I cleaned up my massive indie collection today and kept the songs I like only. My library now consists of 5 GBs of iTunes purchases, 2 GBs of free indie promotional tracks, and ~500 MBs of CD rips. We have 35+ GBs worth of rips from our 400 bought CDs, but I haven’t move them over from JBQ’s library yet — JBQ is the Amazon CD guy and I am the iTunes gal in terms of our music purchases. There’s a small fortune we have spent for music in the last 10 years.

So, while I was cleaning up my indie collection all day today, I thought I should put together a top-60 list with the best of the best for you, complete with download links! The promotional mp3 tracks below are given away, legally as far as I can tell, either by the bands themselves via their site or their iLike/Garageband pages, or by their label, or by their marketing/PR teams.

Please do download these a-m-a-z-i-n-g tracks and check these artists out! And if you like their work, don’t forget to buy too! Alphabetically:

UPDATE: THE MUSIC LIST HAS BEEN MOVED HERE.

Some of the best songs I have heard in the last 1-2 years that most people never heard of. I wish these songs could get some radio play. Check them out on iTunes or youtube.

Let Me Go On – Seabird (alternative rock)
Big Coat – Wiretree (indie pop/rock)
Make Things Happen – Wiretree (alternative progressive)
Better Than Life – People In Planes (alternative progressive)
Jails Everywhere – Magnolia Sons (rock)
Sirens In the Deep Sea – Longwave (shoegazing)
The Devil and the Liar – Longwave (shoegazing)
Fallen – Death In The Park (indie rock)
Nailbiter – Damiera (alternative)
Even Though She Knows – Cold Hot Crash (alternative)
Work It Out – Capital Lights (powerpop)
Mile Away – Capital Lights (powerpop)
Frank Morris – Capital Lights (powerpop)
Save – Timmy Curran (singer/songwriter)
Slow – Timmy Curran (singer/songwriter)
Can You Feel It – Timmy Curran (singer/songwriter)
Sci-Fi Kid – Blitzen Trapper (indie rock)
Gold for Bread – Blitzen Trapper (indie folk rock)
Quiet Nights, Quiet Places – Malbec (electro-pop)
If Looks Could Kill – Music For Animals (pop-rock)
Robot High School – My Robot Friend (electro-rock)
Man Down – The New Frontiers (alternative)
The Keys – Dolorata (classic rock)
Shaky Like The Flu – Loquat (ambient rock)
Harder Hit – Loquat (ambient rock)
Bright Side – Rantings of Eva (alternative melodic rock)
Fracture – Rantings of Eva (alternative melodic rock)
Need – Dangermaker (pop-rock)
Sleep On It – TV/TV (Powerpop)

What a freaking let down. RED, JVC and Sony revealed no new products or updates whatsoever, while Canon rehashed their older ones. Unless Canon announces new prosumer products tomorrow, I will completely lose my faith on that company. They make no sense anymore.

Panasonic on the other hand already announced a bunch of stuff, including a very impressive 3D camera that uses AVC-Ultra (200 mbps bitrate!), and the HMC-40 (press release, news report, big picture). The important thing here is that Panasonic realized that there’s a hybrid consumer-prosumer market (and they even called the HMC-40 a “hybrid”). They are the firsts to do so, as far as I am concerned. I have been burbling about that hybrid need for 1.5 years now!

The camera uses three 1/4.1″ sensors, 12x zoom, 21 to 24 mbps VBR AVCHD recording (unfortunately, no constant recording at 24 mbps), 24p/30/60i at 1080p, up to 60p at 720p, cine-gamma presets, manual controls, enough buttons and focus ring, 2.7″ touchscreen, XLR/handle-bar add-on (sold separately), and Panasonic’s dynamic range stretching algorithm. Price is a bit steep at $3200 though for these specs.

The real let down on this camera is the sensor size though. Even if it has 3 sensors, each is still of minuscule size, and the lens seems to be consumer grade too. Which means that background blur will probably be worse than the $500 HV20’s. This is a deal breaker for me. I would have preferred a single 1/2.0″ sensor rather than three at 1/4.1″.

So, even after the much awaited NAB show, there’s still no camera that does what I need. This HMC-40 came SO CLOSE. So close. But still no cigar. However, there are rumors that Canon will update the Canon’s 5D Mark-II firmware with more video abilities, so if that happens and they add 24p frame rate, zebra support, and shutter speed support, that’s the camera I will be getting — even if it doesn’t have other features that camcorders do. We have about 15 lenses that go on the 5D anyway.

Enough with this shit though. This was a letdown.

The second episode of the very nice, HV30-shot, no-budget sci-fi, drama is out:

Wow, I had no idea, until the thumbnail I was looking on Digg’s pages looked familiar! Scott McIntyre submitted my jellyfish video on Digg, and he managed to get it to the front page! So far the video has acquired 24 new “likes” and over 5,000 new views! Thanks Scott!

We went to a park this afternoon, got some pictures. I used my HV20 with a manual focus ring, flower hood & ND filter to get some handheld pictures in higher shutter speed. They came out underexposed. I think I will be using Zebra at 100% from now on, instead of 70%.

My JBQ snapped a picture of me with my tricked out HV20. He shot it with his Canon 5D Mark I and his ultra-nice portrait lens (check that background blur).

My (noisy) HV20 pictures (all licensed under the CC-BY 3.0):

And another one, shot on my request with a Canon 5D by JBQ, in Santa Cruz:

Our 300 CD changer holder is out of space with our 400 CDs, and there’s no way to playback our digitally-bought 3.5 GBs of mp3/aac files that we have around. We need either something like the AppleTV where we can move all our 35 GB of ripped music in there, or a new 400 CD changer system like this one but with the ability to also play mp3/AAC and have a UI viewable via composite-out.

As it stands right now the AppleTV doesn’t do what we need because it doesn’t have composite-out, as I would like to use a small portable DVD player as external monitor for it. I simply don’t want to hook it on our 50″ TV and have our TV “on” all the time just so we can listen to music. If that was the case, we already have a PS3 that can do that (I currently use it for video playback only). It’s such a shame that the AppleTV doesn’t do RCA because it would have been perfect for music.

As for the linked Sony CD changer above, it doesn’t do AAC, it doesn’t have a hard drive (and I am not sure it reads mp3 files from DVD-R disks and not just from CD-Rs), while its UI simply sucks from what I read online.

The funny thing is that the device we need actually existed once as a prototype product. Back in 2000. And it was created by my husband’s then-company, Be Inc. The Be Aura was a beautiful device (unfortunately I couldn’t find any picture of it online to link, there used to be one), with a specialized UI, a remote control, and had a nice monitor too. Surely you could put together a small PC today with Windows Media or Linux on it, but it will still look like an ugly ass PC in our living room. That was a targeted device like the AppleTV, not a quickly-put-together PC job. Update: The device I was thinking was called “HARP”, btw. “Aura” was the software platform for it.

So, we basically need a device that can accept a SATA drive with mp3/aac and preferably FLAC music, has composite-out with a usable UI, and good digital-out for audio. The CD changer feature is optional as long as there’s a hard drive in there and there’s lossless FLAC support. So, do you know anything that would work for us?

Update: We might just be going for the Sony 400 CD changer it seems. We feel that the home entertainment systems today are in a state that resembles mobile phones before the iPhone arrived. The Sonos system is close to what we need, but no cigar.

Last night we had this Archer Farms‘ pizza that JBQ bought at the Target superstore (where he also bought a new bicycle). While I was reading the back of the pizza box to find its cooking time, I noticed the pictured map of Italy and surrounded countries. Suddenly my eyes go to the uppermost right corner of the map, where “Hungary” was misspelled as “Hungry”.

Picture taken with the T-Mobile G1 phone and its autofocus ability.
It was impossible to take the above macro shot with my iPhone!

I crack a smile, and I tell JBQ to look at it too. We figured that we could send the box to Jay Leno for his “funny products/headlines” section of his show. But immediately after I became suspicious that this was a deliberate “mistake”. That this is a subliminal message. This was a word that was easily reached by the eyes at that corner, a word that subconsciously was telling you that you were hungry. Hungry enough to buy their product.

Honestly, being one of the geeks, I never liked (or more accurately, I never understood) the marketing bunch of people, and such sleazy practices, in association with other viral campaigns out there, make me really dislike the whole marketing “art”. I am a very straightforward person, you see. I could have never worked in marketing.

More info on how the Crank 2 movie was shot. They used five XH-A1 cameras as primary, and fifteen HF10 ones as crash-cams, sometimes shooting all at the same time (with several random crew members just grabbing a camera and shooting — mostly on rollerblades)! They used very high shutter speeds, between 1/1000th and 1/2000th, and with “neutral” picture settings for saturation and contrast, while they cranked up the in-camera sharpness. On the XH-A1 they also used its cine gamma settings, but on the HF10 it was not possible to use its Cinemode ability because it can’t be used independently to manual shutter speed settings (customizing the shutter speed obviously takes precedence in such an action movie). That’s yet one of the reasons why I am still rooting for that hybrid consumer-prosumer camera that doesn’t exist yet. But NAB is here, so let’s see what Canon will announce in two days time.

A few more tidbits about the movie:
- The movie is actually insane, but in a good way. Here’s a positive review.
- It seems that the movie won’t make more than $6-7 millions in the box office this week, but when you add in that count the next few weeks’ earnings, the worldwide release, and DVD sales, it will easily recuperate its $12.5 million of cost.
- If there’s going to be a Crank 3, it will be in 3D, the directors have let us to believe. These two directors really are cool.
- And good looking too.

“A court in Sweden has jailed four men behind The Pirate Bay (TPB), the world’s most high-profile file-sharing website, in a landmark case“, says BBC.

So, the four founders were convicted, even if the files were not hosted in their servers. According to DMCA — that Sweden doesn’t abide to — if you help others to pirate in any way, you are guilty. So they got themselves convicted.

In my opinion, they are indeed guilty — they have been total assholes to lawyers who have sent them takedown notices over time. These dumbasses think that they are some kind of revolutionist heroes. Yes, a revolution is needed for copyright laws and the entertainment industry today, but these guys haven’t realized that in this day and age there is only one way to start a revolution: work through the existing system’s limitations and lobby extensively for new laws. Anything other approach will be shot down by the system and the corporations. This is not 1789 France. You can’t win with riffles, and picketing or rage anymore. You simply can’t ignore the laws. We live in a bureaucratic, corporation-led world, and so you will have to work through these constrains to change the world (e.g. via Creative Commons which is a clever approach that doesn’t cancel the current laws, so it can’t piss off the establishment to come after you). This Gandhi approach works: if you don’t buy the RIAA/MPAA-bound products, these empires will eventually fall, but it’s the only way to do it.

I hold the same opinion about the anti-Scientology Anonymous group: they go at it the wrong way by picketing outside the Scientology buildings and hacking their web sites. Oh, rest assured, I don’t like Scientology one bit, but writing a complaint to their Congressman is probably a more productive way to fix the problem.

I wrote this blog post not to debate if the Pirate Bay founders are guilty or not though. Instead, there was a comment on CNN that caught my eye:
Mohammad: “In my country, if we don’t share new movie, there are no ways to get it!”

The issue here is political. It has nothing to do with royalties, or the entertainment industry, or cheated artists. It has to do with something that’s bigger than any of that: the communication between people from different places in the globe that can’t communicate otherwise because of religious or political reasons. If the only way to get touched artistically, and learn about the lives and hopes, and dreams of the western people is to pirate their precious movies and music, then that’s what you will have to do. Cultural communication is more important than the billion dollars entertainment industry. But I am sure MPAA/RIAA would disagree, although in this case CIA probably wouldn’t.