The Geekorium

Have you ever heard or smelled or tasted something that just dragged you instantly into the past? It’s like that scene with Anton Ego, the food critic in the climax of Ratatouille - everything drops away and you’re experiencing something your concious mind had forgotten, but is still living in your brain buried under a mountain of time.

I was chatting to my kids over dinner when something prompted the memory of an old song from my childhood. Like a lot of the songs I tell my kids about, they didn’t believe it could have been real, so as usual I had to get it playing for them. But the version blasting from Spotify wasn’t the version of the song I’d heard as a child and it got me wondering what had I been listening to all those years ago.

See, like a lot of people in the eighties we had car with a tape deck (and no air conditioner, which I still to this day cannot explain to my children how anyone lived without). And on this tape deck we wore out a lot of tapes driving our parents mad with the same songs over and over. We were a Christian family, the family of a pastor no less, so most of the tapes were Psalty the Singing Songbook (and that anthropomorphic hymnal could be a post in and of itself, but lets not get side-tracked). I’m sure mum and dad had their tapes too, and I recall a lot of Keith Green and maybe some Dion? Was that the ex-pop star turned Christian? This is already taking too long so I’m not looking him up.

But man cannot live on bread alone, and not every tape was dedicated to the glory of God. We had one tape that had popular music. There may have been more, but this is the singular one that has made an impression on my childhood brain. And not because it was unholy. Lets not forget, this was the mid-eighties, and my parents had stopped listening to secular music in the decade before I was born, so this “pop” music was taken from an era before my parents even met. Anything with lyrics was right out, so the tape we had, cribbed from an old record we may have not even owned (yes, I’m putting my parents at risk of being prosecuted for piracy some 35 years after the fact) was instrumental only.

But not just any instrument, no. This was not an album of romantic violin. This was no inspirational piano. Ask yourself, what instrument could elevate the hits of the 70’s more than any other? What could capture the spirit of daring, of whimsy - of new possibilities - like no other instrument before or since?

Why the Moog of course!

That slice of synth heaven from God himself, squeaking to your third ear like the voice of an electronic angel. Telling you music will never be the same and you will never be shackled to wood and string and reed again.

Frankly I’ve built it up too much now. I don’t actually normally enjoy the Moog too much. As a child of the eighties I have a soft spot for chiptunes produced on the Commodore SID chip, so I recognise it can take some rosy glasses of nostalgia to see the appeal of some sounds. In reality, this Moog album was my first, and in the intervening years I’ve never felt the pressing need to seek out more.

But that song I recalled, but didn’t recognise? I thought it might have been an electronic version from an album of synthesizer covers. The memory of the song Popcorn, another childhood favourite, rose unbidden to my mind and I knew it had to have been the same tape.

So I did some digging. It took a couple of tries, but I found it. In that moment I experienced that slow but wonderful excavation of buried memories that crystallise and lock the fragments of the past back into those places you’d made for them.

Which is all so much prelude to share this treasure from my childhood. I present Popcorn (and other switched-on smash hits) by Electric Coconut, also re-released a year later as Elektrik Cokernut’s Go Moog! I don’t recall which title we knew it as, but we probably just called it “the Popcorn tape”. Archive.org has the full album, and I swear as I listened to each song, deeply worn mental pathways covered in neglect reconnected and unearthed memories of brown leather seats three kids wide, big clicky radio buttons, and driving with the wind in your face skipping your hand against the current of air.

Moog may be an acquired taste, but the whole album is such a treat of 70’s hits.

Starting with “Popcorn“, this cover may be the one that most closely resembles the original. “Pop Corn” was written for the Moog in 1969 by Gershon Kingsley and the original is the classic synth tune that hit number one on charts all over the world. You may have heard a different version to me, and that might be your definitive version. Hot Butter’s version was also very popular and the Swedish Chef from The Muppets did a cute interpretation. I hope for your sake your childhood version wasn’t the Crazy Frog one.

Before diving into this album I’d never heard the original “Sampson and Delilah“ by Middle of the Road. I don’t know if my parents knew it, or just fit the name of the song to the music as it played, but I recall a fair bit of “nah nah nah, Samson and Delilah, mumble mumble, huh huh huhh” in place of the actual lyrics as it played. Actually, some of the lyrics are literally “nah nah nah”, so that complicates it somewhat. There’s a little violin sting in there and it’s possible that planted a tiny seed of love for that instrument in my head.

Next is the song who’s very existence my children doubted. To be fair, if you told me there was a hit song in ‘72 whose sole lyric was the words “Mouldy Old Dough’’ spoken in a low growl, I’d probably not believe you either, but there you go. It’s an absolute banger, with tin whistle, a honky-tonk sorta marching beat and the privilege of being “the only British number one single to feature a mother and son”. That’s right, this band of groovy young men roped in front-man Rob Woodward’s mum Hilda to play piano for many of their songs, and you can see from video recorded at the time she was having a fun time playing with these nice young men. The Electric Coconut version is fun too, cemented in my head more than any other on the album except perhaps for “Popcorn” itself.

“Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep“ was a song whose known lyrics in that car extended further than the title, but not much further. Admittedly there’s not much more to it, but I think my parents knew the chirpy cheep bits and maybe the bits crying “where’s your mamma gone” but not much else. It’s probably for the best, as the 1970’s Middle of the Road hit topped the Guardian’s list of Top Ten Creepiest Songs.

Another 1972 hit “Wig-Wam Bam“ by The Sweet is next, and listening to the original up against the Moog version, this is one of the few on Popcorn I might enjoy more. The lyrics of the original have a potentially problematic cultural appropriation issue, being based on The Song of Hiawatha, a poem from 1855. The poem took a bunch of Native American cultural concepts and fashioned them into a narrative but with made up characters that end with the natives accepting Christianity. None of that is in the song, but it’s got that same sort of messed up idea that non-white cultures have magic nonsense words that reminds me a lot of that Witch Doctor song (“ooh ee ooh ah ah, ting tang walla etc..”).

We’re half way through, and wrapping up side one is “Morning has Broken“ popularised by Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens) in 1972. This was originally a Christian hymn, and between this and “Samson & Delilah” probably accounts for the survival of this tape in our religious car for so many years. The Moog version definitely uses the Cat Stevens arrangement, as that piano introduction is so iconic, but the electronic version is almost unbearable to listen to in contrast.

Side two starts off strong with the only original Electric Coconut composition on this album. “Jungle Juice” is a really fun tune that reminds me a lot of Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll Part 2” which came out in… you guessed it, 1972. If there’s some other connective tissue between these two songs, or you think they’re not all that closely related and I’m imagining things, let me know!

“Seaside Shuffle“ is the last song on the album that warrants its own paragraph. Released in ‘71 then again to better success in 1972 by Terry Dactyl and the Dinosaurs, I enjoy both the original and this Moog version. In 1995 when Shaggy released “In the Summertime“ I could not for the life of me figure out why this catchy tune was so familiar, those mental pathways covered over with 10 years of moss. They’re not the same song of course - Shaggy was covering the 1970’s hit “In the Summer Time” by Mungo Jerry. Again, my ability to parse out musical cues may be off-target, but “Seaside Shuffle” and “In the Summer Time” certainly share some musical DNA. I can’t find anything sourced, but this post from 2012 claims Mungo Jerry played with the house band that went onto become Terry Dactyl, but they make no effort to back those claims, so take it with a pinch of salt. Regardless, the similarity explains why Shaggy’s hit triggered that little bell in my brain that elevates my opinion of new music when it reminds me of childhood memories and makes a song irresistible to me.

“Softly Whispering I Love You“ is a slow and quiet track that hasn’t got a lot to recommend itself in an instrumental Moog version. It was written in ‘67 but wasn’t popular until covered in ‘71. None of these versions are my cup of tea. Track ten is “Jeepster“ which uses the squishy electric sound to good effect, but T. Rex’s original is better. The penultimate track is Neil Diamond’s “Song Sung Blue“, and from the shallower mental pathways this song made (though they are still there) this was about the point in Popcorn (and other switched-on smash hits) the kids were begging mum and dad to fast-forward to the other side of the tape - if we hadn’t already asked at “Softly Whispering”. This side of the album really derails fast, and if you’ve made it this far you’re treated to a very forgettable version of Ringo Starr’s “Back Off Boogaloo“. I’m grateful now to have heard the original ‘cause it’s got some charm, but fast-forwarding at any of the previous three tracks and losing this one in the wash is not something anyone in the car ever regretted.

So there you have it, a tape from a record of Moog covers of 70’s hits, learned on road trips in the Queensland heat that buried their way into my brain in ways I could barely put into words before my kids reminded me of a ridiculous song about spoiled food. Digging through the songs I loved gave me some fun connections I wanted to share with you all, and I hope you can enjoy some of them too, through whichever version makes you happiest. I’ve included a link to a playlist of the original versions, and included links to the Wikipedia pages of each song in case you want to learn more about any of them yourselves.

Thank you for reading and enjoy yourselves!

Spotify playlist of Popcorn (and other switched-on smash hits)

Popcorn (and other switched-on smash hits) by Electric Coconut

I want to share the album I was listening to while I [figured out how to dockerise Hugo]({{< ref “Dockerised-Hugo-for-Local-Development” >}}). It’s such an upbeat listen that I didn’t notice when it looped through and played again. I was listening on soundcloud through docker-tizonia but I’ll leave you the Spotify link for Thaehan - Mekatsune and the FULL LP on Youtube

{{< youtube WuAgqT-gsc4 >}}

My two fave tracks are Chapô Chapô and Goblins, but you make up your own mind.

NOTE: I added the above as sign off on another post a few weeks ago, but re-listened to some of their music again today and decided they deserved a separate post. I’m totally blown away by their music. And as an additional bonus for re-reading this post if you saw it at the bottom of the last one, here’s a newer trilogy track called Mechanical Heart.

Following on from last night’s post, I needed a way to run Hugo to build the new entry and deploy it. Since I had to rebuild my environment from scratch I wanted to see if I could run Hugo and Go without installing them locally.

I know Go is unlikely to cause any stability issues, as it installs all its dependencies in the user’s home dir, rather than touching system files but I’m determined in my experiment to keep my new install as clean as possible.

Using some insight I’d gathered from using docker-tizonia a Docker version of Tizonia and using asolera’s Golang minimal Dockerfile image as a base, I was able to put together a minimal Dockerfile that does the following:

1. Creates a golang based build image to pull down the latest version of Hugo.
2. Build and install the Hugo binary
3. Copy the binary to a clean image
4. Set the image work directory to /site
5. Expose the Hugo server port 1313
6. Make Hugo the entry point and default to the help text if I forget to add a command.

The Dockerfile looks something like the following:

FROM golang:1.14.3-alpine3.11 AS build

RUN apk add --no-cache git

ARG HUGO_BUILD_TAGS

RUN go get -v github.com/gohugoio/hugo/source
WORKDIR /go/src/github.com/gohugoio/hugo

RUN go install

RUN apk del git

FROM alpine:3.11

COPY --from=build /go/bin/hugo /usr/bin/hugo

RUN mkdir /site
WORKDIR /site

# Expose port for live server
EXPOSE 1313

ENTRYPOINT ["hugo"]
CMD ["--help"]

Also thanks to jojomi of bits cribbed from their Hugo Dockerfile.

Many of the Hugo Dockerfiles I found would copy the website source to the container in preparation of serving the files from Docker. In my case I’m happy with my plain HTML to continue being served where it is, but didn’t want to lose out on the features you get when you’re using Hugo to develop locally - such as running a test server with live reloading.

With the help of a handy “hugo” wrapper shell script, I was able to fire up Hugo in the container, and serve my local files through a mapped volume with no appreciable difference to how Hugo was running for me before.

The wrapper is as follows:

#!/bin/bash

docker run -it --rm \
    --network host \
    --volume=$(pwd):/site \
    --name hugo \
    $(docker build -q .) "$@";

This wrapper

1. Runs the necessary Docker command to hook the image into the host network so I can check my changes on http://localhost:1313
2. Shares the working directory into the expected /site working directory on the image.
3. Passes in whatever argue I pass in.

I set this Hugo file to executable with chmod u+x hugo and I can now run the automatically updating Hugo server with

./hugo server

Now because the command hugo by itself is used the build the site, I now just pass in a harmless switch like -v (verbose) to build the site without triggering the default --help text.

Finally I use my previous ./deploy script to rsync the files to my host.

The two new files are in my personal-chronicle github repo for any good they can be to anyone, and I’m curious to know if there’s any way I can improve the Docker build to simplify it.

Some questions or areas I think I can improve are:

1. I’m not sure if the line ARG HUGO_BUILD_TAGS is necessary. It just happened to be there when I finally got it working, after removing other lines that were causing it to fail.
2. I’m getting the hugo source from github.com/gohugoio/hugo/source when the Hugo documentation says the main repo root is what you’d use to install it. I’m not sure if there was a better way to go get the Hugo project.
3. I think I’d prefer to freeze the version of Hugo at the current version until I choose to upgrade after testing. I’m not sure how to ‘go get’ a specific version of the git repo.
4. Is the RUN apk del git line necessary if I’m using a throwaway build image?

The thing that blows me away about Docker and Golang and a lot of modern developer technology is just how much “standing on the shoulders of giants” I’m able to do. Docker is not just a clever idea, but such a well built stack that even with a rudimentary understanding of what I wanted to achieve, I was able to do it with a few lines of code. And the Go ecosystem meant that go get etc.. pulled an entire projects worth of dependencies and built the entire Hugo app inside a black box. This is such a far cry from past experiences I’ve had trying to build software from source that I can only express gratitude for all the hard work donated by so many.

{{< youtube kUZLVrBmuE4 >}}

You hum and whistle what you think is a classical tune for months. Only to finally place it, and realise it’s the Joker’s waltz from the 80’s Batman flick.¹

Christmas by Joshua Nunn on Grooveshark

Embedded here are a bunch of Christmas favourites done by some of the best modern artists I could find[^modern]. No Boney M for my family this Christmas[^sister]! Let me know if there’s anyone I’ve missed out! And no mum, Celine Dion doesn’t count.

Oh, and here’s a special playlist just for Paul.

Merry Christmas everyone!

[^modern]:And yes I know some of them haven’t been “modern” for some time, but it’s not John Denver at least. [^sister]:Who am I kidding - my sister loves them

{{< youtube qybUFnY7Y8w >}}

I can’t think of a way they can possibly top this clip. Brilliantly shot in High Def, beautifully choreographed, and perfectly synchronised. If you liked their treadmill clip (symbolically shattered half way through) you’ll love how clever this is. It also knowingly nods to the Internet and Youtube crowd (did I see the mars rover? Something like the water bird that Homer uses to press the “any” key when he works from home? An OK Go concert rendered in Lego?).

What a joyful and exciting clip from a band that knows how to engage their audience. Bravo!

{{< youtube eB3RJ1U_MJA >}}

I’ll be purchasing Caravan Palace ASAP. I’ve found a group that embodies the music I love. Apparently it’s called Electro Swing. I haven’t heard a single one I haven’t liked yet.¹

{{< youtube gnwyxr0UdSU >}}

not visually appealing, but a terrific track

When I find music that I like I can’t let it go until I share it. This is one of those tracks.

I don’t want a separate app where I have to gather all my friends and influencers in one place all over again - I have that in Twitter.

What I want from you is a way to flag a user (secretly) as someone whose opinion has aligned with mine in the past, so that when they say “I love this new movie”, I’ll be reasonably certain that I will too. And if I could flag someone’s opinion as wrong¹ most of the time, then I will know that when they say “I love this song”, not to bother clicking through to it. It might mean that some of the users in my stream have slightly darker or lighter updates so I can tell at a glance which ones I’ve flagged as trustworthy or mostly wrong.

Heck, just being able to easily see that someone is in a “trusted” private Twitter list with a glance at my main stream would be double handy. Do that.

Thank you for listening. If you do this, you will win the world.

PS. to all the people I follow: I’m not talking about any of you. I think all of you have fantastic taste. It’s those oter people I worry about…

I’ve never known what I’d call the type of music I enjoy. Back when I was in high school it was whatever you’d call what that Snow guy was doing (also see the Jim Carrey Spoof). About the same time I enjoyed a very embarrassing singer named Gillum who happened to be the triumvirate of terrible nineties music all in one annoying package, a white Christian rapper. I’m including the video, but please only watch if you have a strong constitution or no longer value the will to live.

{{< youtube aRJHNh-90uU >}}

If you’re extra brave, skip back to the beginning and watch the intro…

I have to give my friend Ben Fuller credit for at the time pointing out that my favourite rapper wasn’t actually very good. If only I’d listened.

From there it was down hill for a few years. Until I reached my twenties. I’m not sure my taste was much better, but I happened to stumble on some music I loved. Still Christian stuff, but somewhat better. For a doubting Christian, there was nothing better than Chris Rice’s Smell the Color 9, and I LOVED Questions for Heaven.

I have to say though, my current taste in music is very different.

Somewhere in the last little while I’ve developed a taste for what I’m told is dance/electronica (well that’s what hey call it in iTunes). The problem is, that most music that pops up when I go looking under that category is repetitive synthy stuff that does nothing for me. The common link with a lot of the stuff I seek out is that old-timey sound from the 1920’s that’s associated with the Charleston. It’s full of muted trumpets and energetic beats. But really, anything energetic and slightly old timey really gets me.

Listen to bei mir bist du schön by Waldeck, Back and Forth by Doctor Steel, and Come on a My House by Nasty Tales and his Orchestra to get a feel for my absolute favourite sort of music.

That’s not to say I haven’t got wider taste than a subset of electronica. My iPhone Genius pulls up equal measures of Lisa Mitchell, Bertie Blackman, Gotye, Regina Spektor, Emiliana Torrini… I think I may have a thing for soft sounding women (sorry to lump you in there Wouter). I even (shamefully) purchased the Voodoo Child song with that woman from Neighbours ’cause it sounded fun at the time.

I’m a fan of the themes of my favourite TV shows (yes I listen to them as music, but if it includes the terrific new Doctor Who theme by Murray Gold you can understand right?). But I think this stems from my upbringing on classical music that somehow got pushed to the side by awful whiteboy rap. It’s cliched but I love Pachelbel’s Canon in D,¹ and the Dance of the Knights from Romeo and Juliet by Prokofiev.

My mother shared the Mamas and Papas with us, and I picked up a love of silly songs somewhere along the way too.

All in all I think my musical taste is pretty varied. I think like most people it incorporates a lot of stuff that made me feel good when I needed it at one time or another, or has memories attached. If you hunt through my site or my Twitter and Blip accounts you’ll find a bunch of other stuff I really enjoy too.

I’ll leave you with a new song that I’m enjoying a bit at the moment. It’s not my absolute favourite, but it’s pretty high up there, and very fun. It’s by an Aussie artist called Unkle Ho. It’s called Big Bad Rag, and has more of that trumpety old timey goodness I was talking about.

{{< youtube IjkjO0AvIDc >}}

And it’s listed as Hip-Hop in iTunes, so I don’t know, although it reminds me of something I tweeted

I like… What’s hip-hop called when people don’t ruin it by talking > over the top of the music?

Sorry Hip-Hop fans.

This post was inspired by discussion with Elle leading up to her posting “You are a radio star..

When we bought our Wii, I promised Mil that we could listen to TripleJ using it, as we haven’t had a radio in our lounge room for years, and she was missing it. So I set up Orb to play my iTunes library and TripleJ and Radio National¹ . But my computer had to be on for it to stream properly, and Orb was pretty useless for streaming video (the other reason I installed it), so eventually I gave up on it, and Mil went back to a music-free existence :cry:

But determined not to be beaten, I found a nifty little MP3-playing SWF (flash program) that I could install on a webserver somewhere and point to the TripleJ MP3 stream. The player I used is created by neolao, and is very easy to use. I used their “generator“ page to build the embed code I needed, and downloaded the player. I created a simple webpage that includes the embeded code (feel free to steal the “source”), and uploaded and pointed to the player hosted on my site. It points to the TripleJ stream, but could easily be adapted to play any other mp3 file or stream. The page is at http://nunnone.com/radio/ and I’ve added it to my Wii’s favourites menu so Mil can find it quickly when she wants some radio. It’s a very basic page, and the same site has many different versions of the player to do more - in fact if Radio National did an MP3 stream as well, I would create multi player so Mil could choose between the two stations.

I can even embed the stream right here, so enjoy!

Edit: removed - see update.

2009-09-06: Using the Homebrew channel to add radio

The biggest problem with the the Wii browser is that it can’t drop the stream, so the buffer fills up eventually and crashes. I tried a few MP3 flash players including one that suggested it could overcome this by playing two streams in sequence for five minutes each and dropping them one at a time to clear the buffer, but I couldn’t get any of them working reliably so I gave up for a while.

Then Lifehacker posted <a href=“http://lifehacker.com/5342733/hack-your-wii-for-homebrew-without-twilight-princess?skyline=true&s=x”>this article about how to add the Homebrew channel to your Wii with just an SD card, and I gave it a shot. Then I downloaded the Homebrew Browser and copied it into an “Apps” folder I created on the same SD card. With that installed I downloaded the MPlayer Christmas Edition from the browser, and finally edited the menu.conf file in the Apps\mplayer_ce folder to add Internode’s stream to the Radio menu with the following line:

<e name="TripleJ" ok="loadlist 'http://media.on.net/radio/117.pls'"/>

Now I can play Triple J for free on my Wii, Mil is happy again, and I can also play DVDs, TV shows and music streamed form my PC!

Yay for lazyhacking!

Update: 2007-12 My feed is superceded by the ACTUAL OFFICIAL triple j: new music podcast. Please subscribe to it! It includes links to the actual MP3s.

Update: 2008-08-29 I’ve deleted the feed from Feedburner, as it’s no longer necessary.

Triple J (an Australian youth radio station) has been putting free music up on their site for years for people to download in MP3 format. They don’t really seem to have a way of telling people when new music is up there though.

Well today I found a use for the wonderful Feed43 service that’s been sitting in my bookmarks folder, and I’ve created a simple feed that should keep track of the new music as it’s posted.

I’m making the feed public with this disclaimer: I don’t own the music and have nothing to do with the Triple J website. Use it at your own risk. If it breaks I reserve the right to not fix it. If I am told to stop it by Triple J I will. I have not included a direct link to the music to avoid as many issues as possible - please visit the Triple J website to download the songs.

Otherwise, I hope you find it useful!

What you need is a way to give instant feedback on TV and radio. The Internet is a wonderful thing, where you can switch off things that annoy you, and turn away from sites that don’t do it for you.

Radio and TV don’t give you that luxury. This is not about intrusive advertising, or even programming that doesn’t work for you (Big Brother?

• turning it over to another channel isn’t enough). This is about entertainment that we care about being in our control.

Imagine turning on the radio and enjoying your favourite station. Then imagine that it gets hijacked by some irritating presenter that makes pointless small-talk for ten minutes between each song with boring callers. And not just your ordinary radio banter, but grating train-of-thought, deep-voiced “You’re a bit of a pickle-head now aren’t you, ho-ho?” stupidity. Wouldn’t the world be a nicer place if switching the radio off in disgust would give someone somewhere immediate feedback

• maybe a mild electrical shock?

Edit: ARGH! He’s doing TV commercials now! Will the madness never cease?

Ok, I’m sitting at home, feeling pretty tired, run down and fairly unhappy. A blog I’m reading mentions iTunes, and I fire it up to listen to some cheery music. While I’m there I try for the millionth time to find a copy of “Come On a My House” a remix of a Rosemary Clooney song by Nasty Tales which I first heard on Triple J radio.

I searched a bit, and the Nasty Tales web site I found had a sample that didn’t sound right. I thought it might have been the version on the Ursadelica - Ursula 1000 album, but wasn’t certain.

Anyway, I LOVED it when I heard it, but I couldn’t purchase it on iTunes, which is my preferred method. For weeks I’ve tried, but to no avail. But then today - a miracle - it’s there. Not quite the version I was looking for, as I think I was looking for the wrong one, but I think it might actually be the one that Triple J played those weeks ago. SO YAY! I’m a lot happier now.

<a title=“Link to Come on a My House on the iTunes music store” href=“http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?playlistId=135448213&s=143460&i=135448318”>Download it NOW if you have iTunes. I promise that the 1.69AUD that you’ll pay will be worth it. It’s noisy and fun and happy. Cheer yourself up. Tell me what you thought.