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.
Monthly Archives: May 2008
Giving Copyright ‘The Slip’
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
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.