Sunday, May 18, 2008

Renewing yourself (I've got another blog!)

"You keep spewing URLs at me, I would never be able to maintain such a web presence!"

Being online nowadays is not so much about having a homepage (frankly, I've got some abandoned ones like that laying around) but participating and being present wherever you want to. Myself I've got a pretty sizable online footprint, composed of profiles in various sites, content like my flickr pictures and my del.icio.us-bookmarks, but now also, not one, but two three blogs:
  • The emigrant blog - what you have been seeing for some time probably, started when I graduated and moved to Estonia from Sweden. I will still post here now and then about what's Estonian, Swedish and life journeys in general.
  • Uncle CJs blog - my new, mine and only mine personal blog where I will post all kinds of ramblings, great ideas and things which inspire me.
  • Carl-Johan's shared items - items out of blogs I read and feel like sharing with the rest of you through Google Reader.

All three blogs have RSS-feeds, so plug them into your reader right now and you'll never have to remember where they are again! (RSS of the emigrant blog, RSS of uncle cjs blog, RSS of carl-johan's shared items)

(Update: Philip mentioned to me that he subscribes to the RSS feed of my flickr pictures. "Huh?" - yeah, of course it has an RSS feed! That will however be the only update, I bet I have tons more of places which may have feeds as well, but it doesn't make sense to list them all.

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

The best swedish SR radio and SVT TV online and podcasts

One of the things I miss the most in Estonia is the high end of the Swedish media selection (as denoted according to some arbitrary scale). Maybe it's the great things in Estonia which keep missing me, but either way, there is a lot of Swedish stuff I really like. Modern technology makes it all the simpler not only to never miss a show, but to view it even when you're abroad, so here goes! In the words of Percy Nilegård: "Det är humor, det är humor, det är humor"

I find it somewhat curious that Swedish media distinguish between streaming and downloadable media (after all, it's nothing a mplayer -dumpfile foo.wmv -dumpstream mms://fooserver.com/foo.wmv won't take care of), but anyway they strip the music away from downloadable media, so that means that you have to capture those awesome P3 Live concerts in real-time.

Swedish Radio provides most of its programming and then some (except major sport events?) through its online radio. Beside this, many of the programs have their own homepages with pictures and additional material (plus some have the dubious habit of posting stuff on youtube)


Finally of course, one must not miss the P1 Sommar programs which vary from amazingly cool to really boring every day of the summer, depending on who's hosting the program.

SVT television doesn't really provide anything for real-time streaming, but SVT Play provides at least most of the programs which are own productions, and its open archive is pretty amazing (as a complement to the funny stuff you anyway find on youtube nowadays). Some key programs are also available as podd-tv (vodcast).


Usually after watching a program I just keep the video file I have streamed down, so if someone would for example be passionate about my collection of Kobra episodes, we can do something about that as well.

(Update: copyriot has a great blog-post about the legality of radio ripping (in Swedish), cudoz to him)

Quadro Nuevo - playing in Tartu today!

Yesterday we went to a really nice Kevadjazz concert in Salme Kultuurikeskus. Quadro Nuevo plays charming tango/jazz mix, with great cultural variation and authenticity and absolutely mesmerizing skill and passion!

This was in Tallinn, but Wednesday they will play in Tartu - check them out! Here's also their wikipedia and last.fm pages. On last.fm you can hear some of their actual music, here it seems I can only embed music like Quadro Nuevo:


(Update: Torrent found here)
(Update: Amazing, with last.fm it is really starting to work to keep track of for example all large concerts in Estonia, or all gigs of a particular artist! I can add my own or comment or connect with people who were there, awesome! I even heard that if you tag pictures on flickr with the event, they will show up by the artist at last.fm! Hooray for crowds! I write more about the last.fm events + flickr mashup and how a made a bargain out of it here)