I’ve had these guys in my pocket for months now, today I finally remembered to check them out. Pretty ordinary day for me today, the up beat of this album was a welcome change.

I’m not normally a reggae fan, but the beats and percussive funk in almost every track is neck snapping addictive. Check it out.

Apart from the size of the stakes, there is no moral difference.

The little time I’ve spent taking in information about this issue for the past few weeks had given me the impression there was something I was missing, there must be some reason why Russia was so out of bounds here v our response in Timor. There is no difference, in fact following the US-Polish agreement on anti-missile defences (including defensive patriots!) there is plenty of good reason for Russia to stay firm.

I got a better understanding and this article from a friend at work today, definitely worth a read.

To commemorate the apology GetUp have released a new version of From Little Things… This version includes plenty of sampled elements from the Keating redfern address and from Rudd’s apology. Not a patch on the original or the live rendition below, but it’s a brilliant idea to get a popular song in the community to commemorate the apology.

I’ve always dug this track, someone was discussing the John Butler Trio & Waifs version they caught live, it made me go looking for alternate versions. This one is John Butler, Missy Higgins, Paul Kelly and Kev Carmody live at Live Earth.

Brilliant stuff, and plenty more on the tube.

Some time in front of reader this week means I’ve had some toys to play with tonight. The coolest and most frustrating all at once has been Last.fm

Essentially I think I care about it as a recommendation engine. It’ll monitor whatever I watch on iTunes (including the iPod) and make recommendations for other tunes I might like. Cool eh? Right now it’s processing my backlog of iTunes listening history.

So the other new cool feature it has is “audio fingerprinting” eventually they’ll build a massive library of hashed mp3’s and be able to clean up the tags on your tunes by letting the cloud pull the data with the “fingerprint” as the key. So far the biggest contributor has submitted 12k tracks - I’m trying to be smarmy and out rank everyone with 17k of clean tracks - but so far I get the box at right after 100 tracks :(

Now this looks way cool I’ve had TVTad running for a few years it’s not under active development anymore and often fails in way that are far too annoying to understand. I now have this whole layer of stuff around TVTad to manage it, restarts - moving files etc. Hopefully Ted will be better.

read more | digg story

You need this article  to get started, it covers the mp4 and h.264 encoding in some detail using mediafork (now known as handbrake).

So far I’ve no idea how it pans out, I dove right in to the encoding - fingers appropriately twisted, we’ll see tomorrow :)

 Update: Headfirst didn’t pan out for me, first pass encoding went fine but the second pass just dumped screens and screens of errors, will have to find a smaller vid to experiment with, or read the article :)