So, since I started writing at the beginning of January, I’ve been trying out lots of different ‘background’ radio.

In the past I used to listen to the birdsong on DAB, but it went off-air last year when Amazing Radio launched. I finally got round to trying out birdsongradio.com the other day and it’s a real disappointment.

They’re selling the recording as an mp3 and a CD, so I shouldn’t be surprised that the free streamed version is crap. But still, there’s nothing like having a peaceful outdoor scene interrupted by a woman telling you to “discover relaxation during your day” over and over again to make you want to punch someone, preferably that woman.

Dan got me started on Radio 3, which is great for working to at home, as long as you switch off before you get caught up in some bellyaching 2-hour German opera marathon. It’s not loud enough to block out other stuff happening in the office though.

Clare Teal is pretty good on iPlayer – I like big band music but rarely know the words, so the lyrics aren’t distracting. The problem is, it’s just one hour a week, so by the time you’ve dragged yourself away from Facebook, it’s practically time to put something else on.

My favourite background radio is easily Bobby Friction on the Asian Network. 12 hours a week of loud, inoffensive music, often in a language I can’t understand, with a DJ who doesn’t sound like an arse. Brilliant!

In September, when I wrote about Geocities closing down, I should have guessed there would be someone out there with the aptitude and inclination to preserve all that content – and it turns out there were quite a lot of people. Idly Googling myself* over Christmas, I stumbled upon reocities.com.

Reocities is the result of some last minute, very hard work by a coder in the Netherlands, ‘J‘, who was suddenly inspired to download and save as much of Geocities as possible. He’s managed to store over 2 million accounts, including the venerable Plush But Itchy Land of Cheesecake and Suchlike.

J’s diary, The Making of ReoCities, tells you exactly how he did it. He had so little time to capture all the files that the diary reminds you of a thriller – you’d just need to swap MB/s for mph and pretend that Yahoo! was about to detonate a bomb rather than turn off some servers, and it could be a ropey episode of 24.

By the morning of the big switch-off, you can see that J is thinking along the same lines: “08:15 AM. Mod_rewrite reminds me of a chainsaw. It’s extremely powerful stuff but if you’re not careful you’re going to get hurt, badly.”

I’m not sure I can go along with J’s emotional argument that Yahoo!’s closure of Geocities is akin to the Taliban’s destruction of ancient religious artefacts, but I do think he’s done a great thing.

And he’s not the only one. Another site which mirrors Plush But Itchy is the frame-free geocities.ws. They’ve stored sites by name rather than using the original Neighbourhoods structure. So if you’re looking for your own site but can’t remember the address, try searching there. Perhaps sensibly, given the legal ambiguity of hosting other people’s content, geocities.ws have opted to make their site anonymous.

The smartest-looking Geocities backup site I’ve seen so far is geociti.es, built by The Archive Team (slogan: “We are going to rescue your shit”). They’ve written a history of Geocities and are looking for people to help with Geocities ‘heritage’ projects.

Bizarrely, as a result of these and other efforts, there are now more opportunities than ever before to visit the Land of Cheesecake and suchlike.

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*Although I’m disappointed to be included on a page about men with breasts, at least my name is no longer associated with genital crabs.

Dan has curated an album called sc140. All the tracks are tweets that people have posted on Twitter, using the programming language SuperCollider.

The idea was to see how much music you could fit into 140 characters of code, for example:

{LocalOut.ar(a=DynKlank.ar(`[LocalIn.ar.clip2(LFPulse.kr([1,2,1/8])
.sum/2)**100*100],Impulse.ar(10)));HPF.ar(a).clip2}.play//

…which translates into this:

There are 22 tracks in total from a variety of artists. The album’s doing well – it’s got support from The Wire magazine and now there’s an article about it in New Scientist.

“My granny might raise her eyebrows if I gave her sc140 for Christmas, but if yours is the Aphex Twin type, then she’d definitely love it,” said Stowell, who has recently had media training, and knows a good soundbite when he hears one.

Download the full album for free.

I’ve been itching to play you Walrus under ice, 1983, but it looks like you have to be in the library to access that particular clip. Still, for future reference, if you ever want to recreate the effect, it sounds exactly like someone beating a dustbin with a rolled up newspaper, while jumping up and down in a puddle.

Here’s another archive recording you might like instead.

In the 1920s, Daniel Jones (famous linguist) made a series of Linguaphone records aimed at learners of English as a second language. In this clip you’ll hear two voices discussing the wonders of the wireless. One is Arthur Lloyd James, who advised the BBC on spoken English and produced several booklets of Recommendations to Announcers during the 1930s. The other is JRR Tolkien (who bears responsibility for the dullest three hours I’ve ever spent in a cinema).

Stuff like this is the plunderphonist’s dream. Listen to more here.

On Breakfast this morning, they played a clip of a Tomorrow’s World April Fool, where the presenter climbed into a dustbin and blew himself up. It wasn’t very impressive but it reminded my Grandad of a hoax he spotted on TV years ago when he was a teacher.

The BBC were reporting on a crucial international chess match taking place in London. Grandmasters had come from all over the world to congregate round a chess board in the middle of Trafalgar Square.

As the players stood about, talking seriously in their various native tongues, Grandad realised the young men on screen were actually his pupils from Hackney Downs in east London. And rather than discussing the match going on in front of them, they weren’t actually talking about chess at all, they were just pretending to be fluent in German by reciting extracts from Goethe’s Faust, which their German teacher, my Grandad, had got them to learn off by heart.

I bet there’s no footage left in the BBC archive – but it’s a shame Grandad told me the story two days after I left the BBC, so I can no longer look on the intranet to check.

It’s the end of an era: Geocities is closing on October 26th 2009. All Geocities content is being deleted, including my first website. Ah, what fond memories I have of Philonski’s Plush but Itchy Land of Cheesecake and Suchlike.

Geocities was originally modelled on real cities and you could explore and choose an address within a geographical location. I was the first person to “move into” Paris Parc when it opened. It made perfect sense to introduce yourself to your close neighbours when they arrived, just as you would in a real city.

It was fun to play websites. I put my visitor counter into a phrase which changed each week (”Philonski sentences her evil landlady to [14926] years in Hell!”) and I liked to hide jokes in the metadata.

At the time I was most proud of my map of Guadeloupe and an interactive pop quiz story about a Jonathan King lookalike trying to escape a parallel universe. But looking back, the real achievement was getting so many people to take part in silly games. The Caption Competition and the Page of Self Indulgence always got a respectable number of hits, even if one anonymous contributor regularly submitted the answer “PUSSY!” whatever the question.

Dan’s site, The Kerrazy World of Edible Undergarments, has already disappeared from Geocities, as has The Strange and Unsettling World of the Ultrafoetus (are you spotting a theme in these titles?). Luckily, the Wayback Machine has copies of both.

If you had a Geocities site, leave a comment – it would be great to mention a couple on this blog before they go offline.