How meticulous—how faithful—does a tribute have to be until it is allowed to have a life of its own? YouTube user adolfobaez is clearly a master of his art, but Radiohead does not make it easy for him with Paranoid Android. Its layers, timing/tempo/structure changes, and singularly unique instrumentation defy transcription. But adolfobaez succeeds. Never before have I been so transfixed by a video of a 17-year-old (!!) video game.

Until now, if you wanted to run more than two monitors on a Mac, you had to pony up for a Mac Pro. No other Apple hardware supports more than one graphics card. DisplayLink has now released a Mac beta for their USB-based graphics driver, and with the right hardware, you can now connect up to an additional four more monitors to your iMac, Mac mini, or Macbook.

The software seems to be very preliminary, as it has yet to feature either 3-D or 2-D (i.e. Core Image, Quartz Extreme) acceleration. DisplayLink indicates that these features are targets for their final release, though, so purchase of the $50-100 USB-to-VGA (or DVI) adapters necessary to make the connection seems prudent enough.

This product is truly a boon for anyone running more than two monitors (have you heard? Every extra monitor makes you 100% more productive) who does not wish to invest in a full Mac Pro just for the extra PCI-e slots and driver support.

Muxtape, an online mix tape/playlist application that lets you share a mixtape with the internet, just launched. (Here’s mine.) Design as simple and effective as this continue to define the gold standard for next-generation web applications because they focus less on “what everyone else is doing” and more on giving the user the tools to “do what he/she wants.”

In terms of:

1. Finding a problem,
2. Providing the tools to solve that singular problem, and
3. Making it really fun in the process,

Muxtape hits it out of the park.

Others have speculated that the site will encounter copyright difficulties and be forced to shut down, but here’s hoping that won’t happen.

Apparently MSN is no longer competing on search quality, instead targeting search . . . ignorance.

Yeah. That’s a dominant strategy.

So if the market for bandwidth-hungry consumers is there, why are U.S. internet users stuck at the 1.5/3.0/6.0/12.0 Mbit/sec cap? Consider the French: Computerworld blogger Seth Weintraub reports on the availability of a 100Mb connection that costs less than $100/month. Additionally, Weintraub upgrades his connection from 100 Mb download/10 Mb upload to 100 Mb upload for 20 Euro more.

It is true that the U.S.’s expansive geography prevents the dense level of fiber optic interconnection that small Asian and Europeans countries can achieve: we’re simply spread too far apart. But that doesn’t preclude a hungry market for higher connection speeds, even if consumers are asked to pay a premium price. We must not allow a bandwidth gap!

1. Larger hard drives swapped in (for extended media-synchronization capacity)
2. SSH and VNC (via Apple Remote Desktop) for remote management
3. Alternate video codecs via Perian—this one is a Holy Grail for users [like this author] that have gigs upon gigs of XviD content already sitting on a NAS
4. Network shares mounted via AFP and NFS . . . possibly obviating the need for larger hard drives if network performance supports streaming
5. The list will only continue to grow . . .

When the AppleTV first came out, most press paid polite attention to Apple’s achievement but sharply derided its thin featureset, consistently noting its lack of TV-recording ability and host-computer-running-iTunes dependency. This author thinks most of the AppleTV’s critics have missed the point: This device is about playback only. It’s about delivering the best playback experience on the market. (It’s also about leveraging its presence in the living room to sell more computers—and new 802.11n wireless base stations—in the process.) Apple has acheived this respectable goal by writing an excellent software interface, putting it in some cool hardware, and at least paying lip service to a decent price point.

Now that hackers have opened the door to customizing the device and expanding its capabilities, consumers can look at the AppleTV as a product that is truly insanely great—especially considering that it was pretty great out of the box.

Nevertheless, this thing is so awesome, it had to be reported. Click thee to Tech Digest to read about Zanussi’s built-in coffee maker, and start cutting down on those daily quad-mochas, cause this baby’s a real bank-breaker at $775. But then again, who can put a price on such wonders?

Espresso—in your very own [kitchen | bedroom | cubicle (?!)] wall.

With iTunes 7, switching between different music libraries became much, much easier:

• Hold down Option (or Alt in Windows) while launching iTunes.
• Select or Create your desired iTunes libraries from the dialog box.
• You can choose from either your local hard drive, an external device, or even a network drive.

Remember that each time you launch iTunes it will automatically select the library that was last open. If you choose to use a network drive and you are not on that network at the time you will need to hold down the Option (Alt in Windows) key when opening you iTunes library to select a different library at that time.

One Mac OS X Hints user developed a script to switch between two aliased drives to accomplish this task. Even better solutions are presented in the thread below.