Digging around Music.Twitter.com, I stumbled across an interesting little feature that doesn’t appear to show up or be connected to anything else.

Adding the ‘instant’ tag after an artist name in the URL gives you similar artists, creating a really good playlist that almost mimics Pandora. For example if you visit music.twitter.com/jtimberlake it shows you that Justin is following 1 artist, Blake Shelton, but if you add ‘instant’ to the end like this music.twitter.com/jtimberlake/instant, it creates this playlist of similar artists to Justin Timberlake.

This hack seems to work with most artists, though some provide fewer results than others. This may be some kind of upcoming feature or one that didn’t ship for whatever reason, but regardless, it creates a pretty killer playlist for those looking for that sort of thing.

Or better yet, visit music.twitter.com/LordHuron/instant and...

Information has become available more and more quickly, first within minutes and now within seconds. I know where we came from because I had Betamax tapes, music cassettes, and vinyl, but I grew up digital. So I’m not as nostalgic about paper books as I am for beige computer cases. I understand screen resolutions and why the amount of pixels per inch matter and words like “processor” and “megabytes per second” don’t scare me.

My grandpa loved technology, he was an enthusiast who loved to tinker. He and I didn’t have a whole lot in common. He was a Marine, I was a rebellious young boy, but with computers and printers and things that made beeps and boops, we had something we connected over. I was interested and he was willing to share his passion and bring me along. I’m not sure if it was his unrest for all things new and shiny that he passed along to me, or if it was always in my...

By now you must’ve seen the video from Jimmy Kimmel, catching people lying about being into bands playing at Coachella that the interviewer just made up. How long must it have taken to come up with band names that they knew were fake? Here are some band names that sound made up but aren’t.

1) Diarrhea Planet - Try and ask someone to their face, without laughing, if they’ve ever listened to Diarrhea Planet. I can hear the NPR Fresh-Air interview now.

2) Ghostface Killah - Sounds more like something you’d hear in a murder trial than an artist name.

3) Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. - “Excuse me, did you just say Jr. Jr.”

4) Foxygen - The band went for something easy to remember. Think of regular – plain – oxygen, but hot and foxy.

5) Godspeed You! Black Emperor - uhhh

6) Japandroids - I know it’s likely a combination of Japan and androids, but it could easy be mistaken...

With information leaky around the news that Twitter had acquired We Are Hunted – a music discovery and chart site – to help them build a new Twitter music app/service, speculation was rampant on their motivation. It’s now clear why Twitter is venturing into music, because they were already running a music discovery service, they just needed a better way for people to tap into it.

Aiming big, Pandora seems to be the first target Twitter is gunning for with the way the app continues on after your first song choice. An obvious play for the mainstream radio crowd, those content to select a style of music and let it be background to their day. This is where the ‘Emerging’ and ‘Suggested’ algorithms will be a big deal and determine whether the casual music consumer keeps coming back to the app or site.

If you think you’re above the few charts offered and can’t benefit from the type of...

iTunes smart playlists are integral to the way I listen to purchased music. I currently only use two smart playlists, but they help me track music coming into my library and make sure I’m listening to the newest stuff. I originally created the two lists – “1 Week” and “Last Month” – because the iTunes library can be a black hole for thousands and thousands of songs.

The 1 Week playlist shows only songs I’ve added to my library in the last 7 days and the Last Month playlist does the same, but for the last 30 days. These aren’t too different from the default “Recently added,” but I needed to split it up and tweak it. As you can see from the playlist configuration picture, I weed out podcasts, only keep checked items, and keep it live updating. This keeps the playlist just music and makes it a good travel, sync-able, option.

I also keep a smart playlist for each year. All the music...

I couldn’t love Sonos more and yet, sometimes it seems the company is a bit frustrating. Their wireless speakers are fantastic in almost every regard, but what drives me crazy is this company that dreams in the future with their hardware, doesn’t often keep up their software.

The Sonos player on Mac doesn’t yet fully support retina, even after almost a year. Their iPhone app didn’t support the iPhone 5’s bigger screen for quite awhile and Sonos’ website also isn’t fully retina either, with their logo being the biggest offender. This should be embarrassing for a company that makes a product advanced enough that a lot of people have trouble wrapping their mind around how it works initially. 

Sonos is engaged in recruiting new services to work with their speakers, often finding companies before they’ve hit critical mass. Beyond the obvious – making speakers – having a swath of services is...

Spotify got me early-on with their free tier. They pulled in my music library, had a good collection of artists, and were the 900 pound choice for a streaming service, so I subscribed to the premium tier. I tried Rdio early on as well, but just never went all in with them. That changed today when I cancelled Spotify and signed up for Rdio. Why? Because of Rdio’s new video service, Vdio.

Granted, Vdio will be available to everyone soon enough, so switching now just for the early beta access isn’t completely necessary, but the idea of a connected music and video service is a compelling one. So compelling in fact that despite Vdio’s extremely limited offering – what amounts to an Amazon Video or iTunes like service where everything needs to be purchased or rented – it still got me to switch.

It’s early I know, but Vdio needs hulu-like video, meaning all inclusive access to recently...

The purpose of calling “Shotgun” is to be the person who gets to ride in the front seat of the car. The front seat is so much better than the backseat.

Section I: General Rules

A) The first person to say “Shotgun” gets to ride in the front seat.

B) The remaining back seats may be divided up in the same manner, by being the first to call “Back right seat”, etc..

C) The word shotgun must be loud enough to be heard by at least one witness. When no witness is to be found, or in case of a tie, the driver has the final word. (Note: if it isn’t the driver’s car, and the owner is present, the owner’s decision is final. Owner must be sober, however, or he will defer his judgment back to the driver.)

D) Everyone must be outside of the building (including the driver) before shotgun can be called. Under no circumstances may a person call shotgun inside a building. For simplicity, an open...

From time to time I get discouraged that I’m not a painter or film maker or singer or songwriter. I get discouraged that I can’t communicate in drawings or melodies or capture video that’s perfectly framed. Words are the one communication method I cling to, though those aren’t always on my side either.

My hypothesis is that any idea, thought, or story can be equally shared through any form of art, if the artist is skilled enough.

If a writer penned a novel about a life cut short with the effects felt by the family long after, a painter would be able to convey the same emotion and feeling into a painting. A film maker would be able to create a movie one in the same, and even a video game programer would be able to tell the story with the same power through game play.

I’ve always measured myself against this untested, comforting and horrifying, hypothesis. Even though I may at times...

Was Netflix’s decision to release every episode of House of Cards at once the right one? I’m no expert, but I’d say so. After not having an active Netlifx account and re-signing up just to watch the [exclusive] show, I have now continued my subscription an extra two months and I doubt I’ll be canceling it again anytime soon.

I finished the 13 episode “season” over the course of a week and thoroughly enjoyed the show. I binged on it because there was no reason not to. There aren’t water cooler moments about specific episodes any more, but rather about specific seasons lumped together as one big arc. Since the details of House of Cards release first came out, I maintained that there was no reason Netflix shouldn’t release all the episodes at once and – if they were already filmed – to artificially hold them back would be crazy.

The argument for not releasing all the episodes at once was...