This masterpiece courtesy Nick Nassar.

I’m running the sweet CyanogenMod firmware on my Android phone. Yesterday, Amazon released their Kindle ebook reading software for Android. I installed it, as I’m eventually hoping to buy Mark Frauenfelder’s Made by Hand when it comes out for the Kindle.

Unfortunately, when I downloaded a test chapter for the Kindle, the text was garbled.

The fix? Click here. If you were able to install CyanogenMod on your phone, this fix should be well within your abilities.
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Alex Chilton, RIP. I am wondering: who is the musician who has the best song named after him? And: who is the best musician with a song named after him? Also: Who is the best musician who recorded the best song with his or her name in the title? (Example I don’t think is the winner: Ballad of John and Yoko.)

The title lays out the scenario: we had an iMac running Mac OS X 10.6.2, connected to the internet via a DSL modem. We wanted to create a wifi network so we could get a Mac laptop, an Asus Eee PC 901 running Ubuntu GNU/Linux 9.10 (Ubuntu Netbook Remix, Karmic Koala), and a Roku Netflix player all on the net. Turns out you can use the iMac itself to create a wifi network. No additional equipment is required, just some tricky configuration.
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WordPress 2.9 is out today, and we’re trying to upgrade all our blogs to it.

These sites were created with MySql 4 databases, and the latest WordPress requires MySql 5. How to upgrade?

So far, we’ve tried dumping/exporting the old database and importing to a new MySql 5 database, but certain characters like curly quotes and Greek letters are broken.

Any ideas on dealing with these character encoding issues?

Mark Benedetti is our guest on episode #7 of the Snow Ghost Community Podcast, talking about the formation of a canon in three “underground cultural formations”: 60s experimental film, early NYC punk rock, and No Wave film.

Hosts: Bruce “Snow Ghost” Russell, Mike Benedetti, and Adam Villani.

mp3 link (39MB), feed

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An early take from a July 3, 2009 session. Thanks to the many guest musicians helping with vocals, percussion, humming, and squeaking.

More formats

Ed. note: After seeing this thread about a student’s unhappy experience with a class on rock and roll, I started a discussion with Seamus McGee, who has academic experience of his own in this area. He shared the following thoughts.

I’m curious about the department through which the course is offered, because that would strongly affect the approach. To be honest, most of these complaints seem trivial, but that’s only because I don’t have a sense of the larger methodological approach for the course, and so I don’t know if the complaints are grounded on the kinds of expectations that might be legitimate to have for this kind of class. Assuming it’s some general history of rock class, I don’t think the history of the formation of the Pistols is particularly important, even though it’s more complicated than either the student or professor seem to realize. On the other hand, it would be extremely important in a course taught through a different field, like, say, cultural studies, where most scholarship on punk takes place. I honestly don’t know why you’d want to spend much time on Zappa, though at the same time using Bizarre as your example for indie labels’ move into major label relationships doesn’t seem like a very good choice to me, although again, it depends on why and how you’re discussing that issue (i.e. whether you care about the politics of indie labels, which you usually wouldn’t for this kind of class).
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Here’s a video from 13 years ago, featuring Stale Urine and the late Misha Mahowald.

These images and her comments remind me of everything I loved about that place.

Some experimental films, courtesy archive.org.

My experimental film advisor comments:
Those Alexander Hammids are really exciting. I didn’t even know they still existed. Never heard of Lutz Mommart, but they look interesting.