T w e n t y S i d e d

• Despite the success portrayed in this instance, I still maintain that if you are going to attack someone you should not use your face to do so.

• Here is a cool meme that got a bit out of hand: A Blog Tour of Homes. Like all the best memes, it might seem a bit obvious and pointless at first, but then turns out to be quite interesting. People run around their house and take pictures, post them on their blog with some (hopefully) brief descriptions, and then you get to have a look around the place. It’s fun to see these different homes and the different ways people live. I found it strangely compelling. Unless you’re some sort of salesman or peeping tom, you usually don’t geet to see inside of a lot of different houses, so this was interesting. My wife has our house in the list somewhere.

• Scott Morris at SUSE Blog has made his book “The Easiest Linux Guide You'll Ever Read – an introduction to Linux for Windows users” available for download. It’s aimed at the total newbie. Brilliant. My wife used Linux for a while and it has a lot to offer the tired Windows user, but those first few steps are brutal. Any move in this direction is a good thing in my book. (Although I do hope the book is more pithy than the title!)

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Since I seem to be blogging about music today, I just have to mention Party Ben, a mashup artist. In mashups, someone takes two very different songs – the more different the better – and overlaps them in such a way that they sound like they belong together. I heard some mashup via a FARK link a couple of years ago and I wasn’t impressed. It sounded more or less like you’d expect: Like listening to two different songs at once.

But Party Ben actually pulls it off, and the results are amazing. Some of the mashups sound even better than the source material. The most impressive is the one where he combines Green Day, Oasis, Travis, Aerosmith, and Eminem. And he makes it work. Check out “Boulevard of Broken Songs“. (About halfway down the page.) Then he mixes Snoop Dog with Led Zepplin, if you can believe that.

Remarkable. Normally I think of popular music as cool, but this has a certain “getting Linux running on a toaster” Geekyness to it.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.