Flash MP3 Player - This is a pretty slick Flash MP3. It looks all iPod-y, oooh.

The Beer Hunter - find out when beer and liquor stores are open in Ontario. Awesome.

The Groupies - "Purportedly edited (in stereo!) from an actual series of interviews with groupies from New York's Greenwich Village music scene, circa late '60s."

I got a sexy Moleskine notebook for Christmas. It's very nice and it's the sort of thing I would never buy for myself but was curious about, so it was an excellent gift. So far I've learned that none of my thoughts or feelings are fancy enough to be written in such a nice notebook. "Would Hemingway or Picasso have written that in their Moleskines, Brad? Honestly." It's still blank and I'm trying to work up the balls to wreck it with language.

Months ago I made up this quick site called junklog to track my reading habits. I had been rolling through a lot of books and wanted a simple del.icio.us style tool to let me log and rate them and nothing I tried did what I wanted. I've decided to open it up and see if it's useful to anyone but me. Still pretty rough around the edges but I've been using it for a few months and it seems to work. It has tagging, rss feeds, uses the amazon.com database, lets you log books, music and dvds, etc. You can check out my logged items here. And here's where I test posting my last 5 read books to my blog:

• Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein This had some interesting ideas in it but mostly bored me. I nearly gave up reading it right near the end but forced myself to stay with it. (tags: scifi mars)
• The Time Traveler's Wife (Harvest Book) by Audrey Niffenegger This was more of a romance novel than anything sci-fi which was disappointing to me. And I found it kind of just wandered and ultimately was pretty boring. (tags: timetravel romance scifi)
• Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden Pretty good. A simple story told in an interesting setting with some fun characters (like Hatsumomo). (tags: geisha fiction)
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey This is a great book. I've read it twice now and I guess I should see the movie. (tags: mentalillness classics)
• The Stand : Expanded Edition: For the First Time Complete and Uncut (Signet) by Stephen King This was the first Stephen King book I read. It was pretty good, though some of the god mumbo jumbo lost me. (tags: stephenking horror)

Mashistory Vol 1: Stairway to Gilligan - A good writeup on that Stairway to Gilligan's Island mashup performance. [via]

I was looking through the oddmusic.com musical instrument gallery, there's a lot of really great stuff in there. My favorite so far is the nano guitar. The write-up:

The world's smallest guitar is 10 micrometers long -- about the size of a single cell -- with six strings each about 50 nanometers, or 100 atoms, wide. Made by Cornell University researchers from crystalline silicon, it demonstrates a new technology for a new generation of electromechanical devices.

The guitar has six strings, each string about 50 nanometers wide, the width of about 100 atoms. If plucked -- by an atomic force microscope, for example -- the strings would resonate, but at inaudible frequencies. The entire structure is about 10 micrometers long, about the size of a single human blood cell.

And I can't help but notice that in the picture the nano guitar looks left handed. Rock!

A few people have asked me about how World of Warcraft is going. Well, I quit playing it. I got about three or four weeks of nicely addicted fun out of it where I needed to play it every chance I possibly could, but then it wore me out and I never logged back in. I didn't make a decision about it, there was no particular angry quitting moment. I just got tired. Here's my boring story: Let me tell you something about World of Warcraft: there's too much running. Seriously, there should be an in-game counter of the sheer number of hours you put in jogging from one destination to another like a chump, it would be startling. I start a quest and it's all "hey, run down the coast for 30 minutes" and then I get there and someone gives me a quest saying "hey, run on back up to where you started". Even sitting on my ass at my desk it made me tired.

I also understand that most of the fun of the game comes from having a good group of people to play with, but I couldn't keep up with the majority of players I met. They were willing to put many, many hours a day into the game whereas I had about two maximum, so it was a little hard to keep in sync.

So I made it up to around level 26, but my isolation combined with my hatred for retardedly jogging around a virtual world has bored and annoyed me out of it. There were certainly a lot of neat things in there and fun was definitely had, but as I ran around I felt the game designers were purposefully rubbing my face in the fact that I was wasting my life and money by playing this game. At least try to conceal that from me, guys. It's really all I ask from a video game.

Holophonic sound [mp3] - a demonstration of holophonic sound from this site. Listen to it with headphones, it's pretty impressive.

Cochlear implant audio examples - Hear what it sounds like to have a cochlear implant.

Finally (after months of delay) I think the source to every song on I Don't Know What I'm Doing as well as separate acapellas is now on ccMixter here. And now I'm happy to move on to new things to put off for months, like trying to integrate the ccMixter list of remixes onto my site somehow.

Ryan sent me a link to this ZEN BMP-100 after my SD card MP3 player ponderings (1, 2) which is pretty much the ultimate dream of what I want. But like most other dreams worth having, it's Korean and probably illegal in North America. Check out the iPod clone, SD card using sexy bootleg MP3 player though. (Some more shots here.) Nice.

Yahoo! acquires WebJay - congrats to Lucas. Link goes to a short interview with him.

I've put the del.icio.us playtagger on most pages on this site that have MP3s. Like the music page and the remix album as well as the other albums. So if you have Flash installed you should see a little play icon next to the MP3 links that will let you stream the song. I think it's too handy to not use when it's so easy to implement. My complaints: 1. I have to include a script off of the del.icio.us server. So if they go down (which they've been prone to lately), my playing goes down. Hopefully it won't freeze and choke my site during the Javascript include.

2. I have no control over the look of the play button. Not that I'm artistically gifted enough to do much with it, but it'd be nice.

3. It's messier than it needs to be when you hit play because it rams a "tag this" link in there. I understand there's no reason for del.icio.us to provide this app if they're not getting something out of it, but it's ugly and probably just confusing to any non-nerd visitors I might have. Also it tends to make the page jump around when it expands and contracts.

4. It may create a bandwidth apocalypse. Streaming and direct linking and so on is scary business. I like that people can bookmark my songs and stream them off del.icio.us, but the bandwidth implications frighten me. But I guess we'll see what happens.

So while it's a pretty cool tool, I'd jump ship to a version I could host and customize a bit better in a hot second.

Following up on the Bonzai USB 2.0 Card Reader, Marcus sent me a link to this Mach Speed TRIO MP3 Player & 128MB SD Card which is basically what I want:

This incredibly small Mach Speed MP3 player is the perfect musical entertainment device to take with you everywhere you go! Slip it into any pocket and get ready to enjoy your favorite tunes any time, anywhere! The tiny but powerful MP3 player supports 16mb, 32mb, 64mb, 128mb, 256mb, 512mb and 1GB SD/MMC flash memory cards and offers 7 to 8 hours playback of superior sound.

It's $57.99 at the link above, but it's only $29.99 on Amazon. But all the reviews there seem to be trashing the thing. So I'd like one that works.

I saw this Bonzai USB 2.0 Card Reader over on Cool Tools. It's a little $7.50 device that you plug Secure Digital RAM (the type that a lot of digital cameras use) into so you can swap cards, upgrade it, etc. I'd love an MP3 player like this. That way you could upgrade the storage as the price on memory goes down, you could keep multiple cards around to swap in and out with different music on them and it'd still be usable as a regular thumbdrive.

Top 50 Music Videos Of 2005 - lots of cool music videos from 2005.

When I moved into this semi-detached house six months ago I was a little worried about making too much noise and pissing off the neighbors on the other side of the adjoining wall with my recording. It's actually been holding me back a bit as I've been crippled with Canadian politeness. Then today the neighbor just dropped by to ask if we're okay with him practicing his bagpipes after dinner. So I guess I'm in the clear for a little guitar action.

ScanJet Music - how to play music on a scanner. Check out the video. [via]

playtagger - I know I already blogged playtagger, but I totally missed the coolest part of it. Try using it as a browser button (info at the bottom of the page), it'll put play icons beside any mp3s that are linked on a page, letting you stream them right in your browser.