Craphound had wicked yard-sale karma, for a rotten, filthy alien bastard. He was too good at panning out the single grain of gold in a raging river of uselessness for me not to like him -- respect him, anyway. But then he found the cowboy trunk. It was two months' rent to me and nothing but some squirrelly alien kitsch-fetish to Craphound.

So I did the unthinkable. I violated the Code. I got into a bidding war with a buddy. Never let them tell you that women poison friendships: in my experience, wounds from women-fights heal quickly; fights over garbage leave nothing behind but scorched earth.

Craphound spotted the sign -- his karma, plus the goggles in his exoskeleton, gave him the advantage when we were doing 80 kmh on some stretch of back-highway in cottage country. He was riding shotgun while I drove, and we had the radio on to the CBC's summer-Saturday programming: eight weekends with eight hours of old radio dramas: "The Shadow," "Quiet Please," "Tom Mix," "The Crypt-Keeper" with Bela Lugosi. It was hour three, and Bogey was phoning in his performance on a radio adaptation of _The African Queen_. I had the windows of the old truck rolled down so that I could smoke without fouling Craphound's breather. My arm was hanging out the window, the radio was booming, and Craphound said "Turn around! Turn around, now, Jerry, now, turn around!"

We recorded a long interview with Sir Clive Sinclair, British personal computer pioneer (ZX80, ZX81, ZX spectrum) and we've just posted it, more or less unexpurgated, online. Many of your readers will have grown up playing games on one of Sir Clive's machines. In the interview he talks about everything from from flying electric cars to Eee PC's and and his thoughts on the modern computing industry.

Sir Clive Sinclair [ BBC iPM ]

I am not audiophile and I do not have a golden ear, but I am extremely interested in the blunt force trauma of the awesome clarity and unambiguous nature of completely rocking out. There are tons of quadraphonic albums on eBay and it is only a matter of time until I find a quadraphonic 8-track player at a garage sale for $1. Besides, it turns out quad receivers are selling on eBay for less than two rolls of quarters, so from a cost of fun perspective, some quad audio experiments are a pretty good value.

Besides the aforementioned technical snafus, there will be the issue of availability of key releases as I imagine Iggy Pop's "Raw Power" is not available in quad. What about Ziggy Stardust? And Black Sabbath's "Paranoid?" Or, at the opposite end of the spectrum, what if a friend excitedly brings over a quadraphonic Yes album and I am not able to keep from ripping it from the turntable to smash it to bits?

Simply Audiobooks has announced plans to make a full range of Random House audiobook titles available for purchase and download in a DRM-free format. The deal makes the Toronto audiobook retailer the first to offer Random House audiobooks DRM-free, and covers more than 5,000 RH audio titles. Downloads will initially be limited to Simply Audiobooks Download Club members, but a la carte download sales will be available later in the summer.

Raymond Scott is, of course, the genius composer who wrote all the amazing tunes that Carl Stalling adapted for the Warner Brothers cartoons. He's hands-down my favorite composer and he was also a brilliant engineer whose homebrew, pre-digital sampling and sequencing techniques were 60 years ahead of their time. Link, Link to RaymondScott.com (Thanks, Ape Lad!)

Back when Amazon bought Audible, they claimed that they would drop DRM if there was enough public outcry and now they claim that something may be in the works, but no one has seen any DRM-free audiobooks from Audible, and no one at Audible is available to do a deal for DRM-free books.

In the meantime, I was lucky enough to meet the Naxos folks at Book Expo America in LA last month and they were absolutely charming. I asked them if they'd be willing to post some MP3s of their stuff for the benefit of Boing Boing readers and they were only too happy to -- so now you can download a free Sherlock Holmes story (the gloriously titled "Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle") and the first chapter of Tom Sawyer (including Twain's inspiring introduction).

I love having the chance and the choice to support audiobook companies that respect readers' rights and the author's right to decide whether DRM should be larded onto his books. Naxos's MP3 store works great and is filled with wonderful titles for your delectation. Link

UK-based Russell Porter chronicles alt music culture in the Porter Report with aggressive wit and offbeat charm. Today, part one of his exclusive interview for Boing Boing tv with the rap / IDM / hiphop / house / genre-bending artist Cadence Weapon, aka Rollie Pemberton, who hails from Edmonton, Canada.

Cadence Weapon, who is 22 years old, is touring Europe and US throughout the summer. Dates are listed -- where else? -- on his MySpace, along with various blinky things. His newest record Afterparty Babies was just released on Epitaph, and is, as the kids say, fierce.

Link to Boing Boing tv episode with discussion, downloadable video, and instructions for subscribing to the BBtv video podcast feed.

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* Here are previous BBtv episodes featuring Russell Porter. Hot fire. (special thanks to Jolon Bankey).

Update: Russell Porter episodes featured on Boing Boing tv get a nod in Rolling Stone. Journamalists: Do not make fun of his hat, for it is awesome.

I’ve just listened to several of the songs on this CD and, frankly, this is some weird shit. I say this without reservation. The musical styles are all over the map except that they all only use human voices (and occasionally hands). Some of it is similar to Western, Christian, styles of chanting. Other tracks are more Classical vocal arrangements with singing. The rest of the tracks seem to be heavily influenced by Eastern, Buddhist, styles of chanting, especially Tibetan Buddhism with its use of harmonics and overlaying voices. It varies quite a bit from song to song. Additionally, when there are recognizable words, they are not in English (nor in any language that I recognize). “Celluar Automata” is the weirdest track of this sort with multiple voices weaving in and out, along with some clapping and exclamations in an unknown language. “Thousander Chant” would be at home on some of the collections of Tibetan chanting that I have and whoever is performing it is obviously trained in the throat chanting used by Tibetans and others in Asia.

See also: Ask Neal Stephenson questions about Anathem

See also: Locus Award winners announced -- After the Siege is best novella 2008!

See also: Canadian Industry Minister lies about his Canadian DMCA on national radio, then hangs up

Spotted on Joi Ito's blog: quick and dirty directions on how to "hack" Firefox 3 into delivering richer, brighter colors more faithful to the original photograph (or graphic).

Snip:

I think that the esoteric discussions about color are interesting, but for most people, the bottom line is, if you turn color profile support "on" on Firefox 3, many images will end up appearing much closer to the color of the original and less washed out. You do this by typing "about:config" in the address bar of Firefox 3. Click thru confirmation page and find: gfx.color_management.enabled. Double click that until it says "true". Then restart Firefox 3.

There are a number of monitor color calibration gadgets and software packages like Eye One Match which will allow you to calibrate your monitor (and camera and printer). If everyone actually did this, we'd all be seeing the same colors.

Whatever, I'm just thrilled that favorite snaps I shot, caressed lovingly in Photoshop, then uploaded to Flickr don't look so anemic anymore. Like "Daniela," above, an aging camioneta cooling her heels on a beach along the Pacific coast of Guatemala. Or these women from the Gaddi tribe in Northern India, at bottom, climbing a mountain to reach a shrine.

Source: DRIA. Gina at Lifehacker just blogged about it, too.

This summer, the Violent Femmes have released their own smoky, slow cover of Gnarls Barkley's high energy falsetto anthem "Crazy" and it's exactly as great, in reverse. Link (via Salon)

Blackstone now joins with Random House Audio (the audio division of the world's largest publisher, Bertelsmann) in rejecting DRM for its audiobooks and I've heard off-the-record accounts of other major audiobook houses planning to do the same.

All this raises the question: when will Audible -- the largest audiobook retailer in the world and the exclusive provider of downloadable audiobooks for iTunes and Amazon -- drop the DRM on its audiobooks? I was shocked a month ago to hear from Amazon that they would not carry the Random House Audio audiobook of my NYT-bestselling novel Little Brother because it was only available as an MP3. Official Amazon policy on audiobooks still seems to be no DRM = no dice.

Bravo to Blackstone for taking a stand for its customers' rights!
PDF Link to Blackstone Audio letter

See also: Random House Audio abandons audiobook DRM

I'm an enormous fan of the original Twilight Zone series (even moreso since I heard the excellent Tank Riot podcast on Rod Serling) and I really enjoyed the 30 episodes in these collections, though a few were weaker in the adaptation and acting than others. Keach does a surprisingly good job standing in for Serling, and the scripts -- lightly updated for contemporary performance -- are really well-suited to audio. There's a good mix of comic and spooky, dark and light in the stories adapted, too.

This strikes me as really top-notch cross-country driving audio, the kind of thing you could listen to in 40-minute chunks with your kids, each episode sparking a discussion about social issues, technological speculation, or moral questions. A few of the episodes are spooky enough to qualify as campfire stories, too. At about $30/box, it works out to $3 per episode, which seems about right -- a little expensive for a couple of the weaker ones and a real steal for the great ones. Link to Volume 1, Link to Volume 2, Link to Volume 3

UK-based Russell Porter chronicles alt music culture in the Porter Report with aggressive wit and offbeat charm. In today's episode, Russell has a sit down chat on a stoney beach with eclectic melodramatic pop musician, George Pringle.

Link to Boing Boing tv post with discussion and downloadable video.

Here are previous BBtv episodes featuring Russell Porter. (special thanks to Jolon Bankey).

Richard is taking Amazon at its word: he's set up "Call an Audible," a one-click site for sending your feedback to Amazon on its DRM policy. I'll be sending them an email: Audible is the exclusive supplier of audiobooks to iTunes (itself the largest distribution channel for audiobooks in the world) and Amazon won't sell audiobooks through its MP3 store, either.

My latest novel is a Random House audiobook and Amazon refused to carry it because it had no DRM on it -- I never thought I'd see the day when Amazon would refuse to sell my books because they didn't have enough restrictions. After all, this is the company whose official (and fantastic) position on used books is "When someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this." It goes without saying that one of the rights you lose when you buy an Audible book is the right to resell it, loan it or give it away.

I used to be a very dedicated Audible customer: I spent thousands amassing a giant collection of audiobooks. When I switched from the Mac to Linux, I had to rip all those books by playing them out through AudioHijack on three separate CPUs, which took an entire month. The more you spend at Audible, the harder it is to get out. Link (Thanks, Richard!)

Rockabilly accordion vampire Count Smokula was born 496 years ago in Smokesylvania. Herbal remedies and excellent squeezebox tunes have empowered him with eternal life. BBtv caught up with him at a recent accordion music shindig in Los Angeles to explore the mystery behind his miraculous powers of entertainment.

Link to Boing Boing tv post with discussion and downloadable video.

I love Sedaris's audio stuff -- he's such a great reader, it really brings the work to life. Plus: DRM-free audio! Link (Thanks, Brian!)

I did.

Little Fuzzy is Piper's masterpiece, a tight, neat science fiction story that epitomizes the golden age of sf. It concerns a prospector on a distant world who discovers a potentially sentient aboriginal race (the "Fuzzies), and his ensuing fight -- fists, lawyers and even guns -- to get them recognized as sentient beings. Along the way, Piper explores the nature of colonial economies, the deepest questions of consciousness and intelligence, paternalism and self-determination, and the nature of the rule of law. All in a package that a nine-year-old will find riveting and delightful.

The Audio Realms 5-CD unabridged recording just won Publishers Weekly's annual Fantasy Audiobook of the Year award (why "fantasy" I'm not sure), and it's easy to see why. Brian Holsopple's reading brings the characters -- warm, human, flawed and passionate -- to life. The editing is not exactly perfect (there's a couple of pickup lines that Holsopple recorded that are left in, which is a little distracting), but the story is every bit as wonderful as I remember it, and the reading is a great match.

Little Fuzzy is in the public domain, so there's both a free ebook and a free recording available of the text. And for the record, I got Tanya Huff's job at Bakka when she retired to write full time. Link to Audio Realms award-winning Little Fuzzy audiobook on CD, Link to free, public domain reading of Little Fuzzy, Link to free text for Little Fuzzy

Mrs. Sloan had only three fingers on her left hand, but when she drummed them against the countertop, the tiny polished bones at the end of the fourth and fifth stumps clattered like fingernails. If Judith hadn't been looking, she wouldn't have noticed anything strange about Mrs. Sloan's hand.

"Tell me how you met Herman," said Mrs. Sloan. She turned away from Judith as she spoke, to look out the kitchen window where Herman and his father were getting into Mr. Sloan's black pickup truck. Seeing Herman and Mr. Sloan together was a welcome distraction for Judith. She was afraid Herman's stepmother would catch her staring at the hand. Judith didn't know how she would explain that with any grace: Things are off to a bad enough start as it is.

Outside, Herman wiped his sleeve across his pale, hairless scalp and, seeing Judith watching from the window, turned the gesture into an exaggerated wave. He grinned wetly through the late afternoon sun. Judith felt a little grin of her own growing and waved back, fingers waggling an infantile bye-bye. Hurry home, she mouthed through the glass. Herman stared back blandly, not understanding.