As some of you may know, Joanna Newsom is one of my favourite artists and has been for years. She is a harpist from the United States, playing delicate yet complex pieces, slowly mastering her voice and writing long, intricate stories instead of more typical, short and catchy song lyrics. I saw her play in Toronto at the Phoenix Concert Theatre and love this review of her concert.

I would like to share some of her music from her album Have One On Me today. I hope you enjoy and look into purchasing her album.

Baby Birch

'81

Easy

Good Intentions Paving Company

Have One On Me

If anyone is interested in an English-only but localized World Cup 2010 Google Calendar, I found one. You can also download in XML, iCal or HTML. Just make sure that the calendar is properly adjusted for your timezone. Right now, it's set in America/Toronto (for me) but your's could be anything from this list.

For example, the URL ends with America/Toronto but if you're in Singapore, you might want to use Asia/Singapore. So change the end of the URL from America/Toronto to Asia/Singapore and hit enter. Now you can export the calendar into your timezone.

Good luck and enjoy World Cup 2010!

Many people are sick of Facebook and their lack of care for privacy. Websites have been setup to make users aware of privacy policy changes, new features Facebook has added (for better or worse) and even JavaScript programs that analyze how open your Facebook profile really is.

A group of four young programmers from NYU's Courant Institute have started a Facebook-killer project to decentralize the web, called Diaspora.

They have raised almost $200,000 using KickStarter.com when there goal was a mere $10,000. They have plans to make the software distributed (very git-like, if you're a programmer), allowing users and companies to set up their own servers, all running off what I assume will be diaspora.com (except that domain has already been squatted).

The project will be licensed AGPL, hosted on GitHub and feature end-to-end encryption for communication between servers and the clients that use the software. Their plans for the first release are:

• Full-fledged communications between Seeds (Diaspora instances)
• End to end GPG
• External Service Scraping of most major services (reclaim your data)
• Version 1 of Diaspora’s API with documentation
• Public GitHub repository of all Diaspora code

Followed by:

• OpenID
• Voice-over IP
• Distributed Encrypted Backups
• Instant Messaging protocol
• UDP integration

for their future releases.

That's a lot of nerd speak for:

Diaspora knows how to securely share (using GPG) your pictures, videos, and more. When you have a Diaspora seed of your own, you own your social graph, you have access to your information however you want, whenever you want, and you have full control of your online identity.

So if you are sick of worrying about Facebook privacy and believe in open source software, why not pledge a dollar or two to their cause or simply tell your friends?

They plan to have their first release up and running by September 2010.