- Blog
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The curatorial twitch
My dad was book mad. He owned a couple of thousand books, mostly non-fiction. He was an old-school, working class, self-taught polymath, a bus conductor-know-all (I’ve written about his dictionaries before). And he had this habit. He would snip cuttings from newspapers and magazines. Almost daily he’d snip a story of some import and file…
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Tweetdeck – cyberspace dashboard thingie
The Tweetdeck crew, led by doughty leader Iain Dodsworth, came to BBC Audio & Music yesterday to grill us about our use of the app and to fill us in on their plans. Fascinating as you’d expect. One interesting observation: Tweetdeck’s not for beginners, not for light or ‘ordinary’ users. It’s for ‘power users’ so…
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Amazing Radio – an interview with Trevor Dann
[You might want to know: when I wrote this I worked at BBC Radio (and still do!) but these are the opinions of a civilian radio nut and not those of the BBC. Also, Amazing still exists but the ‘unsigned music only’ policy described here does not] I’ve developed a bit of a radio crush…
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The XX on working together
6 Music ran a lovely series of programmes about this year’s Mercury nominees. They did a simple thing and recorded the artists introducing the tracks, describing the inspiration and the creative process for each song. It’s like watching a movie with the director’s commentary switched on. Superb night-time radio (and unimpeachable public service output –…
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Twitter as service monitor
How do you monitor broadcast output on FM, LW (MW in some areas), two DAB frequencies, LW and FM channels for digital TV on Virgin cable, Sky satellite, Freeview and the online versions of the LW and FM streams in Flash and Windows Media? I’m not a radio engineer so jump in and correct me…
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Autotuning Seasick Steve
My twelve year-old remixed a Seasick Steve tune, complete with autotune. It’s awesome.
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Adam Savage from Mythbusters
What I love about Adam Savage is his laugh. On Mythbusters, which I watch a lot (I have children under 12), he’s the riotous, uninhibited, self-actualiser – and he laughs all the time. In this video he talks about his other passions. And it’s inspiring.
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The fifth emergency service
19 June 2017 UPDATE: I’ve just taken down the picture of my staff pass that sat at the top of this post – I’ve been advised that these days it’s thought to be uncool to share pictures of your pass online. I’m quite new at the BBC so I’m still pretty wide-eyed about the whole…
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Three reasons #PromsXHQ is important
April 2022 UPDATE: the super-high-quality PromsXHQ stream went on to replace the standard Radio 3 online stream for all output and, if you listen on BBC Sounds these days you’re listening in this extraordinarily vivid quality. Radio 3 have improved the quality of their live online stream – it’s an experiment called #PromsXHQ (‘XHQ’ for…
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Make My Pano now
Pano is an iPhone app. It stitches together the photos you take to make fantastically compelling panoramas. I’ve developed an unhealthy obsession with Pano and a lot of the pics I upload to my Flickr stream are now Panos. They’re fascinating and uncanny and I’ve been wondering what actually happens when you make a panorama…