Defunct: A Webcomic Starring Your Discarded Gadgets

We all own junk. Some of us keep junk around way after we stop using it, telling ourselves we’ll fix it up or sell it or repurpose it. In my case, a lot of it ends up in the basement.

Defunct

So I’m making a webcomic about it. Read more of this post

How to Deactivate an Office 365 User in One Million Easy Steps

Some enterprise email systems are easy. Some email systems are hard. Guess which one Microsoft made.

Office 365 Into Darkness

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Opening Tracks of Every Muse Album, Ranked

It’s totally unfair to judge an entire album by its first song. So today we’re doing exactly that.

Muse album covers

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Apple Pioneers Radical New Concept: Paying Musicians for Their Material

DISCLAIMER: The title of this post is sarcastic.

Until this weekend, Apple was so confident in its new streaming service that it didn’t even feel the need to pay royalties for the music it would be streaming during the 90-day consumer trial period. It took a scathing Tumblr post from Taylor Swift to make them change their minds.

tumblr-404

Give yourself more credit, Tumblr. You can be useful in extremely rare cases.

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I Knew Grooveshark. Grooveshark Was a Friend of Mine.

Grooveshark collage

In the spirit of digital copyright infringement, the image for this blog entry is composed of illustrations from (clockwise from top left) The Atlantic, Slate, Billboard, and Gizmodo.
Also the Grooveshark logo cleverly turned upside down like a dead fish. It’s clever.

I’m not yet sure how I feel about Apple Music. Or rather, I know it bothers me, but I’m not exactly sure why yet. A rant is probably forthcoming in the next few days. But it has made me think more on the fate of Grooveshark, a streaming service that shut down on April 30.

Despite claiming 35 million users, Grooveshark never amassed much mainstream mindshare. That’s surprising, because it was a vast repository of easily linkable and shareable songs, all completely free. It looked slick, it was easy to use, and listeners could even upload songs for the whole world to enjoy.

Which was pretty much the problem.

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