This Makes Me So Inexplicably Happy

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The video features so many wonderful locations around DC that any local will recognize easily. I attempted to list all of the locations I recognized from the truck shots in the background. My list: * Metro Center * Chinatown * Union Station * National Portrait Gallery * The National Mall Also, pay attention to the folks in the background. Ari Shapiro plays the bells once at the old building and again at the new. Scott Simon is in the background of the elevator in the lobby in the old building wearing a coat. Carl Kassell is the older gentlemen who scowls at them at the new building that they go quiet for. Bob Boilen, at NPR Music writes:

The Tiny Desk has moved, and OK Go has helped make it so. Earlier this year, we needed to figure out the best possible way to move my Tiny Desk from NPR's old headquarters to our new facility just north of the U.S. Capitol. We wanted to go out with a bang and arrive at our new space in style, so our thoughts naturally turned to a catchy pop band we love: OK Go, whose unforgettable videos have been viewed tens of millions of times on YouTube. Bandleader Damian Kulash used to be an engineer at an NPR member station in Chicago, so we figured he'd be up for helping us execute a simple idea: Have OK Go start performing a Tiny Desk Concert at our old location, continue playing the same song while the furniture and shelving is loaded onto a truck, and finish the performance at our new home. In addition to cameos by many of our NPR colleagues — Ari Shapiro, Audie Cornish, David Greene, Guy Raz, Scott Simon, Alix Spiegel, Susan Stamberg and more — this required a few ingredients: * Number of video takes: 223 * Percent used in final version: 50 * Number of raw audio channels: 2,007 * Percent used in final version: 50 * Number of microphones: 5 * Number of hard-boiled eggs consumed: 8, mostly by bassist Tim Nordwind * Number of seconds Carl Kasell spent in the elevator with OK Go: 98 * Number of times Ari Shapiro played the tubular bells: 15 * Number of pounds the tubular bells weighed: 300 * Number of times the shelves were taken down and put back up: 6 * Number of days it took to shoot: 2 * Number of cameras: 1 OK Go played "All Is Not Lost" from Of the Blue Colour of the Sky, with words tweaked by the All Songs Considered team. And so begins a new era for the Tiny Desk, after 277 concerts (counting this one) in our old home.

Apple Releases iTunes 10.5.1 with iTunes Match

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Lex Friedman, writing for Macworld:

If you have $25 to spend, you’re about to free up a lot of storage space on your iOS devices. On Monday, Apple officially released iTunes Match to the masses, with an update to iTunes for Mac and PC. The company missed its initial deadline of a late October release, but a note to developers last week indicated the feature’s launch was imminent. iTunes Match, part of the iCloud suite that launched earlier month, stores the entirety of your music library in the cloud, at a cost of $25 per year. Unlike competing cloud storage music services from Amazon and Google, iTunes Match saves a lot of bandwidth and time in your initial synchronization, because Apple can identify which songs in your iTunes library are already available in the iTunes Store. If Apple can positively match a song in your library with any of the 20 million tracks for sale in the iTunes Store, it won’t bother uploading that song; only unmatched songs get uploaded to the cloud. Once iTunes Match is finished indexing your library, you can connect to your music from other computers, along with your iOS devices. Any matched music you stream from iCloud plays back at 256-Kbps quality—even if your original copy was encoded at a lower quality. As an Apple Developer, I've had access to and have been using iTunes Match for about 3 months now. There were some bugs early on that were duplicating my playlists - but it looks as if they've fixed those. I haven't seen any problems like that for weeks now. Still though, with the sometimes shaky stability that iCloud has had so far, I wouldn't be surprised if the initial rush of users doesn't create problems of some type for the short term. Long term though, I see this service as being a winner. You need to download the new version of iTunes in order to use iTunes Match. I recommend you do so.