Apple’s iTunes application is perhaps the most popular app ever installed on the Mac. It’s also one of the least flexible, in terms of customization. There’s little you can do to “make it your own,” so to speak. However, all is not lost for habitual tweakers like myself; the iTunes Visualizer can satisfy your need to not leave well-enough alone. If you display your iTunes window on a second monitor, or just like to look at the iTunes Visualizer full screen on your 30″ LCD, you should know that you have some really nice options available for customizing the appearance of the Visualizer. iTunes default Visualizer Invoking the Visualizer by hitting Command + T (hit Command + F to make it full screen if you wish) then hitting the ? key brings up an overlay on the Visualizer screen containing a few keyboard shortcuts to control various aspects of whichever Visualizer you’re running at the time. But these customizations only go so far. To move beyond minor tweaks to Apple’s built-in Visualizers, you can install a number of truly cool third-party Visualizers which really enhance the iTunes experience. Download More Visualizers I’ve put together a list of some of my favorite Visualizers to get you started. This is by no means a complete list, so if you’re looking for even more, I suggest a quick Google search to quench your thirst. All the Visualizers listed below work perfectly with OS X Leopard, iTunes 8.2, and are free to download and use. Click the preview image to go directly to the download page of each Visualizer. Punkt Visualizer Punkt is a Quartz Composer Visualizer that is much cooler than it appears in this screenshot. Colors burst to the beat of your music. Circle Visualizer Circle places the track name, artist and album in a circular format, and floats in a 3D space. Fountain Music Visualizer Fountain Music is probably one of my favorite Visualizers. It reminds me of the drummers in The Blue Man Group, where water is blasting upwards from the drums, highlighted by bright neon lights as they play. Fountain Music also has a decent amount of customization options, such as particle size and color. Dragon Visualizer Dragon features a squishy, squirmy dragon dancing to your music. I almost feel like this one borders on being somewhat icky — but it’s truly awesome. WhiteCap Visualizer WhiteCap places dynamic wireframe mesh visuals on your screen, cycling through colors and traveling through space. Figure Visualizer Figure places the track title, album, artist and album art on a virtual wall, swiveling around in 3D space. Bugaboo Visualizer Bugaboo places colorful dancing lightning bugs on screen. This is another one of those that you have to see to appreciate. Cubism Visualizer Cubism brings a Tetris-like appearance to your Visualizer, bouncing blocks to the beat of your music. A 3D cube with the album art mingles among the blocks as well. Gaslight Visualizer Gaslight is a customizable frequency spectrum analyzer — kind of old-school, but still quite nice! Snow Visualizer Snow, another offering from WowLab, displays colorful snow blowing across your screen. This one is really nice for soothing music after a rough day at the office. LED Flow Visualizer LED Flow uses Apple’s Quartz technology to place a colorful level meter in 3D space. G-Force Visualizer G-Force, the original awesome third-party Visualizer for iTunes, still going strong with its fractal goodness! Sing Visualizer Sing places a friendly little creature in your iTunes window and sings. Sort of. Well, it’s cool to look at anyway. Jumping Steve Visualizer Jumping Steve pays homage to Steve Jobs with a cutout jumping jack that dances to the beat. Hit the P key for a special iPod commercial-like silhouette feature. Don’t forget that different Visualizers will offer disparate customization options, the level of which (if any) varies between minor, and fairly major stuff — it just depends on the developer, and how much time they bothered to put in. Don’t forget to hit the ? key to find out what options are available to you. If you’ve never installed a plugin or other add-on to iTunes, Visualizers are a great place to start. They’re simple, require little effort to get up and running, and typically they either work or they don’t, with no ill side-effects.

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Pandora, Twitter, Evite and more are parodied in epic Broadway fashion.

Swedish software firm Global Gaming Factory X this morning announced it has agreed to buy file-sharing service The Pirate Bay for 60 million Swedish crowns (which currently converts to approx. $7.7 million). In addition, GGF has entered into an agreement to acquire the shares in Peerialism, a software technology company that develops solutions for data distribution and distributed storage based on new p2p technology. The transaction is scheduled to be closed in August 2009. Last April, the founders of The Pirate Bay were sentenced to one year in jail and a fine of $3.6 million for running the site, which is one of the world largest for downloading files on the Internet (one of the 100 most visited websites in the world according to the press release). The case had been brought on by a number of groups from the music and movie industry. Global Gaming Chief Executive Hans Pandeya said: “We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site.” We’re gathering more information and will update this post accordingly. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

CollegeHumor has outdone itself again. Just a few days after unveiling Bing, the better way to Google, the site has released Web Site Story, a five minute musical tribute to some of the web’s most popular websites. I’m not going to ruin any of the jokes, but suffice to say if you’ve ever bashed Evite, found yourself a few characters over the Twitter limit, or relied on Pandora to serve up some new tunes, you’re going to love this.

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

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Bugün adet görmeme yakınması ile başvuran bir hipermarket kasiyerine muayenesini bitirdikten sonra "Sizin kasalarda 1 kuruş bulunmuyor mu?" diye sordum"Bir torba duruyor ama kullanmıyoruz" dedi"Neden kullanmıyorsunuz? Özellikle Avrupa ülkelerinde para üstü son kuruşuna kadar ödeniyor, ama Türkiye'de kuruş verildiğini hiç görmedim" dedim"Halk istemiyor, taşımıyor da. Biz mesela 61, 62 kuruşluk bir mala 60 kuruş, 63 kuruşluk mala da 65 kuruş diyoruz" dedi"Bu size verilen bir talimat mı, zira benim gördüğüm 61 kuruşa da 65 kuruş isteniyor?" dedim"Hayır, kendi inisiyatifimizle öyle yapıyoruz. Az alınanla, fazla alınan birbirini götürüyor, genelde akşam kasa 5-10 kuruş farkla kapanıyor. Şahsen ben öyle bir kuruş için sorun çıkaran olursa 5 kuruş veriyorum" dedi"Peki hep fazla alındığında kuruşlar birikip kayda değer bir yekün oluşturmaz mı?" diye sordum"O zaman kasa fazla verir, kasiyerin savunması alınır. Ha, arada günahı boynuna cebine atabilir, ama kameralar var, yine yakalanır" dediBütün tahlilleri ve ultrasonografisi normal olduğundan kanamasının olmamasına üzülmemesini, çünkü adet sırasında gelen kanın halk arasında bilindiği gibi vücuttan atılması gereken kirli kan olmayıp damarlarında dolaşan normal kanı olduğunu, bu sayede daha az kan kaybedip kansızlık sorunu da çekmeyeceğini, adetlerinin muhtemelen evlendikten sonra düzeleceğini söyleyerek ilaç vermedim.

Bugün adet görmeme yakınması ile başvuran bir hipermarket kasiyerine muayenesini bitirdikten sonra "Sizin kasalarda 1 kuruş bulunmuyor mu?" diye sordum"Bir torba duruyor ama kullanmıyoruz" dedi"Neden kullanmıyorsunuz? Özellikle Avrupa ülkelerinde para üstü son kuruşuna kadar ödeniyor, ama Türkiye'de kuruş verildiğini hiç görmedim" dedim"Halk istemiyor, taşımıyor da. Biz mesela 61, 62 kuruşluk bir mala 60 kuruş, 63 kuruşluk mala da 65 kuruş diyoruz" dedi"Bu size verilen bir talimat mı, zira benim gördüğüm 61 kuruşa da 65 kuruş isteniyor?" dedim"Hayır, kendi inisiyatifimizle öyle yapıyoruz. Az alınanla, fazla alınan birbirini götürüyor, genelde akşam kasa 5-10 kuruş farkla kapanıyor. Şahsen ben öyle bir kuruş için sorun çıkaran olursa 5 kuruş veriyorum" dedi"Peki hep fazla alındığında kuruşlar birikip kayda değer bir yekün oluşturmaz mı?" diye sordum"O zaman kasa fazla verir, kasiyerin savunması alınır. Ha, arada günahı boynuna cebine atabilir, ama kameralar var, yine yakalanır" dediBütün tahlilleri ve ultrasonografisi normal olduğundan kanamasının olmamasına üzülmemesini, çünkü adet sırasında gelen kanın halk arasında bilindiği gibi vücuttan atılması gereken kirli kan olmayıp damarlarında dolaşan normal kanı olduğunu, bu sayede daha az kan kaybedip kansızlık sorunu da çekmeyeceğini, adetlerinin muhtemelen evlendikten sonra düzeleceğini söyleyerek ilaç vermedim.

Cast: Michael Coleman

Over the weekend, appoximately 190,000 people made their way to Worthy Farm in western England to attend the 2009 Glastonbury Festival. Attendees came to see performances at what is billed as "Europe's largest open-air music festival" on many stages over four days - headliners included Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, and a reunited Blur. Rainy weather did little to dampen the mood, as attendees enjoyed themselves in tent cities, concert performances, dance tents, and the surrounding countryside of Somerset, England. Collected here are a handful of images from this year's festival. (33 photos total)Festival-goers walk through a camping area in the early hours of the second day of the annual Glastonbury Festival near Glastonbury, England on June 27, 2009. (Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images)

The BBC Magazine had 13-year-old Scott Campbell swap his iPod for a Walkman for one week:

It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.

 ★ 

"...Sales of his recordings through Sony's music unit have generated more than $300 million in royalties for Mr. Jackson since the early 1980's."

Want to know why we have a zombieconomy? Because the beancounters killed the incentives to create real value.

Let's use MJ's tragic death as a mini case-study. $300 million over, for example, 25 years? That's $12 million a year.

I'm deliberately leaving out ads, endorsements, concerts, etc., to focus on the the structural problems in one industry: music.

If the world's biggest pop star only made $12 million a year from his recordings, why would anyone make serious music? Where did the rest of the money go? Why, straight into record labels' pockets. Did they make better music with it? Nope — they made Britney and Lady GaGa. And that's how they killed themselves: by underinvesting in quality, to rake in the take.

Wait a second — that sounds familiar. You can add back in the endorsements, etc. now — they only double the figure: to about $25 million.

If the world's biggest pop star only made $25 million a year in total, something's very, very wrong. Where's the rest of the money? Why can't a resource as scarce as the King of Pop capture more value?

After all, that's not even mega-rich.

The world's top hedge fund "managers" regularly pull in hundreds of millions. That's an order of magnitude difference.

No wonder everyone wants to be a banker, investor, or [insert beancounter here]. There's no money left in anything else.

That's the big problem behind the zombieconomy. We don't reward people for creating, growing, nurturing, or even remixing assets. We just reward them for allocating the same old assets.

That 's not an economy: it's just a game of musical chairs.

Hence, no new finance, healthcare, educational, auto, or, yes, music, industry — for decades.

"...Darkness falls across the land The midnight hour is close at hand Creatures crawl in search of blood To terrorize y'alls neighborhood."

Indeed. Everytime you look at today's economic landscape — you should see the Thriller video playing in your head. Because what we've built is a zombieconomy, where little net value is created.

And MJ's death-by-financial-desperation should be a case study in that zombieconomy if ever there was one. Yes, he spent money on absurdly ludicrous stuff. But if top hedge fund managers can do it — why couldn't the world's most famous singer?

PS — The ultimate irony? I can't even link to the Thriller video. It's unavailable on YouTube in the UK..."due to copyright restrictions". Lulz. Leave the link in the comments, and fire away with thoughts, questions, etc.

Apparently the attachment size limit we casually mentioned last week was actually a new upgrade. All Gmail users should see a bump from 20MB to 25MB limits in their accounts, according to the Google Operating System blog. As Alex notes there, Gmail's convenient-but-crash-prone Flash uploading tool may make it very hard to actually get a 25MB file up and going, so clicking to use the older tool that uploads upon hitting "Send" is probably the way to go for gigundo-sized files.

Apparently the attachment size limit we casually mentioned last week was actually a new upgrade. All Gmail users should see a bump from 20MB to 25MB limits in their accounts, according to the Google Operating System blog. As Alex notes there, Gmail's convenient-but-crash-prone Flash uploading tool may make it very hard to actually get a 25MB file up and going, so clicking to use the older tool that uploads upon hitting "Send" is probably the way to go for gigundo-sized files.