Doctor Who theme remixes - if you like Doctor Who remixes, there's a lot to like here.
Mashup Town - blog / podcast of commercial mashups. It is important that you listen to "Smells like Booty" and "Owner of a Lonely Butt".
A Guitar Teacher's Lesson Notebook - a pretty cool blog by a guitar teacher. Lots of interesting stuff in there.
Hit song sonograms - in-depth analysis of what hit songs look like. [via]
I'm always interested in the software people use to help their creativity, so I thought I should write up one of my favorites that gets very little attention. It's Keynote by Tranglos software and it's an open-source Windows-based tabbed notebook. Check out some screenshots here. Keynote sits in my system tray and I can hit CTRL-SHIFT-F12 at any time to call it up and start writing. Escape sends it back to the tray. Inside of Keynote, my first tab is a Notepad that I use for writing anything or saving temporary scraps of information. Then I have other tabs such as a "music" tab where I can enter potential song titles or ideas. It's a tree view so all I have to do when I have an idea is hit CTRL-SHIFT-F12, select the music tab, hit enter to create a new tree node, type my idea + enter and I'm done. I can also enter data in that node as well, such as lyrics or chords or whatever I'd like.
I've tried a lot of these programs and even though there have ben no updates to Keynote since late 2003, I haven't found anything that's as fast, feature-rich and simple to use. I'd recommend to anyone looking to capture their ideas or is just an information packrat.
CDR Repair Kits - turns out the best method is to skip the specific CD repair kits and use Brasso metal polish. Another person vouching for Brasso here.
My little game and interesting links site In4mador! is three years old today. That's older than many humans. Still needs some cleaning up though.
Podcasting Star Wars: Winer vs. Curry is a good overview of the first melodramatic spat of podcasting between Dave Winer and Adam Curry. Now they need to have it out on a lava planet.
#1 Songs - 1930-1989 - just the lyrics, no audio, but still interesting.
The Official BitTorrent Home Page has a torrent search engine on it now. Interesting move. If it's a big hit, it'll allow people to more easily find public torrents they want but at the same time it'll make it easier for the MPAA/RIAA to track what's going on.
The FBI needs to spring for a web designer to do their shutdown notices instead of just saving from Microsoft Word. Look at that ugly HTML markup. Sick. Also I really like the quote from this article:
"Today's actions are bad news for Internet movie thieves and good news for preserving the magic of the movies," said Motion Picture Association of America Chief Executive Officer Dan Glickman in a statement.
You win this round, people for the preservation of the magic of the movies!
craptracker II - a web-based old-school music tracker. I spent many hours staring at Scream Tracker when I was a teenager.
The Winamp iPod plugin - lets you use Winamp instead of iTunes with your iPod.
Music Thing is doing a week-long special on The Tiny Music Makers, a series of articles on the artists responsible for small sounds in operating systems and ads and so on. After doing the Gaim 2.0 sounds I have a pretty good appreciation of how challenging it can be to make tiny evocative sounds, so this'll be an interesting read.
This Reuters article describes how mobile phones are getting integrated into live shows. Artists can make exclusive offers available through phones and also fans can send SMS messages that then appear on the big concert screen for everyone to see.
The companies first worked together on a promotion for Anastacia in Europe. Renshaw said the initiative generated thousands of messages at each concert at a cost to users of 1 euro ($1.26) each. He estimated that 10 percent of the audience participated.
Very neat and takes advantage of people increasingly having these little buying devices on them all the time.
O'Reilly Radar >Podcast support in next version of iTunes. Jobs also takes an SNL-swing at podcasting describing it as "Wayne's World for radio".
The Guns N' Roses Self-Similar Midi Synth is Guns n' Roses songs made up of sped-up samples of entire Guns n' Roses songs. How it works:
First, We took the recordings of several Guns N' Roses songs, from the albums "Appetite for Destruction" (1987), "GN'R Lies" (1988), and "Use Your Illusion I and II" (1991). We sped up these recordings exponentially until the tempo of the song became a pitched frequency. This is generally in the area of 480 times faster than normal playback speed (at this speed a song that lasts 4 minutes would be over in 0.5 seconds). Then we take these short sounds use them as samples to play back midi files of various Guns N' Roses songs. For instance, the GNR Self-Similar version of Sweet Child O' Mine may use the entirety of November Rain as its snare drum sound and the entirety of Patience for a note in Axl's voice. In this way, we can make Guns and Roses songs that are made up of very small Guns N' Roses songs, which could reveal themselves under a sonic microscope, yet are too fast to hear in the actual final product.
Paradise City and Sweet Child O' Mine are available.
The Beta of BitTorrent 4.1.0 has been released, the big addition being trackerless support. If it works as advertised, this is huge news as it'll simplify bittorrent immensely and make bittorrent activity extremely difficult to find and shut down. More info on the trackerless mode is here.
'Yoda' - I'm kind of in love with this video of a Yoda puppet dancing to "Just a Gigolo".