Perennial geek fave, Andy “Waxy” Baio, is interviewed by Nora Young, host of Spark on CBC Radio. First, the most important thing you need to know is that having these two together might be the most sexy collection of voices you’ve ever heard. Seriously – who knew Andy had such a great radio voice? (I already knew that Nora had one of those crisp, sultry voices perfect for what she does.)

Anyway, the interview starts by discussing the chiptunes project, Kind of Bloop, that Baio’s crowdfunding site Kickstarter financed. Chiptunes, if you are unfamiliar, are usually covers of existing songs that are generated in real-time by old sound processors – like say from an original Nintendo console. Kind of Bloop, if you hadn’t guessed, is a reimagining of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue using the beeps and blips of 8-bit videogames.

To many this sounds like blasphemy – and I have to admit that, despite being a raging technophile, my reaction to the album was ambivalent at best. I remember that when I worked in the misery of computer retail, I would put on Kind of Blue in the morning to inject a little hope and beauty into my day. There was something about the expansiveness of the intro to “So What” that felt full of openness to me. It’s hard now to approach this chiptunes album when the things I loved about Kind of Blue – like the way the shimmer of the ride cymbal hovered in the background – are now lessened somehow.

Still, it’s a bias that I acknowledge and I hope to return to the album with less baggage. After all,  I have a strong attachment to the aural textures of chiptunes – so much so that I can actually say that last sentence with a straight face. In the meantime, it’s a good interview for more than just Kind of Bloop, as Andy goes on to discuss Kickstarter and crowdfunding with his usual clarity and insight.

By now, you’ve probably heard of the Associated Press’ highly controversial attempts to lock down its content. In classic style – and, it must be said, with classic style – Andy Baio has crafted a charming response. Rather than a clever blog-post outlining everything that’s wrong with AP’s desire to control the spread of information, Waxy has gone the other route and chosen to produce what I see as a metaphor for the situation: he’s made  a Tumblr that aggregates the AP’s own RSS feeds.

What I love about this is how it works as a symbol. First, even though I have no programming skills, I know that it only took Andy 5 minutes to pull this together, which suggests the ease with which this kind of thing happens. While it’s true this particular site uses the AP’s feeds, it isn’t hard to imagine someone pulling a certain set of information from a more scattered, dispersed set of sources using custom feeds or crawlers. So on the one hand, the Tumblr works as a metaphor for the aggregative power of web technologies to sift and collect information and put it together in one place. To attempt to prevent this is to turn the web into a slow, electronic version of a printing machine, linear, structured and hierarchical.

On the other hand, having the site on Tumblr is also rather neat, as it works as symbol for what I’ll call the disseminative power of the web. Tumblr, perhaps more than most platforms, thrives on the idea and primacy of ‘the network’. In fact, when I try an envision Tumblr as a network, I often end up with visions of 3-D matrices in my head. It’s a bit like a machine – it’s the constant interaction of all the parts that makes it work, and Tumblr is much the same, as posts ricochet and replicate almost endlessly through the act of ‘reblogging’. To invoke Baudrillard, the network precedes the individual instance. To put something on Tumblr is to, symbolically at least, have it infinitely replicated, and infinitely reproducible. This is true for all the web, but I find Tumblr is a concentrated version of this idea, so… I likes.

Thus, Waxy’s delightful ‘middle-finger-in-the-form-of-a-Tumblr’ works as a lovely metaphor for the dual and always-present aggregative-disseminative power of the web. You can gather information from disparate sources and then scatter it in a profoundly non-linear, non-hierarchical fashion, at both ends of the equation. There is no starting point and no end point – only the circulation of bits of information. So, while Baio hardly needs any more kudos, good on him for both the literal and symbolic effects of his artistic, imaginative use of programming and its implementation on the ‘tubes.

A reminder of cooler Vancouver days …

Iceman, originally uploaded by WAXY..

Another great photo by WAXY, aka John Goldsmith. From this year’s Polar Bear swim on English Bay.

*Digital music: Hype Machine’s Anthony Volodkin talks about whether Hype Machine is bad for music. “We probably did play a role in the growth and attention that music blogs have received. This changes the dynamics of many things, as bigger audiences tempt the wrong people to do the wrong things (post link bait, poor quality content but in large quantity etc).” [daily swarm]

*Literature: T.S. Eliot – editor at Faber & Faber in 1944 – explains why he rejected George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.” [inessential]

*Twitter: There is a race to be the first Twitterer with 1,000,000 followers going on right now, and I am losing. My money, as always, is on Britney. Though John Mayer (or his ghostwriter) is somehow not bad with the medium at all.

*E-retail: Click and wait. I don’t know how to read this language. Netherlandish. (Flemish?) [coudal]

*The internet: Waxy makes internet attribution debates not boring.

*Updates: Six things to read on twitter. (I started looking at the quality of the posts from some Minneapolis Twitterers and I’m scared. And I don’t scare easily.)

*Today’s links: Strong D. STRONG.

Fun with Google’s calculator.

Kottke reports that the latest Joshua Davis piece on the 100 million diamond heist has been optioned into a movie. I linked to it through Andy’s Waxy Links. It might be directed by JJ Abrams himself. Joshua Davis also wrote High Tech Cowboys of the Deep Seas: The Race to Save the Cougar Ace, which has also been optioned for film.

That’s really cool, since I use both of these texts in my advanced ESL classes. They are great and it’s astounding that these articles are being made into movies. I didn’t know that this actually happened.

I found this link a few days ago and have just started reading it. It’s a really interesting article that was pieced together by Wired’s Joshua Davis. (via waxy)

[Pattie Maes] from MIT’s Media Lab showed a really interesting augmented reality demo at TED this year. It’s a wearable projector that lets you interact with any surface. A camera tracks the gestures your fingertips make and performs related actions. She shows several uses: projecting a dial pad on your hand, displaying additional info on a product you’re holding, and taking a picture when you form a frame with your hands. The current equipment cost is $350, but that would be reduced in a dedicated device.

[via Waxy]

oscar 2009

(EN)  23 films out of 26 nominated for 2009 Oscar are already available on DVD quality in p2p networks. This is the highest result in the last 6 years, tells us Andy Balo who’s been publishing an annual report on the topic since 2002. Check complete data on Google Spreadsheets and if you have time (i haven’t ), it would be cool to have a less basic infographics out of this data!

———–

(IT) 23 film su 26 nominati agli Oscar 2009 sono già disponibili in qualità DVD nelle reti p2p. Si tratta della percentuale più alta degli ultimi 6 anni, ci dice Andy Balo che dal 2002 pubblica un report annuale sull’argomento. Guarda i dati completi su Google Spreadsheets e, se qualcuno ha tempo (io no ), sarebbe bello avere un’infografica meno basic di questi dati!

This was certainly the last thing we expected to see today. [ShaunF] has created a Greasemonkey script to bypass the captcha on filehosting site Megaupload. It uses a neural network in JavaScript to do all of the OCR work. It will auto submit and start downloading too. It’s quite a clever hack and is certainly helped by the simple 3 character captcha the site employs. Attempting to do the same thing with ReCAPTCHA has proven much more difficult.

UPDATE: [John Resig] explained of how it works.

[via Waxy]

Bittorrent is a great distribution method for large files, but its heavy bandwidth usage can be disruptive to both work and home networks. [Brett O'Connor] has decided to push all of his torrenting activity into the cloud. Amazon’s EC2 service lets you run any number of Amazon Machine Images (AMI, virtual machines) on top of their hardware. You pay for processing time and data transferred. [Brett] put together a guide for building your own seedbox on the service. First, you set up the Security Group, the firewall for the machine. Next, you specify what AMI you want to use. In this example, it’s a community build of Ubuntu. Once you have your SSH keypair, you can start the instance and install Apache, PHP, and MySQL. TorrentFlux is the web frontend for bittorrent in this case. It manages all the torrents and you just need to click download when you want to grab the completed file.

Even if you don’t plan on setting up a seedbox, the post is a straightforward example of how-to get started with EC2. He’s not sure what the cost will be; the current estimate is ~$30/mo.

[via Waxy]

[photo: nrkbeta]

Here’s an update on our earlier post about genetic programming. Altered Qualia has posted a new implementation of [Ron Alsing]’s idea. It starts with 50 polygons and then randomly changes one parameter with each optimization step. If the the change results in fewer differences from the target image, it’s kept as the new best DNA. This search method is similar to simulated annealing. The image above is the result of 1500 good mutations out of 35900 possible. The implementation lets you choose any image, but smaller means the fitness calculation is faster. It’s written in JavaScript using the <canvas> environment. You’ll definitely get better performance using newer browser builds.

[Original image by R Stevens]

[via Waxy]

[Ron Alsing] wanted to try out some genetic programming, so he created a simple test problem: Could you render the Mona Lisa using just 50 semitransparent polygons? The program starts with a random DNA sequence. It then mutates and compares itself to the original image. If the mutation is closer, it becomes the new sequence. The final image he shows looks pretty good after 904,314 iterations.

[prunesquallor] pointed out a genetic algorithm project of his own. It’s a flash program to evolve a car. The car tries to get as far as possible on a set terrain without the passenger circles hitting the ground. The wheel size and positions can change along with the spring length, constant, and damping. A graph tracks the best performance along with the mean. He’s planning on building a version that lets you change the parameters.

[via Waxy]

*Sexy men: Salon says that one of those preppy Ivy League dudes from Vampire Weekend is one of the sexiest men alive. I really liked that “Oxford Comma” song. But not THAT much. I mean. Not even close to that much. [largehearted boy]

*Multimedia: BuzzFeed highlights Paintings on Books, which I liken to people recording videos of their phonographs playing old records, then posting those videos on YouTube. Which is to say, LOVE.

*Videogames: The wondrous Waxy offers a collection of videos of Meta-Musicians, real rockers playing their own songs on Guitar Hero and Rock band. A few weeks ago, I sang Corinne Bailey Rae on Sing Star, though I am not Corinne Bailey Rae myself.

*Digital Rights Management: Apple is talking to more labels about offering their music through the iTunes store without digital rights management.

*Chinese Democracy: You are just three days away from claiming your free Dr. Pepper. Three days. Do not miss this or you will have to pay up to $1.25 for a Dr. Pepper in the future.

*Retail: I did not know that customer service wizards Zappo’s moved their slow-moving stock to 6pm, but now I do.

*Microsoft: Zune has cut prices. I would here like to make a bold stand and say that I prefer saying the word ZOON to saying the word EYEPOD. I’m just sayin’.

*Trends: New York Times columnist (and former Slate columnist) Rob Walker on some of my (and my day job’s) ideas. [Everything redacted.]

*Holidays: First Avenue will hold its second annual “Too Much Turkey” Thanksgiving dinner. [mfr]

*Economics: Perhaps you should listen to Nouriel Roubini on the state of world economics. And then cry. For almost ever. [3 quarks daily]

Digital Pictures Interactive has put together a great augmented reality demo. Unlike many others, it’s entirely Flash based, so there’s no install necessary. Print out the custom symbol and try it out for yourself in your browser. Augmented reality refers to any mashup that combines computer generated content with a live video stream. We see great potential for this technology and the large number of consumer webcams would certainly help consumer adoption. Video demo embedded below.

[via Waxy]

[Cameron Adams] recently appeared on a panel about JavaScript libraries. He represented the hard working coder that still wrote everything from scratch. He wanted to make something mindblowing for the audience. He ended up creating the JS-909 drum machine entirely in javascript without relying on libraries or flash. While he makes no claims of compatibility, it certainly is a nice bit of kit.

[via Waxy]

Here’s a video of a mindbending piece of papercraft engineering. We’d love to see a 3D model for this heart to at least have a starting point when designing our own. The creator’s site is in Japanese though, so it’s hard to glean any insight into his process. Embedded below is a similar cube version.

[via Waxy]

Broccoli are found in people. Two words, Soylent Green. (via waxy)

Google founder Sergey Brin started a blog yesterday. (via waxy)

*Pictures: Some time in 2006, Blackmocco promised not to shave his beard until Metallica released a new album. He offers the world this Flickr photoset as evidence of his devotion, and has recently shaved his beard. [seriouslyomg]

*Songs: Ze Frank wrote a children’s song for adults. He is tall and has more hair than I do.

*Listening: Yahoo! Music, thanks to a partnership with Rhapsody, now lets curious searchers listen to entire songs for free after searching for tunes. Limits include 25 per month (for more, you have to sign up for Rhapsody) and a limit of 4 songs per artist.

*Blogging: Sergey Brin launches a personal blog (and is at risk for Parkinson’s). [techmeme]

*Video: Entertainment Weekly offers a preview of the Ting Tings on kids’ show Yo Gabba Gabba. [music slut]

*Quiz: Do you know your fictional bands? (Too heavy on the nerdy and nostalgic, rather than the strange and fascinating. [neatorama]

*Geekery (and video): Search Engine Rap Battle – the web site. It’s MSN vs. Google. Are you going to bludgeon me for boring you? Sometimes I worry about that as I’m posting links. [buzzfeed]

*Song: “You’re No One If You’re Not On Twitter.” Also, you’re only 3/5 of a person if you have under 300 followers. Or that is what I’m told. [waxy]

*Followup: Way back in the early days of the Listenerd, I called out a startup called out UTTERZ as having a questionable (though amusing) name, even shouting out (somewhat jokingly) to the Name Inspector (a site run by a dude who helps name companies) for a critique. The Name Inspector obliged, giving the name a mild review, then everyone forgot about Utterz. Now, it turns out Utterz has thought better of their name, and will henceforth be known as Utterli.

*Cool: Waxy uses a mechanical turk to crunch some numbers around Girl Talk’s “Feed the Animals. Google spreadsheets tell the tale…

*Hate: The Village Voice explains Why MySpace Music Won’t Succeed. Basically, the article reads like a history of errors.

*Favorites: Will Sheff of Okkervil River lists some of his favorite shit in an interview with Pee-fork, including a song by Wale called “The Kramer.” [via largehearted boy. Is it odd that I am so diligent in crediting conduits through which I come by information -- like Largehearted Boy -- when they are so lax in doing so themselves? No; it is not.]

*Local: The City Pages has come out with its Picked to Click local music issue (for Minneapolis / St. Paul) once again. And the winner is…Lucy Michelle & the Velvet Lapelles.

*Pornography: Complex magazine captures a round-up of porn stars singing and rapping.

*Sports: The Hold Steady’s Craig Finn chats baseball with ESPN. [idolator]

*Fashion: M.I.A.’s long-awaited fashion line is due out this week. [music slut] Also, here she is blogging about terrorism.

*Off topic video: A really inappropriate playground slide. [scanner via mojo]

*Off topic: So I have a regular job. With all the weird things that come with that.

*Also: Here’s camping.

www.waxywax.com