The Tegos Tapes: lesser known work by Vangelis.

Jul 25

With the death of Rutger Hauer yesterday, I was reminded of the great work this Dutch actor has done over the years. One of the movies that of course springs to mind immediately with me (and all fellow geeks around me) must be “Blade Runner”. A majestic movie from director Ridley Scott that is an absolute must-see if you have one molecule of Geek Dna in your body.

What makes the movie so fantastic aside from the great cinematography is of course the music. The soundtrack written and composed by Vangelis is probably one of the most memorable and awe -inspiring elements of the movie. If you take away all the actors and even the storyline of Blade Runner (Which is based on the underwhelming novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep) and you would be left with JUST the music and the shots of the scenery? It would STILL be a good movie.

Vangelis as a composer has done some amazing things: Ranging from the epic soundtrack of BladeRunner to popular tracks like “Chariots of Fire” and writing the soundtrack to not one but two space missions. (Mithodea and Rosetta). Both fantastic albums.

Created as a soundtrack for the instructional tapes for a surgeon

But I like to dig around for the obscure, so in my quest for some “lesser known” material I found “The Tegos Tapes” A great collection of previously unreleased material. Created as a soundtrack for the instructional tapes for a surgeon (Yes, Good old Vangelis did not shy away from the occasional Schnabble) they have not been released as an album but do contain some amazing tracks. I’ll let you in on track number 1 for you to enjoy.

Links.

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KW1304 – Cutting the Cable

Sep 25

This week Knightwise talks about cutting the cable and some thoughts about what this could mean for not just your pocketbook, but also your sanity. There are tons of places you can get content that you source and curate yourself. Come join us to hear about a few.

Producer’s note: Originally recorded in 2017, but not originally aired in KW Season 12.

Links

Credits

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KW1301 – Getting iOS and Linux to Play Nicely Together

Jul 28

There are those times in life when you want to do things because you can… and sometimes you can leverage that in getting done all that you need to do.

Links

Code Snippets

  • Download your ‘watch later’ playlist
    youtube-dl -u <yourGmailAddress> -p <yourPassword> -f mp4 --playlist-start 1 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=WL
  • Download ‘audio only’
    youtube-dl -u <yourGmailAddress> -p <yourPassword> -f m4a --playlist-start 1 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=<your playlist id>

Credits

Episode produced by Keith Murray
Image courtesy of Blakespot on Flickr

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To Pay or not to Pa(treon): The reboot of the podcast.

Jul 05

Having the chance to literally unplug from the daily rush of being a freelance entrepreneur (read: hiding out in the north of France for a week), has given me some time to sit down and think about what I want to do with the Knightwise.com website and the podcast. Don’t worry, we are not going away anytime soon (the fact that nothing has actually been moving on the blog for the last couple of months is evidence of that) but I do need to make up my mind on what to do next, what to do with the “next season” of Knightwise.com

Knightwise.com is essential

Knightwise.com is and has always been the digital playground of my life. Keeping track of new stuff, experimenting with technology and sharing that with the community has been one of the most rewarding things I have done the last 13 years or so. Even though I don’t have much time anymore to get into my “geek groove” because I am insanely busy with my own company, I know that “being” Knightwise and “doing” Knightwise.com is an essential building block to stay sane. I just need that creative outlet AND it’s a great idea to keep abreast of whats going on on the edge of real and cyberspace.

Downloading is doubtfull

With the advent of ubiquitous bandwidth in every corner of the modern world I HAVE been looking at the “classic” way I have been distributing the Knightwise.com podcast. Recording the audio file, uploading it to the internet archive, linking it to the website and then pushing that content to different social media platforms to get traction is .. a pain in the rectum. When you look at the average number of downloads it might be worth it, but it is hard to find new followers and “get noticed” by people who can join the community. As a little experiment I did a Youtube screencast a couple of weeks ago (Completely done on my Linux machine) and posted that online. 4 days later: 20 000 views AND a SLEW of comments. Now I KNOW its not about the SIZE but about the QUALITY of your audience, but still: its a BIG number. Part of the reason was using the platform: Youtube just has a far bigger “reach” then just a teeny wordpress blog like mine. I asked myself the question: is the “old” way of doing podcasting still effective enough ? Maybe we should quit downloading and offer all of the content on a bigger platform.

No I’m not gonna sell out.

Hold your horses, I’m not gonna sell out just yet. With over 1000 articles on the blog there is no way I’m going to ditch my little website here. And I don’t trust the lords of Youtube enough to credit them with all my content. Luckily this is not an “Or” but either an “and” problem. How about we do BOTH ?

Thank you TC

I was inspired by the return of the Spacemusic Podcast. TC followed his dream, packed up his stuff and moved to Malaga to reboot his podcast. He is doing a “streaming” version of the show on platforms like Mixcloud and a “Download” version of his show via Patreon. For 6 dollar’s a show you can get the downloadable version via a secret RSS feed and you get a premium non-stop version too. (Although I find the show LESS enjoyable without TC in it). He makes a buck out of every show he produces and that doesn’t sound so bad to me.

So what do you think ?

Now I’m pretty late to the Patreon Party and there is a reason: I don’t NEED to make money off of Knightwise.com but it WOULD be a little bit of a motivation AND a big help if I need to buy some stuff for the show. I know you have heard this before but it WOULD help me stay true to the general Knightwise.com idea: Free for everyone, at a cost when you want “more”.

As for the “content” part, it WOULD mean that you would be getting the majority of the content from the blog while the content itself will be streamed from the different platforms (Youtube/Soundcloud) and depending if I will be doing Audio or Video you can download the shows into your RSS reader of choice. Sound like a good plan ?

So help me decide: Would this be a great way to get your Knightwise.com fix and would you pay (about 1 dollar or something) per show just to be able to download it for Offline use ? I would love to hear your feedback in the comments.

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Ermagerd, I forgot how to Nerd.

Jun 16

I have been pondering a while now on how I was going to write up this blogpost, thinking about the title, the lead-in, the postcard, the body and the takeaway (These are copywriting terms BTW) but in the end I decided to ditch the whole idea and just write this one off the cuff.

Truth is, I’ve been crazy busy lately. Having my own company, giving talks, subcontracting as a freelance Project manager AND moving house has left me with very little time to do anything remotely interesting in the geek world. That in itself is sad, seeing how much fun I had doing stuff like the Knightwise.com podcast and website over the years.

It has been SO busy that I even started sliding into “norm” land. You know, Norms, those folks who watch daytime tv and consume mass media. When instead of browsing through some obscure SubReddit devoted to cyborg bunnies, I was aimlessly scrolling through mainstream crap like 9gag, Facebook and some celebrity’s Instagram feed. What has become of me ? ?

So I gathered up my imaginary friends (Neo from the Matrix, The ghost of Optimus Prime and a couple of dead Jedi masters) to host a virtual intervention. A moment in time where I told myself: Enough is enough. I urgently need to get my geek back! I need to read books which are insanely niche or unknown to the general public. I need to watch Youtube channels instead of Netflix enjoying smart content from brilliant people who live in tiny apartments across the world. I need to listen to ted talks in a way other people listen to pop songs AND I need to ramble my thoughts online, on my personal blog.

Yes! Blog, you know, that thing we thought up back in 2004 where everyone with a keyboard a screen a teakettle and an internet connection could write his or their thoughts online. Over the last years my “blogging” has more and more fallen into the pre-shaped constrictions of copywriting because “it reads well”. If you realy geek down to it, the main purpose of a blog is not only to be read, it is also the fact of writing it. Expressing your thoughts with the world at large without having to make it “commercially viable” because .. its geek .. right ?

Case in point: Couple of weeks ago I managed to clump together a stupid Youtube screencast on how I had installed Ubuntu 18.04 on my XPS 13 and what applications I was using. 48 hours later the silly little video was hitting 20 000 views and brimming with comments. Wow! Where did that come from ? Turns out I still have some Knightwise mojo in me after all. Now we must be careful with this because the lure of fame (if you can call it that) is never far away. Before you know it you start looking for topics that appeal to a greater mass, and in doing so start to “dumb down” your geeky video into some shallow commercial youtube-countdown video that says “Top 5 things to do after installing Ubuntu”. Not my thing, not at all.

Where I a going with this insane ramble is that, as a Geek its OK to hang out at the fringes. Obscure knowledge, technical documents, falling asleep while listening to the sounds of a numbers station you found on Vimeo… the weirder it gets the better I like it. So I will ditch the rules of commercial writing for a while and just shoot straight from the hip and try to share with you what geeky finds I came across while cowering the fringes. Because we do live on the edge of real and cyberspace .. do we not ?

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