I dusted off the D700 last night to take some shots of Rox’s friend’s band, Immergrün, at the Schlosskeller here in Darmstadt.  It’s a pretty cool little venue but awkward to take photos, as while it’s fairly intimate there’s huge columns in the way (well, it is a cellar…) that kind of limit your options.  Anyway, I got a few decent shots – nothing groundbreaking, but it felt good to be at a gig and shooting some pictures.  Checkit:

It’s always kind of hard to take photos of a band whose music you aren’t familiar with, as you don’t know when they’re going to build up and kick off, those being the moments that you want to capture.  Still, these guys were pretty tight and didn’t seem to mind me making a nuisance of myself at the front.

]]> http://dischord.org/blog/2010/02/27/immergrun/feed/ 2 http://dischord.org/blog/2010/02/18/its-about-time-the-birth-of-big-air/ http://dischord.org/blog/2010/02/18/its-about-time-the-birth-of-big-air/#comments Thu, 18 Feb 2010 13:53:34 +0000 nick http://dischord.org/blog/?p=989

Finally – Mat Hoffman is being honoured by a documentary that covers his legendary status and contributions not just in BMX Freestyle but for extreme sports in general.  I kind of feel like although he’s revered by most people who know about bike riding, he doesn’t always receive the wider recognition that he so badly deserves.  Hopefully this will help set the record straight.

Mat is awesome as shit, so we decided to make a movie about him.
—Spike Jonze, Jeff Tremaine, Johnny Knoxville

I’m super stoked on the trailer, right from the opening with Fugazi and of course Tony Hawk this seems like it’ll be spot-on.  Can’t wait.

Naa, not really.  But most people are only too aware of this whole “skateboarding vs. BMX” bullshit that’s been going on for some time now, brought to a head more recently by both sport’s popularity in the wake of the X-Games as well as irresponsible articles by the likes of Thrasher Magazine.  As a direct result, in recent years BMXers have faced ever growing levels of marginalisation from those who promote skateboarding and those who provide “skateboarding facilities”, in the form of bans or restricted sessions at various skateparks.  This is worse in the US where there are so many good parks that simply do not allow bikes under any circumstance, although I’ve witnessed it in the UK as well.

Anyway, I noticed today on Ride’s site that Fudger put up an email chain started by an angry parent that ended up with one park that was about to allow bikes in changing their minds on the back of these few emails and keeping them banned instead.  The parent concerned claims to be one of the old guard, someone who has lived in the area all their life, grew up in the whole Dogtown era surfing and skateboarding and so on.  It’s because of this that I’m even more amazed at the level of hypocrisy that’s exhibited and that goes seemingly unchecked by the people responsible for the parks to which BMXers should be entitled.

Do you think the pools that people originally skated and rode around were meant for skateboarding?  Do you think that the street furniture that’s played such a big part of both sports was intended for something so creative?  What would have happened if, back when it was all starting, empty pools had been policed so fiercely that skateboarders never had a chance to ride?

I can understand the whole ‘concerned parent’ point of view, but at the end of the day your kid is involving themselves in something where danger is a huge part of the fun.  If it’s not a bike in a skatepark, it’s a car in the street.  Understand what you’re involving yourself in, and don’t complain when you get bitten every once in a while.  Oh, and teaching kids some basic park etiquette really, really helps.  Respect your surroundings.

On the flip side, the attitude that’s prevalent these days is doing BMX no favours.  There’s a level of arrogance that’s been layered on in both over the years, kids don’t really appreciate their roots nor were they around to witness the dark ages where there was literally fucking nothing to ride in terms of skateparks or whatever.  It’s that complacency that breeds the attitude we’re seeing now and mentioned in the email chain, and it’s a real shame as it’s inevitably going to widen the rift between the two and ensure that they’re kept out for good.

I don’t have a solution for this, but I do think it’s something that both sides need to work on.  I grew up riding with skateboarders, some of my best friends in fact, and I’d hate to imagine what it’d be like if the animosity grew to the point that both were kept essentially separate and at arm’s length from one another.  Let’s cut the bullshit and work together.

Hackintoshes have always seemed like way more effort than they’re worth to me.  Custom kernels, problematic updates, random crashes, it all flies in the face of why you use an Apple operating system (and computer) in the first place.  While I can appreciate the hacker aesthetic, I’ve never really had the inclination or patience to try it for myself – until now.

Dan’s been running Mac OS X on his Dell for a couple of years with some success, but it was hearing him talk about Snow Leopard and how well that works pretty much out-of-the-box, including updates from Apple, that made me rethink my position.  Fast forward a couple of weeks and here I am in front of my own PC which now runs an (almost) flawless installation of Cupertino’s finest operating system.  The installation was laughably straightforward, but I’ve outlined it below just for shits and giggles all the same:

Hardware

• Intel E6600 2.4GHz Core2Duo Processor
• Asus P5K Deluxe WiFi mainboard.  SATA configured as AHCI in BIOS, no other changes of note.
• 4GB DDR2
• EVGA GTX260-216 896MB VGA
• 250GB Seagate HDD connected to SATA5

Installation was made with Empire EFI v1.085.  I almost gave up at the first hurdle I wasn’t able to boot from my SATA DVD drive as it echoed some random EBIOS error, to which anecdotal evidence on various forums suggested dodgy media.  I was using a disc which I knew to work so this wasn’t the problem in my case, and in the end I made an OS X USB boot disk by following some instructions out there on the Interwebs, and then booted the installation from that.  The only thing of note here was that I had to add the flags ‘GraphicsEnabler=Y PciRoot=0′ in order to get graphics to work, as my nVidia 260-based card relies on that injector for compatibility.

Anyway, the 250GB disk was dedicated to OS X and so partitioned accordingly during install.  The remainder of the process went smoothly, and after rebooting OS X came up pretty much as clean as a whistle.  All that was then left was to run myHack (on the Empire EFI CD for convenience!) which installs the ’standard’ set of compatibility kexts as well as the Chameleon EFI bootloader onto your disk along with a really fucking ugly set of boot screens.  Everything was working from this point except for wireless and my NIC, the latter of which was easily fixed by a simple modification to one of the Apple kexts for MarvellYukon devices.  Incidentally, the wifi I don’t actually care for as my machine runs into a GbE switch that also has a wireless bridge attached, and so at this point I was happy.

The final litmus test for me was to install 10.6.2 via SU (as well as the recent security updates), migrate everything from my MacBook, and then sit back in amazement as it all worked flawlessly.  So now I have a solid, fully functional install of SL on my PC.  As I’m sat in front of an Apple LCD and using an Apple keyboard, as long as you don’t look under the desk who is to know that it’s not really a Mac Pro!? :)

The only thing that’s broken at this point is sleep mode, but as that’s something I’d never use on my workstation I’m disinclined to spend time hacking around with it any more.  To be fair the installation does seem very fragile and prone to basic errors, such as if the permissions are out of whack on any of your kexts it simply won’t boot with no clear indication as to what the root cause is, and quite often recovery can take a little while so it’s really more hassle than it’s worth.  In practice it’s extremely solid with everything working at full speed (including graphics and I/O) and it seems super snappy overall.  I don’t have to worry about updates or it breaking on a whim and so that’ll do me.

Unless you’re a real dog lover (or you’re ultra bored), you’ll probably want to skip to about 2:50 for the appearance of the one and only Todd Trainer, Uffizi, and the rest of Shellac. :

Went out for a drive today to blow the cobwebs from the S62 V8 as it’s stood unmoved for five weeks now, and we came across this place out in Benllech, Anglesey.  Couldn’t resist snapping off a couple of shots, indeed I wish I’d had a bit more time to explore.  I love derelict old places like this although I’m sure the neighbours have a different view on things.

Clicking the bottom two will embiggen, or alternatively head over to my Flickr feed!

Here’s a quick entry to pimp my friend’s new site: Now, get off my stage.  Ry’s writing under his pseudonym has appeared in many places (including Revolt Magazine), and it’s awesome to see him consolidate this into one place which is going to be regularly updated.

“If you are interested in what I do in LA and what happens here on a somewhat daily basis here it is. I’ve created a blog under the pen name Venus Vandevender. It’s basically about my odd jobs, the people I meet and the situations I manage to get myself into.”

If you fancy reading tales (tall or otherwise) from a guy living in LA who has literally seen and done it all then this is more than worth your time.

There have been a couple of fun questions posed recently on Dig Magazine’s site and on TCU regarding two of the most subjective (i.e style over substance) tricks in bike riding – tabletops and turndowns.  Sad thing is, even I overlooked this guy when it came to the last question – Keith Treanor.  Keith was one of my absolute favorite riders from back in the 90’s, ever since his section riding to Operation Ivy and Gorilla Biscuits in S&M’s ‘44 Something’.  So anyway, I stumbled across this photo recently and I think, for me, that’s the question definitively answered.  Click to make big, and check out Keith’s part below. Chris Moeller seriously needs to come good on that old, old promise of re-releasing the earlier S&M videos.
  
 

I flit back and forth between Safari, Chrome, and Firefox but always end up using the latter as my ‘main’ browser for one simple reason – the plugins.  While Chrome may be quicker and Safari launches faster and has better text rendering, Firefox can’t be touched for one simple reason – the vast array of community-contributed plugins that are currently available.

I did document my favourites back in 2007, but here’s an updated list now that we’re living in the future:

• AppTabs.  This is handy mainly for Fever, and while previously I used a Fluid-generated SSB for this it makes more sense (and saves on memory I guess) to have it right there in Firefox.
• AdBlock.  Despite the fuss surrounding its use, I find it a no-brainer of a plugin.
• Delicious Bookmarks.  I’ve been using Delicious for a long time now, and I’ve got bookmarks neatly arranged by tags so that I can have a specific ‘Daily’ section, ‘Social’, and so on.  It’s extremely convenient having this arrangement right there in your browser, and the service plays nicely with Quicksilver too (via the Social Bookmarking plugin).
• Download Statusbar.  The default download dialogue in all browsers seems to suck, but this plugin for Firefox gets it right.  It’s unobtrusive and offers at-a-glance progress for whatever you happen to have downloading at the time.
• Fission.  Purely cosmetic, it changes the progress indicator so that it’s in the Address Bar a la Safari.
• HttpFox.  I’ve been using this instead of the ‘Live HTTP Headers’ plugin which has been out of date for a while now.  It comes into its own when diagnosing problems with a particular website.  Provides real-time output of the entire protocol exchange so that you can see exactly what your browser is doing and each server’s response to every request.
• Omnibar.  Integrates the search and location bar, kind of makes the overall appearance a bit tidier.
• Web Developer.  The swiss army knife of plugins, this is handy for anything from CSS teardowns to analysing page load times.
• GrApple.  Ok, so this isn’t strictly a plugin per se, it’s a theme for Mac OS X only that makes Firefox actually look like an Apple application.

And here’s the end result:

Exciting stuff!

Still trawling back through the old email archives, there’s some quality – and long forgotten – shit in here:

08/04/1997
“hi nick – i went to marseille skatepark last weekend. it ruled.
here’s a photo of fids and a girls ass.
later – will”

That picture of Fids is nothing short of classic.  Click to make big.

Back around ‘96 / ‘97, myself and Ben used to update a little website that we named ‘Dirt’, with some reviews of BMX videos, music, and information on various ’scenes’ around the UK.  The inspiration came mainly from Kieran Chapman’s eWire e-zine, and while it was fun to do at the time we lost interest and it never received the number of updates it deserved.  Fast forward a few years and I notice that I seem to have lost all the versions I thought I had archived :(

Fortunately, I’ve found the last version published up on the Wayback Machine and with the help of Warrick retrieved it complete and intact and put it back online here.  It’s pretty cringeworthy in places, from the design (made with NetObjects‘ Fusion 2.x!) through to our writing.  The photos were mainly stolen scans from Dig Magazine – although Will did kindly give us blessing to do so – or Big Brother, hence Jamie Thomas over there.  Good shit!

The past couple of years have seen the rise of a strange branch of motorsports, an uneasy alliance between the ‘Xtreme’ generation of sports sponsors and the motoring world that’s resulted in a new event in the X-Games and chaps like Ken Block (I still have a Blockhead cap somewhere, cheers Dennis!) earning the respect of a new audience world-wide for his amazing prowess on four wheels.

More recently, we’ve had a superstar of the FMX world – Travis Pastrana – garnering a stupid amount of publicity and Generation-X mindshare by jumping his Subaru Impreza a world-record distance over a river.  This is where I have to hold my hand up and say enough is enough;  The hype and publicity surrounding this sort of thing completely outweighs the act itself  – it’s basic and fairly well controlled mathematics and to me it cheapens the stuff that Travis does outside of this circus.  I’m not saying that jumping cars isn’t pretty fucking ace, it’s just the promotion that’s beyond ridiculous.

Anyway, If you want to see some real skill on four wheels, check out the two videos below.  Not only are these incredible in terms of the talent required to drive a car in such a fashion, the risks involved are real and up there with what it takes to flip a set of doubles on a motorcross bike:

So this post was inspired by a little video that I came across recently, which includes Ian MacKaye (amongst others) talking about how life as a skateboarder changes your perception of the world around you.

It’s funny because it’s this exact same conversation that I’ve had with so many other people (BMXers mainly) through the years.  For example, once you’ve been riding for long enough a kerb is no longer just a kerb;  you go through a mental checklist of all the qualifying critera necessary for a successful boost of said object.  Is it transitioned or merely flat?  How tall is it?  Is it short and tight, meaning it’ll pop you right up, or long and mellow needing some speed and a slow huck to loft anything out of it?

The everyday mundane street furniture that ‘ordinary’ people see takes on a whole new meaning and is interpreted in an entirely different way by both skateboarders and BMXers alike.  A bench, a rail, a bank to wall.  In most cases the original architect or whoever built the obstacle would have been totally oblivious to such potential, but every once in a while you have to wonder exactly what that person was thinking when they decided to building something like Dusseldorf University (RIP).

I think everywhere I’ve ever lived has gone through some process of mental categorisation by how much ’street’ there is to ride.  Seriously, finding a wallride tucked away in some obscure part of town ranks in my mind far higher than, say, a decent shopping mall or a Starbucks.  In fact, I’d swap all that shit for a decent kerb to session.

The Budweiser ‘wassup‘ advert sparked quite a few parodies back in its day – including some from the company itself, but there was one in particular I was especially fond of in which the ‘wasssuuuup’s were replaced by Yorkshiremen saying ‘ey up’ instead.  Fast forward a few years and a conversation with my girlfriend resulted in me trying to rediscover this lost gem but to no avail.  No searches on Youtube or any strings I tried in Google* revealed what I was looking for, so I basically gave up.

Until now.

EYUUUUUP

You can thank the one and only Paul Fletcher for this, as I happened upon on email of his – purely by chance – back from the beginning of 2001 with this attached.  I’ve found a shit-ton of emails going way back to 1997, so I’ll no doubt bore you with some more blasts from the pasts later.  Current ideas include various Minor Threat Q2 demos, early email signatures of the rich and famous (ScanmaN, Shad, Boothy…) and so on.

[*] Cue some nerd posting a direct link in the comments.

2002 – 2010, thanks for the music!

This morning Dan’s mailbox was graced with some shitty Microsoft newsletter which named and shamed 21 companies busted for selling computers with dodgy copies of their software.  It’s surprising to see how many of these are from ‘up North’ (Bolton, Manchester, Oldham and so on), and just out of curiosity I did a quick Google search for one of the offenders – 1Hr Computing, in Manchester – whereby I came across this Microsoft press release.

There’s some pretty choice quotes in there, such as this one:

Mr Murphy from 1Hr Computers said, “We recognise that we weren’t installing Microsoft software correctly, and that’s something we take seriously.”

Yeah, installing Windows Vista from a copy you downloaded via The Pirate Bay is probably a pretty fucking obvious clue that “ur doing it wrong“.  It gets worse towards the end, where it sounds as if they’ve been brainwashed following a visit from Microsoft’s “licensing specialists”.:

After two face-to-face visits from Microsoft licensing specialists, I now look at their products in terms of how they can help me drive revenue, for example using Office Ready PC3.

It’s almost as if these guys were sent off to Microsoft’s equivalent of the `Ministry of Love’ for a little bit of `correction’.

I was nosying back through some old posts on my site and came across this one from 2006 regarding my favourite Mac OS X applications, and figured it’d be interesting to  update this for 2009 / 2010.  While the ‘way’ I work feels like it hasn’t changed, the range of core applications I use to accomplish daily tasks certainly has:

• Google QSB.  Yes, I’ve recently ditched Quicksilver since moving to Snow Leopard on my MacBook, mainly for performance as it seemed particularly sluggish for unknown reasons.  I may switch back, but for now I’m using a customized version of QSB with Google’s obnoxious branding removed.
• Adium.  Still the best multi-protocol chat client.
• Apple’s Mail.app.  I moved all email for my domain to Google’s Hosted Domain service about a year ago, and with that stopped using mutt and started using Apple’s mail client full time instead.  It has its quirks, but the Spotlight integration etc. makes up for it.
• Fever (+ Fluid.app).  I’ve also ditched Newsfire and started using Shaun Inman’s Fever instead, which does some clever stuff that makes wading through a mountain of RSS feeds that much simpler and quicker.  It also plays nicely with my iPhone, another important consideration.
• Firefox.  My main browser on OS X, it’s quick enough for the most part but wins mainly because of the plugins that I can’t live without.  Losing the Delicious menu feels like I’ve lost an arm.
• Things.  I use this to organise all my ‘tasks’, both at work and outside.  The iPhone synchronisation works a charm.
• Tweetie.  Since Twitter has taken off this is now part of my ‘core’ applications that I feel lost without.  While the desktop client is in need of an update, it’s still about the best there is.
• VMware Fusion.  Always handy to have around, I’ve got a minimal Windows XP install which I use daily (still no fucking VMware Infrastructure Client for Mac or Linux) as well as an OpenBSD VM and an Arch Linux VM.
• Adobe Lightroom.  I now do the vast majority of my photo sorting and editing all from within this one application, only switching to Photoshop when there’s some pixel-specific task at hand.
• Yojimbo.  You should probably read this post by Shaun Blanc on why you need Yojimbo in your life.
• Simplenote and Justnote.  Together these provide the perfect way to keep notes synchronised between my iPhone and anywhere else, the Justnote client on OS X being a neat little HUD-type application that’s minimal and unobtrusive.  While you can pair Simplenote’s web-interface with Fluid to create a little desktop application, the Justnotes client is a little neater and works better.
• Dropbox.  Great service which provides a seamless way to synchronise files and folders with their cloud service.  It’s not just the synchronisation though, their whole service is amazing from being able to restore multiple versions of the same file through to proper clients for Mac, Windows and Linux.
• iTunes, Growl, Terminal.app, and the same core console applications – GNU/screen, lftp, vim, and irssi mostly installed via MacPorts.  Stuff like OpenSSH, bash, and so on also go without saying :)

So there you have it, that’s the definitive – for now – list of applications that I couldn’t live without.  I’ll look back in another year or so and see how that’s changed….

Here’s a choice quote from Simon Aldous, who is a Microsoft’s partner group manager, regarding Windows 7.  While on one hand it’s nice that Microsoft have (finally) admitted that they’ve drawn heavily from Mac OS X’s design and philosophy when it comes to the user interface, his closing comment is what stands out (for all the wrong reasons):

One of the things that people say an awful lot about the Apple Mac is that the OS is fantastic, that it’s very graphical and easy to use. What we’ve tried to do with Windows 7 – whether it’s traditional format or in a touch format – is create a Mac look and feel in terms of graphics. We’ve significantly improved the graphical user interface, but it’s built on that very stable core Vista technology, which is far more stable than the current Mac platform, for instance.

Emphasis mine.  What a truly remarkable thing to say.

According to this post, booting into a 64-bit kernel in Snow Leopard on the ‘original’ 13″ Unibody MacBook is artificially crippled by Apple, despite the hardware being perfectly capable:

$ ioreg -p IODeviceTree -w0 -l | grep firmware-abi
| |   "firmware-abi" = <"EFI64">

This is somewhat annoying given that I’m a proud owner of said machine.  Why bother, you might ask?  Is it worth it?  Well that’s up to you, but significant performance increases have been reported especially in applications like Lightroom and Photoshop, so for me it’s worthwhile.

Anyway, the trick – as that article describes – is to modify the list of 64-bit capable models in boot.efi, and it’s more straightforward than you might think.

Firstly you’ll need to download an application called HexEdit from here, and then copy the boot.efi file somewhere for editing:

$ sudo cp /System/Library/CoreServices/boot.efi ~/Desktop/

Fire up HexEdit, and then open up the boot.efi file on your desktop.  Select Find / Go To Address from the menubar, and enter 0x266E8 as the address to jump to. You’ll see the following:

0x266E0: 38 47 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

Amend this to say:

0x266E0: 38 47 01 00 00 00 00 00 04 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

Be careful that you overwrite those values, and not accidentally insert.  Save the file, go back to the terminal and enter the following commands:

$ cd /System/Library/CoreServices
$ sudo chflags nouchg boot.efi
$ sudo cp boot.efi boot.efi.old
$ sudo cp ~/Desktop/boot.efi .
$ sudo chown root:wheel boot.efi
$ sudo chflags uchg boot.efi
$ sudo bless --folder /System/Library/CoreServices --file /System/Library/CoreServices/boot.efi

Note that we took a copy of the original boot.efi, just in case things happen to go awry.  You’ll also need to tell SL to boot the 64bit kernel by default, so do the following:

$ sudo vi /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist

And amend the Kernel Flags to read:

<key>Kernel Flags</key>
<string>arch=x86_64</string>

This will make your change to a 64-bit kernel the default.  If you wish to revert to the 32-bit kernel, press and hold 32 on the keyboard as your computer boots.

If all’s well, System Profiler should report that you’re running a 64-bit Kernel and Extensions:

23:31 [nick] man nice
23:31 [nick] my twitter account has been suspended
23:31 [nighty-] lol wtf
23:31 [nighty-] why?
23:31 [Durz|lnx] oh noes
23:31 [nick] no idea
23:31 [Durz|lnx] gonna be climbing the walls within a couple of days
23:31 [Durz|lnx] trainspotting style

I’ve been a pretty keen user of Twitter for about 18 months now, but that all stopped last night thanks to my account being suspended due to ’suspicious activity’:

This happened while I was using the service as per usual;  I noticed an authentication failure message from my Twitter client, checked on the site, and saw the above.  There isn’t any immediate or obvious reason for this, but according to the relevant section from the Twitter help site, it was one (or more!) of these things:

• Terms of Service Violations
• Technical Abuse
• Spam Investigation

Given that I was using the service via a pretty popular client, doing normal shit such as replying to people, I can’t see how it’s any of the first two.  But ah, spam investigation – that rings a very small bell.  The only thing I can think of there is that I mentioned Cialis and Viagra when commenting on a spam email I’d received for Tamiflu.  But surely Twitter’s spam filtering isn’t so overly zealous to suspend an account for the mere mention of these words, regardless of context?

I logged a ticket in appeal – which was immediately set to resolved, what the fuck – reopened said ticket, and am now awaiting some kind of update.  I’m not going to hold my breath though, because apparently “accounts may be suspended for a minimum of 30 days for research.”

All this comes two days before I’m due to jet off to sunnier climes for a couple of weeks, which is a shame as normally Twitter is what I’d used to spam update my friends with what I’ve been up to.  The wonders of the modern web eh?  I’m almost tempted to do a Fletch and fuck social networking off, although ironically he still uses Twitter.  Maybe I’ll update this thing more often instead?!  Fancy that!

Update:  This has been fixed!  I had literally no communication from Twitter themselves – no update on the support website, no emails, nada.  Then I woke up Friday morning with an email in my Inbox saying I had a new follower, so I checked my account and it had been reinstated.  The new follower was, of course, a spam account.