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Last year, I went to Burning Man, a festival quite unlike anything else on earth. To call it an ‘Arts Festival’ would be doing it a disservice. I won’t go into the ins and outs of it because it’ll take me several hours to write something satisfactory. Instead, check this out. It’s done the rounds on the Internet and has gone spectacularly viral since its release and is still one of the best Burning Man videos I’ve seen. ...

As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m running a series on ZFS storage systems mostly for the purposes of remembering this stuff and tangentially on the off chance that it’ll help someone too! Today’s documentation entry is concerned with using ZFS’ *send* and *receive* commands to backup datasets over a network. Since installing a new storage server at work, we’ve had an old DL385 G6 chassis with 6 1TB disks kicking about for a good 6 months with a view to converting it to a backup storage device for snapshots and the like. ...

So, in case you have been living under a rock – Beardyman is a beatboxer/comedian/musician who makes up ridiculous sets like this one. It’s really quite fascinating what can be achieved with a Kaoss pad and a bit of creativity!

This infographic makes a great argument in favour of using a blogging platform – ideally self-hosted – as a means of sharing content. Having a blog, I’m fully in control of my content – I own the copyright, I can modify, show, hide, publish and delete at will. The “danger” that prospective employers and so on can look you up on Facebook and other social media sites and may refuse to employ you based on what they find there is easily mitigated by the control that you have over your content. ...

Being ashamed of failure is one the most dangerous psychological traps people fall into. We all do it – every time we’re scared to act because we’re worried about what might go wrong. Every time we want to change something but can’t because we don’t know what will happen if we do. So we get stuck in a loop of wanting to act, but being paralysed. Brené Brown’s talk on TED is illuminating! ...

This is a flowchart for mapping out whether a discussion is viable that I fully intend to print and hand out to people who insist on trying to bludgeon you to death with their beliefs. Support rationality!  Can you follow this? Ok, we can talk.

These days, the hypocrisy in Hollywood has reached astounding levels as the MPAA, RIAA and other media associations have been beating their breast and shouting to anyone who will listen that illegal filesharing and torrents are killing their profits. However, the truth is that firms like NetFlix are losing more money in paying the MPAA’s extortionate licensing fees than they lose to those pesky Swedish Internet Pirates. Peter Kim of paralegal. ...

Some people run a shop to make money. Some people run a museum to preserve something. How about giving away moments or experiences?

I dusted off my camera and took it outside over the weekend while Spring was doing its utmost to make itself felt in the air and got these out of 10 minutes’ worth of snapping! Nature is pretty amazing at times!  It could be a tulip or for all I know, a spaceship!

Unintentional alliteration aside, I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while but didn’t quite know what to say. Before we go on, I invite you to watch this video. No, really, watch it. Read more about positive psychology here Breaking up the learning process One of the things that so appeals to me about object manipulation disciplines in general is the progressive nature of the learning process. ...

Looking cursorially at the newspaper headlines about Abu Qatada, the ‘hate preacher’ who was enflaming Muslims against the western Infidels, I’m struck with an interesting thought. Free Speech by preprintPeople have, predictably, made the knee-jerk response that ‘People should not be allowed to preach hatred like that’ and comments of that ilk. What fascinates me is how, yet again, most folks don’t think it through. Yes, the man is unquestionably a shady character and having him peddle his ideologies to the impressionable can be seen as a Bad Thing. ...

SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) has gone dormant for now, thanks to a massive outcry by millions of end-users who are, ironically, far better clued up about how the Interpipes work than the legislators debating the bills and a host of big-name companies, like Facebook, Yahoo, Google and so on. It’s really awesome to see the industry rally together to fight a piece of legislation that is so badly conceived that it would wreck many more lives and sources of revenue than it would save. ...

This is one of the most fun Tenori-On analogues I’ve come across. It’s really well done, too! Click the squares and put some headphones on. See you in 3 hours.

I’m sitting on a sheepskin in the Isle of Skye and listening to music. You should hear this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUT6b3sxSVs

Beats Antique have released a new album called Blind Threshold and it’s rather tasty. It’s also downloadable for free from their site, though I’d recommend donating to them regardless – they’re an amazing collective of musicians and deserve your support! Without further ado: [wp_bandcamp_player type=”album” id=”3034204548″ size=”grande3″ bg_color=”#E2E2E2″ link_color=”#BB5242″]

The collaboration between David Guetta and Usher resulted in something that’s fairly ‘mainstream club’-esque, but it’s still quite pleasing to the ear and there are some nice melodies and notes in there too!

The D&B/dubstep/glitch wizard, Pretty Lights’ latest batch of tasty remixes are singularly awesome and none more so than this gem. It’s a montage of his Red Rocks gig in Colorado and the way the tune flows and how he mixes in classic rock songs into the glitchy backdrop is sublime!

This is mostly for Katelyn, who has been itching to get more things out of my head and into hers. It’s a bit tricky to do this, however, when we’re separated by an inconvenient ocean. So I got Skins to shoot some rough & ready clips of me flailing wildly with my poi in the hope that someone somewhere finds some new ideas!