This time the roundup is a little but too late, but nevertheless it’s there! I spent lots of time working for customers and also the European Soccer Championship is pulling at my nerves. There are also ongoing Netlabel activities here in Cologne, thanks to the initiative mo. from Phlow.net / Phlow Magazine. So here we go:

1.

The biggest highlight this month clearly was the Firefox 3 World Record attempt. Millions of people downloaded the browser and the servers were only the first two or three hours unavailable. At least there were over 8 million downloads and Europe, especially Germany seems to have many Firefox-fans on board. Here we had 1.1 million downloads, which comes second place right after the USA with 3.9 million. Right at the moment the people of Guinness review the World Record attempt.

2.

Over at the Independent Gaming Source Derek Yu made a report with many interesting links on game engines made with Microsoft Excel Sheets. This is really freaky stuff. Did you already know, that Microsoft developers itself did hide a secret proto-game in the 95-edition of Excel?

“Excel-native cell graphics”

Update: Lars from Gulli pointed me the link to this demo “Excellence“, made in Excel. Thanks! (Video here).

3.

Just some minutes ago I discovered this brilliant video of an upcoming German artists Alexander Marcus. The video is really, really good. Low cost, but highly effective. If you don’t speak German: He is singing about the land “Papaya”, where everyone is happy. You know that story…

4.

Let’s stay on that topic… Look at this beautiful screen- and user-interface design of this absolutely classic movie Dark Star! One of the best movies ever made.

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The Korg DS-10 slowly makes it steps into public. With that piece of software two of my very favorite hard- and software manufactures unite in one device. Some DS-10s will have a special concert tonight in London, according to Create Digital Music. I really can’t wait to get my hands on this musictool, but the official release will be not until later this year. The only chance now is to enjoy great demonstration videos like this:

Natural evolution of something the Gameboyzz Orchestra.

Alva Noto – Unitxt

One of the most interesting labels for electronic music was and may ever will be Raster Noton. They started out as an “Archiv für Ton und Nicht-Ton” (Archive for sound and non-sound) and they still push sound-boundaries with their approach to merge sound, aesthetics and science. They really have good music on, plus in our so beloved digital age, they still make releases with a higher tangible quality. Funny, that from the beginning of Raster Noton digital aesthetics played a central role.

One of the most remarkable artists on this label is Alva Noto, with his very minimal, fragile and rhythmic soundwonders. You may know Alva Noto also under the name Carsten Nicolai and he is one of the people behind this label.

Byetone – Death of a Typographer

The freshest music released today is an intense atmospheric electronic trip. Feel free to listen to “Byetone – Death of a Typographer” at the Raster Noton site. Unfortunately you have to click you thought the website a little bit to get to the musicplayer.

The label will have a booth at the Sonar-festival this year, where they promote their recent showcase, as well as the labels archive. And since Raster Noton was always famous for their mindbending and clear visual and acoustic approach, don’t forget to give them a visit if you meet the festival in Barcelona this year. The Sonar will be from 19.-21. June 2008.

A MidiBox SID gets into the groove.

This project is hot! The goodness of the C64-sound build into a C64 case, but with far more under and over the hood. The keyboard was totally removed and replaced by magical circuitry and a nice looking user interface. The knobs glow and some LED-indicators show the amplitude of the single tracks. This machine isn’t any real C64 anymore – it is a beast. Under the hood 8 SID chips found its place. In total this machine can generate four stereo pairs of sound, and four synthesizer voices at the same time. It gets very futuristic with all that knobs and lights. Very well done interface-design that brings back the good old action- and scifi-movie feeling. A great mod and a jewel for everyone who likes to look at electronic gear.

The worklog of this project is available at subatomic and an extended review can be found at technabob. Oh, you can also build your own C64 MidiBox.

The holy glowing mod.

[ via Engadget ]

The Makezine has a neat project in the recent issue, that triggers my heart with the Atari-beat: so cool, it almost hurts! Unfortunately I did not get any issue of this magazine here in Germany yet, but it looks like you can build this thing on your own. The according project-site on the Makezine delivers the schematics for building this, as well as a program-file download to upload this on any microcontroller. Homebrew to take away, if you like.

This box was designed and developed by the people over at Uncommon Projects. They have very interesting projects on their site, so be sure to visit it. I was wondering if there is a market for things like that. Retro-nostalgia hardware, that is free from hassle and remain at the roots of cool stuff. The success from the Macintosh was also based on take-away versus to assemble at home. Maybe this wonder will happen again?

If you use the Firefox (98% of the hands rise) and are into designing and developing websites, than I have a very special tip for you. Firebug is the best Firefox add-on, that make debugging, analyzing, creating and designing of css-themes extremely easy. It’s a powerful tool that let you design, change and redesign a whole website within seconds. You almost work with your website in a graphical way, like using an illustrator application, but in fact all changes are made on the css. Changes are stored in the temporarily memory of the tool, so you can build upon changes you made earlier and morph and redesign the complete css also “just for testing puroses”. When satisfied, just copy the css and paste it into the file on the webserver.

With Firebug you can test out ideas very quickly or visually explain the design methods, while your customer is sitting next to you. Even for debugging it’s got great features. One example: for every element you browse, you’ll get all css-data that is affected and relevant for this special element on the website – even the inherited lines of code, and also the ones that were inherited, but overwritten (marked with a strike).

Download it at Firefox Add-ons or on the Firebug Website.

[ via CForms ]

Update: The Download Day will be on Tuesday, 17. June 2008. Have a good time in downloading FF3!

The browser Firefox 3 wants to get the world record for the most downloaded tool within 24 hours. On the so called “Download Day” you can submit your mail-address to get the latest information. You “pledge”, that you will download the browser on that day. Just right at the moment the amount of people who promised to download Firefox 3 on that day is impressive. Just take a look at the live-update, interactive map.

[ via Gulli ]