life ends at 27
A stunning take on Hendrix’s classic If 6 Was 9 by Garage A Trois, featuring drummer Stanton Moore, saxophonist Skerik and guitarist Charlie Hunter playing his 8-string Novax guitar. Skerik’s solo is smokin’.
In that order, I think.
Good, not great.
These albums are not bad. They just fall short of my admittedly high expectations.
Not even “so bad, its good”, just mediocre.
I’m a huge Devin Townsend fan and the song that made me an instant convert was Touching Tongues, from Vai’s Sex & Religion. Here’s a wonderful live performance from 1993.
How do you cover one of the most bombastic rock songs of the 80s? If you are Slovenian industrial group Laibach, you make it more bombastic. Remade as some kind of a Wagnerian/disco mutant love-child with spoken lyrics, operatic female backing vocals and an over-the-top CGI music video, its got something for everybody.
Found this in a shop, obviously a collection of songs from before he got help with hitting the high notes.
Yes indeed. I’m surprised he did an MTV commercial though.
Came across an article about how the newer versions of software may not be better than previous versions, most of it caused by increasing feature sets and thus bloat. I am pretty particular about what goes on my PC as I need all the CPU power and RAM I can get for my weighty development tools. Rather than sticking to the “last good version”, I try to look for alternatives based on the following criteria:
Miranda IM is the best IM client on Windows. It is very light weight (the new version 0.7 features a new memory management model which makes it more memory efficient compared to the previous versions) and is very extensible, as it supports plugins. It does take some effort to set up so it works exactly the way you want it to, but I do not see that as a bad thing.
I use two different applications for audio and video. QMP by Quinnware is my audio player of choice. It is currently in beta, but according to the creator Paul Quinn, it is very close to release now. The memory usage might be a little on the high side (compared to svelte players like foobar2000 and XMPlay)but in my opinion its usability trumps that.
I use Media Player Classic for video playback. It looks like the old Windows Media Player 6.4 but that’s the point. I do not need my video player to have some incredibly slick interface. Just make it simple and sensible, and then stay the hell out of the way when a video is playing. I usually install the Combined Community Codec Pack (still the best codec pack) which features MPC as one of the installation options.
No idea about video editing software unfortunately, not one of my interests. For image editing, Paint.NET is the tool for quick and simple jobs. I find it to be very light weight and very functional.
For image viewing and management, XnView seems the best I have tried. Very quick, and the interface is a clone of early ACDSee. Only minus is that it has no Unicode support, but I can live with that… usually.
I also have CDisplayEx installed. It is an open source clone of CDisplay which is sadly very outdated. These are really niche applications for viewing scanned comics, but are capable and very fast image viewers.
For PDF viewers, Foxit Reader is very, very fast. There’s a bit of feature creep in the latest version 2.2, but its still fast. No way am I going back to Adobe Reader without some major re-architecturing efforts on Adobe’s end.
As for email, I have used Mozilla Thunderbird for years now. It is not light weight by any stretch of the imagination but I cannot do without the extensions nowadays. Lightning needs to mature before I can consider recommending it for most of my clients though.
The PC World editors missed one application, the Nero suite. Versions 7 and 8 clock in at a ridiculously massive 170+ megs. I just want to burn some CDs and some DVDs… There are free alternatives: InfraRecorder (open source) and CDBurnerXP (free as in beer). Both of these are very easy to use and will be more than adequate for normal burning tasks.
Trent Reznor (and Nine Inch Nails by default) is now free from any recording contract. As I have mentioned, he is one of the few, perhaps the only, major artist who gets it. Here’s hoping more famous musicians follow his lead.
[via digg]
Yes, got mine in the mail. Thanks YesAsia! I highly recommend them. Free international shipping (conditions apply)!
The package design is exquisite, very classy. All transparent and white.
The styrofoam block to hold the Tachikoma USB thumb drive is a little out of place though… am I supposed to toss it out and keep the drive elsewhere? Tsk…
Making the booklet white on white is just… ass backwards. It looks very cool and everything, but come on! The print is actually more legible in the photo compared to Real Life due to the camera flash.
Isn’t it just the cutest thing?
One thing I noticed is that the music was beautifully mastered. There is a remarkable clarity to even the densest passages; I could hear each instrument distinctly. The music by the incomparable Kanno Yoko is fantastic, of course.
There have been complaints that the new O.S.T. 4 “Smooth in the Shell” is only available in this set, forcing fans who have already bought the other albums separately to shell out for the whole set if they want that. Pretty bad form by the record company, but for the few fans of Kanno Yoko who don’t already own any of the previously released albums (like myself, luckily), this is a great set to own.
Duh Magnet
Ex-Ramone Wants to Sedate Digital Sales
More Reverse Reznor news, as I like to dub such these days.
loser-x
Hunh? Richie Ramone? The Ramone NOBODY GIVES A SHIT ABOUT?
Duh Magnet
THAT Ramone. [:)]
It’s hard, but like the comments say, crack isn’t getting any cheaper.
loser-x
Dressed all formal for the lawsuit…
Duh Magnet
WAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!
Fuck, look at him, looks completely like a down and out insurance agent.