A few months back I blogged about a tech demo that made browsing Amazon more shop-like. It seems Amazon spotted it too, because its new WindowShop interface does much the same thing.
I’m not sure it’s actually useful (at least on a PC – it would probably make more sense on a TV), but it does look pretty.
Want a free Eels EP? Of course you do. So click on this link and give them your email address before 28th October.
The 4-LP Deluxe Vinyl Ltd Edition set of Blinking Lights – which this EP is promoting – is a thing of beauty, and I’m sorely tempted to buy it even though I don’t actually have a record player.
Another interesting post at Broadstuff:
…about 40% of the UK ticket market goes through touts (people who buy tickets at face value, typically from organisations that get allocated tickets and then on-sell them). This creates the calculation below, where there is clearly far more money in touting than in actually being a musician.
Thanks to the ever-entertaining No Rock’n’Roll Fun:
Comes Without Music But You Can Pay For Music If You Like. Just Not Too Many Tunes, Eh? Don’t Go Mad Or Anything. Two Songs A Week.
If you’re in the future, and you work on a spaceship, and you get a call telling you to go and check out some remote colony because contact has mysteriously been lost, do yourself a favour and call in sick that day. Skive for your life. The only reason space colonies, and the drifting spacecraft spookily orbiting above them, stop communicating is because they’ve been overrun by bloodthirsty monsters. This is scientific fact.
Eurogamer reviews sci-fi horror game Dead Space.
If you do a lot of typing, it could well be.
the BlackBerry Storm, Research In Motion’s first attempt at a touchscreen device, is a triumph. It’s a really powerful device with plenty of clever features, but let’s set that to one side for the moment and focus on the question people really want to know the answer to: what’s it like to type on?
A revelation, is the short answer. RIM has managed to develop a touch-screen keyboard that’s as close to typing on real buttons as you’re currently likely to get. Every time you touch a key, the whole screen feels like it’s pressing down under the weight of your finger, and a sharp clicking sound is emitted. You can switch between a full Qwerty keyboard layout in portrait or landscape mode, or opt for BlackBerry’s SureType keyboard configuration (where two letters appear in a single Qwerty keyboard button), and best of all, you can copy and paste between applications – a simple feature sorely lacking on Apple’s iPhone and many other touchscreen devices.
John Gruber hits the nail on the head:
Here is a complete list of what Apple must do to increase developers’ trust in the App Store system:
State the rules.
Follow the rules.That’s it.
Good: The new Christopher Brookmyre, James Lee Burke and Ian Rankin novels.
Bad: The new Girls Aloud single.
Excellent news. We’re not quite at the point where I’d want to dump my daily paper for a digital Daily Me, but we’re getting closer.
The iRex Reader 1000 offers a 10.2-inch diagonal E-Inkscreen, far larger than Kindle’s 6-inch screen or even iRex’s own 8.1-inch diagonal iLiad, its last e-book model. That stretched display is designed to work with any file format, be it an e-book, a full-sized PDF, a Word document or HTML. Like earlier iRex devices, it sports a stylus and touch screen for taking notes and marking documents.
…Business-targeted readers also come with business-sized price tags. Though Plastic Logic won’t yet reveal the price for its device, iRex says its basic reader will start at $650. (By contrast, Kindle sells for $360.) Adding a writable screen to the iRex reader will cost another $100, and equipping it with wi-fi, Bluetooth and a 3G cell connection for downloading documents will raise the price to $850.
But nonbusiness consumers, take heart: Cheaper, book-focused e-readers are also likely to be revamped soon.
Here we go again. Metallica appear to be following in the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ footsteps, releasing an album that’s so compressed it’s painful to listen to. And that’s painful in a “shit sound” way, not a “woo! Scary metal!” way.
the released CD version is – to coin a technical phrase – smashed to f**k.
According to the mastering engineer, responding to Metallica fans:
I’m certainly sympathetic to your reaction, I get to slam my head against that brick wall every day. In this case the mixes were already brick walled before they arrived at my place. Suffice it to say I would never be pushed to overdrive things as far as they are here. Believe me I’m not proud to be associated with this one, and we can only hope that some good will come from this in some form of backlash against volume above all else.