Playing tunes with big sparky electrickery. COOL.

“This is a solid-state Tesla coil. The primary runs at its resonant frequency in the 41 KHz range, and is modulated from the control unit in order to generate the tones you hear.

“So just to explain a little further, yes, it is the actual high voltage sparks that are making the noise. Every cycle of the music is a burst of sparks at 41 KHz, triggered by digital circuitry at the end of a “long” piece of fiber optics.

What’s not immediately obvious in this video is how loud this is. Many people were covering their ears, dogs were barking. In the sections where the crowd is cheering and the coils is starting and stopping, you can hear the the crowd is drowned out by the coil when it’s firing.

This Tesla coil was built and is owned by Steve Ward. Steve is a EE student at U of I Urbana-Champaign. He and Jeff have been going to Teslathons, which is where they met.

It’s been suggested that a good name for this coil would be the “Zeusaphone”. “Thoremin” has also been mentioned, though personally I think we need Theramin type inputs for that.”

Many of you will already be aware of mr_hopkinson’s_computer (especially listeners of Miss Kitty’s Adventures In MySpace on TheCoolestRadioEver, or the Bristolites amongst you), but for those of you who aren’t, here’s the skinny…

There’s a man named Mr Hopkinson, or even, mr_hopkinson. He’s a musician (he was once one-half of Stoloff & Hopkinson, a.k.a. Essenhaitch), and a bit of an artist and film maker too.

He owns a computer. This is mr_hopkinson’s_computer. And mr_hopkinson’s_computer likes to sing. Not only that, mr_hopkinson’s_computer also likes duetting with other musical computers, like Audrey3000.

Explains mr_hopkinson’s_computer:

I like to sing cover versions. I mostly like indie songs from the 80’s & 90’s, but I like some newer ones too.

I started off just doing them for fun in my bedroom but over the last year or so I’ve been lucky enough to perform some live shows, including a little UK tour with my friends Minotaur Shock and Freeze Puppy, and get some play on the radio thanks to Rob Da Bank and Huw Stephens.

See? Not that hard to get your head around.

Anyways, mr_hopkinson’s_computer has both a CD and a 10″ EP out. They feature lovely renditions of songs like ‘Fool’s Gold’, ‘Raspberry Beret’, ‘Fake Plastic Trees’ and ‘Where Is Your Mind’. They are spiffing. Many of them can be heard across the various mr_hopkinson’s_computer MySpace pages (and those of mr_hopkinson’s_computer’s friends, like Audrey3000).

Index of /mr_hopkinson (links to all the MySpace pages, freebies + details of CD/vinyl)
mr_hopkinson’s online interactive video sample orchestra

Political pranksters/Situationists Lite Space Hijackers are trying to raise the spondoolinks to buy a tank, or, at the very least, some kind of armoured personnel carrier…

There comes a time in every activist groups development when they realise that there is something missing in their set up. We have been striving to cause trouble, save the world and wind up the powers that be for 8 years now. However we still don’t own a tank… Please help us right this wrong.

For more info on how to help, see the Tank-O-Meter page.

“In sixty fractions of Megon, we’ll start the landing manoeuvre!”

‘Terrore Nello Spazio’ - a.k.a. ‘Planet Of The Vampires’ - was a 1965 Italian/American co-production, an SF picture said to have (in part) inspired Ridley Scott’s vision of ‘Alien’… Check out the trailer!

‘Planet Of The Vampires’ at Videostored (DivX)
‘Planet Of The Vampires’ at IMDb

Last.fm are now doing a cool widget for you to embed a link to your top tracks, or top artists, or what you is listening to. Here’s mine:

Desperately need to know which Sig Sauer assault rifle Robert De Niro is waving around in ‘Ronin’?

Can’t sleep for the desire to be able to distinguish between the P90 and the 93R in ‘Desperado’?

Or just want to salivate over some smooth cocking movieland gun porn?

Well, I guess that Internet Movie Firearms Database (IMFDb) is the site for you, then. It’s only small at the moment, but from little acorns and that…

The Bristle and Breem list of quality free stuff for your consumer desirable Apple Macintosh computer - There are loads of video making apps and all sorts of other stuff on here - It’s all for free, it’s all gravy and it’s a lovely summer afternoon

- Add your own recomendations by commenting on the post

(or try the thread on the coolest bulletingboard ever )

http://www.isquint.org/ - useful video conversion software

http://www.rogueamoeba.com/audiohijack/ - Very useful shareware for recording sound from alsorts of stuff - trial version is good enough to record long snips of stuff, such as to use in a mix or suchlike.
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ - simply genius is this, a brilliant free sound editing tool that is mind bogglingly good and easy to use and all for free etc!

http://handbrake.m0k.org/ - a very straightforward (albeit a bit slow) tool for ripping direct from DVD to a computer format (eg, avi) - can rip individual chapters, extras or a whole film - It’s free and easy.

http://www.mactheripper.org/ - The name is genius, the programme is free. It rips stuff - Anything pretty much. It is a must have.

http://azureus.sourceforge.net/ - My bittorrent client of choice.

http://www.algoriddim.net/ - A fun little Djay app that is good.

http://www.last.fm/dashboard/ - If you havn’t got this, you don’t deserve a computer frankly. Great tool to listen to music and to find new stuff and keep watch on your mate’s musical choices.

http://download.neooffice.org/neojava/en/index.php - Trial version of MSword expired? - Fuck it and have this for free cos it does pretty much everything MS word does and all for free etc. - Great spreadsheet/wordprocessing stufferizzle.

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ - Media player, plays pretty much anything you can throw at. Really, should come pre-installed cos it’s teh face.

http://www.flip4mac.com/wmv_download.htm - Lets you play wmv files in quick time - the trial version is fine, if that’s all you want to do. It means you can play more stuff in front row.

http://www.divx.com/divx/mac/ - Loads of filums use the divx format. You can’t watch em in quicktime (and thus front row) unless you have this. Then, you can. And you will be happy.
http://www.jubler.org/ - Subtitle editor in Java, works in Mac OS as well as Linux and Windows

http://sbooth.org/Max/ - Rips high quality audio from CD or files, lets you generate audio in over 20 compressed and uncompressed formats including MP3, Ogg (Vorbis), FLAC, AAC, Apple Lossless, Monkey’s Audio, WavPack, Speex, AIFF, and WAVE.
http://transmission.m0k.org/ -Ultra-lightweight BitTorrent client

http://homepage.mac.com/major4/ - ffmpegX is a Mac OS X graphic user interface designed to easily operate more than 20 powerful Unix open-source video and audio processing tools:
* Reads the following input formats: MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DIVX, XviD, non-encrypted VOB and VIDEO_TS, Quicktime .MOV, .DV, .WAV, Real Audio, Real Video, H.263, MP4 H.264, PGM, YUV, PPM, AC3, PCM8/16 bits, mulaw/Alaw, WMA-1/2, SUN AU format, MP2, MP3, AAC, 3GP, FPS1, ALAC, and even more formats
* Converts the above formats to DivX, AVI XviD, H.264 MP4, MOV, DV, 3GP, Sony PSP, MP2, MP3, AAC, AC3, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, VCD, CVD, SVCD, KVCD, KSVCD, DVD, KDVD and MPEG-TS with complete control over encoding options.
* Supports subtitles in VobSub, SubRip, MicroDVD, SubViewer, Sami, VPlayer, RT, SSA, AQTitle, JACOsub and MPsubt formats
* Authors as VCD or K/XVCD (.bin/.cue files); as SVCD, CVD or K/XSVCD (two .img files); as DVD (/DVD/ folder or .img file)

http://www.videohelp.com/tools?tool=Sizzle - Mac DVD authoring tool (menus/video/audioo etc)

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/8825 - Great app for joining movie files, subs, audio tracks etc and authoring to DivX etc - though the developer’s French, so the English isn’t always perfect, it’s easy enough to find you way round with a bit of exploration

http://chris.schleifer.net/ssX/ - Mac Soulseek client, for p2p downloads

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/24492/thelastripper - allows you to save lastfm streams as mp3 and downloads yer album art and stuff

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/21708/metronome - So, you want to play soulful basoon melodies alone but, in isolation, you just can’t keep time - You need a metronome.

http://www.electricsheep.org/ - Teh bestest screensaver ever.

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/19994 - Lightning quick idiot proof DVD authoring tool - This is quite good for free - You can’t just lob a movie file in like you can with toast but converting to video ts with ffmpegx gets round that and it’s quick at duplication.

*Please note* - This software is mostly specific to the APPLE MACINTOSH platform and thus WON’T WORK ON A PC. (though some apps, like ffmpeg have a pc version too)

Polish. Formerly the Gameboyzz Orchestra Project. Fucked up techno squeezed out of games consoles. Mental.

Mikro Orchestra website
Mikro Orchestra on MySpace
‘Polish Tank’

That be the tagline of Modern Mechanix, a lovely little blog focusing on all those old science and technology magazines of yore, with names like ‘Popular Science’ (unlike the unpopular stuff - those white-coated lab rats were cliquey mofos), ‘Mechanix Illustrated’ and, erm, ‘Physical Culture’…

Anyhow, lots of interesting stuff, and some great pictures.

This has got to be one of the coolest blogs ever after our one! check it out. It looks at past visions of the future, space cities and household robots.