Big Black is one of my all time favourite bands - its kind of what happens when geeks pick up guitars and write about peelling back the surface of civility with a blow-torch (excuse the rock-journo-speak :-)

At one point some hardy soul uploaded the entire contents of Big Blacks live release 'Pig Pile' to You Tube but the only things left seem to be Bad Penny and Jordan, Minnesota.

They look so geeky but the sonics are so visceral that you just can't ignore the noise (and sweat) pouring off the stage. As usual the lyrical content is designed to shock and as with most Big Black you need a well tuned and pretty black sense of humour :-)

For Steve Albini's take on the music biz have a read of the infamous The Problem with Music essay.

Steve has recorded (he prefers 'recorded' to 'produced') a huge number of bands including Nirvana ('In Utero'), The Pixies ('Surfer Rosa'), The Breeders ('Pod'), PJ Harvey ('Rid of Me'), Slint ('Tweez'). Heres a pretty complete list at Wikipedia.

His philosophy on recording is covered in this interview with SoundOnSound. Being a recording purist its interesting to note his fascination with obscure Russian microphones and analog tape - he even has a stockpile of media as a hedge against diminishing production. In fact he's so anti-digital that he gave away the CD for free with vinyl copies of his current band Shellacs '1000 Hurts' LP.

Via StorageMojo - CleverSafe looks very cool. Its a geographically distributed storage grid with built in encryption.

If you watch the flash demo you'll see a chunk of data split up to over eleven locations when its written and when its read back only half of the locations need to respond (due to the built in redundancy). Its like RAID but on a grand-scale.

Whats better is that it looks like they're building an open-source community around the product.