Chris Castiglione » free http://www.ccastig.com Chris Castiglione, New Media, Development, Music, University of Amsterdam, New York City Sat, 21 Aug 2010 00:28:59 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Lessig’s Remix & FREE PDFs http://www.ccastig.com/2009/04/30/lessigs-remix-free-pdfs/ http://www.ccastig.com/2009/04/30/lessigs-remix-free-pdfs/#comments Thu, 30 Apr 2009 15:08:05 +0000 Chris Castiglione http://www.ccastig.com/?p=567 Lessig RemixLawrence Lessig’s most recent book Remix: Making Art & Commerce Thrive In The Hybrid Economy was finally put under a CC license today and is not available for free on Lessig’s site.

Currently I’m working on my thesis researching issues of anti-capitalism, digital piracy and Creative Commons and how these forces are reshaping ‘the music industries’. As a result of the subject matter, a vast amount of my resources happens to be licensed under CC.  Often I’ll buy the book if I’m going to read it in entirety, but for research purposes accumulating a free library of PDFs has saved me so much time and lead me in directions I may not have stumbled upon.

Anyway, here are a few recommended (and free!) books I’ve been reading:

Remix, Free Culture, The Future of Ideas and Code 2.0 – Lawrence Lessig
Capitalism 3.0 – Peter Barnes
The Wealth of Networks – Yochai Benkler
The Pirates Dilema – Matt Mason

In addition, PDF Search Engine is really helpful for finding books:
http://www.pdf-search-engine.com/

And I’ve found that Mac Spotlight (the free search thingy on everyone’s Mac) is great research tool. I can comb through hundreds of PDFs instantly. It’s kind of like having a local version of Google Books search.

]]> http://www.ccastig.com/2009/04/30/lessigs-remix-free-pdfs/feed/ 0 Play Any Song – Jango Hack http://www.ccastig.com/2009/03/14/play-any-song-jango-hack/ http://www.ccastig.com/2009/03/14/play-any-song-jango-hack/#comments Sun, 15 Mar 2009 00:57:21 +0000 Chris Castiglione http://www.ccastig.com/?p=468 jangoI wrote a simple PHP script that queries the Internet radio site Jango and allows you to play any song they have in their database. Jango is already far superior to other Internet radio sites when it comes to finding a particular song. In contrast, Last.fm and Pandora are more like traditional radio stations: you can pick the band or genre you want to hear, but you have to wait around if you want to hear any particular song. At Jango half of songs are available to be streamed (check out The Arcade Fire’s page to see). But if you notice, a song like “No Cars Go” is listed as not available. And so this script makes a link that accesses the entire library.

It’s really easy to understand the pattern, here is “No Cars Go”:

http://www.jango.com/music/arcade+fire/no+cars+go

Try out the search tool and let me know how it works. I’ve made the code available on this site, so feel free to build upon it and make it better. Also, here is a stand alone Jango Search example.

Song Title:

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