Slow afternoon thoughts: 3 links
Tuesday, 22 May 2007 03:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
daI seem to have a pile of things bouncing around in my head, mostly in the not-useful state. But this bit has shaken out, and I want to record it for my own sake, if not for anybody else's.
Remember that "Pi" song and video? The band has an entire album, and a few more fun videos on their site. (Warning: these links are currently worksafe, but much of their site isn't. Just sayin'.) The music is mostly cynical bluegrass, which sounds to me like an untapped market. The song about patriotic dinosaurs is great, and so is the "matrix" video set to melodica.
The second musician link: Jonathan Coulton is a guy with a guitar. Kind of a musical xkcd, if you will; a lot of his themes are wistful and pretty geeky. He seems to have a following, and it seems to be mutual: one guy turned his podcast series into a book and a colouring book. Another made a card-game based on his song "Code Monkeys." Anyway, I like his science stuff. And "Re: your brains" is fun; it's about zombies at the office.
Both these bands release music through cdbaby, which has a scary, scary huge assortment of artists I've never heard of, most with samples of their music. CDs mostly in the $10-15 range. They have neat categories for finding music. ("If you're depressed and want to stay depressed", etc.) Where to find the time to browse it all, though?
Finally: the google-borg continues taking over my internet experience. I've been using google's web history for the last month and it's just great. It's an opt-in to let google record the URLs of where you've browsed.
But google also already has the page contents, for things they index; so in effect you can do a google search that only matches pages you've already visited, which turns out to be something I want to do every few days or so. Of course it also includes prior google searches and search output pages. Quite useful.
It requires the Google Toolbar, which has a "no visible toolbar" option so Firefox looks the same, except for the search box, which is slighly google-ified. And with an unexpected feature that the search box "suggested searches" are also useful (eg., catch misspellings before I hit "return").
Since it works on mac/linux/windows, my work and home browsers are recorded somewhere I can get to from anywhere with the net.
Oh right; it also has a "suspend recording" option and you can delete records from the history. And it seems to not record pages that aren't already in the google index; so password-protected stuff is safe. This privacy/usefulness tradeoff is acceptable to me.
Remember that "Pi" song and video? The band has an entire album, and a few more fun videos on their site. (Warning: these links are currently worksafe, but much of their site isn't. Just sayin'.) The music is mostly cynical bluegrass, which sounds to me like an untapped market. The song about patriotic dinosaurs is great, and so is the "matrix" video set to melodica.
The second musician link: Jonathan Coulton is a guy with a guitar. Kind of a musical xkcd, if you will; a lot of his themes are wistful and pretty geeky. He seems to have a following, and it seems to be mutual: one guy turned his podcast series into a book and a colouring book. Another made a card-game based on his song "Code Monkeys." Anyway, I like his science stuff. And "Re: your brains" is fun; it's about zombies at the office.
Both these bands release music through cdbaby, which has a scary, scary huge assortment of artists I've never heard of, most with samples of their music. CDs mostly in the $10-15 range. They have neat categories for finding music. ("If you're depressed and want to stay depressed", etc.) Where to find the time to browse it all, though?
Finally: the google-borg continues taking over my internet experience. I've been using google's web history for the last month and it's just great. It's an opt-in to let google record the URLs of where you've browsed.
But google also already has the page contents, for things they index; so in effect you can do a google search that only matches pages you've already visited, which turns out to be something I want to do every few days or so. Of course it also includes prior google searches and search output pages. Quite useful.
It requires the Google Toolbar, which has a "no visible toolbar" option so Firefox looks the same, except for the search box, which is slighly google-ified. And with an unexpected feature that the search box "suggested searches" are also useful (eg., catch misspellings before I hit "return").
Since it works on mac/linux/windows, my work and home browsers are recorded somewhere I can get to from anywhere with the net.
Oh right; it also has a "suspend recording" option and you can delete records from the history. And it seems to not record pages that aren't already in the google index; so password-protected stuff is safe. This privacy/usefulness tradeoff is acceptable to me.
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no subject
Date: Wednesday, 23 May 2007 05:48 pm (UTC)*nods*
...that leads me to an interesting image; the followup to asian kids levelling up WOW characters for cash: reading blogs and submitting recommendations to digg or something. Which I bet people are doing for cash, too.
On the non-governmental side: for whatever reason, I'm not troubled by google's aggregation, as I am (say) by Amazon's. Probably because google feels more like a middleman who stays out of the way and carefully delineates where things are "commercial". Amazon feels like someone following me around a store trying to make recommendations, which is damn creepy. ...Plus they rewrite pricetags when you're not looking.
Of course, google's "non evil" front-end includes a huge pile of potential evil uses as well; such as searches from China being "optimized" for Chinese legality.
I'm taking it on faith that google won't become increasingly more evil over time, because if they do, they've got the data for it.
On the governmental side, I expect the US government is already data-mining at main router exchanges without google's help. I expect I should be more worried than I am about that.