my.bicycle

Music Piracy By 1882, Edison had a dynamo that operated at 82 percent efficiency. In September, 1882, he had opened a central station on Pearl Street in Manhattan and was eventually supplying electricity to a one-mile square section of New York. Enter Alexander Graham Bell and his cousin, Chichester Bell. The Bells got together with an instrument maker named Charles Sumner Tainter and they set out to make a better version of Edison's phonograph design. The new design was called the Graphophone and the main improvement was that their version, using recorded cylinders, gave a longer life to the recordings. They could simply be played more times than Edison's tinfoil phonograph design. The intent was to market it as an office aid, much the same as we view tape recorders today, as a dictation machine. Of course, Edison was irate when he found out about this. He felt that Graphophone had basically stolen his idea. So much so that when Graphophone asked him to pool their patents,...

On the verge of meta-ing myself into oblivion: geek wageslave -turned- geek minstrel , Jonathan Coulton , recently created a song for game developer Valve, which is used in The Best Game Ending Ever for their highly original game, Portal . If an internet-based, Creative Commons-friendly singer songwriter isn't futurismic enough for you, how about hearing said song as covered by a Japanese virtual idol in nearly unintelligible, katakana-accented English ?

( boingboing and the other michael )

KANYE WEST | STRONGER - embrace irony. (thanks, the other michael )

I’m a fan of U2’s Achtung Baby; I think it’s so great that I even bought it again when they renamed it How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb . Well, it turns out U2’s not the only band to have re-made the album! A band called “Add” has also covered Achtung Baby , with harmonicas, accordions, organs, and casiotones. ( copycommaright )

On 10/19/05, the daughter of one of my MIT friends shadowed me for a day at work as part of a school project. One of the good things about spending time with children is that it forces you to explain things in simple terms. That day, I drew lots of drawings. Copyright as described via simple napkin doodle . ( boingboing )

Seeqpod is a search amalgamation tool; put in the band you like, or song title, and it searches the web for publically available sources, scrobbles together a list of those songs, and lets you put together a playlist. The playlist can be saved for later reference. The songs' URLs are also shown, but appear to need to be hand-copied because the Flash interface doesn't permit right-clicking to copy, and the URL itself doesn't launch a new window, copy the URL, or do anything at all apparently. (minor gripe) There's also an autodetected iPhone specific interface if accessed through the iPhone's Safari browser. And I still miss Pandora . Edit: I love it when people respond to inquiries - I wrote: I'm curious: The URL of each MP3 found is displayed with each found track, but there's no apparent way to copy it to the clipboard or launch a new browser window or tab. Why is there no easy link to the URLs of the MP3s that Seeqpod finds? Emma at SeeqPod wrote back: T...

stereogum presents...OK X: A Tribute to OK Computer : To celebrate the 10th anniversary of Radiohead’s OK Computer we’ve asked some of our favorite musicians to participate in a song-by-song covers compilation. Indicative of the album’s continued importance, each invitee jumped at the chance; the results are personal, intense, tellingly various. Slow down, dig in, enjoy. But note: we did this all legal and everything, so we can’t keep these up forever...get ’em before someone else does. Ambition makes you look pretty. (thanks, the other michael )

Bloat. If you think that Americans are getting fatter, take one good look at the operating system (OS) your computer is running right now. It gets larger and more weighed down with every update. We are in the third decade of global personal computing, and have we really progressed that far? Let’s go back to the dawn of personal computing and grab an old sentimental favorite, the Apple Macintosh Plus. The Mac Plus is an icon of the ’80s along with padded shoulders, big hair and Devo. It seems that we all had a little Mac, either in our college dorm room, in the upstairs bedroom, or on our office desk at some time. With its tiny 9-inch black & white screen and all-in-one packaging, the Mac Plus is a computing relic in the days of widescreen LCD monitors and dual- and quad-core systems. ( full article ) ( tokyopia ) Yeah, there’s a lot of stuff that’s not considered thoroughly here, like just how much more crazy stuff you can do on computers. Try running any 3D app...

...while wearing a ”Kochamara!” Psychonauts shirt! I own this shirt, too! (Thanks, Caroline!) ( The International House of Mojo )

Bootie NYC - New York City's all-mashup bootleg party Get your bootleg/mashups on with Bootie in NYC, or just scope the top ten mashies, available as MP3 download at the site! (Thanks, Sean !)

Dylan Hears a Who! - a collection of faux Bob Dylan tracks, singing classic Dr. Seuss works. Not quite a mashup, it reminds me of Louis Armstrong’s “original” version of Oops, I Did It Again! and Matthew’s Celebrity Pixies Covers . (thanks, the other michael )

WFMU’s Beware of the Blog: Ten Albums in Ten Minutes is part mashup, part medley, part genius, and part sacrilege. In particularl, Nirvana’s Nevermind occupies a place in my heart that defies simplification on this magnitude. (thanks, el otro miguel )

— Naguib Mahfouz Eric Prydz vs Pink Floyd - Proper Education (thanks, weezie )

Peter Murphy and NIN collaborative live tracks; some stunning covers ( zenarchery ) : Nightclubbing Warm Leatherette

Figment Of Blogger’s Irked Imagination Becomes Living, Breathing Song - Idolator . Go. Listen. Love it.

A mess of cool covers of songs you know by bands you don’t over at TheSquareLife.com . I used my real name and email to access the download page, but that doesn’t mean you have to. ( coverville )