My favourite band of all time, Pop Will Eat Itself, split up in 1996. They re-formed last week for a short run of big, big greatest-hits type shows in the South of England. I feel ten years younger just for hearing them play again, even as my body aches from it all.

As Tezzer over at PWEI Nation says; “Five nights, three cities, twelve thousand people. We asked for a celebration and that’s what we got.”

PWEI were always a special band, always ahead of their time. What we fans never realised in the late eighties and earliy nineties was just how far ahead of their time they were. This series of reformation gigs have been the perfect reminder. Breakbeat, drum and bass, big beat, grunge, nu-metal, indie-rock, punk, funk, whatever the fuck you want – it was all there right from the start, before such genres had names. My friend Mark describes it well; “Very few bands are able to simply slough off the entire idea of genres (though many claim to), the Poppies do this all the time and actually seem to be having the most incredible fun doing it.”

Words can’t do justice. Thousands of people who should be old enough to know better spent each night of the tour shoulder to shoulder, pogoing and grinning, sweating like pigs doing the dance of the mad. I’m battered and bruised, and still smiling at every line and every beat that reverberates through my head.

PWEI could very well be the best band in the world right now – watching them for a few nights makes me ask one big question; “What the hell are the rest of the world’s bands playing at?” PWEI threw down the gauntlet ten to fifteen years ago – they gave the world a technicolour climax of new, undiluted, pure adrenalin-kick music… and the world didn’t even fucking notice. Nobody took on their ideas, nobody tried to match them. It’s 2005 and there’s nobody out there who can hold a candle to these teenage grandads, these grebo gurus.

They’re back. Even if it turns out to only have been for five nights, it was important.

This is all idle speculation, but a few recent developments from Apple and Sony have made me think of an odd possible future for the two companies.

Apple have been making a big fuss about leading the way in standards for High-Definition video (they recently relaunched iMovie as a HD-focused product for entry-level consumers, and corresponding changes to the rest of their line-up). At this year’s Macworld keynote speech, Steve Jobs of Apple promised to; “Make this the year of High-Definition video”.

The big announcement swamped by Apple’s new product launches was a new video compression codec called H.246/AVC. According to Kelly McNeil at OSviews.com the codec is; “… extremely scalable, and delivers excellent quality across the entire bandwidth spectrum — from high definition television to video conferencing and 3G mobile multimedia … H.264 changes everything you think you know about digital video.”

Basically, using this new video compression codec, the prospect of downloadable DVD quality movies becomes real. Possibly even in real-time – which means that the streaming and broadcasting of movie content is a real possibility for any broadband user, and brings wireless movie broadcast into the realm of near-reality, rather than science fiction.

At Macworld, the president of Sony Corporation, Kunitake Ando, appeared onstage to discuss Sony’s partnership with Apple on a pro-level HD video camera. Seems a little small-time to warrant the presence of such a high-ranking and secretive figure.

What if this partnership were about much more than just the one product?

Ken Kuturagi, head of Sony’s entertainment divisions, has recently admitted that Sony’s reliance on proprietary formats was a huge strategic mistake. This suggests that they will soon embrace more open standards for future digital machines, to better court the massmarket.

What’s Sony’s biggest new hardware release? The PSP, or PlayStation Portable. A handheld gaming console with an unprecedentedly beautiful screen, touted as perfect for watching movies on the go. It’s equipped with wi-fi, and capable of downloading or streaming content. Sony recently announced that it will be given the capability to stream TV content wirelessly.

In my mind, this all starts to add up, especially given the belief of many analysts that Apple and Sony are gearing up to launch an iTunes Store online for movies – an iMovies store, if you like. OSviews have the best article on it so far.

If Sony provide access to movie content, through a store fronted by Apple’s online sales interface, using Apple’s new HD-to-mobile-capable video codec, watchable on your living room TV through a Mac Mini with it’s HD video out ports and streamable wirelessly to a Sony PSP with it’s stunning screen quality…

… well, it’s possible, at least. I’m not talking science fiction.

You end up with a scenario whereby Sony provide content for a Sony device, but with Apple providing the distribution.

Hmm… Apple’s iTunes movie store was based on an existing technology which they bought up – it’s users saw the website closed down with a mysterious “No longer available” message, shortly before Apple’s revamped version launched in it’s place. The movie download company Hexilent Technologies recently removed their product, iFlicks, from the web, as described here. It looks like a very similar situation.

Update: Kuturagi-san has mentioned that Sony are willing to open up their proprietary UMD disc format to other manufacturers, which paves the way for them to compete head-on with formats like the DVD. More importantly, it opens up the possibility of Sony producing a writable UMD drive – for saving downloaded movies to, perhaps? Link here, courtesy of Engadget.

For years now, I’ve been using dictionary.com to sort out any spelling faux pas I may come up against. I always had the niggling thought in the back of my mind that it was actually giving me the wrong results a lot of the time – or at least the American spellings of a lot of words, when I wanted the English spellings.

I have no idea why I didn’t think of this before, but there’s also a dictionary.co.uk – run by entirely different people and spelling things the English way.

I see said the blind man.

If, like me, you’ve been wondering when all the incredible advances made in the medical world over the past few years will start to spill over into more frivolous areas … Biojewelry is going to make you very happy.

Okay, so they’ve got a few problems with their spelling (or maybe they’re just trying to aim for an American audience, I don’t know) – but the concept is beautiful. Take the technology behind reconstructive bone surgery (growing cultured bone tissue over moulded mesh structures at will), and apply it to product design. If we can now grow human bone in any shape we want, then we have a whole new (and kinda natural) material for making stuff out of. How much nicer would bone feel in the hand than plastic? Biojewelry take the idea one conceptual step further, by offering to take bone marrow samples from both members of a couple, then grow their bone tissue into two eternity rings enabling them to wear each other in a whole new way.

For me, that’s a nice touch, but somewhat hokey. I love the basic idea of being able to create forms from real bone though. There’s more to come from that end of it, I’m sure …

Turns out that the project was a student proposal from two RCA students, which was so well received that they now have funding to go ahead and create prototypes. The website is a call for volunteer couples.

Wow, that was quick and easy.

WordPress is certainly a lot easier to mess with… erm… I mean adapt and personalise… than Movable Type was.

Normal service will now be resumed. You may or may not notice the improvements around here, most useul of them being an RSS feed for those who like such things, and a sort of dumping ground for sites I have recently bookmarked, served up by the wonderful del.icio.us social bookmarking service.

Please excuse the mess whilst I redecorate.

New hosts, new blog system, and a new look.

I’ve moved hosting to Dreamhost, and my blog backend from Movable Type to WordPress. I’ll get to the new look in time, but for now it’s in the world of the ugly default template. I’ve been busy setting up a blog for my girlfriend and another for sea monsters. This one’s next on the list.