There's no place like home

I've been seeing links to the new Weezer video for Pork and Beans all over the intertubes, but I've never clicked on it.

Today I clicked on it. It is full of total intertubic awesomeness! They must have had so much fun contacting all these internet phenomenons to make this video.

Watch it and see how many you can pick out.

They are making a film about Harlan Ellison titled Dreams With Sharp Teeth! Amazing.

He is a cantankerous old bastard. And I love him.

Here is a wonderful clip from the movie



There is more good stuff on the movie web site.

More nerd rap. The Futuristic Sex Robots say they are the only Gangster Nerd Rap band. I don't know if that's true, but their song (and video on YouTube) is entertaining and mirrors the way I feel about the RIAA, the MPAA, the BSA and the DMCA.

Watch it.



I'm downloading the rest of their free album now. It should be entertaining.

Cory Doctorow has a nice article in Locus about copyright and how it is broken and how it should work.

So this is where copyright breaks: When copyright lawyers try to treat readers and listeners and viewers as if they were (weak and unlucky) corporations who could be strong-armed into license agreements you wouldn't wish on a dog. There's no conceivable world in which people are going to tiptoe around the property they've bought and paid for, re-checking their licenses to make sure that they're abiding by the terms of an agreement they doubtless never read. Why read something if it's non-negotiable, anyway?

The answer is simple: treat your readers' property as property. What readers do with their own equipment, as private, noncommercial actors, is not a fit subject for copyright regulation or oversight. The Securities Exchange Commission doesn't impose rules on you when you loan a friend five bucks for lunch. Anti-gambling laws aren't triggered when you bet your kids an ice-cream cone that you'll bicycle home before them. Copyright shouldn't come between an end-user of a creative work and her property.

Worth a read.

I think Nerd Rap is usually pretty funny, and who does it better than Weird Al?

Here is a video someone made to his new song White and Nerdy


And then there is the MC Hawking video. Funny stuff.

Found a new one - MC Frontalot. More silliness.

And then there is the classic MC Plus+.

This is pretty fun stuff. Evil Bobby (who ever that is - I got his link from Pharyngula) has links to a whole bunch of Russian pop band videos.

Glukoza
Verka Serduchka: Come To America
Zveri (Звери)

This one made me laugh out loud - and you don't need to speak Russian to understand what's going on:

Zveri - Vse chto kasaetsya


And this one (not sure what the song title is) is an amazing piece of work.

Fun poppy stuff!

Here is a great tip about a program to keep your iTunes synced with your music folders. I've already had some trouble with this on my OpenFiler share, so I'll be trying this out at home!

The Consumer Electronics Association is finally starting to figure out that screwing over your customers is not a good business practice and is running an ad telling the RIAA to suck it.



More details at the EFF website.

Here is a very nice chart showing the order in which you should read the Terry Pratchett Discworld series.

I have read most of these, generally in publication order. I think I need to start collecting them and then read them following this chart.

The MP3Elf is a pretty cool device. It's an open sourced design for a networked MP3 player. It uses a TINI Java based microcontroller that is in a SIMM package (looks like a memory stick.)

You can download the plans and circuit board layouts for free, or buy kits or fully assembled units.

The price isn't bad, you can get a kit with everything (including a 4x20 LCD screen) for $140. You still need to supply the TINI processor board, which is about $80 and might be hard to get.

So it ends up a little pricey at around $220 and you still have to assemble it.

A wired Squeezebox is $240 and it's in a slick package. There is also the Roku Soundbridge, which is also in a neat package and starts around $150.

Looks like a cool project though.