Monthly Archives: May 2008

Now with Identicons

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I decided it would be a good idea to upgrade to WP 2.5.1 this morning. Unfortunately I made the mistake of not backing up all my files correctly and proceeded to delete my custom WP theme. That sucked, so I spent all day re-making it from scratch. J/k. Luckily ANhosting was able to provide me with a backup of the folder. I had one of my own but it was from a while back, so I’m glad they had a recent backup copy. In other news, I also added the new Gravatar support for Identicons to the comments. That means that now instead of the boring old “blank face”, anyone who posts a comment on my site that doesn’t have a Gravatar will be given an avatar created by running an algorithm on their IP address to generate an image of colors and shapes. See that? Pretty cool.

Giving Copyright ‘The Slip’

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Nine Inch Nails has pre-released their new album, ‘The Slip‘, online (via Chicagoist). I’m not really a NIN fan, but there’s something a little different about this one. They’ve released it completely for free under a Creative Commons license (CC-BY-NC-SA) in many different formats (including lossless). Apparently, Mr. Reznor feels that Radiohead, who gave users the option to “choose their own price” to download their previous album, was nothing more than a marketing scam to arouse interest and sell a regular album in sub-standard quality. In addition to providing top-quality music files in various formats, the NIN are making a bold statement with this album, especially for mainstream artists, and it’s right there is black-and-white on their website:

we encourage you to
remix it,
share it with your friends,
post it on your blog,
play it on your podcast,
give it to strangers,
etc.

I can only hope this trend toward Free Culture continues. I don’t think that everything needs to be free (at least initially), but this album’s copyright is merely an example of the other extreme to a completely restrictive copyright, which doesn’t allow anyone to more than listen to it for the next 95 years. Yes, that’s how long current copyrights last.

Portal Trailer

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I saw that The Orange Box is on sale on Amazon for $30. The Orange Box is a set of 7 computer games in 1 package for Xbox, PS3, or PC. Now I’m not normally very into computer games, but I did always like puzzle games like Myst when I was younger. I even still have a copy of Myst III somewhere, which I don’t think I ever beat. One of the games included in The Orange Box is called Portal. It has a very interesting premise, namely that your only “weapon” is a gun capable of shooting a 2-way portal. You need to use this portal system in unique ways to solve puzzles and defend yourself. I just watched a trailer while taking a break from studying and it looks like a lot of fun. Portal is available on it’s own for $20 (via Amazon or download from the Steam website) or as part of the Orange box for $40 (or on sale for $30 via Amazon). For those of you using Ubuntu, it appears that The Orange Box works well using Wine.