Linked List: April 8, 2009

Wednesday, 8 April 2009

Girls Cut DF T-Shirts Now Available 

Pretty good response to my poll on Monday, so I’ve added girls shirt sizes to the order form. No difference in price. Update: Specifically, we’ll be printing the girls shirts on American Apparel style 2102 tees, the same colors as the guys shirts (asphalt and silver).

Cocktails for iPhone, Free This Week 

Skorpiotech:

We are officially lowering the price of Cocktails+ to $0.00 for a limited time to promote our new “Publish to Facebook” feature. Customers who wish to take part in this limited offer need to hurry, as the offer begins Monday, April 6th at 12:00pm EDT and ends at the “stroke of midnight” on Sunday, April 12th. The Cocktails+ application downloaded will be full and unlimited, including free updates for the life of the major version.

It’s a good app with good cocktail recipes.

A Buck Twenty-Nine 

Matt Rosoff on the price for popular digital songs going to $1.29 industry-wide:

I can’t imagine Amazon’s excited about raising prices in a recession—they’re probably responding to price increases by the record labels, which were made possible by Apple’s capitulation. Good luck with that!

So it’s Apple’s fault that Amazon raised prices. Uh-huh.

Attribution and Affiliation on All Things Digital 

Thoughtful piece by Andy Baio on the linking/re-blogging practices at AllThingsD, including some spot-on criticism from Merlin Mann, and a few comments from yours truly.

More Public-Spirited Pigs 

T.S. Eliot, then a director of publisher Faber & Faber, in his letter to George Orwell rejecting Animal Farm:

And after all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm — in fact, there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed (someone might argue), was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.

(Via Brent Simmons.)

Mastering and Re-Mastering 

Derek K. Miller on the upcoming new Beatles releases:

So it’s true that these new Beatles CDs (and, with luck, eventually iTunes tracks) will be new digital re-masters, but they won’t be the first ones. If you already have a complete collection of Beatles CDs from those 1987 digital re-masters, these new ones will probably sound different, maybe better. But they could sound worse.

Roger Ebert: Bill O’Reilly and Squeaky the Chicago Mouse 

Best punch line I’ve read in ages.

Sun’s VirtualBox 

VirtualBox is: “a family of powerful x86 virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).”

I need to use this for a certain project I’m working on. Admittedly, I’m not using it in any “enterprise” sense, whatever that means. I’m just using it as a desktop virtualization system. But from that perspective it strikes me as inferior to VMware Fusion in every way. An inferior product given away for free — is it any wonder that Sun is in trouble?

Photoshop CS4 Plugin to Disable Canvas Rotation via the Trackpad 

I don’t have one of the new MacBooks yet, but I suspect I’d run into this problem if I did — I rest my thumb at the bottom of the trackpad area.

Remastered Beatles Catalog 

The Beatles:

Apple Corps Ltd. and EMI Music are delighted to announce the release of the original Beatles catalogue, which has been digitally re-mastered for the first time, for worldwide CD release on Wednesday, September 9, 2009 (9-9-09), the same date as the release of the widely anticipated “The Beatles: Rock Band” video game.

But:

Discussions regarding the digital distribution of the catalogue will continue. There is no further information available at this time.