I went to Canzine today and discovered my dream hangout: Popfuel, a 24/7 co-op screenprinting studio at Queen and Dufferin. I have never been so immediately impressed and excited about anything in Toronto as I was about this, and the only thing stopping me from signing up is the sheer distance separating my home from the studio. One day, Popfuel, one day…

Ars Technica has a comprehensive report on how easy it would be to steal an election in the United States by exploiting vulnerabilities in the electronic voting and optical scan voting systems in place throughout 80% of the nation’s voting precincts. By distilling hundreds of reports, videos and news stories regarding the myriad security holes present in systems like the ones Diebold is setting up across the country, Jon Stokes has painted a chilling picture of untraceable, wholesale electoral fraud:

The picture that I’ve painted here about the state of the American electoral system is bleak and depressing. Even more depressing is the fact that absolutely nothing can be done to address these vulnerabilities in any substantial way before the November midterm elections.

(…)

My own personal fear is that, by the time a whistleblower comes forth with an indisputable smoking gun—hard evidence that a large election has been stolen electronically—we will have lost control of our electoral process to the point where we will be powerless to enact meaningful change. The clock is ticking on this issue, because a party that can use these techniques to gain control of the government can also use them to maintain control in perpetuity.

Bizarre find of the day: share a laugh with Beth Agnew along the main drag of old Thornhill, Ontario:

She’s got tons of videos, and they all appear to be the same: Beth Agnew filming herself and laughing for no apparent reason. Y’all should just be glad I haven’t been subjecting you to the other random crap I’ve found lately.

Except for Calvin. Sorry Calvin.

So I got myself a laptop today. Woot! Full review on that later, but for now, a quick fix if you’ve been experiencing trouble. If you’ve been trying to get to the advanced settings for your laptop trackpad and you get a message like this:

"An exception occurred while trying to run "shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL "C:\WINDOWS\System32\main.cpl",Mouse""

then the simple fix is to update the trackpad drivers. Easy peasy if you know how:

1. You’ll need a new Synaptics trackpad driver. Get one at the Synaptics site. You can probably ignore the spiel about grabbing a driver from your laptop manufacturer. Download the correct driver and expand the ZIP to a directory of your choice.
2. Hit the Control Panel, System, Hardware, Device Manager. A new window, the device manager, should appear.
3. Find the “Mice and other pointing devices” entry and expand it. You should see a Synaptics trackpad device. Double-click or right-click and select Properties.
4. In the dialog that comes up, hit the Driver tab. You should see four buttons at the bottom. Hit “Update Driver.”
5. Windows may ask if you want to check Windows Update. Select No and continue. It’ll then ask if you want to let Windows search for the driver itself. Don’t let Windows search for it, because you already know where it is. In the next dialog, uncheck the option to search CD/DVDs and removable drives. Select the box that allows you to search a specific location; in the box below, you can enter the location of folder where you unzipped the Synaptics driver (use the Browse button to find the folder again).
6. Windows will search the directory quickly and, if all goes well, start installing files. It’ll then ask for a restart; feel free to restart at your leisure.

Voila—you should be able to get into the advanced options for your trackpad. Enjoy!

One of the somewhat unfortunate perks of running an mp3blog is the volume of e-mail you get from publicists and labels about bands they’re promoting. Sometimes it’s cute, like when they address you by name and actually display evidence of having read your blog, or when the little promoters send out mass e-mails about how their day’s going and, oh, by the way, here’s some band stuff. Sometimes it’s rote, like when some big promoter sends you the tour dates for a metal band that’s obviously not really your forte. And then sometimes you get well-meaning stuff like this:

“Can you imagine Robert Johnson, Dale Cooper, Debbie Harry and Karl or Groucho Marx gathered around a tropical style rattan table (bending under loads of empty and half empty cocktail glasses), on a casino terrace in a blade runner version of Las Vegas, avidly discussing urbanism, vernacular music, party sociology and substance abuse anecdotes - while popular songs from aeon old 78’s are jangling through some distorted P.A.? And intermingling with that the frantic record-scratching carried over from a nearby 80’s New York block party and the muffled noise from a crowded Mexican speakeasy next door (operated by a former ship’s cook from the Bucovina)?”

Listen, I don’t care if the bio is a joke, or if you’re being ironic by riffing on the “x meets y on a z” nature of most bios. This is still shit, and it immediately makes me not want to listen to the band you’re promoting. STOP IT.

I’m sure you’ve already seen the story of the guy who was promised a threesome if his website got two million hits. Maybe you already know it was a mixture of hoax and viral advertising. What’s weird is the number of sites that have popped up since then using largely the same schtick to convince people to visit their site or join their Facebook group. What’s weirder is people seem to fall for this every time, as if they hadn’t seen any of the other sites before or noticed the similarities. So, in tribute, here’s your very own cheat sheet on how to create your very own blurb for a “if I get ten million hits some girl will have sex with me” site!

For Christina, Spanish (maybe Portuguese?) commercials from the 80s!