As a bit of a change, last weekend I decided to have some new age fun… with a vintage feel! To kick off the festivities Drew, Nico and I rolled through to Hotbox to watch Fulka and Bittereinder. The Fulka show was my main point of interest as I have been working with the band, building them some exciting light machines for their live shows. This was the machines debuts.

A quick run through on the devices… Controller boxes, audio in, LEDs out!

Thanks to Christian Henn for this hip pic of the lights!

The controller boxes: Running an ATMega328 with an Arduino booloader with a 3/4 inch mono audio jack coming in and a string of LEDs going out.

The LEDs: Fulka is a five member band, Fulka is five letters… Each member gets a magic box whose LEDs are on a badge that they wear with one of the letters of the band name.

The fun: Each box gets an input supplied to it via a cable… the cables are plugged into a controller and one of the band members chooses what audio input the box gets. The LEDs then synchronise with the beat of the audio applied and pulse to the beat of the sample.

So in reality, how Fulka used the devices: The members were hooked up to the drums, each letter getting a different bit of the beat. High-hats, kicks, snares etc. So the whole band was lighting up to the sweet sound that they made. Pretty kick ass. I may just do a post detailing this project, I may not

But for now, back to the weekend story…

Fulkas live show had some glitches but all in all they totally rocked out in a folk-tronic kind of way! Good time to check a music video from them?

Bittereinder came on and blew everyone away. Jaco is so good on the mic, backed by Tumi Molekane… it was pretty special. Read a bit more here!

We partied hard, danced, popped in at the cultural heartland of Pretoria aka Sheevs and crashed and burned once more… “Got weekend? Got Sheevs!”

Saturday morning treated me to a lovely day, lovely company and a brilliant breakfast at Pure Café… When in doubt, go there for that important meal of your Saturday healing, we were even treated to some soothing tunes from a guitar player and his upright bass companion.

The afternoon brought something pretty different… Nico, Narochelle and I kicked off our shoes and donned some pants to hit up the State Theatre in town to watch Mummenshanz… OH EM GEE! What a unique experience. I could use my lame words to descrribe the show, or you could just watch this totally excellent video here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=4A5c4jjwanY

Boosh! Thanks to Narochelle for hooking that fun up!

Nothing gets you in the mood for some late afternoon Margaritas quite like the theatre does, so we pulled into my new favourite sundowners spot… Plus Restaurant… beautiful view, quaint vibes and The. Strongest. Margaritas. Ever! Getting excellent on these brought about a mad hunger which could only be solved by Bravos Pizza and solve it indeed it did!

Queue more drinking, Players and finally Café Arc where Robert “The Face” entertained us till we could not laugh anymore and boom Saturday was done.

Sundays are Sundays but this one ended with watching The Science of Sleep. What a great film, rickommended! Just don’t forget the subtitles!

And so my hipster weekend came to an end with big smiles and the best friends money can buy. Love you guys.

^5!

The weekend before last, we packed our bags and headed out of the city for another camping trip. We had hoped it would be a larger version of our “3 dudes, two tents” trip that Andrew, Nico and I did last year, but alas, everyone bailed and had lame excuses like work on weekends etc so we made a plan stan and hooked up the few we could and packed the van. We decided on the same place that the before mentioned trip happened at: Elandskloof. Whatawin.

Check it.

Nicky! Zeffer!

We were fortunate enough to have two of the most insane exciting women with us on the trip… Nicky and Kim. They did not disappoint and kept us close to dropping them off on the side of the road along the N4 for the entire way until they finally passed out.

Nicky and Narochelle!

We arrived near midnight and in true form, pitched some tents in the dark… Being the well prepared campers that we are this went suprisingly well… Except for Nicky’s tent. Luckily for the girls we picked a spot that sheep love, providing hours of pure unadulerated fun running around screaming.

Fail tent!

Sheep love!

When we woke the sun was baking down on our campsite… It’s really hard to pick a shady spot in the middle of the night! We moved our gear over to some shady trees beside the river and prepared for breakfast.

Moving skillZ!

The storm!

I cooked us up a storm with my camping flair (haloumi, fried tomato, scrambled eggs!), got us all fed and then we began doing nothing*.

Chilling…

At the river…

With Andrew…

And Narochelle…

And Kim…

And Nicky!

With clouds!

After a lot of nothing* Andrew “Avid Hiker” NoHawk convinced us to go on a hike. The girls made it about 500m before they were too exhausted. Being true gentleman, we left them and continued on our way. Someone had obviously walked the path before as we found a big hose and some Nicole propaghanda on a tree.

Hiking is fun!

Some hose…

Nicky in a tree…

In the words of Robert Frost, “Good fences make good neighbours”, and this had never rung a more true note than when we encountered a fence and a friendly gate urging us forward.

Good fence!

Badass.

Andrew assured me that anyone with an automatic weapon would never be able to hit us so we jumped the fence and continued onwards as good neighbours should.

Dundundun…

Dundundun…

Hah!

We made it a bit further up the mountain, had a beer, checked out some nature and then followed outdoor hiking rule number 1: don’t go hiking alone. With this in mind I left Andrew and made my way back to camp. He ended up making it “nearly” to the top of the mountain and took a pic of himself.

Natuurlik…

Oh hai Andrew…

“Almost” the top!

Doing nothing* was resumed and before long we were rocking out and making spectacles of ourselves. Whataparty.

Currie cup! Sy bly ‘n bul!

I got to practice my “You will die!” face!

Got milk?

Fresh farm milk, although it smells disgusting when fresh, smells like off cheese if you leave it in the back of a car in the sun for a day.

Gangstas! Nicky and Drew… Represent!

Yes! We camping!

Zing!

Dynamite! Oh Yeaaaah!

When we awoke on Sunday, Nicky’s tent was completely down and out, our campsite was in ruins and for some reason there was boerewors in our cool box. Another banging breakfast (haloumi, fried tomato, peppers, scrambled eggs!) was in order and Kim did the honours of braai’ing that disgusting sausage for the ladies.

Yes, Nicky is still inside that tent!

Brekers braai!

Kim knows sausage!

We packed up camp, checked out some clocks [some what?] and headed on home…

Narochelle and Kim sure can fit some junk in that trunk!

Got clocks?

Brilliant weekend, thanks guys!

And remember: Don’t stop in Witbank aka Emalahleni.

Witbank looks great!

Till next time!
^5!

Footnote: * drinking heavily.

So it’s been a pretty interesting year so far… And everything still feels all bright an shiny.

I started this year with a new job and very “opgewonde” as what to expect. The new job is awesome! I get to build cool stuff, learn rad things and be surrounded by cool tech all day. The people are awesome as well. It’s been a great experience so far.

I started doing capoeira with Jay Sizzle so as to get in shape… What a rad sport! It has also taught me to count to 10 in Portuguese. More on the sport to come I’m sure this year…

Drew put his hands up for Detriot and went to go train some people over there. In his travels he managed to pick up a 6th generation iPod Nano for me… in green!. What an awesome little gadget! Having to install iTunes (who needs it when you have MusicBee?) to manage the damn thing made me do something I haven’t in years: Listen to podcasts.

One podcast that Nico rickommended has been providing me with a lot of audio pleasure… and that my friends is “Joe Strummer’s London Calling”. The show is an 8 part (split into 16 29-minute podcasts) radio series and features Strummer and his awesome eclectic music taste… think reggae, rock and folk… real world music stuff. Read a bit more here or grab it on iTunes here!

Do yourself a favour and grab the series and give it a listen!

^5!

I’ve been pretty quiet this year (as usual) but all good things come to those who wait… and with that I have finally finished my degree and my life can begin to have some normality. I figured I’d blog a very brief version of what I’ve designed and developed this year just to give you an idea of what has been keeping me so busy but then I remembered that the university will have a hissy fit and kick me in the shins.

Briefly and very basically I made a system that allows for images and video to be broadcast to a device at a remote location (using GSM (cell phone) networks) which then displays the image / video using a TI DLP pico projector. The initial image / video is input remotely using desktop software I developed (Go Python and PyQt4!). The DLP pico projector is an awesome little toy, check it out here! I also got to play with the TI Beagleboard which is an incredible piece of hardware, check it out here! It was a challenging project but it ended up working pretty awesomely as a system for remote media presentations! And I aced it! Yay!

Above is a photo of the remote device that I put together… hopefully I won’t get a shin kicking for this.

Boosh! I’m an engineer

^5!

The dirtyoldDisco got invited to play at FestiVAL 2010 in a small town called Val in Mpumlanga… We made a road trip out of it… here is the story…

It’s really small, even on a map!

I rolled through to Game to get a nifty little tent (they were having a special… it was fate), packed my stuff and loaded up the gear into T-Bones car…On the way through town we got to see some Eugene Terror respect art outside the University of Pretoria…

Eugene Terror!

Bravo Pizzeria!

We picked up some Bravo’s pizza (it’s the shiz niz… find it on South Street, Hatfield, Pretoria) and finally made it onto the highway. Check out the shenanigans after the jump!

Tea Baggins!

The R23…

We drove behind this truck for a while… it was the most exciting part of driving to Mpumalnga.

The most eXciting part of the trip…

Finally after about 2 hours we rolled into Val, set up my new bitching tent and checked out the scenery. T-Bone even pushed a hoe.

Welcome to Val!

Pushin the hoe!

The local bar, the Moeggeploegkroeg, was pretty rad. We got some drinks there, watched some bands outside there, ate some sarmies in there, rick-overed after getting too wasted with drinks from there, took crotch shots there, drew in the guest book there and welcomed the bears there.

Moeggeploeg Menu!

Rick-overing…

T-Bone adding to the guest book…

Nice, we were there!

Chuckles and Will!

T-Bone and I played a cool set to those that were still awake enough to party with us, there were no photos, no one could see.

Saturday morning arrived and everyone felt like sh1t. I walked along the train line for a bit, checked out the town a bit more and then sat in the bar until we left. I ignored the drive home.

Feeling less than awesome…

Walking…

More of the town...

Even more…

And even more!

FestiVAL is a pretty rad little festival, it’s not too far from Gauteng and the get a way is good! I’ll see you there next year! Goodbye!

Kay bye!

^5!

Our buddy Eben, more commonly known as HAEZER rolled up country to do a bit of a tour before he heads off to Europe. T-Bone and I got to play as the dirtyoldDisco a bit before HAEZER at the Woods in JHB. The gig rocked (Gig details here)! We played hard, HAEZER played harder… and the crowed loved it!

Photos after the jump…

Bounce!

dirtyoldTeamwork!

Rave!

Thanks to those that rolled through, partied and rocked out!

^5!

Steve Aoki came to South Africa… we went along to the JHB show on 3 April… it was so awesome!

The gang and I all rolled through… we ran into old friends, we drank, we raved! Steve played some awesome tunes, some African tunes and some really weird tunes…

Photos after the jump!

Some african tune!

What I could see..

Woah!

T-Bone and Andrew Mohawk… eXcited Face!

Tengo jodido tipo grande! Sink or swim and what not… good times!

That’s what happens…

And then you hydrate…

^5!

The dirtyoldDisco will be banging it out in Johannesburg this time round… Supporting one of our favourite South African producer/DJ’s, namely HAEZER! It’s gonna be awesome!

Slymedia & Griet Present: HAEZER (Cape Town)

Also featuring:

Baggy Dawg (Desmond & The Tutus)
dirtyoldDisco
Moe Joe
Double Adapter

50 Bucks – ROAR

Check out the Facebook event here!

See you there!
^5!

So the dirtyoldDisco is back in a town near you (if you are in and around Pretoria that is)! Come and bang it out with us for the Human Rights Day party at Tings an Times on Sunday 21 March 2010… Remember that the Monday is a PUBLIC HOLIDAY!!!!

DRINKS SPECIAL!!!! – Buy 1 Get 1 free for all cocktails between 19:00 and 21:00!!!!!

LINE UP:

20:00 – Doctor Khumalo(Dogbox)
21:30 – dirtyoldDisco (Electrotrash)
23:00 – Markus Wormstorm (Sweat X and Real Estate Agents)
00:30 – MoeJoe VS Peter Rocka (Drum & Bass set)(Dogbox)

ENTRANCE: R20

For bookings please contact 012 430 3176/7

Check out the Facebook event here! It’s gonna be good!

Become a fan of the  dirtyoldDisco as well while you’re at it!

^5!

dirtyoldman a.k.a. T-baggins and I finally got our act together and recorded a proper live mix to showcase our sets as the dirtyoldDisco. I think it’s awesome, that’s why we did did it, and we did it well. Now we wait to see who books us for shows… with two potential shows in February it’s looking good so far

Caryn Paryn designed our logo, she designed the cover for us to print, fold and fill with CDs. She is talented, they look awesome! We folded like 60 of them, it took a long time. When they are full of CD’s Ill put up some pics!

Grab the mix below, go visit our lonely blog, ask people to book us for shows, book us for shows, become a fan on Facebook and then tell us what you think! You can also download the CD cover for the mix and the folding instructions to make your own!

dirtyoldDisco – Bon Jovi Friday Mix - Just over an hour and only 89MB of awesome electro!

Grab the CD Cover: Bon Jovi Friday Mix Cover – 12MB .pdf
Grab the folding instructions: Learn to fold it! - 1.3MB .pdf

Party boosh!

^5!