I try to stay in touch with the quirky world of American indie music via the excellent Brooklyn Vegan blog, normally it’s dishes of Alt Country, New American Weird, Post Punk and other musical gumbo are served just the way I like them. However, a recent post has left a bad taste in my mouth.
Brooklyn Vegan links to an article on Axehole (another music blog) entitled “Why Bloggers Don’t Run Record Companies“. The article is itself a response to the excitement surrounding the announcement that eMusic (a DRM free digital …

Google have just begun rolling out a terrific feature, which allows users to grab email from other accounts (work, yahoo etc) via POP3. This could be a godsend for users glued to horrible proprietary corporate email accounts with ineffective spam filters, or anyone tired of multiple simultaneous email logins, who for whatever reason (multiple desktops, mobile access etc) need to use web email rather than a stand alone client. Combining this feature with Gmail’s existing ‘Send mail as’, allows your Gmail to now be used as your central email.
To access …

Discussing online communities today with one of Trinity FM’s up and coming editors, the problem of data migration came up. Web 2.0 services are fantastic, but what happens when we want to leave their walled gardens? As it stands right now there exists no feasible way of say, carrying an identity from Bebo to Myspace, complete with user information, photographs and more importantly ‘friends’ (correct me if I’m wrong, but such a service would undoubtedly violate the TOS of one or both sites).
So far, so minor, a problem easily soluble, …

Jason points out a wonderful documentary from the Discovery channel, detailing the evolution of Hacking, from the blind Phreakers who manipulated early POTs telephone systems, to Steve Wozniak and the development of the personal computer. A great antithesis to the current vogue for demonising creative subversions of technology.

The omnipresence of broadband, combined, at least in Trinity, with a paucity of computing resources, have resulted in a massive increase in student ownership of laptops, combined with resultant student familiarity with the web; ditto the use of email as a communications tool. Five years ago you’d never have arranged a party with an email – you couldn’t have been sure if any of your guests would check their messages that month, never mind the geeky stigma clinging to the medium. These days, you can post an event invitation on …

Starting Wednesday, we’re making a brave and foolhardy attempt at setting up a digicast society in Trinity. All are welcome to come to the inaugural meeting, and non Trinity students are more than welcome to join – if and when the society gains approval from the college’s Central Society Committee. Here’s the spiel.
The proposed ‘D.U. Digicast Society’ would….
1) Provide students with an opportunity to learn how to produce podcasts, vidcasts, and blogs.
2) Work with other groups to distribute their creative work to a world wide audience.
3) Create an online forum, …

Someone needs to build a decent open source 3d brain model in shockwave, VRML or a stand alone OpenGL application (not pseudo 3d quicktime). As far as I can see, none exists. Believe me, when you’re trying to understand functional neuroanatomy, such a thing could not be more useful.
This is the sort of thing that education software does better than books or lectures, greatly accelerating the practical comprehension of complex 3d systems. Educational institutions would do well to develop such software for engineering, medicine, and physics modelling.
Start-ups, currently thinking about …

Didn’t notice this till now, and apparently Michael Arrington hadn’t noticed it either in his recent coverage of video sharing sites. YouTube has (presumably under pressure from copyright paranoid’s in hollywood limited videos to ten minutes in length.
Way to kill the future of your site guys. Seriously, this is a moronic move – they are doing several very foolish things. The first is effectively bowing to Hollywood on the upload of ‘pirated’ material to their site, opening the door to further picking up the soap and litigation down the road …

Techcrunch has an article up on the state of online feed readers, which I think are as interesting for what they lacks as what they include. None of the feed readers reviewed seem to have feed grazer functionality. That is to say, while most will import and export OPML, none allow the direct surfing of publicly available OPML feeds (with inclusions). Each web based feed reader seems, to a greater or lesser extent, to be attempting to create a proprietary RSS walled garden.
Tech Crunch have a nice little graphic table, …

Couple of awesome little titbits before I hit the hay. Warren Ellis, to my mind one of the ten greatest writers to pen a comic, has lent his blessing to an unsolicited upload of one episode of his best loved series, ‘Transmetropolitan‘. If you’ve never tasted the goodness that is Spider Jerusalem’s laying open the guts of the world to sniff the entrails (to mix a metaphor to horrific effect), then I guarantee you are missing out. Check out the scans here.
I’ve integrated the flawed but brilliant Gabbley into dbspin.com. …