You know how it is with music. Sometimes the more you hear about a band, the more you want to hear less about them. After Arcade Fire‘s Funeral, I had reached my saturation point. But after staying away from them for a bit, I came back and gave them an unbiased ear, and yeah, still like them. Neon Bible did less for me, but The Suburbs is working out just fine.

Ok, so the whole point of this post is to tie in some Linuxing with Arcade Fire. Can I do it? Hell yeah.

Thing is, they put out an interactive video for We Used To Wait. You need to go to thewildernessdowntown.com, type in the address where you grew up, and BANG, personalized video. I think this works really well as streets from your upbringing are integrated into the video. Not like I got sentimental and cried or anything, but it just worked nicely.

Ok, fine! I cried, ok? I got all weepy and pathetic and I fucking cried my ass off.

Anyway.

The interactive video at thewildernessdowntown.com is an html5 + Google Chrome experiment. Maybe the first of its kind. So for the full effect, you need to install Chrome. And if you’re using Ubuntu, here’s how to do it.

Sidenote: Don’t do like I did and try to run it on Chromium. Chrome and Chromium are two different forks. Chromium is the development package, where Chrome is your friendly Google browser. If you’re not sure, just check the help/about menu. Don’t be like me and spend 20 minutes waiting for the bar to go past 91%!

So yeah, of course you can download and install directly from the Chrome website, but who does that? This is how I did it for my amd64:

sudo wget -q -O – https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub | apt-key add –
sudo dpkg -i google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb

And that’s it. You’re done.

Now launch Chrome, go to thewildernessdowntown.com, and plug in the address where you grew up. Enjoy.

But if you REALLY can’t be bothered to do it (you lazy bastard), you can have the non-personalized experience by watching someone else’s memories: