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Another great year for music! Taking my last.fm listens and opinion into account, here are my top albums of 2011. I usually extend my “leeway” of albums to about September/October of the previous year, considering that the album became big in 2011. Only about 3 albums were on this edge.

20) Chase and Status – No More Idols

The main reason is primarily because of this song. By far one of my favourite songs ever. The rest of the album unfortunately isn’t as good as the previous album.

19) Real Estate – Days

Quite a surprise this. Very listenable album!

18) TV On the Radio – Nine Types of Light

I really like TV on The Radio… if I am in a specific mood. This is a great album, but it didn’t hook as much as Dear Science did.

17) Gil Scott-Heron and Jamie XX – We’re new here

What a great mashup album. Jamie XX (of well.. the xx) remixed Gil Scott-Heron. Random cover-art, but a great album. RIP Gil.

16) The Naked and Famous – Passive me, Agressive you

After hearing Young Blood, I didn’t expect the rest of the album to so great. Young Blood itself is such a great track. Something about it puts a lot of our generation into a song.

15) Radiohead – King of Limbs

Every Radiohead is hotly anticipated. King of Limbs as well. You kind of expect Thom Yorke and co to bust something amazing. In Radiohead’s standards, meh. In general, great album. And how can you not like Thom’s dancing in Lotus Flower?

14) Neon Indian – Era Extrana

His debut album was a pioneering album in chillwave, although at times it felt purposely so. Drenched in 80′s synth-lo-fi-ness. With Era Extrana, it feels like he has kind of grown up and took a new approach, one that doesn’t quite try to be more than it is.

13) Jamie Woon – Mirrorwriting

This is probably the closest I’ve come to liking R&B, but this is probably because he lent some cues from dubstep (or post-dubstep as it is called these days). Spirits is such an uplifting song. He usually does the whole song by sampling his voice. Check it out.

12) Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues

I was wonder how they could top their debut album. They did, and they did it so well. Their music always has a way to transport you to snowy cabins somewhere in Canada. And their lyrics are always thought-provoking.

11) Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross – The Social Network

What a great soundtrack. Just listen.

10) James Blake – James Blake

Probably the most inventive album for me of the year. Minimalist and deep. He has such a great voice, with the mix of almost soulful-dubstep.

9) The Black Keys – El Camino

Wow. What a groovey album. I wasn’t a fan of Brothers (gasp!). But this is so great. Just watch this guy dance, then you will know why.

8 ) Mutemath – Odd Soul

You could say Mutemath ventured into Black Keys territory in this album. They did. In fact El Camino and Odd Soul are very similar. It’s a change from their more electronic influenced sound.

7) Gotye – Making Mirrors

This album came out of nowhere as I was perusing reddit. A mixed-bag of songs, but each one unique and exciting. The strange contrast between Wide Eyes Open and then moving into I Feel Better. I was wondering if there having a laugh. And this is what makes it great. This guy has an amazing voice. His music videos are worth watching on their own as well.

6) Crystal Fighters – Star of Love

Created by using basque influences, these guys produced such an interesting sound by infusing it with electronic elements.

5) Foster the People – Torches

This album also came out of nowhere. After hearing Pumped Up Kicks, which I still feel is kinda boring bubblegum pop, my friend was raving about them. Got the rest of the album and was hooked. So listenable and such great hooks!

4) Nero – Welcome Reality

Epic. These guys make epic music. Their music videos however are… odd. Don’t know if they purposely did not try for some more production value. Never the less, a great dnb/dubstep album. Massive sound.

3) Bear in Heaven – Beast Rest Forth Mouth: Remixed

Didn’t expect this here, did you? Their original album was great (with some dud songs), but this remix album turned all the songs into gold. There are few albums where I like every song and play it through from start to finish. The more I listened, the great it became.

2) M83 – Hurry Up We’re Dreaming

When I heard M83 were releasing a new album, I thought I would eventually get it, considering I enjoyed his previous albums. Although, a lot of his electronic-shoegaze gets too much after a while, so I skipped. Then I heard Midnight City and was amazed. Taking some cues from 80′s vibes, this album is just spectacular. It blows it out of the water. I fell in love with the slap bass in Claudia Lewis, and tripped along in Raconte-Moi un Historie.

1) White Lies – Ritual

I’m a sucker for White Lies. Their second album cemented this. I rarely listen to music based only on lyrical content (because usually I suck at hearing what people sing). With White Lies however, I just enjoy so much singing along to the songs. This music video is random.

Honorable Mention:

Isochronous – Inscapes.

I would’ve loved to include them in this list. They are a top-class act heralding from South Africa. The only problem is, is that I haven’t listend much to the album. It is not that I don’t like it (in fact I am glad the production level has been stepped up!). Without sounding hipster, I’ve been listening to the songs from this album since I first saw them live in 2009. I am eagerly awaiting new sounds!

There you have it! My favourite music of 2011!

A few months ago, I decided it is time to sell TwimeMachine. The code, 2 years old and ducktaped to hell, was breaking. Random errors kept slipping in. Instead of working to fix it, I rather wanted to just sell it and work on something new. Just as I started looking for buyers, the ad revenue and traffic shot up. I was rather busy and couldn’t fix it. Time went on and I had to relearn Django for test. Opting to kill two birds with one stone, I recoded TwimeMachine in Django.

As per usual, when I start a new app/web idea I try do it in a new language, with new architecture, whatever. Just something new I can learn. So, I opted to learn how Heroku works as well Amazon’s S3 for serving static files. It was quite a learning experience, learning how to set up virtual environments for Python and getting Heroku to work together.

So, what’s new? Feature-wise. Nothing new. But I have coded in such a way to easily add new features. I am probably going to add a once-off premium service in the feature that will enable users to download their tweets, read @mentions and read hashtags. When that will, I don’t know. Architecture-wise, it is running on Heroku and serving static files from S3. Will see how it pans out. I still have no clue how to determine when to scale to more dynos. Apparently one dyno can handle between 10-50 requests a second, which amount at 10 requests a second to about 864 000 requests a day. So far I’m well within that range.

Heroku offers 750 free hours, which if I am thinking about this correctly, amounts to 31 days of constant requests (at 1 request per second). That amounts to +- 2.6 million requests per month. My calculations might be wrong. If I am, please correct me. I’ve tried googling for these stats, but haven’t found any. As for S3, it should basically be free.

So currently, I’m running it all for free. Which is awesome! Lastly, I have set up opt-out following of @twimemachine. I get around 300-600 uniques a day. So hopefully I can build some traction from that into my Twitter account. Currently, nothing on TwimeMachine has any traction. There are no network effects or anything being stored (atm), so I’m relying on that to build up some value.

So, go to TwimeMachine and have fun reading your old tweets. And remember, it is not cool to live in your past.

If there are any errors, do let me know.

Cheers!

As you might know. Music is my second passion after the web. If I am not studying or making websites, I am making music and going to gigs. I have plenty of music-related stuff to share with what I’ve been busy with.

A new post of mine is up on Bandwidthblog, in which I talk about Facebook and Spotify. Gist: They are on the right track. What I’ve found with automatic sharing with Tweekly.fm is very much in line with what will make Facebook and Spotify a success. Go read it to see why.

A music video!

I made this a while ago in July, but never managed to share it. It’s for one of my songs, called Move Along.

It was shot with my HTC. It will be title track of a new EP I am working on (will include vocals). The intention of the EP will be to fund myself an iPad 2, so I can start jamming some live gigs with it connected to my Mac to Ableton. I’ve always wanted to do a gig, but I found it incredibly boring and not worth anyone’s time to just stand and press play. Ableton connected to a midi-controller will add some live elements to it. Look at TouchAble. Here is an example:

Awesome! Here is a snippet of another song that will be on it.

Some gazey WIP by Simon Segfault

Finally, I’ve started playing around with Node.js again. Expect a real-time music related application soon. Quite excited about this. I have no idea how it will turn, but I guess that’s what makes it exciting as well.

And finally. Keep listening!

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P.S. On non-music related note. TwimeMachine is now officially up for sale. Contact me if you are interested.

Just an update on what I’ve been busy with during August.

I joined github!

I’ve been following some projects (making little changes here and there). I’ve also uploaded SimpleRest, a simple JSON based PHP REST server. It’s not much, but it shows the flow when REST is used. I will probably add more to it in the future and probably make a blogpost about it. I like github. It really sparked my interest in open source. It is so easy to edit, commit and send a pull request to small open source projects. Someone cloned my small project and it is exciting to think people are using my code (even if they are just looking at it and think that it sucks). Expect more open source stuff from me in the future.

I wrote a blogpost on bandwidthblog, detailing OS X Lion’s interface and spitballing why Apple chose to make it look more like iOS. I also wrote a post on the MIH Medialab blog on the power of APIs.

For Cape Town’s creative week, there was a competition to  create an electronic remix of Cape Jazz (or Ghoema). I made a fun, upbeat groovy kwaito version. Go look on my soundcloud and dance with. The winners still has to be announced.

I recently updated my linkedin profile that has been stagnating. Add me on there.

In TwimeMachine news, it has been doing surprisingly well! It is now almost netting 150 000 pageviews a month! The ad revenue is rather good as well. Speculations on the rise in ad revenue is probably due to the site breaking often. The code is horrible and I haven’t had time to fix it up properly. In times of peak traffic, it kind of breaks. I’ve been looking at options to speed up development of TwimeMachine (un-breaking it, adding features, etc), one of them which includes selling it. If someone wants to take over the reigns and push it further, don’t hesitate to contact me.

Tweekly.fm is also continuing as usual, netting a few thousand users each month. Exciting things are happening. Stay tuned!

I’ve started contributing to Bandwidthblog, so you might see more of my web/tech related musings appear on there. Two of the recent posts are:

Should I use Google+?

I really believe the system is flawed. Go read and see why.

Should Wikipedia’s Search be improved?

This is a response to Greplin’s challenge to improve Wikipedia’s search.

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Apart from that. I am busy developing my API at the MIH Medialab. Thoroughly enjoying the environment and I’m spending most of my coding time now on completing a prototype!

New York is planning a digital strategy. One of these components is running the ‘government as a platform’.

“We can help to create ecosystems the same way that the Facebook and the Twitter APIs have created entire ecosystems of tools and products and experiences that are deeply integrated. Every municipal government and different types of public services has the same potential, which is that you can open up — through an API — the information and services that the city provides. Then you can allow everyone to engage with the city on their own terms.”

This is quite exciting! Being somewhat of a technotarian, it will be really interesting to see what becomes of this. I hope interesting mashups will rise up to better the life of a New Yorker (and hopefully set the trend for other cities and countries).