As we create content across the internet, whether it’s twittering and tumbling, uploading photos, recording bookmarks, or blogging, it becomes increasingly valuable to have a way to aggregate all our content in one place. Lifestreaming is an answer to this need for a coherent and unified presentation of our online lives. A Lifestream grabs the RSS feeds we create at most sites we participate at and collects them on one page in chronological order, allowing a quick look at everything we are doing online.

I’ve created a lifestream for myself at the website that serves as my main identity online, Apollo Lemmon . com. There I am currently sharing blog entries from Frozen Truth and Zaadz, twits and tumbles from Tumblr, photos from Picasa, links through del.icio.us, interesting fashion and gadgets through Stylefeeder, and music I listen to at Last.fm. I used wp_simplelife, a superb plugin for WordPress, to create the stream and now just dive in and do my normal internet activity and it collects it all for me.

Lifestreaming is a public manifestation of the more inclusive and private LifeLogging, which I’ve written about before, and is an advancement I have a lot of hope for.

If you are interested in creating your own stream, I do recommend wp_simplelife, but there are a lot of options out there, and many are collected at Lifestream Blog.

For a long while I’ve had a general policy of keeping my inbox empty. I’d let replies and actions sit for a while sometimes, but the appeal of a clean, white page when I leave Gmail is too great to let lapse for too long. What I haven’t had was a methodology for keeping that inbox clutter down and staying on top of everything. Inbox Zero came to my attention again today (it keeps popping up everywhere) and that has all changed.

Simply, Inbox Zero is a set of “skills, tools, and attitudes” for maintaining an empty and manageable inbox. A lot of the tips seem like common sense once we encounter them, but most of us are applying some simple methods that can save us time and keep our focus on things we value more than dealing with e-mails. “Act now or delete” becomes a liberating mantra for avoiding being bogged down by e-mails.

I’m now working on having my RSS feed reading work similarly. My ideal is that when I encounter something interesting among my feeds I read it and then either move on, add it to my del.icio.us bookmarks, or blog about it.

Here’s a great video of Merlin Mann, the guy behind Inbox Zero, talking to employees at Google:

Poe has been lying low in recent years – her last release, Haunted, was in 2000 – but has launched a new project at Repoezessed collecting recorded accounts of dreams, presumably for inclusion on a new album. The site asks for submissions of MP3s containing spoken accounts of contributors’ dreams with the prompt, “I had a dream that…”.

Poe has a history of including spoken recordings in her music. Haunted was a themed album made with recordings of her late father, Tad Danielewski. Haunted was a powerful and moving album and owed much to Poe’s skillful use of these recordings. Because of this precedence and my deep admiration of Poe in general, I’m very excited to see what she’s up to.

Above is the video for Poe’s first hit, “Hello”. Poe’s most recent released works are five tracks that can be found on the first two Conjure One albums.

Last night I began reading a new blog on the integral scene, Integral News and Views, where I found an interview with Robert Augustus Masters. Masters is an integral writer and therapist who places emphasis on living an integral life. His eloquence is extraordinary and he gives some of the clearest descriptions of just what being integral means to our lives.

This is an important reminder to those of us who are engaged in building an integral life and forming an integral life practice. An ILP, however it is structured, takes into consideration each of those “physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and social dimensions” of our lives and strengthens our capacities in each of them. When not following an ILP, it’s very easy to become wrapped up in aspects of our lives that seem to dominate.

As a student, the cognitive part of my life is always demanding a lot of time and attention, and my physical well-being suffers when I don’t take steps to include resistance training and walking in my life. Likewise, when relational demands come to dominate, my meditation practice diminishes. One of the great challenges in living an integral life is being mindful of the many dimensions and capacities we have and must work to strengthen if we wish to live at the edge of our potentials. And then comes the actual work of practice.

To think with greater clarity, to love with greater skill, to feel with discernment and authenticity, to hone our bodies and enrich our environment, none of these should come at the expense of the other and each should be given time, effort and acknowledgment. If we are to better ourselves and our world in meaningful, lasting and exciting ways we must live integrally. Being integral demands a lifestyle that addresses our fragmentation, as Masters clarifies:

Also from Robert Augustus Masters is “What is ‘Integral’?“, a call, in part, to “do whatever is needed to make ‘integral’ a fitting term for how we are actually living.”

Video offerings online can be frustratingly hard to keep track of without a program like Miro. When I find a video podcast I enjoy, I just add it to my list of subscriptions on Miro and it downloads as soon as new episodes are released. If I often search for something on YouTube, I’ll just add the search to Miro and it will keep me updated on new videos. I can sit down and watch when I have the time and know everything has been taken care of so that I can just enjoy the videos. The interface is intuitive and the content offered through promoted channels is superb.

The best software products combine ease of use, aesthetics and wide functionality. When it comes to video, I rely on Miro to deliver most of what I watch online because it is the best combination of those three aspects of quality I’ve found. In addition to this, being open source, free and cross-platform (Miro supports Linux, MacOS and Windows) makes it a natural fit for me.

Miro provides a healthy model for what internet video delivery should be. It has rich features that make it easily one of the best video products available, and because it is open source and has a strong community behind it, it’s always improving. Free, fast, efficient, fun and beautiful can describe the software we choose to use, and with Miro available that choice is an easy one to make.

Channels I watch on Miro:
Geek Brief – “Geek Brief TV is Shiny, Happy Tech News.”
Seed – Seed magazine’s video feed
Pulp Secret – “the world’s first comic book network”
Marvel/DC – parody “playing in Marvel and DC’s sandboxes”
Integral Naked – Integral Naked’s free YouTube channel, filled with superb content from the leading edge
Boing Boing TV – strange video from across the ‘net
Galacticast – “a comedy show parodying all the worlds of geek-dom”
Ask a Ninja – Ninja comedy at its best.
Pink: The Series – “Pink is a serialized dark comedy produced specifically for a web-based audience. … Think of it as a live-action graphic novel.”

Hot on the heals of Radiohead’s brilliant In Rainbows, Saul Williams just released his new album, The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust!, to the world through the ‘net. He ups the ante by releasing the album in a lossless FLAC format, as well as MP3 and OGG. It’s such a pleasure to be able to hear two of the best albums released this year without the hassle of middlemen and unnecessary hindrances like chunks of plastic and dinosaur promotion methods. Won’t it be wonderful if this direct method of delivering music takes off?

Delivery aside, this is a magnificent album. NiggyTardust! is the result of a collaboration between Saul and Nine Inch Nail’s Trent Reznor, and both are in fine form. As the title might suggest, this album holds a strange mix. Saul’s lyrics are richer with meaning and eloquence than ever as he again plays with mysticism, hip-hop and other disparate ingredients in a way that is unmatched. Reznor’s contribution gives the flavour of his past work to the album and his expertise in arrangement and production give it a distinct solidity. And there’s a sharp rendition of “Sunday Bloody Sunday”!

It’s just $5 USD (something minuscule for us Canadians) if you want to pay and free if you don’t, so there’s no excuse not to give it a listen, is there?

more »

Buck 65‘s Situation is his most coherent, thoroughly masterful and enjoyable album to date. It’s filled with the retro-eclectic themes and masterful rhymecraft that Buck 65 has become admired for while remaining essentially fun, inventive and fresh. This is a superbly smart, sexy, playful and observational collection of tracks.

Loosely based around the year 1957, there’s a complex nest of ideas within these songs and an underlying longing for a return of the creative and subversive cultural explosion Buck 65 perceives in the counter-cultural events of that year. He sees himself as a cultural observer and this comes through in so many plays on historical and present events and norms. Betty Paige, beatniks, film noir, hip hop, regional wrestling, pornography and hobos collide and form an unlikely thematic storm that is never unwieldy, but rather seems perfectly pieced together.

Buck 65 performing “Dang” from Situation live in Halifax
(I was lucky enough to be there for the taping)

Buck 65′s take on cyclical rebellion is worth exploring in addition to the music, so check out this recent Pitchfork interview where he explains the album’s genesis.

Joe Perez is the featured guest on Integral Naked this week. Joe is one of the bloggers I admire most —intellectual and soulful impact like his is seldom found—, and it was a great pleasure to walk through the dusk this evening while his dialog with Ken Wilber played. Joe’s story is a brilliant example of the value of an integral stance in living our lives, and it’s also deeply touching just as a human struggle.

Soulfully Gay is sitting at the top of my pile of books to read when academic demands allow, and I’m even more enthusiastic about sinking into it after hearing some more pieces of Joe’s story. There’s much to be inspired by and to learn from just on the surface of what will be within, and he has shown ample evidence of a great depth in the writings I have read. I highly recommend Joe’s blog at Until for a taste of his writings and contribution to integral understanding, especially as applied in integral Christianity.

The author of one of the most searing, courageous personal memoirs of our time shares how an Integral Approach helped him reconcile a life of fierce inner struggles with what it means to be a gay man in today’s culture, the difference between genuine spiritual experiences and psychotic episodes, and the thorny intersection of homosexuality and Christianity.

In the foreword to Soulfully Gay, Ken Wilber writes: “Joe Perez’s book is perhaps the most astonishing, brilliant, and courageous look at the interface between individual belief and cultural values that has been written in our time. By a homosexual, or a heterosexual, or any other sexual I am aware of.” Ken wrote this foreword without even having met Joe—probably one of the strongest complements one writer can give to another—and Soulfully Gay is the second offering from our Integral Books imprint at Shambhala Publications.
…
As Ken so beautifully summarizes, “Joe’s life is being artfully lived in the very fact of its truthfulness, its deep embrace, shadows and warts and worms and all, woven unhesitatingly into the tapestry of a lustrous display, a deep peace, an abiding love… and therein, surely, a lesson for us all….”

You can find a free sample of Ken Wilber and Joe Perez in dialog at Soulfully Gay. Part 1. Out of the Closet, Into an Integral Embrace and sign up to hear the full transmission and many other brilliant conversations.

Today the newest version of Ubuntu, my operating system of choice, was released. Codenamed Gutsy Gibbon, it’s the most beautiful, polished and accessible OS I’ve used. What is Ubuntu? Simply put, it’s an open source operating system (think a replacement for Windows or OS X) that is shaped by a desire for a free, easy to use and robust environment to work, play and live with.

I switched from Windows a couple years ago and haven’t looked back. Ubuntu is better in all the ways that matter to me, and it’s entirely free. Millions of us across the world happily use Ubuntu daily for all our computing needs and breathe easier to be free of the confines of Apple and Microsoft products that just can’t compare to the software produced by the vast open source community.

Applications for Ubuntu (and Linux in general) are of tremendous quality and are usually freely, quickly and easily available. In fact, if something I need to do isn’t available with Ubuntu out of the box, a few clicks and a couple minutes with have the program I need running. The ease of use is above and beyond anything in the proprietary software market.

Many folk have picked up on the wonders of Ubuntu lately. Wired champions it as accessible, while Boing Boing calls it “easy, sexy“. There even arises a degree of OS jealousy when many Windows and Mac users see just how slick Ubuntu is. The good news is that all it takes to get Ubuntu up and running on your computer is one CD (either downloaded or ordered by mail), and you can even try it out before doing anything at all permanent to your computer. Or you could buy a computer with Ubuntu installed from Dell.

Did I mention it’s beautiful? Take a look at some of what can be done for eye candy: more »

Transhumanism has been an easy movement for me to embrace, as much as I disagree with some theories, opinions and timelines proposed within the field. Longer, better, more productive and more free lives would be hard to refuse. Infuse that with an integral framework and you have the makings of a luminous future.

New Scientist has a feature on transhumanists in its Death-focused new issue, under the title “The Plan for Eternal Life“. It seems some transhumanists are making a play to bring the ideas of technologically enhance humans into the mainstream.

Here is a video from New Scientist that features transhumanist leaders Aubrey de Grey, Nick Bostrom and Anders Sandberg:

I disagree with Mr. Sandberg that we are merely data, identity and personalities (objects), but rather that consciousness itself is essential to who we are. Still, there is a lot of benefit to be gained with digital recording of our memories and other traits. Aubrey de Grey is one of my favourite speakers on transhumanism in general because he presents a pragmatic and simple argument, free from some of the more contentious claims being made; he makes clear the moral imperative we have to work to improve quality of lives.

Imagine a world where we have more time to develop. Imagine a world where our lives are rich and lengthy enough that we can achieve our fullest potentials. To refuse this possibility to the world would be a terrible loss.