Hypsometry. Modal Synthesis.

Muxtape is incredibly simple: Upload some songs and you’ve got a mix.

As a friend of mine wrote:

It feels like there’s nothing to it. But really, I like that. There seems to be little space for people’s overblown internet identities. Only jams.

So true. No friends, no profiles, no activity updates, no notification emails—just the music. All you need, and nothing more.

You can listen to my current mix at cboone.muxtape.com.

Hypem – The Hype Machine – is amazing. They took a simple starting point: People blog about music. Added an obvious idea: People want to listen to that music. Built some smart software to bring the two together, designed an elegant interface for it, and that was that. Amazing web application.

It’s easy to search for music. For instance, just now I searched for tracks by Voice of the Seven Woods, a brilliant contemporary folk band from the UK. They’ve made a lot of music over the past couple years, but only a little of it has made it onto proper releases, so finding tracks on the internet is crucial.

Hypem gave me a list of 14 blog posts that contain Voice of the Seven Woods tracks on them. I can listen to the tracks online, through Hypem, go directly to the original post, or buy the tracks through Amazon or iTunes. (Hypem seems to only list DRM-free music, which is pretty much as it should be.) And I can subscribe to a feed for this list, meaning that I can easily keep track of Voice of the Seven Woods music blogging.

One other cool thing: In addition to the requisite hot music page, they’ve got a spy page, where you can see what other people are searching for. Scrolling through the list just now, I found half a dozen tracks that I’m psyched to listen to, but wouldn’t have thought of searching for.

It’s like Technorati, but useful.

There are two reasons I’m not sure I could live anywhere other than where I do. One is the coffee. The other is the music.

Their reviews alone are enough:

By now, Xasthur is practically a household name. Assuming your house is a cave, or painted black, or lit by torches, or painted black with the blood of your enemies. (Xastur.)

Apparently, there was tons of reverb in the Jurassic period. (Jean-Luc Herelle.)

A copy was sent to us ages ago, and on first glance it looked like some disc of classic Irish music. An old sepia toned photo on the front, an Irish looking font with the text “An Evening With Danny O’Really”. Hmmm. So we sort of ignored it for a while, but the photo on the front was sort of haunting, and finally we realized the man’s eyes were sort of fucked up, green and alien. Bug eyed. Staring out creepily. So we had another look, and noticed the legend “Music For Unusual People”. The we flipped it over to find a huge flat topped swirly eyed green demon with a forked tongue, ripping the front cover in half. Interesting. (Danny O’Really.)

Indeed.

When I’m traveling I carry an AirPort Express with me, for instant wifi-ication of the world. Right now I’m staying in a friend’s apartment in Brooklyn, which already has wifi but whose stereo is not connected to the network. So, I figured it’d be simple enough to use the AirPort Express to connect the two, and thus my laptop, right?

Wrong. So, for posterity’s sake, and for the sake of my brain the next time I need to know how to do this, here’s how to do this properly, at least in the circumstances I encountered:

Restart the AirPort Express by holding down the reset button for a bunch of seconds. (The documentation says to hold the button down for 5 seconds to get a hard reset, but I found that only worked sometimes. Hence my vagueness.)

Open up the AirPort Utility application and use the manual setup controls to configure the base station.

Go to the Wireless tab of the AirPort section of the controls, and choose “Join a wireless network” as the Wireless Mode. Choose the correct network from the Network Name list (waiting for it to refresh its list, and retrying as needed). Then choose the appropriate Wireless Security setting from the drop-down menu.

And that’s the first part of the trick. For no obvious reason, the AirPort Utility isn’t as smart as the regular AirPort interface, and is unable to properly determine what security a given network is using. So you need to figure the appropriate security setting out on your own.

The router my friend uses is a Westell 327W, presumably configured in a fairly default way. The password is a 10 digit string of numbers and letters, which indicates that the network is secured using 40-bit WEP with a hexadecimal password. The fact that it’s 10 digits long indicates this. If the password were 5 characters long, it would be a 40-bit ASCII password; if the password were 13 characters long, it would be a 128-bit ASCII password; if the password were 26 characters long, it would be a 128-bit hexadecimal password.

Despite the simplicity of these distinctions, it turns out that AirPort sometimes has trouble telling what type of WEP password you’ve given it. To get around that strange inability, you need to either enclose the password in double quotation marks, to indicate an ASCII password, or prepend a hexadecimal escape ($ or 0x), to indicate a hexadecimal password.

So, given that the network here uses a 40-bit hexadecimal password, prepend $ to the 10 digit string of numbers and letters, and enter it in the Wireless Passsword and Verify Password fields.

Go to the Base Station tab, still within the AirPort section of the controls, and choose a name for the base station, as well as a password.

This, in theory, should suffice. But a quick check of the AirPort Express’s settings – in the Summary tab of the AirPort section of the controls – showed that the base station was still planning on connecting to the network using Ethernet, per its default settings. Turns out that displaying the Internet section of the controls clues the AirPort Utility in to the actual current settings, so just click on that, then go back to the AirPort Summary display and make sure your settings are correct.

Once everything looks good, click Update. Wait while the machines do their little dance, then jump into iTunes, choose your new set of speakers from the list, and listen to your music.