larryni.me.uk

I thought the Apple Mac ads that went out in the US were lame. The UK ones are no better. Not even Mitchell and Webb can make them any more interesting and get me interested in the over-priced hype.

I’ll stick with my (Linux) PC, thank you very much.

The support act for The Surgens gig at Sandinos has been confirmed. And it’s great news! Stagger Lee from Dublin will be going on stage first. I saw them live a few months ago when they were supporting The Things, and they were awesome (both bands were). In the past they have played support for bands like Sleater-Kinney, The Kills and Jon Spencer Blues Xplosion.

Click the links to check out some of their tracks on MySpace.

In other Derry live music news, The Mighty Stef will be playing Sandinos on 22 February. I don’t really know anything about him apart from that he’s from Dublin. The tracks on his profile sound very good. A bit of country, rock, garage and some punky Tom Waits. Here he is performing St Catherine from his album ‘The Sins Of Sainte Catherine’ which was released last year:

Definitely sounds like something I’m gonna enjoy

Click here for some more Mighty Stef clips on YouTube.

The Supersuckers are auctioning off a speeding ticket they received whilst on tour.

Are the Supersuckers built for speed? Yes! The last time they got a speeding ticket we thought it would be cool to sign it, put it on eBay and give the proceeds (after the cost of the ticket, of course) to a good cause. In fact, the cause was the West Memphis Three defense fund. Well, people keep asking us if we’d ever do that again and I guess the answer is yes, here’s another one. We obtained this little beauty toolin’ around Canada from Seattle. It’s signed and it is totally suitable for framing. Enjoy this little beauty. Questions or concerns please let me know chris@supersuckers.com

The current bid is $36.

I had been wondering if that kind of thing goes on on ebay. Not surprisingly, it does:

An investigation by The Sunday Times has indicated that the practice of artificially driving up prices — known as shill bidding — is widespread across the site.

Last week one of the UK’s biggest eBay sellers admitted in a taped conversation with an undercover reporter that he was prepared to use business associates to bid on his goods for him.Our inquiries found evidence that a number of businesses — ranging from overseas property agencies to car dealerships — have placed bids on their own items using fake identities.

And ebay doesn’t seem to be too concerned about it:

He claimed eBay would never follow up a complaint against him for shill bidding because he generated about £15,000 a month in commission for the company. “Are they going to ban somebody who’s making them the best part of 15 grand a month? No,” he said.

Apple’s DRM is not about copy protection. It’s an effective way to lock you in to their business model and make as much money as possible without any regard for consumers’ rights.

The Norwegian Consumer Council, Forbrukerradet, lodged a complaint with the Ombudsman on behalf of Norwegian consumers claiming that the Fairplay DRM system acted against the interests of consumers. It said that the fact that the technology stopped songs bought from iTunes being played on any player other than an iPod broke the law in Norway.

The Ombudsman has now agreed, according to Torgeir Waterhouse, senior advisor at the Consumer Council.

“It doesn’t get any clearer than this. Fairplay is an illegal lock-in technology whose main purpose is to lock the consumers to the total package provided by Apple by blocking interoperability,” Waterhouse told OUT-LAW.COM. “For all practical purposes this means that iTunes Music Store is trying to kill off one the most important building blocks in a well functioning digital society, interoperability, in order to boost its own profits.”

And it’s not just Apple. RIAA/MPAA & co are doing the exact same using DRM – selling it to us as copy protection in order to fight piracy. But all they want to do is to sell us the same stuff over and over to milk it for all they can and line their ever growing pockets. The sooner more countries wake up to the realities of what DRM and proprietary formats are actually being used for, the better. New and fair legislation is needed to protect the consumers.

I always believed that South Koreans were rather lucky when it comes to early adoption of new technologies.

Wrong.

This nation is also a unique monoculture where 99.9% of all the computer users are on Microsoft Windows. This nation is a place where Apple Macintosh users cannot bank online, make any purchases online, or interact with any of the nation’s e-government sites online. In fact, Linux users, Mozilla Firefox users and Opera users are also banned from any of these types of transactions because all encrypted communications online in this nation must be done with Active X controls.

Read the rest of the article here. It’s quite an eye opener.

This is just hilarious!

A row has broken out between two remote Irish islands over an inaugural Father Ted festival next month.

Inis Mor, the largest of the three Aran Islands off County Galway, is planning a three-day “Friends of Ted” event.

They want to mark the ninth anniversary of the death of comic Dermot Morgan, the star of the Channel 4 series.

However, Inis Oirr, the smallest of the islands, believes it has a bigger claim over Father Ted because local scenes, including the Plassey shipwreck, are shown in the opening scenes of the hit comedy.

And how are they going to solve this row? With a 5-a-side football tournament!

“We thought they could play each other and the winner could be Craggy Island for 12 months while the runner-up could be Rugged Island, and they could play again next year on a home and away basis,” he says.

Father Ted is one of my favourite comedy shows. No matter how many times it is repeated (and it’s repeated a lot), I never get tired of it.

Wow, this just looks like amazing fun. I’d love to try that myself!

And here are some mad french guys combining a slingshot with a parachute. Nuts.

(via The J-Walk Blog)

I first heard The Surgens a few months ago when I bought the brilliant Blood on the Scratchplate ‘65 compilation. After listening to two of their tracks on that comp a good few times I finally ordered The Surgens’ Songs of Sadness, Misery & Abuse and it rocks, £6.99 well spent.

They hail from Peterborough, England and describe their sound as ‘twisted country, blues and surf’. Which might sound a bit strange, but fucking great. And judging by the pictures on their website, their live shows are anything but boring!

Now they are making their Irish debut, Beatnik Soul has confirmed that they are playing Sandinos on 16th February. Door £5. Support tbc.