Ouch. Long time no post.
At least none about Japan. However, it was not for the lack of things to happen here, rather the contrary. It’s hard to take the time and distance to synthesize and serialize impressions into meaningful, hopefully enjoyable, posts while you’re in the midsts of the cultural storm. [...]

Radiohead has described In Rainbows as “almost embarrassingly minimal”, and it is. With Hail to the Thief, they had already shown their desire to move past the deconstructionist experimentations of Kid A and Amnesiac.
Rather than digging further in its beautiful alienation, the band has grown more intimate and, it seems, more serene. Although [...]

When called to testify in an RIAA trial about music file sharing, Jennifer Pariser, the head of litigation for Sony BMG, embarrassed herself with a rather simplistic statement:
“When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song.” Making “a copy” of a purchased song [...]

New XMMS2 clients appear almost weekly, but their visibility has so far been limited to the IRC channel, the Wiki and, occasionally, the mailing-list. I thought it would be more exciting for the community to hear about the life (and death) of clients on the Planet, and thus I offer from now on to publish [...]

MP3Tunes may or may not be an Evil (as in Axis of ~) service, but it just announced a developer contest to encourage people to implement its API and create new interfaces (on the desktop, mobile phone, TV, toilet seat, whatever).
The contest page on the official website isn’t quite as verbose as one would have [...]

I posted a review of William Gibson’s Spook Country, in French, on the Xénobiophiles blog. Here is the English version of it.
“We’re all doing VR [Virtual Reality], every time we look at a screen. We have been for decades now. We just do it. We didn’t need the goggles, the gloves. It just happened. [...]