Just found this hilarious video, a transcription of John Coltrane’s legendary Giant Steps solo.

For all you sight reading experts out there, try to play along with this!

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Bookshelf

I just ordered a book from the Nordic online bookstore Adlibris and was happily surprised by their work for the climate.

If you pay only 10 Swedish crowns extra (a little over 1 U.S. dollar) your package is delivered climate neutral, which means that they compensate for all carbon dioxide pollution caused by your shipping. A great initiative and I hope many will follow their example. From now on this will be my online bookstore.

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Ahmir Khalib Thompson, better known as Questlove or ?uestlove, is the drummer of the hip hop group The Roots. You might think that a Questlove Top 4 will be a list of my top 4 favorite recordings, but that’s certainly not the case.

Questlove

Questlove is one of my favorite drummers and he has for sure influenced most hip hop and R’n'B drummers out there. Apart from playing with The Roots, he’s been working with many of the biggest soul and R’n'B acts. He’s also a producer and has produced artists like Common and D’Angelo.

As I stated earlier, I’m not gonna list my favorite records where he appears, instead I’m gonna make a list of 4 great Questlove moments. Feel free to add your own in the comments of this post! Here we go!

#4: The Roots at Berns, Stockholm

To be honest with you, I wasn’t sure if I should put this one on the list. The reason for this is that I wasn’t there. I know, shame on me, but I think I had a gig that night. Anyway, I have friends who were there and they have told me about it, and this is why i decided to put it on the list. You can see it as a good warm up for the other three. Here goes:

The concert is about to start, and all lights are out. All of a sudden you see a flashlight moving on stage, my friends think it’s a stage technician taking care of something. The flashlight makes a stop at the drum set, and is then switched off. Then the magic begins. For a few minutes Questlove (in case you haven’t guessed already, he was maneuvering the flashlight) plays a simple, heavy groove and according to my friends it doesn’t get any better than that. Him alone on stage playing a bad ass drum groove. I believe them.

Later this concert, Questlove gets up from his drum set and walks up to the front of the stage. He pulls out his Afro pick comb, always tightly secured in his fro, grabs a pen and start signing it. The crowd goes crazy and waits for him to toss it out. Instead of throwing it though, he fixes his hair up a bit, puts it back in his fro and walks back to the drums. That’s star quality right there!

#3: Dave Chapelle – White People Can’t Dance Sketch

I discovered comedian Dave Chappelle a few years ago, and really like his stuff. This sketch is one of my favorites, and the best part, Questlove is in it! Enjoy!

#2: Questlove shopping in Stockholm

Questlove Designed Nike Sneakers

Questlove has a passion for sneakers, and he actually got the chance to design a pair of his own, which you can see on the right. Number two on the list relates to this passion, more precisely to a visit in a sneakers store in Stockholm.

Swedish newspaper DN På Stan also made a list last week, 100 great, funny and memorable Stockholm moments 2001-2010. (full list in Swedish) Here’s #67 on the list:

The Roots drummer ?uestlove walks into the store Sneakersnstuff on Åsögatan during one of the bands’ Stockholm visits. ”Show me all your size 14’s!”, he says. The staff dig out almost every pair of size 14’s in stock. ”I’ll take ’em!”, he says. In total, 34 pairs of shoes.

I just love this story, makes me wish I would have been there to see it. I wonder how he managed to bring them all back to the States?

#1: The price is right failure horn

Alright, time for number one! I’ve been following Questlove on Twitter for about a year now, and he really is active there, twittering a lot. Of all his tweets I’ve read, I have one favorite in particular.

I have tried to find the tweet in question, but since he has written almost 12.000 of them, it’s hard. It’s not a problem though, what he wrote was something similar to this:

A friend of mine split up with his girlfriend and his Facebook page now states “is not in a relationship anymore”. Of course I had to comment with this:*
(*see video)

This is exactly my kind of humor, and that’s why this one’s number one on the list. Here’s, according to Questlove, what to play for your friends when they brake up with their girlfriends:

So there you have it, my Questlove Top 4 Moments list! Have any moments of your own? Share it in the comments section below!

Hide yourself! Göm Dig!

I just stumbled over a really funny page, called Göm dig, which translates to Hide yourself in Swedish.

The idea of the page is that you send in pictures or videos of yourself hiding in different surroundings.

A little hard to explain, but visit Göm dig.nu and you will see what I mean! And no, you don’t have to understand Swedish!

If you are like me and read a lot of different blogs, I hope you are aware of the possibility to subscribe to a blog.

RSS Icon

This is done with the help of RSS, short for Really Simple Syndication.

You have probably seen different variations of the orange symbol to the right on different blogs and newspaper sites around the web, and this is actually what indicates that it’s possible to subscribe to the content of a page.

The advantage of subscribing is that you don’t have to surf around to all the different blogs that you’re reading, just to see if they have updated. This is probably no problem when you only read a couple of blogs, but as your list of favorites grow, it can get very time consuming.

Instead you subscribe, and new posts automatically appear in your feed reader as soon as a blog you’re subscribing to has published something new. Perfect!

Google Reader

Me myself are a big fan of Google applications, and therefore I’m using Google Reader, which is a great web based service for reading blogs. The advantage of a web based application instead of a program installed on your computer is that you can read your favorite blogs wherever you are in the world, all you need is an Internet connection.

How to subsribe

To subscribe to a blog with Google Reader, you first have to register for a free account. Then you visit your favorite blog, find and click on the orange RSS icon, and end up on the feed page, where excerpts of the last written blog posts appear. To see what it looks like, visit the feed of jensfilipsson.com.

Copy Subscription Link

On the feed page, you copy the link in the adress field of your web browser. Then you log in to your Google reader account, choose Add a subscription and paste the feed address you copied. From now on, all you have to do to read the latest from your favorite blogs is to sign in to your Google Reader account.

Add feed to Google Reader

The Google Reader Next Button

The disadvantage of reading blogs in a feed reader is that the content sometimes look a bit boring, you’re used to reading your favorite blogs on the actual blog, and used to the (hopefully) nice design of it. Well, Google have come up with a great solution for this as well!

When logged in to your Google Reader account, go to settings and then click the goodies tab. There you find the possibility to drag a bookmark to your browser bookmark bar.

Google Reader Next Button

Now you don’t even have to log in to your Google Reader account anymore, all you have to do is press the next bookmarklet in your browser, and if any blog in your Google Reader has been updated, you will be taken to the actual blog and the actual blog post automatically. A perfect way to read your favorite blogs!

Subscribe to my blog

Now that you know how to subscribe to a blog, feel free to add my own feed to your reader! The address is http://feeds.feedburner.com/JensFilipsson.

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Why Ubuntu?

First of all I got very tired of computer viruses and having to format my hard drive and reinstall Windows when I accidentally catched one. On Ubuntu there simply are no viruses. Sweet!

Second of all, I’m a big supporter of open source software, which is exactly what Ubuntu is. Before I made the switch I had been de-microsofting my XP system as much as I possibly could, removing all programs I could replace with open source ones, for example Firefox for web browsing, Thunderbird as e-mail client, and of course Open Office instead of Microsoft Office. Oh, and this whole webpage is based on Wordpress, which is an open source blogging software.

Open Source is great in the matter that a whole community of users are on your side, contributing with updates, plugins and assistance, making the software much easier to customize for your own needs. The software is constantly developing and security vulnerabilities are discovered and corrected faster.

Why pay for something that could and should be free?

Another heavy aspect is of course the prize. Ubuntu, together with other quality open source software, is completely free. It doesn’t cost you a dime, you don’t need any license, and you can share it with everyone. Download a copy and install. It’s as easy as that! When you think about it, it’s crazy that students and other people around the world with a limited access to money actually use and pay for Windows, considering that there are a totally free option which can do exactly the same things as Windows, but for no cost at all (and probably also will take care of the task better than Windows).

Built on nice values

The name Ubuntu was chosen very carefully and is a name that reflects the philosophy which both developers and users stand behind. Ubuntu can in Zulu and several other African languages be translated as “humanity toward others” or “I am who I am because of what we all are“.

Ubuntu and the people involved share a basic philosophy that guarantees the user certain freedom: software should be available without cost and to everyone, regardless of language or eventual disabilities, and people should have the freedom of modify and adjust their software in any way they want to.

Based on this, here are the promises the developers behind Ubuntu give to their users:

• Ubuntu will always be available without cost and there are no special ”business version” that costs money.
• Ubuntu releases on a regular basis; a new version is released every half year, containing free security updates and bugfixes for at least 18 months.
• Ubuntu contains the best translations and disability support that the open source community can offer, to make Ubuntu available to as much people as possible.
• Ubuntu totally stand behind the principles of open source software.

You don’t see Ubuntu in TV commercials or on the big subway posters, instead they rely on the spoken word, for instance users recommending it to their friends, just like I do now!

The myths

Before I learned about Ubuntu, what I knew about Linux was that it’s complicated, it’s only for programmers and it looks ugly. If you think the same, think again! Ubuntu is very logic, it’s easy to learn and get used to, and it looks great! There are tons of themes, icon sets and applications to make your Ubuntu look and feel exactly the way you want it to!
To the right is a screenshot of how my desktop looks right now; very clean, a dock with the programs I use a lot and a now playing-widget showing the album art of the record I’m listening to at the moment (Kurt Rosenwinkel, Deep Song).

Easy to work with

I’m also very impressed with the smart structure of it, take the process of installing new programs for instance. On Windows you would probably start with a google search, trying to find a program that will do what you need it to do, and in my case I also wanted it to be free, which meant also trying to sort out a free program in the jungle of 30 day demos and stuff like that.

On Ubuntu all available software is gathered within your operating system, you just launch an application called Synaptic Package Manager, find the program you want and click install. No need for activation processes, buying licenses or anything like that. It just works!

As soon as there are new updates for any program you have installed or for Ubuntu itself, it tells you, you click once, and your system is totally up to date.

So, can Ubuntu replace Windows?

For most users yes. In my case, I use Ubuntu for everything, including working with this homepage. I have left a small partition on my hard drive with Windows XP, allowing me to boot up Windows XP when I need to do so. This is because I have some special music software that doesn’t work on Linux and doesn’t have a good enough equivalent (yet). I also have a copy of Photoshop on there, but I have realized I don’t need it, the totally free image editor GIMP works just as good for me, I can do exactly the same things I used to do on Photoshop, only i don’t have to pay thousands of dollars for it.

If I wouldn’t have my special music interest I would say there is no need of keeping Windows, but for those wanting to do the same, the process of installing Ubuntu and keeping Windows was very simple. When installing Ubuntu, which is a very simple and easy procedure, it allows you to shrink your Windows partition to the size you need, and install Ubuntu on a new partition. Then when you boot up your computer, you just choose which operation system you want to launch.

Testing it first

If you would like to try Ubuntu out, but are not sure if you want to install it, there is a very easy way of doing this. You just download a copy of Ubuntu, or you copy it from a friend, and then burn it on a CD. Then you just boot up your computer from the CD, which gives you the ability to try Ubuntu out without installing anything. This way you can see how it feels and really try it out before you install it.

The future

I hope I have convinced you to at least try Ubuntu out. Open source is in my opinion the future, and hopefully the Ubuntu community will keep growing, providing an healthy alternative to the commercial giants. More and more computer manufacturers have also started looking this way, for instance you can now get a Dell Computer shipped with Ubuntu as operating system. In Holland the government have set April 2008 (now) as deadline for their start of using open source software, as a way to be less depending on individual companies like Microsoft, and to save a lot of money.

Sources

I have written this article straight from my head, based on information I have collected while surfing the web and while using Ubuntu. The part about values mainly comes from Wikipedia. If you have any questions or want to make a point, please leave a comment. Have fun using Ubuntu!

(Here’s a link to intressant.se, hopefully this will help people finding this post easier.)

[tags]firefox, linux, open office, open source, operation system, thunderbird, ubuntu, windows xp, wordpress[/tags]

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[tags]killerchops.tv videos[/tags]

[tags]let them sing it for you[/tags]

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