The RIAA Steals From Artists, Girls Play Games

Stephen Brandau | February 28, 2008

From Mandolux's Flickr stream

Remember all those lawsuits the RIAA won against those greedy music pirates who had stolen music from artists? Well, they never gave any of the artists the money; That's right, the RIAA effectively profited by suing people who downloaded music. Someone's pissed

To all you mothers: You may want to stop nagging your sons to quit playing videogames as this article provides evidence that the addiction is neural for males. Meanwhile, another study shows us girls can make up for a lot of spacial skills deficiencies by playing computer games. While discrepancies between male and female geometric/mathematic skills have been studied since before the inception of video games, the study does imply that a great deal of the otherwise presumed genetic deficiency can be handled with training.

Last.fm Frees the Music

Stephen Brandau | January 24, 2008

Yesterday Last.fm announced they have made their entire music catalogue available for streaming. This is big news after it's become clear the record labels weren't going to change their distribution strategies, themselves. From the announcement: "With the support of the folks behind EMI, Sony BMG, Universal and Warner—and the artists they work with—plus thousands of independent artists and labels, we’ve made the biggest legal collection of music available to play online for free, the way we believe it should be." Although the service just launched, there's quite a bit of music already on the site ready for you to listen. I suggest one of my favorite albums, Mignonette by the Avett Brothers.

While the service shows a lot of promise, it's got a lot to fix. Quickly I've already noticed the autoplay feature doesn't seem to work with albums; in other words you'll have to continually click the play icon for each subsequent track in an album. The last.fm player also doesn't feature a pause button, something absolutely necessary when it comes to internet-based music players.

Currently it seems the industry is still planning on selling tracks for the same old prices, but once iPods come standard with wifi access, it's going to be hard to get anyone to pay that sort of money when they can easily stream any song they want to right into their headphones.

Free Music, Vectorization, and '08 Candidates

David Davin | November 1, 2007

Trent Reznor and Saul Williams are following Radiohead’s example and offering a collaborative album online for free. The album is available in 192kbps for free, but for those of you used to Oink’s Pink Palace, a $5 charge will get you the album in 192kbps MP3, 320kbps MP3, or a FLAC lossless audio.

While I may not like what their football team has done this year, students at Stanford have created a free, really useful service which changes bitmap images (most normal images, jpegs, gifs) into vector art. Vector art uses lines and shapes instead of pixels so enlarging the image won’t pixilate it. You can upload your images to be vectorized here.

This quiz from a local TV station’s site tells you which 2008 presidential candidates’ views most closely reflect your own. Give it a try. The quiz isn’t perfect but it’s still insightful.