Nobody onstage can hear anything the audience doesn’t hear. No click tracks, no guides, nothing can be heard onstage that isn’t going to the front of the house. If it’s a synthesizer, you have to make that sound onstage happen with a synth. If it’s an organic sound, it absolutely cannot be put on a sampler. No ‘feeling it'. No sunglasses. No rocking out. No improvising. No noodling. No psyching up the crowd. No pretending you’re cool. I understand that if someone’s going to make me his idea of cool I can’t control that. But no wearing the rock-and-roll hat.

James Murphy, aka LCD Soundsystem, on their live show. The new album is killer.

Heartfelt and sad reflection on faltering middle aged relationships. Album out today.

Dark Chocolate with:

+ Jalapeños 
+ Fleur de Sel (Sea Salt) 
+ Ginger 
+ Hazelnut Brittle 
+ Organic Mint Leaves

aka Jalesaltginhazminto!

A cracking, pulsating track from The National. Album out today.

Beautiful looking bikes, not overdesigned or overdoohickeyed or overbranded. Especially this one - fluro orange with white tyres and yet it still looks simple.

When the hot zone is the entire device, and it’s a device you’re likely to be frequently picking up and handling, using it is actually slightly stressful: you don’t want to accidentally trigger unexpected behavior, so you’re more careful and cautious… One reason the Kindle seems like a more “peaceful” ebook reader, and why the Kindle 2 is so much better than the first Kindle, is that it has almost no hot zones.

Marco.org on touch screen ‘hot zones'. I know the feeling from the iPhone - it’s disorienting when it rotates when you don’t mean it to.

Kotaku on game worlds. Be interesting to see where something like the old Ultima games came in. Very small I suspect, despite feeling huge in their day.

At my first corporate sell-out job, there was a guy running a PC piracy club. You paid him $20 to be a member, which qualified you for a bottomless list of games and apps burned to CD on request. This was in the days of 28.8k modems, so it was a big deal - he was downloading cracked software 24x7.

There was no way he, nor any members, could have bought or even played more than a few of the games available. People would go nuts requesting every last download, despite there being no chance they would get through them. It was more about the kudos of having the game than actually playing it. Which also means they would never have paid for it even if it wasn’t available via the ‘club'.

Which makes this article ring very true.

Wired:

Facebook has gone rogue, drunk on founder Mark Zuckerberg’s dreams of world domination. It’s time the rest of the web ecosystem recognizes this and works to replace it with something open and distributed.

Australian iPad pricing: $629-$1049