Sony really played fast and loose with you, whether you know it or not.
If you bought any cd listed here, then you are owed money by sony. This is your money. The EFF has kindly set up an easy way to get your money from Sony. Go check the list. Go get paid by someone who’s done you wrong.

Feature from PC Magazine: Build It: A Homemade Media Center PC

Actually, this is just a test of a script change to make blogger’s blogthis extension play nice with the greasemonkey script I use for tagging.

Edit: the test worked. But I’m going to read that article anyway.

Stereo Bluetoothâ„¢ Headset HBH-DS970 – Specifications – – Mobile phone accessory – Sony Ericsson

I want to wear my headphones and listen to music. Use the tiny remote to see what song is playing and fastforward, skip, etc. When a call comes in, the music pauses and I speak using the mic in the remote, then back to the tunes.
Why isn’t everything like this?

Saturday was busy. I went up to hunter mountain for some riding and then deeper into brooklyn for a pal’s birthday party. Coming back late at night this guy gets on and begins playing guitar, his amp strapped to his back. He gave me this crappy little xeroxed card that gave his myspace address – this stuff is great for a late night subway ride.

Blues For Haifa
Pocket Change
Saras Street

Just watched Dark Days, a film by Marc Singer. The story isn’t so much the story in the movie as the story of the movie. It is a documentary about how over 150 people came to live in an abandoned tunnel under penn station. The people are endearing and honest about themselves and how they got there. They’ve managed to build houses and wire them with electricity. They salvage thrown out cookware, refrigerators, televisions, couches etc. This is all very nice and interesting.
Then you find out how the movie was made. It’s the director’s first film. He was just hanging out with these guys and then they all decided to do a movie. The film is donated, the camera is rented, the crew is made up of homeless people, the tracking dolly is made out of shopping carts, and no one has a clue what they are doing.
It’s a miracle it got made. But you owe it to yourself to see a miracle every once in a while, and this is one. It won a slew of awards at sundance etc. Don’t just watch the movie, take time to explore the dvd. This is one dvd where the special features are worth an extra hour of poking around.

Get it from amazon, get it from netflix, but do check it out.

In case you hadn’t heard, Sony has admitted that their audio cds install a spyware rootkit on your computer.

Ed Felten has a guide to dealing with the Sony Spyware.

How to tell whether the rootkit is on your computer: On the Start menu, choose Run. In the box that pops up, type this command:

cmd /k sc query $sys$aries

and hit the Enter key. If the response includes “STATE: 4 RUNNING”, then your machine is infected with the rootkit. If the response includes “The specified service does not exist as an installed service”, then your machine is not infected with the rootkit.

One caveat – I have heard reports that some Sony CDs do install spyware on Mac computers as well. If I find out how to check this, I’ll point you to it.
I highly recommend you take a look at this, it’s a terrible security hole. You may also want to consider your buying music from Sony.

update: boy, this didn’t take long – there’s a virus out there that takes advantage of Sony’s carelessness with other people’s things.

Why is it that today I had a sudden urge to listen to Hate Kill Destroy by those lovely balladeers The Business?

Oh yeah.

My bad.

If you haven’t heard, you should. First Jay Z released his supposedly final Black album and included an a capella disc. Then people started doing what they do if you leave that sort of thing hanging out. Hence came DJ Dangermouse’s “The Grey Album“, a mix of the great beyonce rider’s Black album and the Beatle’s white album, which inspired a video and a host of other mashups. I’m rocking “Jay-Zeezer: The Black and Blue Album” right now.

Also, I have to mention the Kleptones and their “A Night at the Hip Hopera” which should make Freddie Mercury smile, if not his estate’s lawyers.