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I’ve been meaning to throw together a chillstep mix for a while now, but haven’t got round to it. Now that I’ve started in earnest, I was compelled to share these three tracks because they’re aural porn. Enjoy the teaser! Chillstep Teaser Minimix by Kyrill Poole on Mixcloud

The Nexus 7 is a great piece of kit, but some units suffer from a crippling bug that is very simple to fix but can lead you to bash your face against a hard thing in frustration. If you let the device’s battery run down to absolute zero, it’ll power off like a good little piece of electronics to prevent the lithium polymer battery from exploding. Unfortunately, in some units, this leads to the battery dipping below baseline voltage and results in the device trying to power on when connected to mains power, running “out of battery” and hard shutting down with a terrifying sound of white noise from the speaker and static on the screen. ...

Preamble: this is going to be relatively short and a lot of things here won’t get necessarily their fair share of exposure and the detail level is somewhat lacking in places. I hope to write more on specific topics covered here later. tl;dr: “This is a work in progress” Essentially, I have two questions: Why are women deemed attractive by the majority of society/the media/you name it when they are seen as limited or vulnerable in some way? ...

RamesesB generally makes aurally orgasmic noises, so when I heard this mix being played at Spinning@ yesterday, I literally smacked my gob at How awesome it was and The fact that I hadn’t heard it before. So the only thing to do was to go on Soundcloud and find it. And I did. Introducing: Forgotten Dreams

I’ve not done a music post in a while and during the lull, a whole load of musical gems have percolated through my ears and lodged themselves firmly at the back of my brain, quietly driving me mad. So here are some of the awesome tracks I’ve had the pleasure to experience! Quite ignoring the gorgeous glitchy remix of the song, the video editing and style of the video match the track perfectly. ...

A shipment of these bad boys has just shown up. Enterprise-grade MLC SSDs. Yes, it sounds like a bit of a misnomer, but if Smart Storage are to be believed, their take on ensuring SSD durability means a whole new era in enterprise SSD storage. Up until now, you had essentially two choices when purchasing SSD storage for your storage solution: Buy SLC disks at a considerable premium from the likes of Toshiba or STEC or, god forbid, OCZ. ...

The last photos I managed to get my camera to take before it died a noble death by lack of battery today.

A month ago, a lovely friend from Canada came a-visiting! So Skins Elliott, photographer and all-round Pretty Cool Guy, Katelyn and I went to the South Bank to amble around and catch up. Some photos got taken! I’m especially happy about how my little manual 50mm f/1.4 lens produces this really nice soft-focus effect in some situations. I need to work out what I did to achieve this!

A while ago, I joined this awesome collaborative production company called HitRecord. It’s a little bit different. It’s a collaborative production company. Think open source, Creative Commons and a whole bunch of delightful humans rolled into one package. Anyone can join. Anyone can contribute. As long as it’s your own work. It leads to some incredible collaborations like this: …that arise from someone writing a short story, then someone else drawing a couple of character illustrations, then someone else recording a reading of the story, then someone else recording a live green-screened rendition ...

In keeping (somewhat) with my photographic theme, today I noticed that it was valiantly attempting to snow. Mostly it turned into slush but some of it stuck around on plants in the garden and on my back as I was bent over staring intently at bushes through a lens. Anyhow I managed to do some photography and got a bunch of pictures of snowflakes and other states of water. Now I wish I could feel my fingers… ...

An utterly fascinating essay by Jean-Baptiste Quéru just caught my attention and as a technology nerd, I find it incredibly awesome. It’s called Dizzying but invisible depth. It appeals to me on a number of different levels, encapsulating a concentric series of black boxes, each more fascinating in its complexity than the last. Dizzying but invisible depth You just went to the Google home page. Simple, isn’t it? What just actually happened? ...

I’ve resolved to try and practice my photography more. I have a kickass camera and an extremely fun lens and yet I leave both of these things sitting gathering dust constantly! So this next week I will post a set of photos each evening to alleviate that. Tonight’s theme: Macros! 

My friend and I had a rather amazing game of Bananagrams where she was busy constructing elaborate ladder-type layouts while my word grid was doing its level best to impersonate the map of the Russian Empire. All in all a success, I’d say! Anyhow, I decided that what we needed was some dramatic macros of the whole thing.

I’ve been meaning to write about this for some time after I finished my accidental essay on polyamory thinking as soon after I completed that, I was walking along and more thoughts sprang to mind. Anyhow, today’s topic of choice is the use of language in effective communication in a relationship context. God, that was a mouthful. It’s simpler than it sounds though. For the purposes of disambiguation, I refer to “relationships” in all their multifarious flavours, varieties and forms, not solely polyamorous, monogamous or even romantic ones. ...

My beloved Canon 60D has been sitting with my mum for the last two weeks which has been preventing me from taking more photos, as I resolved to do recently. I got it back last night so of course I did the only thing that a sensible and mature photographer would do: take pictures of my housemate’s cleavage!  After all’s said and done, I’m very fond of my f/1.4 30mm lens and its depth of field. ...

Ah yes. Now we’re talking.. A descriptive graphic of the proliferation of language designed to describe women who like sex vs men who do and the gender divide inherent therein. Try it yourself – see how many words for each of the four categories you can think up and see what the distribution looks like for you. ![]

In sorting through my stepdad’s stuff, I came across, amongst other things, a collection of old cameras and lenses (film, naturally), in the M42 mount format. For some reason unknown to me, I hadn’t thought of the possibility of using these lenses with my 60D until a week ago. In hindsight, it was obvious, given that my friend and fellow photographer, Matt Schultz uses a SMC Takumar 50mm f/1.4 lens on his 5D MK-II to great effect. ...

I’ve recently discovered this lovely new feature that SoundCloud has: sets. So, thinking “Hey, a playlist feature! Yawn…”, I idly clicked some tracks and added them to a “Set” but apparently it’s a bit more than that. It’s a ‘social playlist’, after a fashion, that you can publish to the world. Nothing new and ground-breaking, sure, but still undeniably cool. So here’s some things I mashed together into a dubstep / chillstep playlist and think are delightful and make your brain turn in fun new ways. ...