FatBinary Stickies

Depeche Mode eh? Where to start.

Caught them at The Nynex this week, what an absolutely cracking gig that was.

Now, I’m bit of an angsty-old-school Mode fan so I was hoping to hear more of my dream setlist, Love In Itself, Something to do, If You Want, Blasphemous Rumours, that sort of thing.

As it turned out the set was mainly their more ‘modern’ (by my standards anything post Music For The Masses is modern!) stuff, not surprising since it’s the Playing The Angel Tour.

Anyway, what was it like?

Brilliant that’s what… the place was packed to the rafters, the sound, delivered by half a dozen very impressive linear arrays, was pristine yet ear splitting, everyone was screaming their lungs out with the words to all the songs yet the music was so perfectly loud you could barely hear your own discordant scream-along never mind your neighbours’.

The lighting rig was superb and you should’ve seen the kit these guys had in the wings, you could’ve cut an album using just the foldback kit alone and FOH looked like Darth Vader’s bathroom.

Martin Gore came dressed as the drummer’s girlfriend as usual, and at one point I think Fletch pressed a button or something too. Seriously. As for the rest of the band they had a drummer (a drummer? in Depeche Mode?) and some stand in for Alan Wilder, who I for one sadly miss and cite his leaving as the reason for their departure from what I know as Depeche Mode… your mileage may vary on this one naturally.

Plus, have I just never noticed it before, or, is Dave Gahan camp?

The music? Top - Question Of Time made Nynex explode and Martin’s ‘unplugged’ Shake The Disease was superb. Old fave Just Can’t Get Enough roused the crowd no end as did stadium essential Everything Counts.

Seriously, however sad I may be by clinging on to the Mode of old you had to be there to appreciate just how stupendously rocking this gig was. It’s nearly twenty years since I saw them live and believe you and me they still have it. In spades.

And the crowd? I haven’t been amongst so many people my own age since school - it was top and on more than one occasion I thought I’d died and gone to milf heaven so there you go, make of that one what you will.

Depeche Mode… still top.

Remember my trouble finding a CD Tray template for printable discs? Well, I decided to give Disc Cover from BeLight Software a whirl.

As soon as you launch the app it drips GUI goodness over your screen. The interface is intuitive to use and beautiful to behold, and you can create the whole shebang - covers, inlays, discs, all from one project.

The included clipart and templates aren’t really to my taste so I find myself starting from a blank template each time but Disc Cover makes it an absolute doddle to knock a print project together so there’s no worries.

When you’re done with the design you hit print and Disc Cover takes care of the rest thanks to the countless printers and paper/tray formats that it knows about.

This software is very, very cool. Love it.

Saw The Mighty Boosh at The Apollo this week with Mrs FatBinary and Miss Myrna. What a cracking night out that was… absolutely brilliant.

Either you get ‘em or you don’t but whatever, we’re big fans here and nearly broke something after laughing for just under three hours with nothing more than a fag-and-beer break for respite half way through.

The show itself was a bit of a mish mash of stories from the two series (mostly Tundra) with loads of cheeky banter between scenes. Weird crowd mind you, 60% students (to be expected I suppose) with the rest made up of old Manchester heads and pissed up scousers - peculiar.

If you like The Boosh (I’m told it’s an acquired taste) then you absolutely have to see them live… the bits BBC3 made them leave out have to be seen to be believed! Seriously. The less-than-well unicorns bit sticks in my mind more than it should. The Boosh is loose and it’s coming at you like a flannel.

This is pretty funny. Makes you wonder if there’s actually some kind of semi-decent algorithm behind the iTunes Just For You feature currently in beta on the iTMS.

I bought the old NWA track “A Bitch Iz A Bitch” the other day and based on that sale iTunes decided I might like “Bad Girls” by Donna Summer.

From “bitch” to “bad girls” is pretty cool since there’s definately no correlation between artists, track or genre that I can think of.

Just noticed this little bit of iCandy - if you hold down the play button on your Rev C iMac G5’s remote for a few seconds it puts your Mac to sleep.

This is old news I know, but I swear I didn’t notice the remote control graphic that pops up before, complete with animated ‘z’s.

Nice touch? Well, I like it!

It was a real pain to grab the pic you see here… you can’t just take a screen grab because it pops up just as your iMac is about to hit the hay.

I had to find the graphics file (shown here at 100%) deep within the System folder and Photoshop it onto a desktop background shot to make this mock up screen grab.

I wonder what the “remote-linked1.png” icon in this folder is for?

It shows the remote with a linked-chain motif above it. Could it be a sign that the remote is ready to be ‘linked’ to any old Mac with an IR port in the near future?

And before you remind yourself that the only Mac with an IR port at the moment is the new iMac, you can add one to any USB equipped Mac today by plugging in a new iPod dock and bingo, your Mac’s FrontRow ready.

I came across a brilliant Quartz Composition screensaver the other week on the YellowMonkey blog called iQuotes that shows a selection of Steve Jobs quotes as a Keynote/FrontRow-esque slideshow.

It appears that maybe a couple of people at Apple have set this as their screensaver too!

Anyway, I enjoyed the screensaver loads and had a shufty around with it in Quartz Composer and made a couple of tweaks here and there… I added a bit of movement and made the text fly in and out when the quote changes, that kind of thing. I also added the option to change the feed url for the quotes to one of your Safari RSS feeds from within System Preferences.

You can download the modded version from the following link:

Download iQuotes2.qtz.zip

I must stress I didn’t create this screensaver! YellowMonkey did! I just twiddled it a bit. All the hard work was done by YellowMonkey, zero credit comes in my direction for this lovely bit of Quartz action.

I trawled the web last night looking for a Photoshop template for printing on to CDs using the standard “Tray B” type tray that you slot into your printer. You’d think the web would be littered with them wouldn’t you?

Maybe I wasn’t searching hard enough but all I could find were templates for CD labelling apps. There’s plenty of CD templates out there but I couldn’t find a “Tray B” template that positions the CD in the right place.

Anyway, in the end I knocked one up myself so here it is for anyone that might find it useful:

Download TrayB.psd.zip

It works great for me in Mac Photoshop CS2 printing to a Canon Pixma iP5000 - YMMV. Note to Mac users - the file is set to be a Stationary Pad so when you open it, you’ll automatically open a copy instead in a true template-stylee. Uncheck ‘Stationary Pad’ in the Finder’s Get Info box if this bothers you.