August 24

Playing a Platinum Record /  / comments (16)

     Valentine Hellman checked in today with easily the best email I've received in a long time. Valentine, you see, OWNS a platinum record. He's taken it upon himself to play it and determine what exactly the grooves of a default platinum record contain.

Clearly, this is awesome. Here's his email:

     "I have a story I thought you might be interested in. Long story short is that I used to be in a cheesy Christian band, and we had a single that was on a double-CD compilation. This comp sold 250,000 copies and since it contained two CDs the RIAA certified it platinum. I have possessed a platinum record for the past six or seven years. I had it hanging over the toilet in my bathroom. Anyways, last Saturday my friends and I busted it out of the frame and put it on a turntable.

You might be interested to know these facts about the record:

• The hole in the middle was the size of the hole in the middle of a CD.
• There is extra space around the outside of the record that gets covered by the matting which makes it larger than a standard 12" LP.
• There is only information on one side of the "record."
• The thing is extremely thin as well. Like tin can thin. Thinner even.
• The strangest thing is that when I played it, everything was backwards. I ended up spinning it backwards to hear the recording.

     Anyways, the record always looked like it only had two tracks, and it turns out it did. The tracks were not what the same as the ones that are on the compilation record. After some research I think that the tracks are from a Salsoul Orchestra 12" single. I don’t know who they are, but I downloaded a snippet of one of their songs from the single and I think it is a match. One of my friends taped the whole experience and hopefully I will post this somewhere if you are ever interested.

     Here is my full write up if you are interested, which is also where I will eventually let people know where to find the video footage."

     There's more backstory at the link. Hooray for Mr. Hellman's inquisitive nature -- we now have EVEN MORE useless vinyl-related knowledge!

Tiny Update:

     Many people have suggested that this item was in fact a factory mold, not a record. This would explain why it played in reverse. Since audio information on vinyl is represented by lateral variation in the groove (Not vertical, as I thought until very recently), it's entirely possible that playing a factory mold would yield the results described. This, of course, begs the question, are all platinum records made from discarded factory molds? One way to find out would be to play another one...

August 22

Evolving Faces? /  / comments (1)

     Ever since Readymade Magazine got my brain churning on the possibilities of DIY clocks, I'd been toying with the idea of having the minute and hour hands rotate entire transparent clock faces -- to create some sort of evolving image. That's as far as I ever got with the idea, so I was pretty excited to see that someone else has effectively finished the thought.

     The face of the Imbroglio clock consists of a soup of multi-colored shapes on transparent backgrounds, which rotate and convene hourly in such a way that the numerical representation of the hour is visible, however briefly. Definitely not the most functional clock, but endlessly appealing to my nerdy sensibilities. If it weren't $120, I would be all over that shit.

     Anyway, the point of all this is to put this thought out there so that other internet wanderers might stumble across it and inform me of similarly evolving clock faces. That's all. [via]

Update:

This 'bingo' watch similarly plays with the idea of a rotating, semi-transparent clock face; and this binary clock implementation uses semi-transparent faces as well.

August  8

Red Raven Carousel in action! /  / comments (23)

     Shortly after posting my round up of vinyl video implementations, the eBay market price for the carousels used to view Red Raven Animation records dropped significantly, and I was able to pick one up for far cheaper than they were selling a year ago. In the course of researching the previous article, I'd found plenty of visuals of the animation contained on the records, but no footage of the actual records themselves in action, which is really where the appeal lies. So, without further ado, here is a short video clip - just click on the image below. The record is playing at 45 RPM since my turntable doesn't do 78.

Alternate Putfile video link

August  1

Coded Comics /  / comments (2)

     In the comments to a previous entry, someone pointed out that this week's 'This Modern World' strip contains a coded message. This past Friday, while killing time at a bar before a show, I accidentally opened the local 'alternative weekly' to this particular strip, and using the knowledge of the strip's title and author (Tom Tomorrow) as a key, I decoded the message that runs along the bottom of each panel. The full, undecoded strip can be found here. To see the decoded message, simply click on the panel below (My decoding is in red helvetica).



     There's a brief mention of the rogue 'P' in the message on Tom Tomorrow's site:

"(1) The news logo behind the aliens translates as gibberish because it is gibberish; and

(2) Yes, apparently if you translate the crawl, I mistyped the word "moron" as "morpon."

And while I'm flattered that so many of you would take the time to figure that one out, I have to say, you're scaring me a little bit here, people."

     A less politically-pointed coded message can be found in nearly every 'Spy Vs. Spy' strip. The original artist, Antonio Prohias, 'signed' the strip in morse code. Interestingly, though the late Prohias (1921 - 1998) no longer pens the strip, his coded signature still appears in it.