Create Your Own Portable App For A Flash Drive
You probably know about those sites that let you download and install free app suites to your thumb drive (LiberKey, PortableApps, etc.). But if you've played around with their suites for awhile, you may have started hankering after other apps (or more up-to-date versions of the apps in your suite) that you could install yourself. This tutorial shows you how you can roll your own:
How To Create Your Own Portable App For A Flash Drive.
Millions of Tons of Water Ice at Moon’s North Pole
1 March 2010 report:
There may be more than 600 million metric tons of water ice sitting in craters at the moon’s north pole. The discovery, made by an Indian spacecraft, could mean big things for human colonization of our nearest neighbor.
Scientists Find Huge Quantities of Water Ice on the Moon - Truthdig.
New study shows smarter people are more likely to be liberal atheists
More intelligent people are statistically significantly more likely to exhibit social values and religious and political preferences that are novel to the human species in evolutionary history. Specifically, liberalism and atheism, and for men (but not women), preference for sexual exclusivity correlate with higher intelligence, a new study finds.
The study, published in the March 2010 issue of the peer-reviewed scientific journal Social Psychology Quarterly, advances a new theory to explain why people form particular preferences and values. The theory suggests that more intelligent people are more likely than less intelligent people to adopt evolutionarily novel preferences and values, but intelligence does not correlate with preferences and values that are old enough to have been shaped by evolution over millions of years.
Read full article: Intelligent People Have "Unnatural" Preferences And Values That Are Novel In Human Evolutionary History.
Bloom Energy’s 100kW solid-state “Energy Servers”
This looks like the next generation of fuel-cell technology -- oxide, they say, whatever that means, not hydrogen.
Bloom Energy | Be The Solution | Products - What is an Energy Server?.
How To Fix (Almost) Any Set of Audio Speakers
Can't wait to try this out on the damaged set of Acoustic Research Red-Box speakers that I inherited a while back.
How To Fix (Almost) Any Set of Audio Speakers Home Hacks | Apartment Therapy Unplggd.
Millionaire Malema: Nyah Nyah Nyah Racist
Found this little piece of boring rap on WatKykJy. But the subject matter makes up for the worthlessness of the music. ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema, well not really him of course, responds to criticism regarding the fact that he is stinking rich:
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Pioneers of Post Metal
Disclaimer: nothing in the post below is based on thorough research. The post should not be regarded as definitive in any way. It’s a list of casual observations born out of a six-month heavy-metal binge (which is still going strong 
Musical innovation is going apeshit in the metal scene. Everything that came after thrash metal (i.e. after Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer and Anthrax) has kept dividing and subdividing into new subgenres. It's hard to realise for us 40-something fogeys that since thrash came to dominate the metal world in the mid-Eighties, the entire scene has gone into a frenzy of ferment that continues to accelerate. I mean, who can keep track of all this?
- Classic Heavy Metal (e.g. Black Sabbath)
- Power Metal
- Speed Metal
- Symphonic Metal (e.g. Epica)
- Thrash (e.g. Slayer)
- Progressive Metal (e.g. Opeth)
- Death Metal (e.g. Emperor)
- Melodic Death Metal (e.g. Amorphis)
- Black Metal (e.g. Blut Aus Nord)
- Melodic Black Metal (e.g. Old Man's Child)
- Blackened Death Metal (e.g. Behemoth)
- Folk Metal
- Metalcore (e.g. Caliban)
- Grindcore (e.g. Napalm Death)
- Deathcore (e.g. The Agonist)
- Sludge Metal (e.g. Mastodon)
- Doom Metal (e.g. Swallow the Sun)
That's just some of the subgenres I've come across. And when you hear about types such as “symphonic folk metal” or “melodic metalcore”, you can’t be sure whether the reviewer had just made up a new label on the spot – that’s how prolific and diverse the world's metal output is right now. What I want to report, though, is that I've recently noticed two different artists who have worked their way through, and ended up, more or less, on the other side of metal:
- Ihsahn (Norwegian, ex-Emperor; full name Vegard Sverre Tveitan; born 1975)
- Devin Townsend (Canadian, ex-Strapping Young Lad; born 1972)
Yes, they still make a fair bit of noise. Ihsahn even does the death growl (fondly referred to as the Cookie Monster death growl). But their noise is generally of the sophisticatedly rousing sort, rather than the Satanic cannibal kind, and the scope and originality of their work is breathtaking. Both are daring composers who use unexpected yet melodious changes in rhythm, interesting instruments (free-jazz saxophone in Ihsahn's case, and for Townsend a 7-string baritone guitar that he helped to design), along with dense yet delicate aural textures in tracks that are sometimes(!) still recognisably metal, yet unconstrained by it.
Of the two, Townsend is lighter and most accessible. Ihsahn's sound is heavier, slightly artier. Having said that, the difference between them is not that great. And both are pioneers who must be heard to be believed. Through them and their ilk, metal is returning from the gothic gulag, extending itself so widely in all directions that it almost reaches the mainstream again. Collectively their music could be described as a rabid Pink Floyd for the 21st century ... evocative, surprising, ambitious and aggressive, powering through the swamp of modern metal like an armored anaconda. It is my dearest hope that this new breed of metal will galvanise the sickening spew of present-day pop into something I'd be content to be caught dead listening to.
Come to think of it, it’ll probably be a cold day in hell before real metal makes it into the mainstream. I mean, what would there be to rebel against then?
Super-highly recommended albums
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Fantastic way to find new music
TuneGlue is a wonderful free service that prompts you to enter the name of a musical artist and then shows you visually which artists are most similar to the one whose name you entered. It also provides, on demand, a list of releases each artist has created. No downloadable music, so the service can’t fall afoul of copyright watchdogs.
Use TuneGlue and you’ll find that one thing always leads to many more. Revel in your new knowledge
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Fuck you, VIP goons
Says the excellent Mahala.co.za:
It’s like we went to sleep and woke up in Zimbabwe. Granted it seems to have taken 16 years to get here. Scratch that, I’ll discount five for Mandela. The rot only really set in when the big little man with the pipe took over. Up until then it was all rainbow nation building and just one dodgy arms deal. But while we’ve been sleeping, comatose for 11 years, drunk on our new found freedom to consume, the Zanu-fication of the ANC was underway and gathering steam. What I’m referring to is the unfettered arrogance and licentious entitlement of the current crop of ruling party politicians.
And it’s only getting worse, as this week has demonstrated. It all started with a harmless little jog, this dude, Chumani Maxwele a 25 year old student at UCT, and card carrying ANC member, is jogging on De Waal Drive when a whole series of speeding, black 4×4s, with sirens blaring and blue lights flashing, zooms passed him, probably giving him a huge skrik. Like any sane, proud young lion he makes a fist save for his middle finger which extends into the air in meaningful defiance. He flips the cavalcade the bird and probably mutters “fuck you” to himself and carries on jogging. An entirely normal, oft repeated urban response to obnoxious roadhogs. A car in the cavalcade stops, VIP security goons with machine guns jump out, arrest and interrogate him and hold him for 24 hours. You can read the full report in the Sowetan here and the follow uphere.
The VIP police seem particularly oblivious to the fact, that as a citizen of South Africa, he has the inalienable constitutional right to express himself freely. His crime, according to the article, “insulting the president”. Despite the fact that he had no idea which fat cat politico was travelling in the blue light convoy. JZ seems awfully touchy these days. But that’s not all, so affronted were the powers at this symbol of disrespect to our supreme leader, the police apparently went on to raid his house and sent “intelligence officers” to interrogate him the next day. A little overkill for just giving someone the finger, ne?
When the rest of all the sane people in the country woke up expecting the government to distance themselves from the actions of a few overzealous and obviously misguided cops, the spokesperson for the ministry of police Zweli Mnisi released this statement.
“No person is permitted to use foul language and swear at another individual, especially as such conduct may lead to promoting hate conduct in the Republic.”
To which I respond again: FUCK YOU!
via This is not Zimbabwe, yet | Mahala.
The world goes befuck for Die Antwoord
This band of foul-mouthed, fake working-class slackers really tickles my funny bone. And I find their Sarf Efricken rebelliousness very liberating. Strangely enough, so does the rest of the world.
Pitchfork: Articles: Who the Hell Are Die Antwoord?.
NME: Die Antwoord And 'Zef' - South Africa's Biggest Non-Existent Scene
