ectoblog.com

Is there ever a reason to buy a ringtone? No.

Freesound Project

Audacity

Also, Iphonebrowser, because Apple is the devil, but it doesn’t mean I have to put up with it.

Donovan’s ‘Atlantis’ is probably the most spectacular matching of great chorus to shitty rest-of-song that has ever fallen out of a pop star.

“All legends from all lands were from fair Atlantis”? Spectaculary bad lyric. Horrific. And there’s far, far more where that came from!

But the chorus is so catchy. And how can one object to “my ante-diluvian baby” sung so irrepressibly? One cannot.

Hail Atlantis!

Morgan Fichter needs to LOOK AT ME DAMMIT

I was listening to “Don’t Fear the Reaper” the other day
For probably the first time in a long time

My heart was in my throat, wishing them well
In their mighty trek

around all those helper verbs

Through that thicket, that rock n roll briar patch
Past the bleaching bones of stupid warriors

“She had taken his hand, she had become like they are”

Bless their hearts.

Adriano Celentano takes a stab at sounding like he’s singing English without really singing English:

If this is what Italians think English speakers sound like, we sound pretty frickin awesome. And talk about our dance moves!

I could look at Greta Scacchi all day.

And the sign said anybody caught trespassing would be shot on sight
So I jumped on the fence and yelled at the house, Hey! what gives you the right
To put up a fence to keep me out or to keep mother nature in
If God was here, he’d tell you to your face, man you’re some kinda sinner!

Ecto, 12 years old: “Yeah! There’s way too many signs! And I hate people telling me what to do all the time, too!”

Ecto, 45 years old: “Just keep off the man’s fucking lawn, a-ight?”

What am I, 45? I only now noticed that embedded in the rock group “The Beatles” name is the word “Beat.” Which is pretty much probably why they chose that name.

I know, it’s fucking inexplicable how I could have survived this long.

“I can hear my mother wailing and a whole lot of scraping of chairs; I don’t know what it is but there’s definitely something going on upstairs.”

Good Heavens, Iris is beautiful.

Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny: Official Movie Site

Well, I can’t wait.

On April 24, 1976, Lorne Michaels, producer of NBC’s Saturday Night, made an on-air offer of $3000 to The Beatles if they would re-unite and perform on the show.

“$750 is pretty chintzy,” George Harrison [said] to Lorne Michaels on an SNL episode, upon finding out he’d only get 1/4 of the $3,000.

Without further ado: Crackerbox Palace (prefaced by a short interview with George) from SNL Nov 30, 1976. Thanks, Zarathustra!

What if you could rip an mp3 from your Pandora station for free? Would you enjoy that, or would you fear that the end of Pandora is in sight?

Doesn’t matter what you think. If it can be done, it will be done, and this can be done. This thread explains how to do it.

Their program can be used to prettify the process, but you can also just go to C:\Documents and Settings\HP_Owner\Local Settings\Temp\plugtmp (or wherever your ‘plugtmp’ file resides) and see a whole bunch of files called ‘access,’ access-1,’ etc. These are mp3 files. Give them .mp3 suffixes, and you just turned the songs you were listening to in Pandora into luscious, luscious mp3 files. It only works in Firefox (the temp file in IE is named something else, I guess), and only as long as you have Pandora running. Save the songs outside of the plugtmp file, because that disappears when you stop running Pandora.

Of course, when you’re finished listening to those songs in your own media player on your own time, be sure to delete them, as keeping them indefinitely on your hard drive would be wrong.

Welcome to 8-track Heaven!

MY TAPE JAMMED IN THE PLAYER — NOW PART OF THE TAPE
IS CRINKLED LIKE AN ACCORDION. CAN I FIX IT?OK, here is the definitive fix for crinkled tape:

Do NOT cut or throw away any tape!
Get your iron and set it on low to medium heat
and hold the tape between your hands with about 6 inches of crinkled tape
between them. Slowly drag the crinkled tape across the edge of the iron.

NOTE: keep even tension on the tape being heated, NOT so much as to
stretch the tape, and not so little as to let it stick to the iron. Move
the tape slowly back and forth across the edge of the iron and the
crinkles should disappear.

This procedure takes PRACTICE, and you will have to experiment with
the heat of your iron, the iron must not be too hot or the tape will be
damaged. Start low, and work the heat up until its right. If the heat
is too low, no damage will be done. Too hot, and you’ll know it pretty
quickly.

There’s nothing that will transport me back in time more quickly than thinking about 8 track tapes. They are very era-centric; they were everywhere, then they weren’t.

The Jam help you relive that night in ‘83 when you were young and stupid and so was everybody else.

This link that I got from j-walkblog is interesting; it went 2 for 2 for me, returning “Dixieland” and the pistols’ “God Save the Queen.”

So, like I said, this site provides musical graphs and pie charts. It’s looked at what I’ve played on the computer for the last couple of months, and here are several things that it’s noticed:

1) I’ve listened to a lot of Tenacious D.

2) I’ve listenend to a lot of Jonathan Richman and Wire.

3) I’ve listened to a lot of Janis Joplin and Dusty Springfield.

4) I haven’t listened to much Who at all.

It’s obviously a skewed sampling. First, it’s only music that I have on the computer. Mostly, I only listen to that when I’m riding my exercise bike. So, by God, there’s going to be a lot of Tenacious D to help me through. Second, it’s only a sampling of the last couple of months. There are many many bands I like, but haven’t listened to for a couple months.

There are, though, several interesting things that surfaced in the ‘rankings.’ One is that the Beatles are at #8. I can tell you that the Beatles got to #8 without breaking a sweat. I have zero Beatles albums on the computer; just a few isolated songs. They get played.

Another is that Dusty Springfield has nowhere to go but down. “Son of a Preacher Man” is on one of my ‘working out’ rotations; when that gets demoted—and it will, eventually— Dusty will take a dive.

Number 10? Elvis Costello. He’s got nowhere to go but up.

Number 20? The Soft Boys. I think that’s a pretty solid ranking; they won’t go anywhere.

I’m on this thing called audioscrobbler, which is, I think, based in the UK. Basically, it provides an add-on to Winamp that tracks what I listen to on the computer, crunches some numbers, then provides me with graphs and piecharts to show me what I listen to.

It’s all done automatically, of course. The graphs and numbers are interesting, but where audioscrobbler provides an actual service is when it compares me to other people in the database, and then provides me with a list of users that listen to similar things, and a list of the bands and songs that they listen to. So I can check their graphs and pie-charts to find bands that I don’t listen to, but who maybe I should listen to, because I might like them.

I’m certain audioscrobbler isn’t the only service that does this. It’s just the one I stumbled onto.

So, over the last several months, I’ve been checking the site haphazardly to find new stuff, because I’m bored. During one of those checks, I noticed that audioscrobbler had provided all the information that I’d automatically divulged to Winamp to this other site, “last.fm.”

Finding this out filled me with dismay. I certainly hadn’t told audioscrobbler that they could willy nilly give my Winamp info out to third parties. It was outrageous! This was the exact reason why I’m so loathe to hand out any information on the net; in fact, I’ll surf past a site that requires cookies without a second thought. If it requires cookies, I don’t want to see it.

So, as I was screwing myself into the ceiling over this egregious breach of manners, I was checking out “last.fm.” They had everything that I had supplied audioscrobbler. Hell, they even had my login, not to mention the same password.

Of course, that’s a good thing and a bad thing.

It’s good in that (I realized) this site was controlled by the same people as the audioscrobbler site. It was, in fact, almost the same site, only with a different url and a slightly spiffier look.

It’s a bad thing because audioscrobbler didn’t tell me this was going to happen.

It’s a good thing because (I think) audioscrobbler isn’t sophisticated enough to know they gave the appearance of supplying my data to a third party.

It’s a bad thing because any web service provider should be sophisticated enough to know this.

In the end, it’s pretty egregiously bad, but innocent, and I like the content, so I let it slide. And to top it off, the port to ‘last.fm’ provides me, the user, with access to a radio metaphor that isn’t on audioscrobbler proper. So I get to click a button and listen to music that users who appear to like music that I like listen to.

That’s how I’m listening to Tomorrow Never Knows by the Beatles as I type, which is, in the end, a very good thing.