Save American Edit

Update: Okay, Dean Grey Tuesday is here and if you want to grab your copy of the excellent mashup of American Edit. Head to the link below to get it. Help save mash-up and creativity in music.

American Edit is an excellent mash-up album that has been given the cease and desist order by Warner Records. However, Dean Grey, the creator and his fans are not taking it lying down and are going to do a Dean Grey Tuesday thingy on 13 Dec 2005 in protest of the record label's action. Read more about it on the linked website and support real creativity in music.

We hope to mobilize the online Mash-Up community by organizing a simple one-day organized event. Participants would be asked to post the American Edit album online for 24 hours only starting on Tuesday, December 13, at 12:00AM. Doing so is not intended to be a mass organization of music piracy but, rather, one single display of the consumptive power of the mash-up and home remix community in the hopes of encouraging the labels, publishers and artists who are curious about the mash-up community to consider giving the high quality productions of "illegitimate" music a legitimate consideration as a promotional avenue for all music.

Writely - Word Processor on the Web

The web allows you to do plenty of things. I've mentioned that you can edit photos and images using a web-based image editing tool called PXB8.COM. Now you can even do editing of documents on a web-based platform. Writely is a web-based word processor that you can use to do your text editing. You do have to sign up before you can start working on your novel online. With text and images covered, will we soon get a web-based Excel?

List of free online games

Games? Free? Sounds good to me. On the Goodexperience.com site is a list of games that you don't have to pay for that you can play online. Having fun without spending a dime is always good.

Free adverts

This is such an ingenius way to get eyeballs for your ad. I wonder how much those guys are paid for holding up the fake newspaper for.

More music CDs that will compromise your PCs

It seems that the DRM-related problem of Sony-BMG has exploded. Now, it seems that not just disc with the XCP protection system but those with the MediaMax protection are also affected. This seems to be a bigger problem as there are more CDs with MediaMax, including really popular artistes like Sarah McLachlan and Avril Lavigne. The link below contains a list compiled by EFF on affected CDs. You can also read more about this problem on a FAQ on EFF. Damn... the music labels are screwing with us and our PCs.

DJ Riko's Christmas mix album

How about that? Here's another disc of Christmas music from the mash-up community. This time, it's DJ Riki doing a platter of his fave Xmas tunes that are quite rare and surprising. Check it out if you're looking for alternative to standard Christmas tunes. Also don't forget to check out the other mash-up disc we've mentioned called Santastic by dj BC.

Copyright Free Movie Torrents

BitTorrent is used not just for dubious video, there're plenty of legal videos available on the Net too. A great example is this Public Domain Torrents site which offers a great range of classic and B-movies where the copyright of the movies have expired. iPod versions of these movies are also available on the site.

read more | digg story

When Grand Theft meets Lego

What if there's a version of Grand Theft Auto made using LEGO bricks? Then it'll probably look like the video in the link below. Pretty awesome stop motion done there. With Star Wars LEGO made into a game, we can always dream of Grand Theft Auto LEGO, can't we?

read more | digg story

Lyrics are not legal too

Seems like after going after the copying of music, the record companies are going after the copying of lyrics. If you're a music lover, you'd know that listening to your fave tunes and reading the lyrics sheet is a totally heavenly activity. With the added support of lyrics display on iTunes, listening to music and reading the lyrics is easier than ever. Plus, some smart developers have released a number of freeware that lets you easily search and pull down lyrics. Well, the record companies are going after them too. The popular pearLyrics has got a cease and desist letter from Warner/Chappell Music Limited to stop development of this software. Sadness...

Windows In Your Pocket

Okay, we know that you can put Firefox and a few other useful apps on a thumbdrive. You can also probably squeeze in a Linux system in one of these portable babies. But what about the most common OS on this planet? Tom's Hardward shows you how you can cram a bootable Windows XP on a flashdrive. Amazing but true.

Porn? Not really...

Galumpia has a bunch of pictures that are cropped to resemble close up of porn pictures. But when you expand the pictures, that're not really porn. It's pretty amusing... and goes to show what cropping a bunch of pictures can distort your perception.

Putfile bans Singapore after hanging

The recent issue about Singapore hanging the Australian for drug smuggling has generated some attention, and some tech sites have gotten into the act. In fact, the file upload site, Putfile.com, has disallowed it's services to those in Singapore because of that. Is that really necessary, and does it even matter?

read more | digg story

Wookieepedia - A Star Wars Wiki

With Wikis harnessing the power of the community to create useful information, it's no wonder a Wiki for Star Wars has appeared. Called the Wookieepedia, it contains everything you need to know about the cannonic movies and its extended universe. If you know something, you can even contribute and share your information. It's a Star Wars resource even Chewie will be proud of.

Roll dice with LEGO

Too lazy to roll those dice when you're playing games? Some smart guys from GameByEmail have put together a machine called Dice-O-Matic made from the ever useful plastic LEGO bricks. According to the site, this puppy can crank out 20,000 dice rolls a day. That's plenty enough dice rolls for anyone, I bet.

Converting video to iPod

Converting video to be played on your 5G iPod is not that difficult if you're using a software like Videora iPod Converter for Windows machine. However, understanding how this freeware works and trying to find out what settings work best can be a pain, since the documentation is so sparse. Thankfully, the folks at Twelve Black Code Monkey has done a comparison of the different settings and placed it in an Excel file. Useful when you're deciding how you want to encode your video for viewing on an iPod. Nice.

Free Music Download List

Who doesn't love free things? Instead of financing the major music labels in their quest of suing music listeners and adding to their coffers, why not look for songs that are free on the Internet? The author of gHacks has compiled a list of the best free music download sites on the internet. The list contains about 40 sites that offer legal music downloads to their visitors. Say together... free music is good...

read more | digg story

PXN8.COM - Edit photos online

Sometimes you need to edit some pictures but you don't have a photo editor installed on your computer. Well, you can now make use of PXN8.com. This is an online photo editing application. Basically, you can select a picture, and then do things like cropping, resizing, rotating, and even apply some effects, like blur, lomo, sepia, etc. It is even integrated with Flickr and you can upload your edited pictures to your Flickr account! Amazing.

Christmas mash-up album

If you're sick of listening to the standard Christmas music every year, why not try something different this holiday season? Top notch masher dj BC has compiled an album of great Xmas mashups called "Santastic: Holiday Boots 4 Your Stockings". Go grab this album, complete with CD sleeves that you can print out, and spread some smashing Christmas cheer.

Free iPod video content

Looking for something to watch on your brand new 5G iPod? Other than getting them from iTunes Music Store and other less official sites, you can head down to FLiXPO, a site that offers video clips ranging from film trailers, funny ads, indie videos and even games machinima. And yes, they're all free... as in free beer.

Scrabble using L33T Tiles

This must be the perfect gift for geeks who love word games. L33T Tiles are replacement tile sets to be used with Scrabble and other word games. If you use these tiles, you're of course expected to use the net slang known as leetspeak. The website even offers a dictionary for those who would like to confirm that the words used actually exist online. So stop using regex and pwn someone with words for l33t folks, woot!