Thanks to a new Google group I just joined, I get awesome new music in my inbox every day. I was running seriously low on good music. There’s only so many times I can listen to Portugal. The Man before it gets old, and even Kid Cudi radio on Last.fm is becoming repetitive.
[audio:http://blog.rhymeswithmilk.com/media/audio/black-keys-tighten-up.mp3|titles=Tighten Up|artists=The Black Keys]I didn’t mean to imply that I hadn’t listened to the Black Keys before I joined the super fun music group, but I was uninterested enough in their previous albums that their newest album’s release would have gone unnoticed to me. I actually really like it so far, though. Until it’s released on the 18th, you can listen to the whole thing on NPR.org.
No Comments »I can’t figure out if I fucking love this band, or if they annoy me to no end.
Paste magazine thinks they’re phenomenal, so I guess I’ll follow the the crowd for now…
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[audio:http://blog.rhymeswithmilk.com/media/audio/mumford-the-cave.mp3|titles=The Cave|artists=Mumford & Sons]Winamp rules. This song in FLAC rules.
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Frolfing today was awesome, but Hannah didn’t come, so maybe frolfing was not awesome.
It’s profound eloquence like that that makes me think I should’t be blogging.
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Grooveshark has a negligible amount of Smashing Pumpkins songs, and Deezer only has horrific covers. So for the first time, I uploaded a bunch of songs to Grooveshark tonight, 139 of which were Smashing Pumpkins. It says that they will be reviewed and added to my library within 24 hours.
I wonder what that review process is. Are there certain artists or songs that are blocked? There’s no way a human could do all the reviewing, there must be way too many songs uploaded every day. So is there an algorithm they go through to make sure uploaded songs not on the black list? Do they just look at the song’s metadata and compare the song title & artist name against a database? If so, you could just change the songs info to something false, then upload it. Or perhaps they use acoustical signature recognition like Shazam?
Maybe I’m over-thinking it because the *NSync albums I just uploaded are already in my library. Apparently they don’t go through too much scrutiny.
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I just got a new laptop, and it came with dozens of annoyingly bloated applications that I really don’t need. At least 4 different media galleries and organizers were pre-installed. To get around having to delete and uninstall everything, I just wiped the C: drive and installed a fresh, albeit cracked, version of Windows 7.
As it turns out, a lot of the terrible annoying applications were actually there for a reason. They made my computer work. Specifically, they made all the features that originally made my laptop badass work. Not only did a bunch of features stop working (touchpad scrolling, bluetooth, the Fn key), Microsoft somehow found out that the new version of Windows I installed was not genuine, and they reminded me that they knew every 5 minutes.
I called Sony to see if I could buy a restore disk, which I was hoping would be able to restore all of the lost functionality. After a lot of confusing phone calls, I found out that a restore disk doesn’t even exist for my computer. They said that it’s most likely because it’s a new model, and often restore disks aren’t created for at least several months after new products are released.
Which makes NO sense.
Maybe that is in fact the case, but don’t you think it’d be easy enough to create an install disk BEFORE you start selling a specific model. But whatever.
Anyway, I eventually was told that my computer actually has the restore “disk” built in. When I was installing the fresh version of Windows, I noticed that there was at least one extra partition on my hard drive. I had no idea what it was for at the time, but I decided not to erase it…just in case.
Thank god I didn’t. That extra partition contains what is essentially a snapshot of your computer when it left the factory. It had a backup of the original operating system and custom applications Sony spams their new computers with. Ultimately, it was entirely painless going through the restoration process, and within an hour or two, my computer was back to normal.
What I’ve learned (aka the moral of the story):
- Don’t delete mystery factory-created drive partitions…just in case.
- Uninstall shit like Norton 60-day free trials, but if it says “Sony” and you don’t know what it’s for, simply don’t touch it.
- If a cracked product requires activation to work, always activate it OFFLINE if possible.