Read | Chris Aldrich

👓 Duxtape | Kicks Condor

Read Duxtape by Kicks Condor (Kicks Condor)

While messing with Dat last night, I got carried away in nostalgia and began… recreating Muxtape in Dat. I wanted to see how far I could get. (If you don’t know what Muxtape was—it was a way of sharing mp3 mixtapes online for a brief window of time in 2008, until it was shut down by the grown-ups.)

So, it seemed interesting to try to replicate Muxtape, because it would be very hard to “shut down” on the Dat network. And, sure enough, I was able to get it working quite well: you can upload songs, tweak the colors and titles, order the songs and such—I think this is quite faithful.

And, yes, it’s peer-to-peer. You can edit your tape using the URL created for you. Then you can pass that same URL out to share your tape. Visitors can listen to the music and seed the tape for everyone else.

If you’re interested in seeing what a mix looks like, try: dat://8587f3…aa/. (You’ll need Beaker.)

Source code is here. Inspired by Tara Vancil’s dat-photos-app. Thanks, Tara!

This is an awesome idea. I really wish I had the bandwidth to dig into DAT. Who wouldn’t want to be able to make mixtapes like this for the internet? It’s not too dissimilar to my listen feed (aka faux-cast), but could be more customized and curated for friends/family.

👓 WordPress VIP Go sites are experience outages (yes, us included) | TechCrunch.tumblr.com

Read Wordpress VIP Go sites are experience outages (yes, us included) (TechCrunch)

You might have notice something funny if you visited TechCrunch dot com this morning (aside form the usual dryly hilarious tech commentary, that is). Our site, along with others, was hit by a major...

Fascinating to see TechCrunch is syndicating content to a Tumblr so they’re still “up” during a hosting outage.

👓 To Save The Science Poster, Researchers Want To Kill It And Start Over | NPR

Read To Save The Science Poster, Researchers Want To Kill It And Start Over by

Nell Greenfieldboyce (NPR)

Mike Morrison hardly looks like a revolutionary. He's wearing a dark suit and has short hair. But we're about to enter a world of conformity that hasn't changed in decades — maybe even a century. And in there, his vision seems radical. "We are about to walk into a room full of 100 scientific posters, where researchers are trying to display their findings on a big poster board," says Morrison, a doctoral student in psychology at Michigan State University. The idea of a science poster is simple. Get some poster-making materials and then slap on a title, the experimental methods and the results. Almost everyone has created a poster like this at some point — often in childhood, for a school assignment or a science fair.

I like the idea of this, but most conferences worth their salt also publish short abstracts of most poster presentations which have roughly this type of short overview of poster presentations. Prepared researchers will have scanned through them all and highlighted a dozen or so they want to stop by to see more about or meet the researchers.

Of course, all this to say that this method isn’t a potential improvement for the lazy drive-by poster visitor.

👓 The Day the Music Burned | New York Times Magazine

Read The Day the Music Burned (New York Times Magazine)

It was the biggest disaster in the history of the music business — and almost nobody knew. This is the story of the 2008 Universal fire.

This brings back some memories of when I worked for several months for Iron Mountain at their Hollywood facility right next to Anawalt lumber. They had quite a large repository of music masters stored there as well as a custom nitrate film vault. At the time I remember thinking many of the same things mentioned here. I suspect that there’s an even bigger issue in film preservation, though this particular article makes it seem otherwise.

I’m surprised that the author doesn’t whip out any references to the burning of the Library at Alexandria, which may have been roughly on par in terms of cultural loss to society. It’s painfully sad that UMG covered up the devastating loss.

The artwork for the piece is really brilliant. Some great art direction here.

👓 There’s Nothing Wrong With Posing for Photos at Chernobyl | Taylor Lorenz | The Atlantic

Read There’s Nothing Wrong With Posing for Photos at Chernobyl by Taylor Lorenz (The Atlantic)

Influencer-style pictures are simply the way we document our lives now.

Strip away the headline and the social media influencer angle which is a canard.

There’s an interesting societal shift happening here in photography. For counterpoint, compare this with Pictures of Death: Postmortem Photography by Nancy West (The Atlantic).

👓 The Soothing Promise of Our Own Artisanal Internet | WIRED

Read The Soothing Promise of Our Own Artisanal Internet by

Nitasha Tiku (WIRED)

As unease with Big Tech grows, some prescribe a slower, less viral online existence. "Eat independent sites, mostly not Facebook."

Great overview article on some of the bigger problems. It also has some excellent analogies of the web with the changes in the food movement over the past 30 years or so. Nothing new, but well written and with some great links to pull things together.

👓 The cheater in the Oval Office should be banished from the tribe | LA Times

Read The cheater in the Oval Office should be banished from the tribe by Virginia Heffernan (LA Times)

Think Trump didn't know he was getting a shady assist at the ballot box. Read the Mueller report.