… the one with the chap photocopying then falling into the floor with rabbits, then becomes a cloud etc…then trident have made the single by the crimea a free download here http://www.tridentgum.co.uk/NR/rdonlyres/E9DC0CB5-316C-4DB0-A4A2-F34DEF9EEBE3/0/thecrimea_loopaloop.mp3
Vicky argues with me about this as to whether its a cover or as I think a brilliant re-interpretation of a great song. I was listening to Mark Ronson on the radio tonight saying how they sort of improvised the track because Amy Winehouse couldn’t quite get the right rhytmn as it was going to be done quite differently. But whatever way, its done magically by Amy, lets hope she lives long enough to become as legendary as she deserves. Apparently Amy was supposed to be in the video but never quite made it.
Funnily enough (made me laugh anyway), Vicky didn’t know there was an original of this track and couldn’t understand why I thought it was a cover… Anyway, turn it up loud!
No, not a multimedia extension to Distributed File System, but the music to the current DFS furniture store advert, is it this ? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tknrTkxBeU - ‘Be Gentle with me’ - Boy Least Likely To
A knid of Calvin Harris meets Harry Nilsson vs Oakenfold meets Neil Young fusion. Very nice anyway.
Update: Actually it turns out that the DFS advert music more likely to be an instrumental version of ’Colours’ by Calvin Harris.
So, the Spice Girls are getting back together… interesting. I remember where I was when I first heard ‘Wannabe’, it was 1996 and I was suffering on a hot, unhealthy train from London Canon Street which was stopped at Tunbrige Wells behind a broken Eurostar as was common during that time. I remember thinking that despite my FM receivers poor sound quality, this track would be number 1.
However 11 years on and the worlds a different place. Surely it won’t be enough for Posh to just to strike a pose and point, she’s somehow beyond that … or maybe that’s all we, the public, want, some nostalgia.
I always amazed how remixing or sampling a track can make me love something I hated. Take for instance the perennial ‘Groove is in the heart’ , I dislike it, and I particularly dislike the unique start… but listen to that same sound sampled into ‘Like This Like That’ by Sesa ft Sharon Philips (as played by Pete Tong tonight)and I just love it, very much how Will Smiths ‘Miami’ took a sample from the whispers track I didn’t like and made it great. Same true of beautiful by Christina Aguilera which is great remixed, anything remixed by Bob Sinclair, Jacques Lu Cont and of course NERD’s Rockstar remixed by the master, Jason Nevins.
I saw this advertised on TV last week and I couldn’t find a review so I went and had a look at one in PCWorld. It looked very nice and I’d wanted a home media hub to replace an ugly PC for some time now so, despite it being horrifically bad value for money at £499, I bought one. They also sell an LX3000 which has a bigger hard disk (250GB vs 160GB), double memory (2GB vs 1GB) and a processor with double the cache (couldn’t see any other major differences) but that was a whopping extra £200 and even worse value, and those are bits I’m happy to upgrade myself if need be.
I was a bit cautious because it ships with Vista Home premium which normally requires a Cray and 100GB of RAM to run at anywhere near XP speeds, and this was a weedy 1.6GHz Dual Core (think its a Pentium and not Core Duo, the spec says Core Duo but it has a Pentium sticker on the front) with just 1GB. However, I don’t want it to do anything else but be a media center, so I decided to go ahead.
Quickly got it up and working, but it soon became obvious that this is the real bottom end for Media Center performance with a Vista score of 3.8 (constrained by video perf). However, to my surprise the built in Intel graphics chipset did run Aero and at the full 1920×1200 of my 47″ HD LCD panel. I actually ran this through the VGA connection via a VGA->DVI converter. There’s no HDMI on the LX just a DVI.
So everything worked out of the box, just a little bit slowly. Its not too noisy, but gets very hot if its in a stack of units, so give it an airflow. The fan is on the bottom and they provide a stand so that you can have it stand upright, although it looks less attractive vertically.
It comes with a wireless keyboard with a built-in trackball which is the size of a marble and bizarrely light up red, at which point you can see its filled with glitter… However, you do need to plug in a USB transceiver for it onto the unit which is a bit Heath Robinson. I do like the remote control which feels good and works well, in fact, don’t use the mouse in Media Center, the combination of the slow speed of the scrolling the massive acceleration of the trackball means you will never be able to get to the menu option you want, always the one before or after, just use the remote.
One minor annoyance is that the IR port for the supplied remote control is external, in fact it’s that huge shoebox sized unit shipped in the original MCE SDK that looks like a bar code scanner from Tesco, and its very out of character with the rest of the package. One super-HUGE annoyance is the power LED. Its blue (but that’s ok) but its as bright as a lighthouse! and when on standby it flashes every second so when you turn the lights out you immediately feel like there a police car outside. Clearly any fix for this issue will look ugly (tried a plaster) so not sure what I will end up doing…
This looks like its exclusive to PCWorld, Dixons and Currys as the Vista build and even the Philips manuals have been edited, added to and branded by ‘The Tech Guys’, the trade descriptions contravening brand belonging to DSG.
Anyway, I quite like it overall, and although I know I could have built a better one myself, there is something to be said for just buying something complete that is just designed to do one job. The actual clincher to buying it was that my wife said she liked it … its also the same reason that the top wasn’t off it and its guts exposed within 5 minutes of me getting it home, shame!
http://www.pcworld.co.uk/martprd/editorial/philips-easylife-lx2000-lx3000-tv-package
UPDATE: so lots of people have asked me questions about this article here are some of my answers:
Yes It definitely does 1920 x 1200 using the DVI connection to my ATEC 1080P (1920×1200) LCD TV.
It is slow, just on the cusp of usable. Getting the extra memory would probably help a small amount but not as much as a better matched processor, maybe a 2GHz.
With media center running and nothing else it uses about 800MB of its 1GB RAM.
Its not at all noisy for me, I stand it vertically so the fan is in clear air. When I had it stacked with my Apple TV it got very hot and span the fan up. In normal operation its quieter than a Sky HD or PS3.
I have not found any way to turn the bright blue LED off at night.
No I can’t turn it on with the remote either, I have to press the button on the front to get it back from standby, big issue in my view.
If you, like me, are a Madness fan, don’t forget they are on tour this month !
This is my fav track this week. jamelia - beware of the dog. Love that double drumming a la Marilyn Manson, combined with Depeche Mode.
