Keempa has this really fascinating story up about the practice of hiding old text adventure games on some of the records released in the 70s and 80s.
Most of these hidden games were written for the Sinclair Spectrum home computer, which is probably why I never experienced the Thompson Twins game first hand. To play the game you had to record the proper section of the record onto a tape and then use a tape recorder to load the game into the computer.
With the notable exception of Apple's WWDC announcements, which you can read at myriad other sites, the one thing that caught my eye today was this beautiful italian commemorative edition of Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea designed by Paolo Orsacchini. It's printed on waterproof paper and enclosed in a clear pouch filled with real sea water. Collectors can either bust it out of its original packaging, dry it under the sun, and enjoy a classic read, or they can preserve this limited piece in all its designed glory. Unfortunately the links over at Core77 didn't work properly, hopefully they'll fix them soon so we can all find out more information. And if you were wondering, yes, last night's LCD Soundsystem show at the El Rey was uh-mayz-ing...possibly even legendary. Aside from James Murphy's ability to completely rock it while recovering from a nasty cold, I've never, ever seen an LA audience so into it. I don't think there was a single person who wasn't chanting screaming along with LCD's well-known mantras. Yeah, yeah, yeah, ya-ya yeah yeah yeah!
Ah, what would we ever do without all those enterprising young hackers out there? The latest goodness unleashed upon the world is MySpaceMP3.org, a site whose simple purpose is to let you put in a My Space artist and download all the songs listed on their page as MP3 files. The bit rate and sample rate of the downloads is hardly stellar, at 96k and 22,500Hz (same quality is listening on the artist's page), but if you really want a song and if you can ignore the site's popunder ads, this might just be for you.
Sony Tokyo's R&D group recently showed Music synchronized artistic expressions for Ferrofluid. The artwork, by Yasushi Miyajima and Sachiko Kodama, consisted of a dome filled with ferromagnetic nano particles suspended in a treacly black oil. Using a combination of voltage-regulated electromagnets and metadata added to music beforehand, the nanites appeared to react to the music, assemble themselves in line and form a stunning tree-like display on a central metal pillar.
I'm a sucker for good color, and Pantone knows I'm not the only one. In addition to notepads, bags and all sorts of other branded accessories, you can now order Pantone USB flash drive. Available in 13 Pantone Colors, these compact and portable external drives are Mac and PC compatible and feature capacities up to 4GB.
