Cover Police
From at least one of the musical pioneers behind Tron - The Rock Opera, comes Rodeohead - who, as the name suggests, covers Radiohead songs in an authentic bluegrass banjo-picking style. At the moment, all you can download is a five-minute medley of 17 songs (check out the duelling banjos on the descending riff from Paranoid Android). There's something about Radiohead's more mournful material that seems to attract offbeat cover versions, from Karma Police by Brown University, a capella group The Brown Derbies, to Richard Cheese's easy-listening rendition of Creep, from his album Lounge Against The Machine. www.chrishardwick.com/index2.html
http://masl.to/?U18413F88
www.richardcheese.com
Open corp
Nearly a year since Greg Dyke first announced their plans, it's still not clear how the BBC will be releasing online its huge back catalogue. That hasn't stopped independent lobbying group Friends of the Creative Domain from voicing its concerns that the contents should be freely available for non-commercial use. So far, it has a letter to the governors that you can add your name to, and a mailing list to keep you informed about developments in the campaign. Meanwhile, in the US, there's only a week left to enter the Electronic Frontier Foundation's patent busting contest, intended to uncover and challenge some of the "stupid" and "dangerously bad" patents that have been granted in software or internet-related fields, such as video streaming (US Patent No. 5,132,992), paying with a credit card online (US Patent No. 6,289,319), and BT's favourite, the humble hyperlink (US Patent No. 4,873,662). www.public-domain.org/?q=node/view/36
www.eff.org/patent/
If it's June...
Can't keep track of which charity campaign you're supposed to be aware of from one week to the next? Avoid embarrassing oversights by consulting the Count Me In Calendar, where you'll learn that, for instance, today is both National Insect Week, National School Grounds Week and Pet Smile Month - along with National Food Safety Week, an occasion celebrated, coincidentally, by the addition of pre-fermented soya beans to the no-holds-barred, gross-out weblog Steve, Don't Eat It! This latest entry is vividly described by the fearless Steve as "coated in some kind of sick slime" and evoking "the playful, complex aroma of a dumpster in July". www.countmeincalendar.info
www.thesneeze.com
Cult hybrids
Sure, the web's DIY video-makers will run out of different cult film permutations eventually but, until then, Imperial Dogs is the long overdue fan-made crossover between Star Wars and Reservoir Dogs, primarily consisting of a part computer-animated video to the soundtrack hit Stuck In A Room With R2. Wizard People, Dear Reader, on the other hand, offers a less family-friendly commentary to the first Harry Potter movie, in the form of two 70MB MP3 downloads, which you are instructed to burn to CDs and play simultaneously with your DVD of the film. http://masl.to/?H2F412F88
Dancing weight
Dance Dance Revolution-style video games are the fun new way to get in shape, argues GetUpMove.com, an enthusiastic endorsement of this new exercise regime, none too subtly backed by a manufacturer of dance mats for home games consoles. Still, if you're looking for a slightly more credible aerobic accompaniment, WebJay's promise of Listener Created Radio provides a range of playlists compiled from freely (and apparently legally) available MP3 and Real Player audio and video downloads. The French experimental multimedia site D*I*R*T*Y has taken the trouble of linking all its tracks together into Real Player streams, including mixes by Air, Autechre and DJ Shadow. www.getupmove.com
www.webjay.org
www.d-i-r-t-y.com/mixes/
