Radiohead Are Naked!

Radiohead have released a new single: Nude.

They’ve split it up into “stems” and are asking people to remix it.

That sounds nice. Oh, but you have to pay for each stem (there’s 5: Bass, guitar, vocals, strings/FX and drums).

And “Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, Colin Greenwood, Ed O’Brien and Phil Selway will be registered and credited as the sole writers”?

Seriously, this is wrong on so many levels. Trent Reznor releases a 38track album under Creative Commons and encourages people to remix it. Radiohead release a 10 track collection of what feels like unfinished stuff they’ve had kicking around the studio for a few years (Nude for example has been doing the rounds on bootlegs for over a decade now), allow people to download it for as much as they want as a gimic to up their hand in contract negotiations before removing it for download and releasing it on CD…and now they have the gall to make us pay to give them content?

FUCK YOU RADIOHEAD! Seriously, this is the final straw. I endured a couple of mediocre albums, concert prices jumping for no apparent reason (the show is essentially the same as it was when I saw them in 1997 (twice), 2000, 2001 and 2006 but the ticket prices have gone up to over 4 times the price), but no more. Radiohead have got their last penny from me (and I’ve spent a lot on them over the years)

As a parting gift, I made them a remix: http://www.radioheadremix.com/remix/?id=165. It won’t be there very long, it violates section 7 of the terms and conditions, but it made me feel better. Maybe you can go and vote on it if you’re pissed off like me.

(Edit: Yup, its gone…Well, it had 53 votes before it was removed.)

Gypsy 0.6

Due to popular demand I’ve released version 0.6 of Gypsy, my GPS multiplexing daemon.

This is also the first release that is hosted at freedesktop.org, so my blog finally has a reason to be on planet-fido other than Daniel Stone added it one night while drunk.

The important info:

And because some people complained after the last release that I was being “sneaky and under-handed” by not mentioning why I think Gypsy is better than its competitor, I’ve written a page listing the design flaws that I’ve come across and how Gypsy solves them: http://gypsy.freedesktop.org/why-not-gpsd.html.

Fuck it’s shit

I like comicstrips. I grew up on Garfield (when it was still funny and fresh) and Charlie Brown, Bill Watterson is a personal hero of mine and I wish I had the guts to stand up for what I believe in like he does. Comic strips are a very maligned artform, capable of being incredibly meaningful while at the same time making us smile and sometimes even roll on the floor in laughter. Unfortunatly there are a lot of bad comic strips out there as well – The Comicstrip doctor dealt with many of the classics before flames and apathy set in, the Comics Curmudgeon has taken over brilliantly.

Recently OSNews has started up its own comic strip, cos y’know its a modern day newspaper or something, and really I felt I had to say something about it because it is so utterly terrible that it is hurting a medium that I enjoy so much. This strip is called Focus Shift, or as I’m now going to call it “Fuck it’s shit”. So what are my problems with it? Its not just that its terribly drawn (I’m hardly the next Michelangelo myself really). Its not even that its just completely unfunny. No, my biggest problem is that it is so unfeeling and so clinically sterile that its mere existance has started to offend me.

What am I talking about? Well, if OSNews had a boardroom and editorial meetings to decide content, I think the meeting where Fuck It’s Shit was sanctioned would have gone something like this:

– You know, I’ve noticed that a lot of geeks like this XKCD comic
– Yeah…
– Can we find someone to copy it for us?
– OK, it should be easy, it is only stick figures after all, but sometimes its a bit…rude
– Right, so we’ll take out that swearing and the sex references. Leave in the love stuff, that’s quite cute
– Oh yes, that is always nice, but sometimes I find the jokes are a bit too … intellectual? If we can make it simpler, we’ll get a larger target audience. Leave out the quantum physics references.
– Oh, and its a bit weird too sometimes, we’ll fix that.

However I highly doubt OSNews is that professional, so I imagine the concept was more that Thom Holwerda was reading XKCD and decided that it would fit that awkward hole in OSNews’ front page, and it’d be easy to recreate, after all, its just a single joke with simple drawings, it can’t be that hard, can it?

Fuck It’s Shit has terrible artwork, its terrible artwork that’s trying to be acceptable, but it fails. On the other hand, XKCD’s are is simple because that is all it requires. Randal (I think thats his name, I’m really sorry if it isn’t, but for the purposes of this rant it is now, so there…) Munroe has shown in some of the earlier XKCD strips how good his artwork can be if he wants it to be (And to be honest, I long for more of his landscape images).

XKCD’s humour is high brow with low brow twists. I don’t find them all funny, I don’t even get some of them, but I always appreciate the thought that went into creating it. Fuck It’s Shit is tired old cliches and non-jokes (cf. Handwriting from 17th Feb).

When you read XKCD you get the feeling that Randal draws it because he loves to draw, because he wants to draw, because he needs to draw it. That passion is conveyed in the artwork and the detail and the jokes. There is a sense that he took time and effort over each strip, time to get everything right. Looking at Fuck It’s Shit the only sense is that it was done as quickly and as effortlessly as possible (cf. http://osnews.com/thread?301270 where Thom explains why he’s switched to a computer font for the text…)

When XKCD does a comic on love, it feels heartfelt, natural and quite sweet. When FIS does if (e.g. Insecurity – 11th March) it feels tacky, forced and slightly embarassing.

Finally, FIS (sorry, I can’t be bothered typing it all out anymore) feels sterile. Like a fast food chain selling “home made apple pie”, it kinda looks like the apple pie your grandmother would make, but you know that it wasn’t made out of a love of making apple pie, it was made because there is a perceived market for apple pie or the boy band who decide to do a rocksong, cos thats what the kids are buying these days…FIS feels like cynical attempt to attract some sort of cult following to their news site but like the boyband trying some rock numbers, its a sanitised, clean version, a safe version, a boring bland version…would FIS dare to do something like the fantastic http://xkcd.com/137/ ? I’d doubt it…but once you start thinking about what is acceptable to your audience your work ceases to be art, and is merely nothing more than a product. XKCD is art, FIS is a product. And it is a bad one that needs to be discontinued.

(This image was meant to have an XKCD style tooltip reading ‘And yes, I’m aware that this ‘joke’ has the same conceptual problems as the original on which it is based’ but it appears that WordPress strips it from the img tag. Boo hiss!)

(And for what its worth, I’m not a massive fan of XKCD, I read it maybe once every couple of months, I’m only using it to compare Fuck It’s Shit with because of how hard Fuck It’s Shit is trying to be XKCD)

Never thought you’d write a browser, cos HTML is so passé

I wrote my first web browser in 95 on the Amiga. The fact that I didn’t have an internet connection didn’t stop me, but really it was a bad HTML viewer. Later in 1998 I revisited the idea for my introduction to C course and wrote it again, using raw Xlib. Then Mozilla was released as open source and really there wasn’t much need for me to do more.

But the world is a funny place and history often ends up repeating itself, so without further ado sit back watch this short movie

Yup, webkit inside clutter. Completely proof of concept at the moment hacked up using the GTK backend. Thanks to Alp, Pippin and everybody else everywhere…

Bands I Remember Seeing in 2007

Aphex Twin
Portishead
Fuck Buttons
Kling Klang
Julian Cope
Thurston Moore
Malcolm Middleton
The Horrors
Rosy Red Rash
The Heads
Malakai
GZA/Genius
Madlib
Sunn o)))
Francioz Breut
Glenn Branca
Fuzz Against Junk
Sparklehorse
Oneida
OM
BORIS
Earth
Crippled Black Phoenix (x2)
Selah
Peter Broder
Efterklang
Cashier No9
Caribou
Cruz (x3)
Out Of Touch
29’s Fell Shadow
65daysofstatic (x4)
And So I Watch You From Afar (x5)
La Faro
Iron & Wine
Splitscreen
Angelfall
Fighting With Wire
The Winding Stair
The Benjamins
Kitty and the Can Openers
The Jazz Committee
The Paul Hartnoll Experience
Mixmaster Mike
Manic Street Preachers
Bjork
Modest Mouse
Slint
Alexander Tucker (x2)
Explosions In The Sky
Oppenheimer
LCD Soundsystem
Beastie Boys
The Fall
The Chemical Brothers
Polyphonic Spree
Sonic Youth
The Aliens
Final Fantasy
Jarvis Cocker
!!!
Shychild
The Little Ones
Soul II Soul
Dirty 3 (x2)
A Silver Mount Zion (x2)
Cat Power
The Drones
Yann Tiersen
Nina Nastasia
Einstürzende Neubauten
Bill Callahan
Joanna Newsom
White Magic
Ian Wadley
Art of Fighting
Brokeback
Nick Cave
Grinderman
Low (x2)
Devastations
Magnolia Electric Co
Papa M
The Only Ones
Shannon Wright
Gas Giants
Spiritualized Acoustic Mainline
Philip Glass
Yakuza (x2)
LITE
Tracer AMC (x3)
Cars In Walls
Boathouse
Amy McGarrigle
Ben Folds
Clem Snide
Parhelia
The Butterfly Explosion
Death Vessel
The Verve
Cathy Davey
The Elliots
Driving By Night
Pixie Saytar
Desert Hearts
Steer Clear
Killing April

(plus at least 2 others I remember seeing but not the names of)

I value my privacy

I just noticed – these fuckers are recording the open source contributions I make. They’re even collecting the data and publishing it. Of course, its not *all* the contributions I make. This is an incomplete picture of my open source contributions. This is my data, they have no rights to do this. Its an invasion of my privacy!!!! Next they’ll be recording the things I say in my blog! This atrocity must stop before all our freedoms are stripped away from us!

And once that happens, the terrorists will have won!

All the colours

Strangely productive in a random driveby patch way. Was choosing paints to decorate my house recently, and I loved the simple way to pick matching colours. Pick colour a – get the swatches for colour a and pick a colour that works with it. So I hacked that idea into the background colour selector.

Its filed as bug #500324. I’m bound to be leveling soon…