The Minneapolis folks behind Yearbook Yourself are at it again, this time on Facebook. The new app, Wild It Up, allows Facebook users to “wild up” their Facebook photos by adding realistic-looking elements such as fashion accessories, animals and tattoos. See the accompanying photo of yours truly.  (And please accept my apologies for the accompanying photo of yours truly.)

Wild It Up was created by Colle+McVoy for Caribou Coffee. That’s why there’s a bunch of Caribou drinks and snacks to add to your photos, too. The app seamlessly integrates with your Facebook photo galleries to make the process easy. As with other Facebook apps, you can share the often-funny results of your wild-upped photos in your updates, as well as add them to your profile. Print out your photo as a coupon and take it to a Caribou store, and you’ll get a free Wild Cooler drink (for a limited time). See that? It pays to make fun of yourself.

By the way, Colle+McVoy celebrated its recent Webby award for Yearbook Yourself this week with a rooftop party at its downtown office. The new edition of Yearbook Yourself is supposed to be up by the end of this month, in time for back-to-school promotions. Until then, you can go wild on Facebook.

If you’re looking for a quick musical fix for your July 4th weekend, the Amazon MP3 store has two deals worth celebrating. The first is the free Patriotic Music Amazon Sampler from Documentary Recordings, a 10-track collection that includes “God Bless America,” “America the Beautiful” and military songs. The second is the 30-track A Salute to America, by 101 Strings, a new everything-but-the-kitchen-sink collection released this week that costs only $1.89. Performance quality varies, but for 40 tracks for less than $2, it’s still a good deal. Seriously, even the iffy Lawrence Welk-sounding renditions on the latter are palatable as background music for a barbecue. The Amazon MP3 downloader is required, but the free plug-in makes downloading easy and can be configured to dump the new tracks right into iTunes.

What do your Twitter messages say about you? TweetPsych claims to tell you by analyzing your tweets’ linguistic composition to determine your psychological profile. It’s another interesting entry to add to my write-up today about Twitter add-ons.

But do keep in mind that it is, as the disclaimer notes, “for entertainment purposes only.” For example, my TweetPsych profile ranks sports as No. 3 among cognitive-content features for which I scored higher than the average. The only problem is that I’ve never tweeted even once about sports. I have, however, mentioned “video games” often, so I assume that TweetPsych is defining “game” as a sports term, which is kinda lame. On the other hand, my profile says that I talk a lot about jobs and my work, which is true because I pretty much use Twitter as an extension of Technobabble.

 Give TweetPysch a try and let me know how it works for you. 

After five years, I have canceled my subscription to Sirius XM Radio. You can now add me to the 1.7 million subscribers the satellite radio service lost in the first quarter this year. My decision had nothing to do with Sirius XM’s new iPhone app, which has been criticized for not including primo programming such as Howard Stern or Major League Baseball (neither of which I’ve ever listened to), but it does have everything to do with these reasons:

1) The audio quality has declined. I’m not talking about reception quality, which has always been fine. I’m talking about the sound of the music. It might be just my ears, but the music on Sirius over the past year or so has increasingly sounded like poor-quality MP3s — not all the time, but much of the time. The audio has always been compressed on Sirius and XM, before and after their merger, but it sounds noticeably worse to me lately – to cram more programming into limited bandwidth, I assume.

2) The price has gone up. When I first started with Sirius, the price was about $120 a year. My latest annual renewal would have been about $150, more if I wanted online access to programming. This isn’t as big a deal, but it was still a factor.

3) Sirius bailed on Cinemagic. One of the most exciting things about XM for me was its channel devoted to nothing but film music. So when Sirius merged with XM, it was the main channel I was looking forward to. But immediately upon “adding” Cinemagic, Sirius pre-empted it with Christmas music (one of three such channels during the holidays), but it ran regular alerts saying that Cinemagic would be back after the new year. It was — for about a week. Then Sirius replaced it with an all-disco station — even though it already had separate channels devoted to 1970s and dance music.

4) My listening habits have changed. After converting my vast CD collection to high-quality MP3s, I pretty much listen just to my iPod (via my car stereo) while I drive. That change, coupled with the previous factors, sealed my decision to cancel Sirius. (But I do have to say that if Cinemagic had been added, I probably would have kept Sirius as a way to keep up with new releases.)

When I called Sirius to cancel, I was offered two months’ worth of free programming to stay on. I declined. My subscription officially ended last week. Thursday, I received an email offer to renew and get two free months and then three months at $13 each. I didn’t reply.

Here’s something interesting, though. A few days after my subscription ended, I received a survey asking why I had left. I filled it out, citing much of what I’ve written here. One of the questions asked if I would be willing to pay $6.99 a month for 50 channels of programming that I would choose. I’d actually seriously consider that, especially if it included Cinemagic, because that would neatly address most of my concerns. (UPDATE: See comments for why this won’t happen.)

Until that happens, though, I will be a former Sirius subscriber.

The latest come-on from a new line of HDMI cables prompts this reminder not to waste money on overpriced options backed by techno-mumbo-jumbo. Consider these touted features of Radio Shack’s new Auvio HDMI cables (pictured right), as listed in a press release:

* “24k gold-plated hybrid HDMI connectors for a secure, high-speed connection”
* “Triple shielding to prevent outside electrical interference and ensure a strong signal”
* “Optiflex™ cover, low-loss conductor and dual twisted-pair construction for durability”
* “Deep color and xvYCC support for a great picture”
* “Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio support for great sound”
* “RoHS and Prop. 65 compliance for environmental friendliness”
* “Limited lifetime warranty for peace of mind”

The release goes on to say the cables are being offered at a “superior value.” That price: $35 for a 3-foot cable to $80 for a 12-foot cable. What? Such pricing makes it hard to believe the claim that Auvio researchers created the cables after they “found that consumers paid more than they should for features that simply are unnecessary or excessive given their needs.” Uh, that would include Auvio cables now, too. They might be cheaper than Monster HDMI cables — the whole reason they were created, to have a “lower-priced” option when showing Monster cables to customers at Radio Shack – but they are still way overpriced. And the “features” of an HDMI cable are fairly limited. It either is or isn’t an HDMI cable; build quality is probably the biggest concern.

To put it in perspective, Monoprice’s premium HDMI cables (pictured above) have virtually the same “features” as Auvio, including gold-plated connectors and a hefty build, yet sell for less than $5 for a 12-foot length.  If you can prove to me that the sound and video of a home theater is any better — or even different — as a result of the Auvio cable vs. the Monoprice equivalent, I have an MP3 Challenge you should be able to ace.

(Which reminds me:)

TAKE THE TECHNOBABBLE MP3 CHALLENGE!
Can you tell the difference between MP3s and the original CD?

iNetVideo is selling Tranformers on high-def disc for $1. There’s only one catch: It’s on HD-DVD, not Blu-ray. A few years ago, Transformers was the top-selling movie on HD-DVD. Now the format is obsolete, and you can get a fantastic presentation of the blockbuster in a two-disc set for a buck — 97 percent off (plus $2.95 shipping). How quickly things change.

By the way, iNetVideo is selling more than 140 new HD DVDs, many of them for less than $5 (plus the aforementioned shipping). If you’re one of the 17 people who still have and use an HD DVD player (I still have but don’t use mine, which I bought for $29), that’s quite a deal. And don’t stop browsing once you go past $5 on the list. There are deals to be had among multidisc  sets, such as the five-disc The Ultimate Matrix Collection for $29.99 and the three-disc musical documentary That’s Entertainment for $9.99.