beatworm.co.uk

In November 1955, Bo Diddley was booked to play live on the Ed Sullivan show, the middle America's favourite TV variety show. As legend has it, he was booked to play a single tune, but he misinterpreted his cue card, which had his name, followed by a song title, launched into his, perhaps slightly racy for the times, eponymous calling card – "Hey, Bo Diddley!", immediately following it with the song he was booked to play, the only slightly more sedate "Sixteen tons". They tore the roof off the house, and got themselves banned from the show. 

Here's a particularly rocking performance from 1965

That lady on the second rhythm guitar is known as The Duchess.

Not many musicians get to name their own beat. And in this case, it's a beat that refuses to die. Not many musicians can play it well, but that hasn't stopped them trying through the years. I put a playlist of the most egregious examples I could find up on spotify. There's some direct lifts, some re-interpretations, some slightly tenuous reaches, and hopefully some surprises. It's an editable playlist, so please feel to add any that you find.

I feel sure there ought to be a Spiritualized song in there, but for the life of me I can't find one from memory.

Once you get into the habit of spotting them, it's quite an addictive hobby. I find that I often only spot them a while after I've picked out a song as an earworm.

If you find that your Mac's 'Open With' menu is growing cluttered with identical menu entries for the same application, this indicates that your Launch Services database is confused. 

In the normal course of action your computer scans for entries to merge into this database at boot time, and then at login for the user domains. The Finder updates it with new application information, as and when new App or Framework bundles are encountered during it's normal operation. Unfortunately this database does seem to be capable of becoming persistently corrupted, which will result in symptoms like a duplicate-riddled 'Open With' menu, or incorrect or inconsistent Filetype/Application associations. 

On Mountain Lion, you can interact with the system database from the shell, using the lsregister utility. Run it without arguments to get basic usage instructions. It is not on any default, paths, it's buried away inside /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework.

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework\

/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework\

/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -dump 

will show you the current database in human readable form. To scrap and rebuild the database completely you might do something like this 

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework\

/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework\

/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -all u,s,l -r -v 

The -domain argument there is specifying that we should recursively ( -r ) scan for bundle directories in the the user,system and local domains (i.e. "~/{Applications,Library}/" , "/System/{Applications,Library}", and "/{Applications,Library}" ) and register their document type bindings and other information with the Launch Services agents, which will update their database with this information. The -v switch turns on progress logging, which is all done to stderr.

If you're in the habit of installing apps or library bundles to some alternative roots than the builtin domain types, you can add those paths to the command, instead of the domain flags.

Manga-Camera is a free camera filter iOS app. The intent is to render live photos in the style of a manga action frame. You pick a background effect and then snap. There doesn't seem to be a way to apply the filter to library photos, you have to shoot live, which is the way I prefer these gee-gaws to work. It takes a little practice, but I found the results can be entertaining, and occasionally even a little convincing.

Jack was made for manga, obviously.