Back in the day, I used to tell my little sister about new music. Now she not only hears about new artists before I do, but she becomes friends with them. (See: photos with Momus, Mirah and Khaela, Phil Elvrum from the Microphones.)

So, at her recommendation, we went to a party in Pasadena last night at some-guy-named-Dave’s house. In the muggy living room, local band Katie the Pest and Katy Robinson from the San Francisco-based Dear Nora entertained 20 or so musigeeks with acoustic tales of hope, heartbreak and baby kittens. Best show I’ve seen in ages. (Thanks, sis.)

Gene Kan, founder of InfraSearch/Gonesilent.com and Gnutella’s most vocal spokesman/developer, passed away on June 29, at age 25. I haven’t seen this mentioned anywhere, except for a single post by Wired reporter Brad King on the Pho music list. Brad informed us that Gene was found dead in his apartment around June 27-29. There was a note found alongside his body, but no additional details are currently available. I expect this will soon be picked up by Slashdot, Wired, and the usual suspects.

I had the privilege of working with the XCF folks, but never managed to meet Gene. Here’s his musings on open services from last September, an audio interview on NPR, some haiku from his personal homepage, and his resume. Also, you should read Joey DeVilla’s Letter to Gene Kan.

After expiring last September, Baio.net was finally released back into the wild yesterday and I snapped it up! I’d been patiently waiting for months, so it’s a relief that nobody else registered it (like the Scott Baio fan club.)

Now, I can give out vanity e-mail addresses to my dad’s side of the family, if they ever got around to getting computers. Also, I was thinking of setting up a family weblog a la Utsler.net. Any Baios (Baioes? Baioii?) around the world who want a free e-mail address, give me a buzz.

I’m probably going to regret this, but I found the full video clip of Katie Couric battling conservative psycho-pundit Ann Coulter on the Today Show. It’s been in the entertainment press recently, dubbed the Couric/Coulter Catfight. Needless to say, it’s uncomfortable and strangely compelling. Download the 8 MB Windows Media video, or the rushed transcript from Drudge. (If anyone can mirror this video, post the link in the comments. Thanks to Moatmai for the clip.)

It took a while, but my Metafilter Statistics page has finally been updated again, after resting peacefully since last November. Regardless of how you feel about Metafilter, these charts give you a three-year glimpse into the changing trends of a popular online community. It looks like traffic has finally seemed to level off a bit, after a period of long growth. (It’s also a convenient way to spot cult threads.) I posted a thread about it on Metatalk, the forum for discussing all things Metafilter.

Question: Why does Amazon.com have a dog named Rufus on their 404 error page? Travis Smith, editor of Variety.com and generally nice guy, found out the short history of Rufus, the Amazon dog.

A couple new improvements to the Waxy Backlinks script. It can now be called from PHP scripts, referrers from some search engines are now excluded by default, and you can set the maximum number of backlinks to display and the minimum threshold of hits before a link gets displayed. Any of these options can easily be changed in the script itself. Many thanks to Joe Utsler and Ben Trott for bug reports. Download Waxy Backlinks v0.05 now! (Installation and configuration details inside.)

Two strange Star Trek-related tidbits:

1. The short-lived cottage industry of Y2K survival books and videos probably isn’t doing so well these days, but the materials are still available if you’re interested. These ranged from the alarmist Y2K Millennium Meltdown: The Silent Bomb (“science fiction has become a science nightmare”) to the outright paranoid Y2K: Hidden Dangers of Martial Law and a Police State (“Will President Bill Clinton use the Y2K computer bug crisis as a pretext to declare martial law and usher in a brutal Gestapo police state?”). Compared to others in the genre, Leonard Nimoy’s Y2K Family Survival Guide seems almost rational. Almost. Anyway, I uploaded the short introduction video that I found on Usenet (6 meg AVI). If you want to see the rest, you can still buy it on Amazon. ($7.50, cheap!)

2. Another recent Usenet discovery is the little-known album recorded by Brent Spiner, most famously known for his role as Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation. (Maybe he was jealous of Spock and Kirk.) Ol’ Yellow Eyes Is Back, released in 1991, features everyone’s favorite android crooning his way through twelve Tin Pan Alley standards. “It’s A Sin (To Tell a Lie)” features backup vocals by fellow cast members Levar Burton (Geordi La Forge), Jonathan Frakes (Commander Riker), Michael Dorn (Worf), and Patrick Stewart (Captain Picard). The album is long out of print, but you can hear “It’s A Sin” here (4 meg MP3).

The Usenet alt.binaries.* newsgroups have been a haven for file trading since 1993, but never received much attention because of the learning curve and limitations of ISP’s Usenet feeds. Even if you manage to install a newsreader, locate your news server and figure out how to decode multipart attachments, there’s no guarantee that your ISP carries the binary newsgroups or has anything more than a day’s worth of files.

Easynews provides a web-based interface to the Usenet binaries archive, with roughly 40 days of retention for all groups. A staggering number of albums, software, movies, and images are posted daily to Usenet, decoded by Easynews, and placed for download from the Easynews website. $10 gets you six gigs of downloaded files per month, and it’s the best $10 I’ve spent in a long time. The free trial gives you a one gigabyte quota and three days to play around with the interface, which I highly recommend. My comments are inside.

July 26, 2003: The free trial is no longer available. They’re up to 10 GB/month for $10, though their retention is closer to 21 days as Usenet traffic increases. Still highly recommended.

Tom Jennings, the creator of Fidonet and all-around renaissance guy, will be speaking this Saturday in downtown Los Angeles. This Wired article from 1996 gives some background on the man that made my first taste of the Internet possible (indirectly, through a Fidonet news/mail gateway). He’ll be speaking about his Story Teller project, an experiment in obsolete computing that prints and vocalizes text and symbols stored on punched tape. Time and directions inside, if you’re interested.