MOOG in Kei to the City

My interest in cars has led me to watch Mighty Car Mods.

One of the films they made, Kei to the City, has a really great soundstrack. The interesting thing is, besides how good and inspiring those songs are, they're created by Blair Joscelyne, or Moog, one of the Mighty Car Mods member.

The album, uploaded by a youtube user, has soundtracks featuring male and female voices, different rhythms, genres from hip-hop, to house and vocal tunes.

This album is just a bit of what Moog can do. From other songs I've heard, I noticed he can work with a variety of styles, keeping each song as a different set of feelings transmitted to the listeners.

His music is available in Blair Joscelyne's website, MCM website, as well as on iTunes.

It's always great to find artists you knew nothing about and having a pleasant surprise!

Bike Riding: Somewhere to go, something to drink!

One of the things really enjoy doing is cycling. I use a mountain bike with an aluminum frame, front spring suspension, rear suspension (mostly for comfort) and mechanical disks brakes. It suits everything I do: road and cross-country (although I wish I could do cross-country more often).

I used to ride my bicycle more often than I do now since lately I have had little time to do it.

Yesterday I decided to go for a ride with an objective: reach one of the highest locations in this region and take a picture. Since I had to go somewhere, I went towards the sea. 

The landscape makes it worth it:

Down this hill there a beach ;)

After this ride I leave two bicycle riding tips:

Tip #1: Drink water! Even if you don't feel thirsty, drink. And always take more water than you'll need, or find a place to refill. I ran out of water at 2/3 of the 25 kms I did, and it became much harder after that.

Tip #2: Keep the right rotation! When pedaling, the right rotation speed is more important than how fast you are going. Try finding the best rotation speed that suits you and keep it. Use the gears to compensate for uphill or downhill effort while maintaining rotation speed.

Tip #3: Ride with an objective! Going somewhere specific or reaching N kms, it doesn't really matter. If you stick to your goal, riding there will be easier. ;)

How to: Install Firefox in Debian Wheezy

This post covers the installation of Mozilla Firefox in Gnome 2 environment.

Step 1:

Download the latest Mozilla Firefox from the official website (choose language and distribution).

Step 2:

Extract firefox-29.0.1.tar.bz2 (version may be different). Using unp may be a good idea, it's always handy:

unp firefox-29.0.1.tar.bz2

or just use tar:

tar xvjf firefox-29.0.1.tar.bz2

Step 3:

Move the firefox/ folder to opt/:

sudo mv firefox/ /opt

Step 4:

Apply permissions to users. This is needed to run firefox from the Applications menu, but the permissions you give it are your choice. I chose to allow superuser and sudoers write and execute permissions, and guest users only execute:

sudo chmod 750 firefox/

Step 5:

Create an alias inside the bin folder so you can call firefox from the terminal. I called it realfirefox since firefox was already used by Iceweasel xD.

sudo ln -s /opt/firefox/firefox /usr/bin/realfirefox

Step 6:

Create an Applications menu entry so you can use Firefox from the Internet menu, like this:

cd /usr/share/applications/

Create a .desktop file for Firefox:

touch firefox.desktop

And with a text editor like gedit

gksudo gedit firefox.desktop

paste this inside the firefox.desktop file:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Mozilla Firefox
Comment=Browse the World Wide Web
Type=Application
Terminal=false
Exec=/usr/bin/realfirefox %U
Icon=/opt/firefox/browser/icons/mozicon128.png
StartupNotify=true
Categories=Network;WebBrowser;

Voilà! By now you should have you beloved Firefox working via GUI. But remember, for every Firefox version, you have to repeat this process.

Daiki Kasho in Gran Turismo series

It's not the first song which comes to my mind when I think of Daiki Kasho, but "Place in This World" is definitely a great example.

I find Daiki Kasho to be a composer who can make songs of several types and inspire lots of different emotions.

I first knew his songs from the Gran Turismo series. In case you want to check the bands he worked with (I did, and it's definitely worth it):

• Dakota Star
• Alan Brey
• Chiaki
• Jonathan Underdown (from Fade)
• Ray Hikari (from Station of Revenge, and the one who sings the song below)

If anyone ever stumbles upon this page, I'll glady post any links to these bands or a blog with an interview, information, whatever. I believe there is also a portuguese guy who really likes Dakota Star and has uploaded videos on Youtube, so it's great that people keep these bands alive.

After all, these are the songs we will remember we heard when playing videogames.

Happy gaming ;)