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Analysis of Rate of Human Problems – getting mathematical on how messed up humans are. The stats are interesting too.

Remote Control Reggae – LEGO robot that can play reggae on a ukulele.

A batch of freshly hatched remixes:

• Bad Attraction (Future Boy Sambadelic mix)
• Borderline (Fantastic Vamps 8-Bit mix)
• Making Me Nervous (Autolect mix)
• Sick as a Dog (Future Boy Old-Time mix)
  
• Sick as a Dog (The Canine Fever Dream mix)
  

Despite a few additions this week, Sick as a Dog gets the award for being the least remixed song so far.

Apparently the remix podcast feed was broken, it should be fixed now. Thanks to Herbert for letting me know.

There’s an interview with me here I did a while ago. As for Podcast play, I think The Skinny on Sports is using my music as an intro/outro. I see others fly by on Technorati but I lack the drive, ambition and organizational skills to write them down.

Hey, if you’re the person who did the MatterOverMind remix of Making Me Nervous, please email me as I’ve lost your address. I’m on the home stretch of contacting remixers for the remix compilation.

Got an email from Derek Sivers at CD Baby regarding MP3tunes. Turns out MP3tunes was listed as “Lindows” on the companies my album had been shipped to, so that explains that.

Also it looks like the catalog is exclusively CD Baby artists and Derek says the artist cut is “the usual 65 cents per song, $6.50 per full-album”, which is higher than it says in the FAQ and would be as high a cut as iTunes despite the purchase price being lower.

A cool feature: “All music purchased at MP3tunes remains in the user’s “Music Locker” so they can enjoy unlimited download access to their MP3tunes music library from any web browser at anytime. There is no additional charge for users to re-download their music from their Music Locker.”

Express URLs are handy AND dandy: http://www.mp3tunes.com/BradSucks

I played around with it a little more and here’s my list of usability complaints:

• Titles and artist names are truncated too heavily, widen it up. (As ranted a bit more about here.)
• The horizontal sliding browsing thing, while cute, isn’t user friendly. It’s annoying to look through large lists. And combined with the tiny title length, I can barely read a full title anyway.
• When I click on preview links in Firefox I’m prompted to download the 30 second mp3 clip and then need to go open it manually. It shouldn’t be hard to make this stream automatically.
• Severely limited number of CDs it shows me on genre pages, unless you count ones you see when you horizontally browse, which I don’t because it’s annoying.

All of those points make for a pretty crummy browsing experience and seem like easy things to change.

CrimsonBay – it’s like iTunes for Indian music. Cool! [via]

MP3tunes has launched. It’s the new DRM-free music downloading site by Michael Robertson, formerly of MP3.com. The site is painfully slow under the load right now so enter at your own risk.

Songs are 88 cents, albums are $8.88, which are both lower than iTunes. The about page says artists get almost 60 cents a song and almost $6 an album. (Then subtract the digital distributor’s cut before it gets to the artist, which can range tremendously.)

My album I Don’t Know What I’m Doing is in there here. I have kind of a morbid fascination with what genres music services jam me in. MP3tunes puts me in Pop / Quirky, which seems as good a place for me as any.

Since the site’s swamped I haven’t gotten to look around much, but dudes, what is up with the heavy truncation on artist names and album titles? On the front page I see “Theme Fr…” by “Elias K…”, “Figures….” by “Two Ton…”, Serenade…” by “Rachell…”, Capricor…” by Mark Ha…”. When not a single artist on the front page can fit their full name or album title, it’s time to shrink the font or widen the screen or something so visitors can read what the hell they’re supposed to click on and buy. And mouseovers on the truncated titles would be nice.

It’ll be interesting to see if MP3tunes catches on with the anti-DRM set. Will they accept it as a good way to get media in a format that’s useful to them or call “too expensive” on it and keep downloading music for free? Guess we’ll see.

Turn your Mac mini into a low-cost recording studio – An extensive how to from Engaget. I’d love to see a cost comparison with the PC.

PodBrix – handmade lego people with iPods.

Band to Band – “construct a simple ‘family tree’ based upon the interrelationship of band members” [via]

Euphemisms For Death and Dying – I am fascinated by this list of death slang.