Here’s an article about race and Second Life. I don’t have a lot to say about it, but I find this kind of stuff extremely fascinating.

Someone somewhere is producing a series of short episodes called Street Fighter: The Later Years, which is a satriical look at what the “real life” characters from Street Fighter II are doing ten years after the height of their popularity. Very amusing stuff.

Or not.

Sometime ago I stumbled upon something called the devolving.net covers project. THey would pick an artist, and some people would record a cover of a song by that artist and they would post it. It’s not a big deal, they’ve only done three artists and there has only been three entries for each. They haven’t been all that great, except for this one person who goes under the guise of “Moosica”. His stuff has been consistently interesting and surpringly good given the things he tries. The songs all are redone in a style you wouldn’t normally think of casting them in, yet they all work.

He has a website where you can download his songs. I suspect for the time he writes music as a hobby, so you can download his songs for free, and that’s pretty much all there is to it. I admit I haven’t listened to his original stuff yet, but all his covers are pretty good in my opinion.

NOTICE 7/26: I fixed the link. It was pointing to a different “Moosica” site before, if you can believe that.

Someone pointed me to this a long time ago, but I’ve recently revisited and starting the compile/hone a station that would sound something like I would do if I got to broacast my own radio station. You can always look it up and check on it’s progess by clicking here.

Funny AND scary.

BrokeBACK to the Future

With Ninja Turtles, half the kids idolized by way of signing up for ninja class. The lazier half just ate more pizza.

Songs iTunes or or other download sites are typically sold in a compressed propietrary format that can only be played in certain players. While one can typically “free” their purchased songs by burning it to CD and then re-ripping it, some sound quality is usually lost in the process. Also, songs that are on sale in iTunes in the US may not be available in iTunes UK, and vice-versa.

Toto, however, is making their music available on the internet in a way that I believe is close to the dream setup for buying music online. They offer three formats for downloading the album: 128kbps MP3, 320 kpbs AAC/MP4, and losslessly compressed FLAC format. This means these songs can be played in pretty much every player on the market or any player on your computer. If you’re particularly picky about paying for full on sound quality like me, the available of the FLAC format is essential. But they don’t stop there – part of the download includes a high resolution image file of the album’s liner notes and booklet. You can buy the whole album or individual songs, and you can get it straight from their website, so anyone with internet access can get it.

The best part? The cost of the album to download is only 8.99 euros, which is roughly $11. That’s cheaper than paying nearly $20 to buy the European import from CDUniverse (Amazon has it for almost $30!). You get all the tracks, even the Japanese bonus track (the Japanese import would’ve been about $40!). Even if the album gets released in the US, it will still more than likely be expensive.

Let’s review: From anywhere in the world, you can download the album as full-quality audio files that you can play anywhere and it comes complete with the liner notes, and you can buy it for less than what any other place is selling it.

Thank you, Toto, for getting it right.

Buy & Download Toto’s “Falling In Between”

In the same vein, you should also check out Magnatune, an “internet record label” that does the same thing with a wide variety of independent artists. You can listen to every song they sell in streaming MP3 format and then purchase the music in any format you like for (and here’s the kicker) any price you like above a certain minimum. 50% of what you pay is guaranteed to go straight to the artist.

Magnatune

The UN has given approval to the manufacturing and distributing of laptops to schools. These are special low-cost laptops that cost about $100 each. Even though they have built in wireless capablity, it’s other notable features are its lime green casing and manual crank-shaft to charge the battery. It probably won’t find it’s way into the mainstream market, but I love the idea of cranking your laptop. Article here.

Looks like holding out on getting a Gameboy DS was a good idea because, and really not surprisingly, a new version of the DS is in the pipes. It’s called the DS Lite, and the only new feature is that it will be thinner and lighter than the current DS. Right now the only release date for it will be in Japan in March. I imagine there will be little to no delay for its release in the US. Article here.

Some of you may not know, but the people at WordPress also have their own blog hosting site at WordPress.com. It’s been up for sometime now, but about a month ago it opened up to the public for membership (before it was using a Google-esque invitation-only method).

An entry on a site called Lifehacker talks about where you can find music for free on the web. The most interesting revelation of this article is that Amazon.com makes available free no-catch MP3s of songs by major label fairly well known artists for download.

For $60, you’ll soon be able to buy a NEX. The console features slots for both Nintendo and Japanese Famicom games and comes with built-in support for wireless controllers. All old NES controllers and accessories are compatible.

NEX FAQ

Update

I also found this neat site by a guy who teaches a class on game development using NES emulators and a languange he designed called NBASIC. So you can go to Bob Rost’s 98-026 site and learn how to make your own NES games or download and play the ones made by his students (and it’s legal! )