[inlink]paul,2850[/inlink]

I remember that PlastikMan album "Sheet One" featured a sheet of blotter paper decorated with little Plastikmen... What would you do with that? I wonder if that's why it's so hard to find copies these days?

[inlink]scud,80[/inlink]

Hey (e:Scud) , I'm on Xbox Live every once in awhile. I don't play any sports games, but lately some Halo 2 and Mechassault 2... my gamertag is GamesFirst (like my website)

Look for me sometime, or drop an invite sometime -- I have the XBL forwarding on so I get invites to my cell phone. It's pretty much the hotness.

Check this out, from BoingBoing ( )

Apparently PyMusique is a free program that allows you to download tunes from iTunes without the DRM (iTunes uses FairPlay, which is not supported on any platform except the iPod, which some people don't like *gasp*!)

Anyway, I suggest getting PyMusique for any new acquisitions. Or old ones -- apparently it will let you re-download all your tracks as regular old non-DRM files. woot! \0//

Oh, damn, (e:Paul), this is exactly the way I like to do it -- I come to (e:strip) to read other people's journals -- I always disliked how if I saw something I thought was cool or wanted to say something about while I was browsing around, it was so hard to open a new tab and go to (e:Strip) to post something about it...

Yeah, this feels great. You roXor my boXor (e:Paul).

So I just found this page ( ) at Rolling Stone about M.I.A. M.I.A. is a Sri-Lankan female rapper who bad ass. You can watch her vid for Sunshowers on the page I just linked to. You can download a Sri Lankan hip hop mix on this Bit Torrent link ( ) -- it's the Tsunami Terror Mix. Remember, Sri Lanka has been in civil war for ages now (what, like 10 years? 20?) and all of Arthur C. Clarke's mysterious investigations couldn't prevent some of the most tragic terrorist attacks in the world, perpetrated by the Tamil Tigers. ha, and 50 Cent (the Mumblefish as I like to call him, after the Matt Dillon movie) thought he was bad...

Anyway, everyone ( ) is writing about M.I.A. I saw her vid on MuchMusic when we escaped to Canada for the Inaugaration. Download her video for Sunshowers. One of the best new tracks this year, fo sho.

[inlink]paul,2797[/inlink] (e:paul)

That image on Halavais' door looks like a Rasterbator ( ) print from here. Or it could just be a really huge print of a really large file that's been run through an ascii generator like this ( ).

Fun stuff...

(e:Paul) has been having issues with his Basic Stamp, which is, apparently, something used in basic electronics. Don't ask me, I just read about this stuff...

Anyway, I was reading Hack A Day (http://www.hackaday.com) and they wrote about the Basic Stamp a couple times on two different fun-looking projects. The first is a "robot Grover" modificiation (http://www.hackaday.com/entry/1234000017035470/) and the earlier article, which includes an introduction to the basic stamp is here (http://www.hackaday.com/entry/1234000487032939/).

Maybe this give hope? Or leads to some overlooked resources? I dunno...

Jon Udell does Screencasts, which is a pretty interesting thing in and of itself. While browsing his site, I found this great screencast about the Heavy Metal Umaut article on Wikipedia ( (WIKIPEDIA - heavy metal umlaut)). It's a great display of the power of Wikipedia to evolve and the entertainment value in reviewing the history of articles. Of course, it's even more fun when people like Udell have packaged it all up into a nifty little video for you. Check his screencast here:

Hapened across this entry on Engadget this morning:




It's a how-to on hacking Google maps. Whee!

Wow, I love how sometimes an interesting blog posting will lead you to multiple things you've just GOT to know about. Case in point, this here post. I have to go make tacos right now, but when I come back, I'm going to read this stuff:

First, GTxA (http://www.grandtextauto.org) just posted about John Udell's walking narrative that uses a unique Google Map Hack. What? Google Maps Hackable? I've been so busy with other stuff I hadn't even played with it, but now I discover this (http://69.90.152.144/collab/GoogleMapsHacking) and this (http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/) which are really interesting resources for Google Map Hacking. The potential seems way fun...

So then I was watching what seemed like a regular video tutorial and I notice that this guy has a link to find out more about screencasting... screencasting? I haven't heard of this... So I clicked around a bit and foiund this: which pretty much sums it up, I guess. I have to do more research. But his point about sharing our use of tools through video and audio and images is pretty cool. I think a lot of people forget how creative we can be with a tool. Just look at all those people using a wrench for a hammer, or a nail file for a screwdriver. We're born to it. We are not necessarily limited by the limitations of software packages or any other technology. But that's a different post...

I wanted to encourage (e:Scud) to check out Blog Torrent ( www.blogtorrent.com). It's a good little utility for serving files via Bit Torrent (WIKIPEDIA - bit torrent) . What's really cool is that it just requires basic PHP to run on the server, and you serve the files from your PC running a Bit Torrent seed. If this all sounds complicated, it isn't. Blog Torrent takes care of everything really nicely. It's amazingly easy to install.

Set that thing up, and you can use the RSS feed as a dynamic XML listng of your podcasts -- that would be the link to put into iPodder to download on schedule.

All this too much? Don't have time to figure it out? Here's what I propose for (e:Strip) folks and anyone else who wants to distribute their podcasts or other media creations. Really, as long as it's yours to share, I'll be happy to have it listed on my tracker. But to use a tracker, you need to do a few things still. And my tracker is not working at the moment (read the post below this), but here's how it will work:

go to (that's my Blog Torrent Tracker) and sign up for an account. Don't worry about me selling, spamming, or otherwise abusing your email address -- I won't.

You can then create Torrents. The Blog Torrent program will make the little Torrent file for you and will automatically open up the basic Bit Torrent program to seed the file. (You will need to seed the file to make sure there is at least one seed online -- no seeds means no downloads.)

That's it. I like to use the Azureus BT client (http://azureus.sourceforge.net/), so I open the .torrent file that Blog Torrent made in Azureus and let it do the work. There are some good tutes out there for using Azureus to gather media and podcasts.

So now if you want to share your materials, you can post the .torrent link shown in the index (http://www.shawnrider.com/bt) on your (e:strip) journal, or anywhere else you can post a link. Anyone with a Bit Torrent client installed can open the .torrent link directly. Other folks can be directed to the index page where they can use the Easy Download link, which automatically installs the Bit Torrent client.



Hopefully this post helps people get into Bit Torrent. I should note that it's not safe to use Bit Torrrent to download illegal materials, and that I don't want any illegal materials on my tracker.

Have fun.