I made a recent resolution to myself that I should listen to more music, and go and see more live gigs. The last gig I went to was probably over 10 years ago – I don’t count the folk music at the Farnham Beer Festival as a proper gig

So I was very interested when a friend of mine introduced me to a new free iPhone app called Songkick.

Songkick is a massive location-aware calendar of gigs, tailored for the tastes of the user.

It’s an app that runs on the iPhone and there’s an accompanying website.

Songkick uses location services on the iPhone and finds gigs nearby. Multiple additional locations can also be manually selected. I’ve told Songkick I’m interested in events near where I work, and near home. But if I’m away from home it can find events local to me, which is pretty awesome if I’m in at a loose end in a new town.

The best part though is that Songkick analyses your music tastes and can produce a customised list of events shown in the “Your artists” part of the app. So rather than just show me a massive list of gigs in the area it has some intelligence to show me bands I’m likely to want to go and see, as well as new bands I may be interested in.

Songkick can scan a users Pandora, last.fm and iTunes library. Artists can also be added manually, or by following recommendations on the site.

It’s really easy for songkick to figure out what music I like because I use last.fm. I simply signed up for a new Songkick account and gave them my last.fm account name (but no password) and they grabbed the list of recently played tracks from there.

Once that’s done (which took just a minute or two for me) the ‘Artists’ view on the phone is now populated with artists I like, and highlights those currently on tour with a little ribbon.

I’m hoping this is going to help me fulfil my resolution, and maybe I’ll discover some new music along the way.

                          

Thanks to Peter Stevens for pointing this video out to me. I’d not seen it before, and it raised a smile. Those of an impatient disposition might want to skip to 2 minutes in to the video. It’s only 4 minutes long in total and is worth watching in full. Although you might find yourself unable to shake the tune and words as I am.

Note: If you’re viewing this in an RSS reader you might not see the above flash video. Click through to the post. Also viewable in html5.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eaton’s#Bankruptcy has a little history.

                          

Google have finally (street)mapped most of the UK. Look at all that blue!

From Land’s End..

..to John o’Groats..

and pretty much everywhere in between.

Including my own back yard! Not found myself on it yet, but have had a great time ‘driving’ around the country. Found anything fun? Leave a comment

                          

Feeling a bit rotten at the moment as I’ve been off work ill for a few days with some kind of bug. Apparently I’m on the BRAT diet so my wife says. Basically this means eating very basic stuff like bread and apples. I’m pretty sick of eating toast and sliced apple so wanted to do something a bit different. This is where the community came in! I was idling in the irc channel for my fantastic VPS provider Bitfolk and mentioned my lack of inspiration. One of the other denizens suggested I cook the apples.. which lead to this:-

Ingredients

One slice of bread
One apple – peeled, cored and sliced (16ths should be small enough)
2 tsp water
2 tsp sugar
Cinnamon to taste (I used just under half a teaspoon)

Instructions

Put the sugar, water and sliced apples into a saucepan and cook on a medium heat for 5 minutes, turning the apples to make sure they all cook evenly. Half way through the cooking process add the cinnamon.

Toast the bread.

Cut the toast in a decorative fashion

Serve the toast on a plate, add the apples, eat.

It’s really basic but tasty, takes no more than 10 mins to make, and about 2 mins to eat

                          

I saw this tweet from the Ubuntu community Manager, Jono Bacon, and thought I’d take a look at his wishlist.

Click for bigger

Of course he’s probably changed it by the time you look at it now I said that!