I’ve followed Deerhunter for a few years, catching them two years ago at Loufest, but I’m really jazzed for their new release, Monomania, which hits May 7th, after their performance last week. On Tuesday they were the musical guest on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon where they played the title track, and just tore things up. A lot of response I’ve read online has questioned, or poked fun at, Bradford Cox’s outfit and his walking off set near the end of the song, but who cares, it’s rock and roll, it’s great. As for the song, it far outdoes any thoughts I had of their future material, this is something else:
So my son’s Nintendo 3DS wi-fi stopped working a few weeks ago, and I finally had time to take a look at it to see if there was anything that could be done. The situation was that it would work fine playing games or doing anything not needing wi-fi access, but as soon as you’d turn on the wi-fi switch, after about 10 seconds, the screen would go black and display the message: Error Message: Error Has Occurred. Hold down the POWER Button to turn the power off. Following the directions and restarting changed nothing, after 10 seconds or so with wi-fi enabled, blamo, black screen of death! Nintendo’s troubleshooting guide led me to the exact issue, but the recommended course of action was only “Hold down the POWER button to power off the system, Continue to use the system to see if the error reoccurs, General system stability can be improved by applying the System Update that was made available on March 24th, 2011. Try applying this System Update and see if the issue improves.” The first two recommendations of course did nothing, and the last one was impossible since you need wi-fi to update the firmware! I followed their links to look into repair, but since the unit is out of warranty it would cost $85.00 (not including tax and shipping) for them to fix it. Hmm… seeing that these go for ~170$ brand new, that seemed pretty excessive, so I dove into a Google search to see what I could find. Forum after forum I found that while this is a pretty common problem, no one seemed to have any idea how to fix it. Finally on ifixit.com I found a promising answer, and it turned out to work perfectly, thanks Alejandro. TL;DR the wi-fi card works itself loose and only needs to be reseated for it to work again. Knowing this, I got down to business and started ripping this sucker apart.
At my last gig I got a crash course in using git fulltime, and I really enjoyed getting used to it, and leaving things like subversion and CVS behind forever. And yes, while I’m sure I gave Ant a few gray hairs on the way, we eventually got there together. He gave me a customized .gitrc to use, which I’ve modified a bit, and now have shared as a gist. This .gitrc tells you the branch you’re on, with color handling of the bash prompt according to the branch/status of the current git repo. For example, the prompt would look like this: [~/foo](master) $ with master colored RED, until you’ve added a file to the repo, but not committed it, when it will turn YELLOW. Once pushed it will turn back to RED to tell you things are in sync. As a bonus, after every command this will set the color of dollar prompt based on return value of previous command. If it’s 0 it will be white to indicate success, if it’s !0 it will be red, indicating an error.
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Another year of fun discovering new toons, what’s not to like? This year took on a more guitar friendly indie sound than past years, a trend I fully support. While there are some comebacks there are more than a few new entries, which again, is that discovery that keeps me going. If I had to pick one disk that I listened to most it’d probably be Swearin’, the fine outfit from Brooklyn that I got to see open for the Japandroids this year; what a fun, unexpected bunch of songs. Meanwhile Tame Impala came back with a monster of a sophomore release, proving Innerspeaker was no fluke. Special notice to Future Of The Left, with a record that makes me think back to early Brainiac, which is always a good thing. With that, here are my picks for the best music of 2012. Read more »
This excerpt of Banksy’s thoughts on advertising is making the rounds, and it’s spot on. With companies tricking consumers into revealing more of themselves becoming the norm, this kind of blowback needs to happen. Somebody get this guy a drink, he’s making more sense than anyone else these days; he’s a smart chap.
look out honey, cause I'm using technology
I use and support
