ldopa.net

Download here.

In this version:

• Many totally awesome yet heartrendingly subtle cosmetic improvements.

~jeff

2:00 PM: I see a website with a link leading me to this page which has a linux distribution for my 4G iPod. I download and install it; linux for previous generations of iPods is here.

2:05 PM: Gobbledy-gook of all kinds scrolls up the iPod’s screen for a full 10 minutes.

2:15 PM: I use the excellent 4G linux on iPod uninstaller function, which frighteningly enough requires the use of the iPod “disk mode” (hold down select and play at startup).

3:00 PM: I read positive reports on the web and figure I must have done something wrong. Maybe I didn’t click “Install” hard enough. I try again.

3:05 PM: I boot into iPod linux! and immediately have to adjust the contrast to read the screen.

3:10 PM: I try all of the gimpy little games and whatnot in the distrubution. I have to give them an awful lot of credit for duplicating the iPod interface, if they just had a copy of the iPod’s Chicago font it would be close to perfect.

3:15 PM: I test out the high-quality recording function, apparently it claims to record in quality up to 96 kHz. This is the reason to try iPod linux. I plug in my nice Sony mic and select “Recordings”.

3:16 PM: “Recording is not supported on this hardware.”

3:17 PM: Deeply saddened, I uninstall again. Verdict: without recording support, there seems to be no point right now to linux on 4g iPods; however, if I had an older iPod that could record, I would give it a shot.

UPDATE: I had to use DiskWarrior to make the iPod report the correct amount of free space again. I would avoid iPod linux like a plague with herpes on it.

~jeff

There’s a wonderfully written how-to on Ars Technica about photo-enhancement. Anyone who’s even the slightest into digital photography should check it out.

On the flip side of enhancement, here’s a neat how-to on how to make your graphics look fashionably “worn-out”.

~jeff

I went camping in Vermont this weekend. I had never gone camping before, and it was lots of fun, even though on the second day it rained.

At night, my iPod sure came in handy. Here’s a list of which albums got played over the three day trip, with annotations when necessary:

*On the drive up*
* Everything’s Ecstatic (Fourtet)
* Gold (The Fucking Am)
* Hold Your Horse Is (Hella)
* U.F.Orb (Orb)

*First night camping*
* Caravanserai (Santana)
* Band of Gypsies (Jimi Hendrix)
* Entroducing… (DJ Shadow)
* The Prosthetic Cubans (Marc Ribot)
* Panthalassa (Miles Davis/Bill Laswell)
* The Equatorial Stars (Brian Eno/Robert Fripp)
* Maarifa Street (Jon Hassell)

*Second day camping*
* Man About a Horse (Steve Tibbetts)
* Death Chants, Breakdowns and Military Waltzes (John Fahey)
* Bad Timing (Jim O’Roarke)
* Filles De Kilimanjaro (Miles Davis)
* Lush Life (John Coltrane)^[1]
* Fire Walk with Me Soundtrack (Angelo Badalamenti)
* Dream (U. Srinivas/Micheal Brook)
* The Blue Notebooks (Max Richter)^[2]
* On Land (Brian Eno)

*On the drive back*
* Deadbeat Heros (Doug Stanhope)

~jeff

[1] “Lush Life” is a kind of forgotten Coltrane album, but for my money, it’s one of the best “jazz” jazz albums ever recorded. It’s just perfect.

[2] “The Blue Notebooks” is a modern classical electro-acoustic concept album kinda-sorta about the works of Franz Kafka. It shouldn’t work, but it does. Previously I’ve said that this is the most beautiful modern classical album I’ve ever heard; I now have to append that to say it’s simply the most beautiful album I’ve ever heard *period*.

Boy on a Stick and Slither is OK, but there are a couple of gems there. Particularly this one.

I do love this site, it makes the weirdest sounds. It’s like listening to The Books, Negativland, John Zorn and John Oswald all at once.

I think the user interface got an nice upgrade since last I played with it — and now when the “lyric” sample isn’t there, the site now tries to create the missing word for you out of little tiny bits of other words… which is not entirely *successful* as much as *interesting*.

So keeping with our unfortunate theme for this week, I present to you, Let Them Sing It For You: The Journey Edition.

~jeff

Here’s a shameful fact: I’ve gone tubing *twice* in less than one week. It’s like I’m in training for one-third of the laziest triathlon in the world. But seriously, if you’ve never gone floating down the Farmington River on a hot summer day, you’re kinda missing out; it is incredibly gorgeous.

It takes about two hours, and all you’ll need is a bathing suit and about $20; just call me, we’ll go.

~jeff

The very first time I saw Dashboard, I thought there should be an option to have Dashboard come up as your screen saver, and just let it be “ambient information”. As luck would have it, there are now *two* options to accomplish this:

Amnesty Saver, which lets you choose one widget to float around your screen

or

DashSaver, which plops them all on screen with a black background.

Both have been tested to work with the incredibly popular AIMFON Widget.

~jeff

A comment thread in another post prompted me to go down and find this in the vaults: The Unhappiest Kitty in the Whole World.

I’d like to say no animals were harmed in the making of this, but that would simply not be accurate.

~jeff

There’s a decent article on 37 Signals here (but you’ll probably have to watch a Flash ad about incredibly thin cell phones to read it). I like 37 Signals’ software a lot, and I use their “Ta-da Lists” annoyingly often.

As a side note, if you’ve bored and have a few moments to spare, watch the 15 minute intro video of the guy developing a weblog from scratch at the Ruby on Rails website. It’s a pretty impressive technology, and the guy doing the demo is amusing and foreign and says “Whoops!” a lot.

~jeff

Cyberduck is hands down the best FTP client for Mac OS X. It’s free under the GPL and in active development — it just keeps getting better. Give it a try.

~jeff

Pleix.net hosts a number of films, including this very interesting piece, and this long-time personal favorite.

Nice article on Mitch here. Earlier this year right before he died, I had ordered a t-shirt, and it was very late in coming; I got an email a few weeks later explaining “it’s taking us a long time to fill the orders, hope you can understand… sincerely, Mitch Hedberg’s parents”.

~jeff

This site uses Google Maps and Google Earth to sneak a peek inside the gob’mints super-seekit alien landing strip “Area 51“. If you zoom in real close, you can see David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson wandering around looking for their post-X-Files careers. That’s right, I went there!

~jeff

Once, the wise, wise Jeff said, “I think if Steve Perry was alive to see this, he might”

And without further ado, I present to you…

Mr. Steve Perry!