — along with 3 remixes by Lusine, Hatchback, and Manual. It feels good to finally have all the artwork and music done for this one, the final step is ok’ing this test copy. I also did my first offset print job in a while (click for some images) as part of this project, the posters will be included with the record. Looking back, this single has been about as much work as it was to put together my last album, funny how that works.

After I get back from Austin it will be time to really focus in on finishing up this new album. For some reason whenever I go out of town, when I return my house looks like a bomb went off. I guess things just get out of hand and disorganized when I’m rushing to get packed up. I hate returning to the mess because it’s really stressful to try to work in a disorganized environment. So I finally got some free time over the past few days and reorganized the place and got the studio back in order. Hopefully now when I return it will be a smooth transition back into work.

Some inspirational vintage book covers from the Itis Edition store.

After all my recent hyping of SSD’s (Solid State Drives) I thought it was time to jump in and try one out first hand so I went downtown to Central Computers this afternoon and got an OCZ Vertex 120. I decided to post up my initial reactions and findings after dropping the Vertex into a Macbook Pro Unibody and installing OS X today. If you’re not really a technical person, still have a quick read through the numbers at the bottom because if you use a computer for anything creative (or for anything at all actually) and are looking to significantly boost performance, SSDs should be on your radar. If you have no clue what an SSD is, here’s a brief primer from an earlier post.

After a lot of research on the various SSD manufacturers I came to the conclusion that OCZ’s drives have the best performance/quality-to-dollar ratio. I went with their Vertex 120 drive not only because it’s very fast, but also because it uses the Indilinx Barefoot controller. The concept of an SSD controller may seem a bit esoteric, but it’s very important at this relatively early stage in the development of SSD technology. Inherent to all SSD drives is a tendency to build up “garbage” which can slow performance over time (if you want to know more about SSD “garbage”, read this). The Indilinx controller has a built in mechanism to deal with this garbage and keep the drive running at optimal speeds. The garbage collection runs while the drive is idle and is completely transparent to the OS or user. This capability makes the OCZ Vertex and other drives that run the Indilinx firmware arguably the most advanced SSD’s available at this time. Only firmware 1.30 and up supports this feature but luckily the Indilinx controller supports updates. The drive I bought came with firmware 1.10 but I was able to flash it to the latest 1.30 with relatively little hassle. Apparently all new Vertex drives are shipping with 1.30 stock; mine must have been a couple months old. Here’s the method I used to update the firmware: Bootable Free-DOS for Mac ISO w/ 1.30 FW update.

While the Vertex 120 is not by any means cheap ($389 for 120GB), it is much less expensive than many comparable drives from other manufacturers. It’s the first I’ve seen that offers this kind of performance for anywhere near this price. Of course, 120GB isn’t a lot of room, so you’re going to sacrifice storage space for the speed unless you want to put up the $720 for a 250GB model. I’m not too concerned with that as I’m using the Vertex for my MacBook Pro and I don’t store most of my media and large files on there. I typically use it for live shows where I just need very high read speeds and about 20GB of space. If you’re using a desktop computer, you could alternatively keep your large standard drive and use an SSD as the OS drive.

So I opened up the MacBook Pro and swapped out the old drive for the new SSD. This was very easy on the new unibody MBP and only took a few minutes. I then did a fresh install of OS X and booted up. Even after all the hype about SSD performance I was still amazed by the marked improvement in overall system performance I experienced. I could go into the minutiae of interacting with OS X running on the SSD, but suffices to say it is incredibly quick and surprisingly enjoyable.

So, on to the numbers: I did some really basic measurements to gauge the basic performance of the new drive and compared them to the original drive that came with the MBP. First I timed how long it took from power on to login screen. I chose this method so that the amount of startup items and installed apps on either particular machine wouldn’t effect the time.

Power On to Login Screen – MacBook Pro OS X
With standard drive: 75 seconds
With Vertex SSD: 28 seconds

The boot time for the SSD was nearly triple the speed of the standard drive. But this doesn’t tell the whole story, boot times are dependent on a lot more than raw hard drive speed so even though the difference is impressive, it’s still not telling of how fast this drive really is. For that we need hard numbers. I used the free Xbench to measure the drive speeds and give a better picture of the wide chasm that separates these two drives.

Original Drive Scores (Stock Mac Hitachi 320GB)
Overall Score: 34.13

Sequential Read: 43 MB/sec
Sequential Write: 54 MB/sec

Random Read: 17 MB/sec
Random Write: 22 MB/sec

SSD Scores (OCZ Vertex)
Overall Score: 229.2

Sequential Read: 202 MB/sec
Sequential Write: 169 MB/sec

Random Read: 154 MB/sec
Random Write: 176 MB/sec

As you can see, the SSD destroyed the standard drive in every conceivable way. The speeds I am seeing are nearly comparable to my RAID0 system which has 3 drives and a highpoint controller and cost me over double the amount I paid for the Vertex SSD. Throw in the fact that the Vertex uses hardly any power (great for notebook battery life) and has no moving parts to break down and you’re looking at a bargain. If you’re looking for a way to speed your rig up I highly advise looking into getting a SSD. Just keep in mind that SSD is a very nascent technology in the grand scheme of computing. If you don’t really need a drive now I would hold off a little and wait for the industry to develop. Prices have been falling very steeply while performance and disk space has steadily increased. If there’s one thing that consumer computer technology has taught us it’s that this trend will most definitely continue until SSD drives become the norm.

If anybody currently has an SSD let us all know your experiences in the comments.