Great video piece by the BBC on the saving, and subsequent attempts at renovation, of the house where John Coltrane wrote "A Love Supreme."

Seeking relief from bullying, Brittany transferred to Jackson Middle School. Her very first day of eighth grade, eight boys crowded around her on the bus home. "Hey, Brittany, I heard your friend Sam shot herself," one began.

"Did you see her blow her brains out?"

"Did you pull the trigger for her?"

"What did it look like?"

"Was there brain all over the wall?"

"You should do it too. You should go blow your head off."

A long but necessary read about the multiple student suicides that happened in the Anoka-Hennepin school district in around 2010. It doesn't really matter what your views are on gay rights. It really doesn't even matter if you think these kids were lying, making up these wild stories about being harassed and tormented by their peers. Any person with a soul should have seen that these kids needed help, politics be damned. Shame on anyone who thinks otherwise.

Torrenting is probably too hassle-y for the average viewer: Installing Transmission, VLC, perhaps re-encoding to watch on my TV—but I'm pretty techy (ok, a geek) and have been doing this for years. However, if a show is available on iTunes—as South Park is to me now I've set up a US iTunes account (yet another tech hassle I had to overcome…)—I'll click and buy. It's simple, quick, better quality, not to mention legal. It's also cheap.

Preach it, Peter Serafinowicz.

Record label Sony has apologised for increasing the price of two Whitney Houston albums in the UK, hours after her death on Saturday.

The wholesale cost of the two LPs - Houston's Ultimate Collection and Greatest Hits - went up by about £3 each, causing an automatic price increase on iTunes.

Is there anyone who is even remotely surprised that the record labels tried doing this?

A nerd needs a project because a nerd builds stuff. All the time. Those lulls in the conversation over dinner? That’s the nerd working on his project in his head.

It’s unlikely that this project is a nerd’s day job because his opinion regarding his job is, “Been there, done that”. We’ll explore the consequences of this seemingly short attention span in a bit, but for now this project is the other big thing your nerd is building and I’ve no idea what is, but you should.

At some point, you, the nerd’s companion, were the project. You were showered with the fire hose of attention because you were the bright and shiny new development in your nerd’s life. There is also a chance that you’re lucky and you are currently your nerd’s project. Congrats. Don’t get too comfortable because he’ll move on, and, when that happens, you’ll be wondering what happened to all the attention. This handbook might help.

Attention: significant others of nerds. This is for you. (Sorry, Shannon.)

With insider trading charges pending over LetsBuyIt, Schmitz decided it was time to lay low (by his standards); “in fear for his life,” he fled to Thailand in January of 2002. On his website, he hinted at possible suicide, saying he would be crossing “to a new world,” Hale-Bopp cult style. But instead of offing himself, he declared that he wanted to be known as “King Kimble the First, Ruler of the Kimpire” — a label he would apply to his future projects. (It’s listed as his title on LinkedIn.)

This guy is basically Richie Rich, if he didn't start with his family's money, built his fortune around multiple unethical business strategies and was hard into psychedelics.

A fantastic biography of Neil deGrasse Tyson (from Playboy, of all places, but the link is SFW). A must-read if you consider yourself a fan of his.

I challenge you to fully realize how awesome life is. To: Party hard. Go on adventures. Make good love.  Be bold. Scare yourself. Laugh it up. Be awesome. You already are, and when you can party without alcohol, the rest of your life will become a party too.

If you want to develop apps, take your time and make something awesome. Make it fast. Make it beautiful. Make something you’re proud of. Don’t make 60 crappy apps: Make one really good one.

As someone who's about to start an iOS development business, this is exactly the model I intend on adopting. If you make something you want to use (and especially something you're proud of), other people will want to use it too.

This is the sole reason piracy is up and profits are down: because doing it right totally sucks. And that’s apparently how the studios want it.

Preach it.

I love Marco's reply to this post, too:

If I’m adding a movie to my Netflix queue, I’ve already decided not to buy the DVD. I’m adding it because it looks mildly interesting and I’d like to watch it sometime. If I can’t add it to Netflix, I’ll just forget about it and probably never see it.

I think that's probably the biggest reason I stopped buying physical copies of movies. Even though there have been some decent flicks that have come out in the past few years, I find myself going back and watching those movies again less and less. If I'm watching any media, it's streaming TV on Netflix.