The Free Music Archive and WFMU are holding a remix contest to demonstrate the potential of open digital libraries, inviting users to remix the Public Domain.
While I don’t have a great deal of free time, this idea has great appeal for me. By chance I had some time last weekend to peruse the archives, find some material, and put together an entry. I’ve never made a remix before, and I had a great deal of fun doing this one.
I was in Dublin last weekend, where I went to the Dead Can Dance concert on Sunday at the Bord Gaís Energy Theatre.
It’s been just over seven years since I last saw Dead Can Dance. It was in Bethesda on October 10th, and they were on their 2005 World Tour. I find it hard to believe that it has been so long. So much has changed, and it almost takes an event like this to measure the accumulated years of subtle influences.
One thing hasn’t changed: Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry and the other touring members of Dead Can Dance are amazing musicians.
DCD never seems to have become a household name, but I hear them regularly being used as background in television journals and documentaries. Perhaps many people have heard them but don’t recognize their name or have heard Lisa Gerrard who has a number of film credits and who co-wrote and sung the theme to the film Gladiator.
I received an email from Livestream yesterday encouraging me to “Cover Sandy live using our Android or iPhone app.” I guess I should be happy that they weren’t able to tell I don’t live anywhere near the Sandy strike zone.
At first I thought it was poor taste to use a natural disaster to announce a new smart phone app.
I thought about it for a while, asking myself if this was any different from an ad telling me where I could find news about the storm. I also considered how much I appreciate the accounts of real people and the positive aspect of encouraging of users to share their own stories.
Maybe it isn’t so bad after all, but it still doesn’t seem right to me to capitalize on an event that brought death and destruction in this way. I guess it’s just the new face of Internet news advertising.
Just over nine months ago, spurred by this post from ZDNET about Facebook rolling out the new timeline feature, I managed to remove all my old Wall posts in emergency mode. Or so I thought…
It’s been a while since I logged in to my personal YouTube account, but when I did so a little while ago, I found out that YouTube wants me to start using my full name.
I hadn’t heard about this before, but it looks like they’re finally aggregating information from my different accounts to suggest that I use my full name as I entered it on my now defunct Google+ account.
The woman in front of me in the checkout line bought J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy at the grocery store yesterday. I wasn’t prepared for this opportunity and wasn’t able to get my iPhone out of my purse in time to get a good picture before she put it into her grocery bag.
As she was ringing up the purchase, the cashier said she wanted to read it too–a friend of hers had enjoyed it and recommended it highly.
There is no bookstore in the village of less than 2,000 inhabitants where I was shopping, but the grocery store usually stocks the bestsellers. I checked the news (link in French), and sure enough “Une Place À Prendre,” the title of the French translation, is at the top of the charts for novels in France this week.
Last week Mike Cane told me to stop giving Twitter images.
I decided to follow his example and create a new photo blog. As Mike pointed out, Twitter integrates WordPress media into its inline previews, so when I tweet a URL to a post there, the photo will display inline on the Twitter website using the View Media button.
Since mobile web use continues to grow, I decided to take the opportunity to see if it was possible to create a suitable blog entirely from the WordPress app on my iPhone.
‘Every person is afraid of the drones’: The Strikes’ Effect On Life In Pakistan
“If I am walking in the market, I have this fear that maybe the person walking next to me is going to be a target of the drone. If I’m shopping, I’m really careful and scared. If I’m standing on the road and there is a car parked next to me, I never know if that is going to be the target. Maybe they will target the car in front of me or behind me. Even in mosques, if we’re praying, we’re worried that maybe one person who is standing with us praying is wanted. So, wherever we are, we have this fear of drones.”
An unexpected side-effect of upgrading my iPhone to iOS6, the App Store is now entirely in German.
Although I know what schließen means, unfortunately, I don’t really speak German anymore.
Two articles came my way via Twitter on Friday,
The Nanny State Didn’t Show Up, You Hired It via Mike Cane
USA – Occupy 2.0: Strike Debt via Douglas Rushkoff
The first one discusses how society and marketing change our perceptions and expectations in ways that we often don’t realize. The second one describes how members of the Occupy movement have begun to rally around a shared point of suffering, the increasing personal debt burden.
A comment by one of the San Francisco Occupiers caught my attention,
The well-prepared mind 