warren's posterous

...content to be confirmed...

XmasminimiX mmxi

Kipper-williams---turkeys-005

Hello fellows of festiveness,

What a lovely year it's been. Austerity has been all the rage, strikers on the streets, the world teetering on the edge of financial crisis - oh sorry, that's not all that good is it?

Anyhow, notwithstanding the waxing and waning of the world's woes - there are still some things in life you can rely on...

Lo! The 2011 aural missive has descended from the heavens!

Sad to report, even this stalwart of the season has been affected by the earthly imperative for cutbacks. However, while we may be smaller this year, we are still perfectly formed.

Either listen in the player or click the 'download' link underneath...

Merry Christmas!

(download)

PS You can find the Xmas Mixes going back to 2008 at http://warrenpearce.posterous.com/tag/christmas

Fantastic tasting, deady easy green tomato chutney recipe.

Green_tomato_chutney

Taken from excellent book by Lindsey Bareham "The Big Red Book of Tomatoes".

I scaled numbers down a bit, only had raisins to use, and put in coriander, cloves and nutmeg instead of mixed spice (just used what I had in the cupboard basically).

Your kitchen will stink of vinegar for half the day, but it has come out looking like proper chutney.

Makes a *lot* so make sure you have plenty of sterile jars ready - running them through a dishwasher probably the easiest method.

Collaborative consumption: sharing to beat hyper-consumption?

via ted.com

Seductively simple idea, drawing on a plethora of sites such as Zipcar and Swap. Although many of these are yet to spread outside London in the UK, the potential is clear; especially in a period of economic hardship. I guess the nearest I've ever got to this is offloading stuff on Realcycle/Freecycle - although that's basically a one-way affair.

Most interesting perhaps is the prospect of peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing; for example, renting your vehicle (which spends most of its time unused) to someone else. The hurdle is the eBay-style reputation that will be needed to make P2P lending work. Building up a reputation buying and selling low-value items online is a lot more straightforward than through lending and borrowing cars etc...

Yulephoria - 2010 Xmas Mix

<insert numerous festive puns here>

Lapleaks

Christmas is a mix of the sublime and the ridiculous, and this Christmas mix has both in measures larger than your teatime port.

As usual, I'm leaving the contents to be a pleasant(ish) surprise. No tracklisting here, but if you want to leave any guesses, comments or complaints then please do so below.

DOWNLOAD YULEPHORIA: 2010 XMAS MIX

This is the third Xmix I've done, you can get Xmas Rush (2009) here and Operation Christmas (2008) here. Enjoy!

Hope you have a very Happy Christmas and a Peaceful New Year :-)

Xmasmusic
CREDITS:

Private Eye for the cartoon (you should really buy it)

Graph Jam for the pie chart

Christmas Yuleblog (the Xmas muso-Don), Gumshoe Groove and many more lost in the mists of time for highlighting the music.

And of course, the artists (well, perhaps not Meco).

How can I stop cars running the zebra crossing?

P351

It just happened *again* so have to get this off my chest finally.

I use this zebra crossing at least four times a day at busy times. The road is fairly busy. I see at least one car a day drive through the crossing (presumably) oblivious to me standing patiently at the kerb waiting for someone to meet their obligation to stop.

Apart from being illegal, this may only be classed as an irritation. Except I think it's just the thin end of the wedge. I recently started crossing when the near side lane stopped for me, only to clock a car on the other side driving towards the crossing. I kept looking as I crossed until it became obvious it wasn't going to stop, necessitating a swift jog for the last few steps (unfortunately I was too shocked to take the registration, instead opting for pointlessly shouty swearing).

My question/plea: is there anything I can do about this, before someone gets hurt?

Tamworth station: a brutal staging post

(download)

On one of those journeys where the rail network does its beat to push you onto the roads by pinging you back and forth cross-country.

A cold, grey day is what Tamworth station is made for. All function, no form, it's simply a pile of cable, steel and concrete to enable alighting from trains.

Simple but so rich: gender plot of artists listened to on Last FM #dataviz

Click here to download:
gender_plot.pdf (14 KB)
(download)

[Download the pdf so you can see what's going on properly]

Seriously, this is is so good. Axes are pretty self-explanatory - the vertical axis show the gender ratio for listeners to an artist (ie Gaga v. popular with the ladies, Kyle Hall not so). The size of the artist's name corresponds to my number of listens in the last six months.

On a side note, this covers the last six months. I don't actually listen to a lot of music through Last Fm itself (occasionally I use the artist radio stations). Mostly this is scrobbling my own stuff through iTunes and, more recently, through Spotify which I'm using more despite it's quite limited selection. One blind spot on scrobbling is listening to mixes, even if it picks up the DJ name OK - listening to an hour of Bok Bok registers the same as a 3-minute DJ Nate track.

Perhaps an option to use length of time rather than number of tracks as a variable could be included?

All in all, a *great* data visualisation - if you're a Last FM user you can get your gender plot here.

[hat tip to @lexpretend]