He wrote this for a Chrome experiment.
Why Google Has Already Lost Against Spotify
Also why I haven’t given Google Music a try.
Unhappy Computer on Blue
By original Mac icon designer Susan Kare. Prints available. I kinda want this for my office/computer room.
How to Date Emotionally Stable, Amazing Women
Read this, then send it to your single guy friends who are always having problems with women. The problems aren’t always with the women they date…it’s within. It takes two to tango.
If you ever catch yourself thinking phrases such as: “If I do X then she will think Y,” or “What did she mean by that?” or “What is she trying to make me think about her?” or “I never know exactly how she feels about me,” or “She says A but she does B,” then let her go. It’s bad enough being in a romantic situation where the emotions and sexual interest are ambiguous — that means that one or both of you is incapable of expressing yourselves coherently. But once the meaning of the behavior itself becomes ambiguous, well, that means one or both of you is attempting to manipulate the other one and you’re setting yourself up for disaster. It may not happen right away. It may not even happen soon. But one day, you’re in for a disaster. You’ve been warned.
Famous vegan Alex Jamieson eating meat after 12 years
Your body doesn’t care if it’s ethical to eat animals.
Note how she says that among her friends it wasn’t about her health, but how her eating animal protein was going to affect the movement.
Facebook Is High School
What is Facebook to most people over the age of 25? It’s a never-ending class reunion mixed with an eternal late-night dorm room gossip session mixed with a nightly check-in on what coworkers are doing after leaving the office. In other words, it’s a place where you go to keep tabs on your friends and acquaintances.
You know what kids call that? School.
Yup. Facebook is high school.
On The Media: Who’s gonna pay for this stuff
On The Media on media business models in the _digital age_1.
This week, a special hour on the incredible volume of media available to consumers, and the incredible difficulty of making money for creators.
We are living in the entertainment golden age for consumers.
While they cover things like Spotify and Netflix, what was new to me is how many people latch onto things like Ad Blockers. I don’t use them. I think having an ad in a sidebar is a small price to pay for free content. But some of the ad-block defenders sound like jerks.
Then again, I don’t usually go to sites that deluge their readers with advertisements.
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Yeah, I know. I shouldn’t use that term. ↩
Prefuse 73 – One Word Extinguisher
One Word Extinguisher celebrated its 10th birthday last week.
I remember first hearing “Detchibe” on the Warp homepage back in early 2003. I had heard nothing like it before. It introduced me to instrumental hip-hop, or glitch-hop, or whatever you’re supposed to call whatever this is.
One of the best albums released in the new millennium. Just listen to it if you haven’t.
| Track # | Name | Rating |
|---|---|---|
| 1 of 23 | The Wrong Side Of Reflection (Intro) | ★★ |
| 2 of 23 | The End Of Biters-International | ★★★★ |
| 3 of 23 | Plastic | ★★★★ |
| 4 of 23 | Uprock And Invigorate (A Prefuse/Daybre Production) | ★★★★ |
| 5 of 23 | The Color Of Tempo | ★★★★★ |
| 6 of 23 | Dave’s Bonus Beats | ★★★ |
| 7 of 23 | Detchibe | ★★★★★ |
| 8 of 23 | Altoid Addiction (Interlude) | ★★★ |
| 9 of 23 | Busy Signal (Make You Go Bombing Mix) (A Prefuse/Daedelus Production) | ★★★★ |
| 10 of 23 | One Word Extinguisher | ★★★★★ |
| 11 of 23 | 90% Of My Mind Is With You | ★★★★ |
| 12 of 23 | Huevos With Jeff And Roni | ★★★ |
| 13 of 23 | Female Demands | ★★★ |
| 14 of 23 | Why I Love You | ★★★★ |
| 15 of 23 | Southerners (Interlude) | ★★★ |
| 16 of 23 | Perverted Undertone | ★★★ |
| 17 of 23 | Invigorate (A Prefuse/Daybre Production) | ★★★★ |
| 18 of 23 | Choking You | ★★★★★ |
| 19 of 23 | Storm Returns (A Prefuse/Tommy Guerrero Production) | ★★★★★ |
| 20 of 23 | Trains On Top Of The Game (Interlude) | ★★★ |
| 21 of 23 | Styles That Fade Away With A Collonade Response | ★★★★ |
| 22 of 23 | Untitled | ★★ |
| 23 of 23 | Untitled | ★★★★ |
Mark Zuckerberg’s Self-Serving Immigration Crusade
Adrian Chen on FWD.us:
The implicit argument behind FWD.us is that the U.S. doesn’t have enough high-skilled domestic workers to meet tech companies’ needs. This is a myth, and Zuckerberg and FWD.us are just the latest tech players to promote it. In fact there is no shortage of domestic IT workers, as shown in a new study from the Economic Policy Institute. While there is an unusually low unemployment rate among American tech workers (3%), they haven’t enjoyed the large salary increases that would signal a shortage. There is also little evidence that the foreign workers tech companies hire are any better than Americans. The real reason tech companies want to hire more high-skilled immigrants is that they can pay them less than Americans, since immigrants are in a more economically precarious position. More than 80 percent of workers hired under the H-1B program are paid less than their American counterparts, according to the EPI. This kind of outsourcing benefits tech companies while hurting domestic tech workers.
Get Clucky
Its natural conclusion.
Are We Laughing With Charles Ramsey?
We laughed with the guy who reviewed the hamburger because he was already being silly. I don’t think we laughed at the woman who did the “backing up” thing, or the guy who saw the leprechaun. They were being serious.
“I Could Have Been a Great Opera Singer, If I Were Rich”
The thing about opera is that it is really, really expensive. It truly is an elite art form. It costs $100 to $200 to audition, and you have to bring your own pianist, who is $40 an hour. At conservatory, we were always taught to take taxis to auditions, never the subway. We were also expected to do at least one summer opera program each year, in Italy, Germany, Austria or Belgium. These programs ran $3,000 each. Most of my classmates would do two or three each summer. We were taught that we should “rely on our financial buffer” after graduation, and were advised not to get jobs. A job will distract you from opera singing and make you tired, they said.
All the rich kids went into show business and/or silicon valley.
Help Computer
When I was a youngin’ in my early 20′s, “Viral Video” wasn’t in the vernacular – but “PORKCHOP SANDWHICHES!” was.
The Verge takes a look at those Fensler Films GI Joe PSAs and updates us on what they’ve been up to lately.
Spotify Does iTunes’s Heavy Lifting
I usually don’t link to forum threads, but this thread on Macrumors about iRadio makes the point I was thinking of writing about.
Originally Posted by aheying7
As a high school student, I can say everyone I know quit using iTunes and uses Spotify exclusively now. That’s what Apple needs to compete with, NOT Pandora. In other words, you should always be able to pick the song like Spotify.Artofwarfare
As a college student, I agree with you completely.
Something weird I’ve found: I listen to a lot of music on Spotify on a free plan, and about once a week I find a song I like so much that I buy it on the iOS music store just so I can listen to it on my iPhone. So Spotify basically is doing all the work of convincing me to buy the song, but then Apple is the one collecting the money when I decide to buy it.
Spotify serves as music discovery, but it’s not making the money. Apple is.
Screw it – buyin’ Blu-Rays
I’ll try not to make this another PS3 love letter, but today I bought a bunch of Blu-Rays. Having a PS3 remote changed the game for me. I’ve been trying to curtail purchases of physical media. iTunes has a lot of stuff I like and I already live in the Apple ecosystem for music.
But there are a few problems with this approach for movies.
- Movies on iTunes are often marked up with the lazy tax.
- My internet connection is not super-duper fast. If I want to watch The Godfather Part II1 through iTunes it may take 60-90 minutes for it to load enough of the movie to let me watch it the HD version.
- HD versions are BIG, like around 5 gigs sometimes. I don’t want to buy extra external drives just for media. Yeah, ok – “THE CLOUD” – but again, slow internet makes the cloud impractical for huge files. If it’s REALLY that important to me I’d rather just have a disc.
- My movie collection is subject to the whether or not big companies currently have the rights to distribute that content. I haven’t seen this happen yet to movies I’ve purchased on iTunes, but it’s already happened with music I purchased.
“But what if you want to watch a movie on your iDevice or laptop?” you might ask. I never want to do that. For me, movies are like games. I want to sit on a couch, I don’t want to touch a keyboard. I don’t want to feel the heat of a laptop. I don’t want to hold an iPad or iPhone in my hands. I want to be as comfortable and lazy as possible.
And when I’m traveling I often don’t have the free time to watch The Godfather trilogy.
So, screw it. If I need to OWN a movie I’m getting it on Blu-Ray now. All the movies worth owning2 aren’t available on Netflix Instant anyway. And when the Blu-Ray train passes (already in decline, since some of these movies are super cheap) I’ll deal with that when it’s really a problem.3