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Bleep has added Ninja Tune to their list of labels. The whole catalogue isn’t up yet, but it’s coming this week. Omigod omigod omigod!

I thought it was really cool when Warp first opened Bleep, but I had no idea they were going to take it this far. You can get stuff from Def Jux, Lex and a whole slew of other labels.

Go check it out, and buy something while you’re there. Gotta support the good stuff. Vote with your money!

Posted at 7:53 pm.
5 Comments

Ryan Sims over at Just Watch The Sky learned a hard lesson recently: if you lose all the music on your computer, do not sync your iPod until you’ve figured out a way to get the songs off it.

A hard drive on his G5 crashed, destroying his entire music collection. He installed a new hard drive, installed iTunes and hooked up his iPod. iTunes then asked him if he wanted to sync the iPod and without thinking he clicked “Yes”.

All remaining remnants of his collection were then erased.

Let this be a lesson to all you iPod/iTunes users out there. Your iPod may one day become the only backup you have of a vast music collection. Sync with care!

Posted at 2:35 pm.
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The BugMeNot registration form, required for any “employee, partner, affiliate or legal representative of any site which enforces compulsory user registration” who wishes to use any resources of BugMeNot, including emailing the administrators.

To quote Jason Kottke, “That’s some funny shit”.

Word.

Posted at 11:30 am.
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I was just installing the newest version of Yahoo! Instant Messenger (so I can play games with a special person) When I came to that oh-so interesting part of any installation process. The part when you get to choose which parts of the software you want installed, as well as some other features.

Yahoo! has done something interesting here. You can select the Typical install option which will give you the messenger, the Yahoo! toolbar and some “extras”. Down below there are three options, including a checkbox for making Yahoo! your default search.

Well, I didn’t want the toolbar, so I selected the Custom install option so I can, you know, customize my installation. Here is where the interesting thing happened (if you find these kinds of things interesting). I could no longer deselect the “Make Yahoo! your default search” option.

Does anyone else out there hate feeling trapped by software? Please give me some flexibility! I really like Yahoo!’s messenger, but it was almost enough to make me stop the install and keep my antiquated version. But that special person has been bugging me to upgrade so we can play games, so here we are.

Now I’ve got to see if I can uninstall the toolbar. Although I get the feeling it’s an Internet Explorer thing only. Ha ha. The red dinosaur triumphs once again!

Posted at 9:47 pm.
1 Comment

Apparently, there’s a rather fervent War on Pornography going on, right under our noses! Who knew?

Posted at 8:27 pm.
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Last year I helped beta test a content management system called “Textpattern”:http://www.textpattern.com, created by a man named Dean Allen, who runs a web site called “Textism”:http://www.textism.com (with the dog of all dogs, Oliver [and now “Hugo”:http://textism.com/photos/?s=48, also]).

Well, then Dean dropped off the face of the planet and I got bored. The getting bored part didn’t take nearly as long as it did for Dean to resurface and announce a web service based on a more advanced version of Textpattern. Anway, I was long in the arms of “Moveable Type”:http://www.moveabletype.org/ by then.

And so we arrive in the present. Textpattern is in gamma release, at version 1.19. It’s very robust, if a little rough around the edges. It’s also a pleasure to look at (you’ll have to find the screenshots of the administrative pages to know what I’m talking about) and a joy to use. Dean is also the creator of a markup system called “Textile”:http://textism.com/tools/textile/, which makes (are you ready for this?) marking up text for display on the web a quick and simple process.

So this evening I spent about 3 hours migrating from Moveable Type to Textpattern. The transition was relatively painless (I only had to touch the PHP code twice), and I was able to import all of the articles and comments from my Moveable Type install. I had to recreate my templates from scratch, but copying and pasting HTML text from MT templates turned out to be a snap.

So, we’ll see how it goes. This is the first post under the new regime, and hopefully the beginning of a beautiful relationship.

Posted at 11:25 pm.
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