When i was a kid, i used to dream how it would be when i was 20-ish. Be a DJ, do cool work in IT, buy any gadget i would like. I realized my dreams. I DJ-ed on some big festivals, traveled abroad, do cool work at one of the best IT companies in the Netherlands and i can almost buy any gadget i can set my eyes on (if my purse allows it ;) ). Was i happy that i fulfilled my dreams? No i wasn't. In fact, as soon as i reached a milestone in my life, e.g. DJ in London, i would immediately set another one. e.g. DJ in Japan. I felt empty, always looking forward into the future, never looking back or living in the present and enjoying the fact that e.g. i played at the Lowlands festival (one of Hollands biggest music festival). I wasn't enjoying my life until i started applying Bert's motto; "It's not the end result that counts, it's how you get there".

The thing i love about music is discovering. It's always a great sensation to hear a new track and getting goosebumps, learning/growing to love it, sharing it with friends and family. You can find a diverse range of music in my iTunes and vinyl library ;). From Alan Parsons Project to Kilimanjaro dark jazz ensemble, jazz to breakcore and back again to minimal classic. I'm open to listening to new music and there are a few good ways of finding it. In this post i'll tell about a couple of my favorite ways of discovering new music!

In all the above usage scenarios i will post my top 5 apps! starting with this post for the general stuff. The general stuff is what i need to get around on my mac and makes me feel comfortable (and perhaps warm and fuzzy inside) and isn't part of the standard OS X Leopard installation.

So without further ado, i bring you;

1. Quicksilver by Blacktree

2 years ago i had installed my own wiki onto my Macbook Pro. If i had a new idea, i would put it there, in some page, in a list, with or without some extra explanation. The pages, lists started to pile up. Reading them again and again was fun, but it didn't move me to actually execute them. I had more ideas then i could execute.

Last week i bought the new Prodigy album from the iTunes store, "Invaders must die", after a girlfriend recommended it to me. She told me to check it out because i really like the old skool Prodigy sound (Charly, Out of Space, etc.). I even produced some mashups as Soundbites. You might say I'm a bit of a fan from the early days.

Sitting in front of my laptop i listened to the too-short 30 second previews from the iTunes store, the first couple of tracks sounded like the "Voodoo People" remix from Pendulum. It sounded ok, then i heard some old skool beats with some old skool sounds and a massive bassline! It was decided, i immediately bought the whole album. A couple of days later i put the album onto my iPod and started listening and rating the individual tracks.

Track rating of "Invaders must die"

The first two titles are massive sounding clean produced tracks which have a Pendulum versus Prodigy sound to them. There are a couple of other tracks which also sound that way and it is not quite what i like and thus have received a lower rating (2-stars). If you like Pendulum and the Prodigy, this is the album for you. Massive beats, with the ever so recognizable snare drum and well produced.

Then there are what i think are the old skool tracks and of-course are my favorites, less well produced and with beats from the 90's. "Take me to the hospital" has it all, rave, bassline, a beat that sounds like it came from the "Fat of the land"-album, vocals, reggae and a police siren which has been skewed and is dangerous to listen in a car because you think the police is chasing you. Then there is "Warrior's Dance" (4-star) which is simply amazing, when i first listened to it it gave me goosebumps, twice! Old skool beat from waaaay in the beginning of the nineties, screaming "drum and bass" bassline, a catchy female vocal but best of all at the very end there is an air horn! You cannot rave without an airhorn! The other three tracks that have gotten a 3-star rating are; "Omen-reprise", It gets 3-stars because I'm a big sucker for Vangelis, it's like track 2 but without the beats and a lot more synth, building up to a climax. "World's on fire" is so so in the beginning but then a very recognizable rave sample is used and i get goosebumps all over again! btw the rave sample has been taken from Vamp from Outlander. Finally, "Stand up" is just nicely experimental (3-star again).

Although i don't think every track is as good, i have found a couple which have become favorites. To me the Prodigy have proven that they are still the kings of rave.

Wine event in iPhoto

Well the solution for me was very simple. Take a picture of the wine bottle with my iPhone (or any other camera), import the picture into iPhoto, add it to a "Wine event", rate the picture and if needed add some description to it. What i have then is a list of wines, well pictures actually, with ratings (1 star is horrible-do-not-drink-again, 5 is wow!) and a short description of how it tasted, where i bought it and perhaps the price.

Now the only thing left is to have the list easily accessible when I'm shopping for new ones. Hmmmmmmm, well i found a pretty nifty solution , it's the all magical iPhoto->Smart Album->iTunes->iPhone combo! You start off by creating a Smart Album in iPhoto, then setup the conditions as seen in the picture.Open up iTunes, plug in your iPhone (or iPod), go to the pictures tab and click from the Selected albums the "Best wines" album. Now hit the Sync button and you have an album of best wines added to your mobile device (aka iPhone or iPod)! So what just happened? I have a fully automated way of adding pictures of great tasting wines to a picture album on my iPhone. Whenever i add a picture to the "Wine" event in iPhoto and give it a 3-star or more rating it gets synced to my iPhone. Of course this is just a taste of what is possible with rating pictures of bottles of wine and syncing them back with "Smart albums". I'm going to be adding "Smart albums" for "Best Whiskey" and "Worst wines" (so i don't accidentally buy them anymore).

Currently this wine is at the top of my list! (price is a bit steep but hey! the taste is great!)

Chateau D'Aurilhac 2005 Haut Medoc

I sat on the couch drinking some wine, bought at the local grocer and noticed some brown piece of newspaper lying on the floor. I reached to pick it up and it was a cutout of a review of the record in German. It must have fallen out of the paper sleeve of the vinyl record when i put it on! I read it, didn't think much of the review itself but the nice thing about it is that somebody put a review of an album in there some 32 years ago (1976) (when i was born ;) ). Perhaps because it was the reason why he or she bought the album, perhaps not, but the record felt personal, like it really belonged to someone.

Anyway that kept me thinking during the day. It's nice that you can attach some information to media, be it a vinyl album, cd or mp3. You can add, pictures, pieces of text to add some personal touches and read the descriptions on your Apple TV or other favorite media center and even discover them 32 years later. So as of today i decided to add some personal notes, reviews, pictures i find to songs in my iTunes library. I can use the description field and artwork to personalize my digital media, to make it mine and not something i just downloaded from the Apple iTunes store like everybody else.

oh before i forget! Here is the piece of brown newspaper i found.

German review from 1976, Steve Miller Band - Fly like an Eagle

Piles of paper lying on our desk at homeLast year we tried to put everything into boxes, sorted and labeled but as i am a nerd i gave up on it. I couldn't be bothered, trying to look for the right box, finding the appropriate place to put the paper in.

But after listening to Andy Ihnatko on the Macbreak weekly podcast where he recommended software to scan in your receipts, business cards and so on, it got me thinking about our paper mess and perhaps scanning would solve a bit of our problem.

So i looked for some scanning and paper organization software for Mac OS X because we already had an Epson perfection 1260 scanner in the house. I found Yep! from Ironic Software which organizes PDF documents just like (what they say on the site) iPhoto. 

Yep! is an application that can scan documents using a TWAIN scanner driver and then create PDF documents. The biggest feature for me is the use of tags which you can assign to those PDF's. For example; if we have a receipt for some apple stuff we scan in the paper, and just assign some tags to it, like; receipt, apple, <store-name>. The application also allows you to quickly search for PDF's based on those tags. This is very powerful which i experienced when doing my taxes last month. Normally it would take me at least 2 hours of sifting through piles and boxes of paper to get the information needed to do my taxes, this year i measured it and it took me 15 seconds!!! I just typed in the appropriate tags, like taxes, overview, 2008 and it returned all 8 documents which i needed.

Wow! this is a nice life improvement for me and my girlfriend.

Now for some quick tips;

• Make sure the PDF's and the tags that go with it are backed up. Yep! PDF's and Library settings are on my Drobo, which in turn is backed up on a separate disk.
• The Epson scanner will sometimes stop responding! and the only way i could get it working again was to restart the Macbook Pro. But yesterday i found a solution! Launch Activity Monitor, kill Yep! and the Epson Scanner program, unplug the scanner USB cable and plug it back in. Then launch Yep! again and you are ready to go!
• Make sure everybody that does the scanning knows about the tags and what they mean ;)

Currently i've only scanned in 75% of the piles, in 4 hours smeared out over 4 weeks i'll be done with all of them!