Remix Culture

I love mashups and I love mixes. The only thing I could possibly love more is a mix of mashups!
For those that don’t know, a mashup is the mixing to two songs to intertwine. Like the music from one song mixed with the lyrics from another song. A mix is the blending of two songs into each other.
On the local radio station Indie 103.1 is a weekly show called The Smash Mix, which is a half hour long mix of mashups. DJ Paul Vhas been doing a great job for the last several weeks with the Smash Mix and keeping it entertaining. His mix on April 15th for Tax Day was brilliant.
The mix airs on Fridays at 5:30-6:00pm and repeats at 9:30-10:00pm on Indie 103.1. They have a good streaming feed, so even non-Angelenos can listen in. Personally, I record it weekly with my Griffin Radioshark.
The best place to find the mix is at CultureDeluxe under DJ Paul V. You can also find the mixes at FleetwoodMash, scroll down to DJ Paul V.
There is even a Smash Mix podcast feed at Alohadude.net, for those podcastingly inclined.
I wrote to DJ Paul and asked how he made the mixes, I assumed it was all produced in a digital audio workstation software package. It’s not, it’s mixed LIVE. Here’s DJ Paul’s reply:

I guess I should let people know this more:
All Smash Mixes are made & mixed live – CD deck to CD deck (usually 4 decks tho). I’m not mixing them live on the air, but I pre-make them during the week.

But there’s no audio software involved at all. I might take a stab trying Cool Edit soon, but I haven’t even installed the program yet.

I kinda like that there’s a live and real DJ element to the mixes, even if they could be perfected using software.

Ciao for now….PV

To me, this is the remix culture I love. Sure translating speeches into different languages via Creative Commons licenses is a cool idea, but it a bit dull compared to rocking out to tunes by a great DJ…
There are those that don’t like Indie 103.1 because it’s owned by Entravision and has ties to Clear Channel, but I love it. This is some real creativity and great radio pumping out on Indie.
If loving the Smash Mix on Indie 103.1 is wrong, I don’t want to be right.

Rainy

It’s a rainy morning here at Cruft Manor. To bring you up to speed on the latest developments, here’s a quick update.
We got a dog. Err, well I should say, while I was off at NAB in Las Vegas, Michele and the girls got a dog. Michele has the story and picture over on her site.


I was not 100% in favor of getting a dog at this time, but you I’ve learned not to fight the inevitable. The dog is very cute, but I was suprised to find that Michele saved a dog with no tail.

I don’t know if the dog lost it’s tail, is a strange no-tail mutant dog, or her breed of dog has no tail. I don’t even know what kind of dog, young Piper is. All I know is that a dog without a tail is strange.
Next on the news front is Mira losing her teeth. Yes, at 6 years old, Mira has lost both of her bottom front teeth.

Even Michele had to admit, Mira is no longer a baby, she is indeed a big girl now.
On the household tech front, the old Whirlpool dishwasher slowly died. For several years, it has only worked in Heavy Wash cycle and no other way. We bit the bullet and with the advice of Papa Tony, we bought a Maytag washer with Jetclean® II and Quiet Series™ 300.
In the brief time the old dishwasher was removed, I snapped a picture of the empty space in the counter, revealing the layers of paint and age in our 56 year old house.

Lastly, the trailer for Serenity, the movie based on the show Firefly, is out. Check it out.

Need a monitor – askflickr



Need a monitor – askflickr, originally uploaded by Argyle.

This is the computer in our kitchen. It is a hacked Virgin computer from the dot-boom era.
It’s slowing dying and I plan to replace it. The computer is easy to build, but a simple 10″ LCD monitor is tough to find.
15″ LCDs are easy to find, but 10″ LCDs are quite hard to find for a reasonable ( <$200 ) price. Any suggestions?

Monday MLP

This made me laugh this morning.
Loyal Cruft reader Ben told me about a great article on Dr. Pepper, the Lando Calrissian of sodas. Thanks Ben!
Alex, another Loyal Cruft reader, passes on a link about business jargon. Sadly, I hear this crap all day long…

Anonyblog is back after some password issues and my derelict stewardship of the site.
I was surprised at dinner last with Len & Monique that the upcoming XXX movie wasn’t staring Vin Diesel. Ice Cube in the new XXX. I’m so there.
Lastly, in a bid to adopt a dog from a rescue group, my wife Michele aka Scarymommy, posted photos of our house on her weblog. You can see Cruft Manor in all it’s glory. Of course, Mr. P, will have some issue with this…
And in World of Warcraft:


My alchemy skill roxxors.

Funny

You know what’s funny?
Getting new business cards a month ago, handing them out to many people, and being told today that the email address is wrong.
And not just wrong as in typo/misspelling, wrong in as another person’s address all together.
Poor Mr. P has been getting my emails and having no idea why.

Change comes

Today is a big day in the Pusateri household. Michele and I have discussed this quite a bit and come to the decision for me to leave the world of television and move into working full time on my real passion, Datafloss.


You gotta do what you love, and I love this new opportunity.
Some may say I’m crazy to give up the executive pay, first class travel, and a corner office, but they simple don’t know the world-changing and paradigm-shifting power of Datafloss.
Life will be different for the family as we enter ‘start-up mode’ and I finish up the first round of financing that’s been going on in the background for a couple months now.
Cruftbox will remain as my private voice on the net, but look for my new professional voice at Datafloss!

PixToPix

Most mobile phone carriers offer camera phones as one of the new features to induce people to upgrade and commit to even longer contracts. Obviously camera phones have great appeal to many people for a variety of uses. From a mobile phone, one can send these images off to email addresses and other mobile phones via the MMS feature. MMS stands for Multimedia Messaging Service, which is a fancy way of saying a way to send images, sounds, and text.
While some phones can now handle true email, almost every cameraphone has MMS capability built-in. On paper this sounds great, using MMS to send photos from your phone to the phones of your friends and family. Unfortunately this is not the case.
MMS works well within a carrier, so I can send MMS messages with photos to other T-Mobile users (like my wife 🙂 ), hell we can even record audio clips into the phone and send them along with the photo for a fully multimedia message. It’s funny and useful. More than once I’ve shopping and sent a picture to my wife for the go ahead on a purchase. We envision our daughters doing the same thing in the future as they get older.
Imagine this conversation:
Me: Hey Zoe, what’s up?
Zoe: I’m just hanging with Emily.
Me: Oh really, where at?
Zoe: Um, err, at the library, yeah, we’re at the library.
Me: Really, sure you’re not at the mall drooling over boys?
Zoe: Dad!
Me: Well if you are at the library send me a picture of some books.
Zoe: Dad!?1!! You don’t trust me?
Me: Humor your dear old father…
Zoe: [a photo of Zoe giving the finger arrives]
In another spectacular failure of American telecom policy, almost no major wireless carrier allows MMS traffic from outside their network. The glaring example of the ‘marketplace deciding’ technology issues make the American mobile phone scene dead last in the industrial world.
Here’s how US MMS policies don’t work. My phone is on T-Mobile. I want to send a camphone picture to my brother who has a Verizon phone. If I send him an MMS message of a photo, Verizon intentionally strips the photo from the message before relaying it to him. I have the same problem sending MMS messages to every other wireless carrier.
The carriers will tell you send the MMS messages to an email address that is invariably something like [yourphonenumer]@[yourwirelesscarrier].com. I have tested this extensively and it does not work from phone to phone. The carriers think that if they erect these information blockades, they will force you to get your friends and family to switch to the same carrier. Just like their position on number portability, they are wrong. If they opened MMS capability, it would be an advantage to use them instead of other carriers that block the MMS messages.
Have no fear; help has arrived in the form of PixToPix.com. The kind people at PixToPix.com offer a free service to serve as a middleman for cameraphone pictures. If you sign up with PixToPix and give then the vital info about your phone, you get a [yourusername]@pixtopix.com email address. When you give that email address to your friends and family, they can send MMS messages from their phones to that address and PixToPix will convert and relay them to your phone. The service even works with emailing images from a computer directly without using a phone.
I’ve tested it and it works well. If you send a MMS picture to cruftbox@pixtopix.com, it will pop up on my mobile phone. Now my brother and I can exchange photos even though T-Mobile and Verizon don’t want us to. 🙂
The system even addresses privacy issues. If somehow people start sending photos I don’t like, I can drop my current Pixtopix address and get another. Much better than having to change your phone number.
Looking toward the future, imagine an interface with Flickr or Textamerica where you could subscribe to pool image feeds and have them sent to your phone. Or parsing the Yahoo News Top Photos RSS feed and getting a daily dump of interesting photos. Or getting a regular photo sent to you from a nannycam. The possibilities go on and on.
Give it a try, I would bet that a high percentage of loyal Cruft readers have camera phones.
The service works for most major US and Canadian wireless carriers, but if you have one of the remaining small local ones, you may be out of luck.