Musicians have a problem. They spend money recording and producing an album and pressing albums. But somehow their hot release gets on Bittorrent before the official release date. By the time their album releases, anyone who's interested enough has already heard it ( Read more... )

The new version of Android uses the speech-to-text feature from Google Voice to let you do text input by speaking. It actually works pretty well: you hit a 'microphone' button, speak into the phone, and what you said appears in the active dialog box. Behind the scenes Android sends your voice to Google's servers, and the server decodes the speech ( Read more... )

Modeselektor is playing Wednesday, March 19 at Mighty in SF. Tickets are a mere $12. That is all.

My co-worker Adam has a cell phone with this ringtone:

http://tongodeon.com/lj/08.02.20-adam_ringtone.mp3

Some people in this office insist that the melody of his ringtone is "very similar" to Dreaming of You by Selena. Some people go even further, saying that the ( Read more... )

Yesterday as planned I went up to Santa Rosa to see Shpongle at the Harmony Festival. It was a very good show. It was such a good show that on the way home Jeff and I couldn't stop giggling about what a good show it was. Giggling at the utter absurdity of any show being able to be that good ( Read more... )

Today Apple announced "iTunes Plus". For 30 cents more you can buy 256kbps music without DRM. That's absolutely fucking fantastic.

A little over a year ago I announced that I would never buy music from iTunes because the DRM restricted my fair use rights: I couldn't export clips, remix samples, or share between devices. I did say that I'd ( Read more... )

On last week's "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me" they cited an ABC News report claiming that "what David Hasselhoff is to Germany, Lionel Ritchie is to Iraq". Lionel Ritche "has performed in Morocco, Dubai, Qatar and Libya" and says "I'm huge, huge in the Arab world. The answer as to why is, I don't have the slightest idea ( Read more... )

I'm a fan of MC Frontalot. It takes a special kind of nerd to write a song about a 419 scam. (Lyrics for deafies.)

Last week I posted my Morse National Anthem. boingboing picked it up, and kraquehaus just told me that it got mentioned on Wait Wait Don't Tell Me.

Wait_Wait-Morse_Anthem.mp3

A few people including gauntleteer ran it through a morse decoder to discover the punchline: because I wanted this version to be as offensive as possible it's not just the Morse National Anthem, it's the ( Read more... )

A lot of people are angry about "Nuestro Himno", a Spanish language version of the United States National Anthem. Even President Bush opposes it because "people who want to be a citizen of this country ought to learn English and they ought to learn to sing the national anthem in English ( Read more... )