Facebook’s News Feed is a great way to get just the highlights from your social networks, but it never shows you everything—just the stuff it thinks is important. If you want to avoid that and see everything your friends post, you can enable a comprehensive, chronological view with the new News Feed design. More »
More here:
How to Bring Back Facebook’s “Most Recent” View in the New News Feed
If your old car has finally bit the dust but its stereo is still in good shape, IKEA hacker Stefano shows us how to put that stereo into a cabinet and keep it alive. More »
View article:
Turn an Old Car Stereo Into a Boom Box
At our sponsor Intel’s LifeScoop site, I posted about ” Music That Writes Itself “: In ambient music pioneer Brian Eno’s 1996 book A Year with Swollen Appendices, the composer wrote, “I really think it is possible that our grandchildren will look at us in wonder and say: ‘you mean you used to listen to exactly the same thing over and over again?’” Eno was talking about generative music, a process by which a computer creates unique works from fixed parameters set by the artist. In its simplest form, you twist a few knobs (virtual or otherwise) and the computer takes it from there, creating music that can be credited to the system itself. The term generative art is most likely derived from “generative grammar,” a linguistic theory Noam Chomsky first proposed in his book Syntactic Structures (1965) to refer to deep-seated rules that describe any language. Steven Holtzman, author of Digital Mosaics (1997), traces the art form to the dawn of the information age in the 1960s, when musicians like Gottfried Michael Koenig and Iannis Xenakis pioneered computer composition. Decades later, a number of generative music apps are bringing Eno’s vision to our smartphones. ” Music That Writes Itself ”
Taken from:
Generative music apps
More than two million semis travel some 120,000 miles apiece along America’s arterial highways every year at an average efficiency of just 6 MPG. Six. Miles per gallon of diesel—not even Hummers are that wasteful. However, a new “Super Truck” design by Peterbilt has shown it can go the same distance for half the gas. More »
More:
Peterbilt’s New “Super Truck” Gets 10 MPG—Double the National Big Rig Average
How many Roku models are there? Like, twelve? But it doesn’t matter: the newest one is here, and thankfully (predictably?) it’s the best one yet. So good that you’ll stop using other crap you own. So good you’ll use your cable box less. That good. More »
Famed grindcore band Napalm Death were slated to play a unique concert at the Victoria and Albert Museum on Friday night, but the museum cancelled the show fearing that “the high level of decibels generated by the performance would damage the historic fabric of the building.” The group was to play through a sculptural ceramic sound system built by artist Keith Harrison. The sculpture was expected to crumble under the volume of the performance. “Sound as a weapon – or a weapon of change – is a very interesting concept and I think that the whole process of our sound gradually degrading clay sculptures is captivating,” Napalm Death vocalist Mark “Barney” Greenway said last week. “The noise element of music should never be understated and this exhibition at the V&A will hopefully demonstrate that music can do interesting things beyond the realms of clipped production techniques.” According to the V&A, the museum “is committed to an exciting programme of exhibitions and events but the safety of our visitors and building remains our priority at all times.” Above, Napalm Death’s “Suffer the Children” from their 1990 album Harmony Corruption , the first album to feature Greenway on vocals. (via BBC News ) What does a sonic blaster (“less-lethal” audio weapon) feel like … Make your own $1 million vomit-inducing flashlight for $250 – Boing … Testing infrasound thrills and chills with a double-blind randomized … Infrasound Experiment – Boing Boing
Read the original post:
Napalm Death concert cancelled, fear of volume-related building damage
The Verge is reporting that Amazon is in talks with record labels to create a new subscription music service. More »
Read More:
Is Amazon in Talks to Create a Subscription Music Service?
An anonymous reader writes “When cell phone unlocking became illegal last month, it set off a firestorm of debate over what rights people should have for phones they have legally purchased. But this is really just one facet of a much larger problem with property rights in general. ‘Silicon permeates and powers almost everything we own. This is a property rights issue, and current copyright law gets it backwards, turning regular people — like students, researchers, and small business owners — into criminals. Fortune 500 telecom manufacturer Avaya, for example, is known for suing service companies, accusing them of violating copyright for simply using a password to log in to their phone systems. That’s right: typing in a password is considered “reproducing copyrighted material.” Manufacturers have systematically used copyright in this manner over the past 20 years to limit our access to information. Technology has moved too fast for copyright laws to keep pace, so corporations have been exploiting the lag to create information monopolies at our expense and for their profit. After years of extensions and so-called improvements, copyright has turned Mickey Mouse into a monster who can never die.’ We need to win the fight for unlocking phones, and then keep pushing until we actually own the objects we own again.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
See more here:
We Should Be Allowed To Unlock Everything We Own
It turns out that the human cells scientists have studied the most and used in research for more than 60 years have some unexpected and pretty intense genetic mutations. Good thing they weren’t used as part of 60,000 published papers. They were? Oh geez. More »
See the original post:
The Human Cells We Use For Research Are Kind of A Genetic Disaster
It seems like these days I can’t eat breakfast without reading about some new encryption app that will (supposedly) revolutionize our communications — while making tyrannical regimes fall like cheap confetti. More »
More:
Which Encryption Apps Are Strong Enough to Help You Take Down a Government?