Percussa is now shipping their AudioCubes. New images and video can he found here. The price is somewhat lower than what I expected! I may have to pick up a set.

After setting up a recent tracks widget for my homepage with Zend_Service_Audioscrobbler, I came to the disappointing realization many people have lamented. There is no album information in the recent tracks feed, and no easy way to get it through other means. I don't really understand why the album info is not provided in the feed - the album listening stats are available, so it's being stored in the scrobbler database somewhere. I'm sure there's a good reason for this omission, since there have been a number of requests for this feature on the last.fm forums.

Since album detail feeds are available (with track listings!), it's possible to correlate the artist and track names in the recent tracks feed to the albums. It's not an easy task, and it's not 100% accurate, but with a little effort, you can put together a system that can match album info to your recent tracks list, complete with cover art, URLs to the album pages on last.fm, the whole enchilada.

Here's the lowdown

Have you ever wanted to display your last.fm recent tracks (or any other info last.fm info for that matter) on your own site? If you're using the Zend Framework, it's amazingly easy. The Zend_Service_Audioscrobbler class in the incubator provides an easy way of using the Audioscrobbler web services.

I put together a brief tutorial on how to make it happen.

This is one of the coolest things I've ever seen - a fully automated, magazine fed, remote controlled beer launcher.

If only it was easy to get decent beer in 12oz cans.

Akismet provides an unobtrusive mechanism for filtering spam posts from user submitted content. It works. Well. You never have to pester your users with the psychedelic Turing test that is Captcha again.

I installed the Zend_Service_Akismet implementation here and MicroAkismet on a few other blogs over the last week. Even sites with serious comment spam problems have seen the spam drop off to zero. I haven't seen any false positives yet.

Get it. Use it. Love it.

Elle magazine has threatened Avery Brewing of Colorado with a copyright infringement lawsuit over the name of one of it's best-known brews. Avery is a small microbrewery dedicated to brewing excellent, high quality craft brewed beer. Elle magazine is dedicated to the destruction of our society through the starvation and objectification of women.

If you think this is as ridiculous as I do, why not send Elle and email and tell them about it: elle@neodata.com

ZDnet's George Ou is reporting what is now my all time favorite windows exploit. I expect much hilarity to ensue.

UPDATE:
This listserv post from 11 years ago points out the obvious. You'd think that with the NSA helping out with Vista's security this would have been taken care of by now. Too bad Microsoft isn't devoting as much energy to security as they are to DRM.