Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
First encountered the ever-surprising accidental art of Jodi.org (don’t click that link) on antiweb almost a decade ago. Wired makes the point that Jodi and other net art sites are a sort of indulgence, or embrace of faulty programming.
…what sets online art apart from other technological endeavors is “not the innovative use of technology, but a creative misuse of it.”
A BBC article on the toxicity of semiconductor manufacture says that:
… weight for weight, the average computer chip does more harm to the environment than the car. … In order to produce one memory chip that weighs two grams, the total amount of materials and fossil fuels required to make that chip is 1,400 grams. That’s 700 times the weight of the original chip…
I knew semiconductor manufacturing was very toxic, but didn’t know it was this bad. However it would be much harder to account for the amount of resources computers save via:
– telecommuting
– digital photography (analog photos also extremely toxic)
– paperless office (hah! in theory*)
– what else?
Also it’s a red herring to only compare manufacture – try comparing the impact of daily use of cars and computers.
* I’m content not to print almost anything, but long ago accepted that many people do — I work with people who print out anything longer than a paragraph so they can “actually read it.”
birdhouse hosting is pleased to serve up the photography of Mimi Chakarova, at mclight.com.
Update on a recent post on G4 energy draw : According to a fellow posting in a MacNN thread, the LinkSys probably consumes around 32 watts and my DSL modem around the same. The Studio Display draws 40W in use and 10 W asleep. So that’s between 60 and 95W delta between this rig and the Pentium we spot tested at the solar joint (I had mistakenly assumed that the modem and router would draw next to nothing). That means that if I could borrow the Watts Up again and hook up just the Mac, it would probably draw less power than the Pentium after all. All moot now – have decided not to move on alt.power before we buy a house.
Showed my boss iTunes’ new remote music sharing (but not downloading) feature today and he immediately tagged it as webcasting. Is it webcasting? If so, then does this form of sharing require royalties to be paid? Who will determine whether I’m just listening to my home collection from work (or vice versa) or casting my collection to 100 listeners (assuming I had that much upstream bandwidth)? And so what if I am? I’m not sharing the files with them, only the performance. And if sharing the performance is a problem, does that mean I can’t have a party and play a CD for everyone who attends?
Gray areas, but you can begin to see why iTunes throws an alert “This feature is for personal use only” when sharing is activated.
Bummed. Had this big idea to do solar-powered, Mac-based web hosting. On first conversation with an employee at Sun Light and Power, it had sounded like I could power a G4 with a single 120W panel, a $50 RV battery, and a $60 RV inverter. I borrowed the Watts Up to measure actual consumption and went back to Solar Dude with my numbers today.
The server, with LCD monitor, DSL modem and router draws 162 watts constant (8.67 kwh in 57.5 hrs). Assuming fixed-position panels on a South-facing roof in the East Bay, figure around 4.5 hours/day of usable sunlight. So I would need six 160w panels to keep the batteries charged day and night, not one. The panels run $500-$600 each. Comparing against our electric bill, it turns out that if the system had required one panel, it would have paid for itself in four years (tax rebates don’t apply unless you do grid-tie (sell your electricity back to the utility)). I was willing to bite off four years in exchange for the customer draw of solar-powered web hosting. But unless solar panels start falling from the sky (gently), it’s not going to happen. Panels make electricity out of thin air and are therefore pure gold. That’s also why there is virtually no used market for them.
Turns out you can get up and running with wind energy for about half the price of solar, although I’m not going to try and do that in a rental. And those stories about windmills killing so many birds on the Altamont Pass? Wives’ tales, apparently. Solar Dude says there have only been two confirmed bird kills there.
Question for the electrical geniuses — Solar Dude said it seemed like my server was drawing a lot of power. For comparison, we plugged his 1.8 GHz Pentium into the Watts Up and it drew 80w. So if the PowerPC is so energy efficient, why is my single PPC 867MHz drawing nearly twice what a Pentium draws (albeit with LCD in sleep mode, modem and router)? Of course the setup cost would still be huge even if I went x86.
Anyway, fossil-fueled birdhouse hosting is now up and running with a small handful of customers. Bring it on. Not giving up on the idea… maybe I need to write a grant for free panels or something.
In November 2001 I had just migrated from BeOS to OS X and was sorely missing the ability of my MP3 player to broadcast my home collection to work (see iTunes Needs Streaming). All the hubbub surrounding the new iTunes music store has eclipsed the news that it’s finally possible to do exactly that. I’m sitting at work right now listening to my home MP3s, and haven’t dropped a frame in two hours. All 16,000 tracks are immediately available, with all the usual search functionality. All my playlists (both standard and “smart”) are available. I’m in hog heaven.
If you set sharing on in the prefs, you can also provide a direct link into any point in your collection — Cmd-Click and select Copy URL. philm points out that it’s also possible to link to specific items in the iTunes store. Check these examples.
A few follow-up thoughts on the iTunes integrated store:
– Some comments on last night’s post led me to check out eMusic and yup, it’s very cool. Great service. But for me (and I suspect many others) the integration of the store into iTunes just makes sense and is going to result in me buying more music. Possibly a lot more. I don’t know how or why — it just feels much natural to use that little iTunes search window I use all the time to search on music I don’t already have than it is to go to an external web site. Also, the flat rate at eMusic means I would feel compelled to spend time surfing for music whether I need music this month or not. Don’t have much time for that these days and prefer not to feel compelled to shop.
– There are a dozen arguments we can level against the first incarnation of the service (not available internationally, only offers Big Popular music), but the fact is that the war between The Labels and The People over digital music downloads has been going on for several years now, with no signs of abating. What we need are major steps toward compromise, so the labels, the artists, and consumers all get what they want. This is what that compromise looks like. Not perfect from every angle, but also better than what we have now, ie bidirectional animosity and ongoing war. The service will improve over time. It just launched.
– Several complaints about albums costing too much to purchase digitally. Yup, that’s true, I’d agree with that but add that half the point here is that you don’t have to buy the album – you buy the tracks you like. If you want the whole album, why not just buy the CD? On the other hand, if they can offer substantive discounts on whole albums, I would be more inclined. Just saying that my approach has always been to purchase the whole album if I want the whole album and download songs if I just want songs. Nothing about this store changes that.
Anyway. Despite its imperfections, I still think this service is going to make huge inroads towards cracking the great nut of electronic music sales. Done right, everyone wins.
Just spent half an hour surfing through the music store built into iTunes 4, and gotta say, it’s an intoxicating experience — like hanging out at the headphone station at the record store listening to sample tracks, except that the UI responds faster and there are way more albums. Around 200,000 tracks from the Big 5 labels to start with. Initial observations:
A) This changes everything. Someone had to “go big” and make a play for the paid music download proposition, and do it right. That someone may as well be Apple, and sure enough, they’ve done it right. The associative power between artists, genres, tracks, and databases of “what other people bought” is incredibly powerful. Throw in the ability to sample the first 30 seconds of any track and you get a very addictive, shopper-friendly experience (.99/track). In 10 minutes, I decided to purchase the music of Jack Johnson and Diana Krall — two artists I had thought of idly in the past without tasting.
B) Decided to, but couldn’t — a bug in confirmation of billing details for existing .Mac customers made damn sure of that.
C) 200,000 tracks is not really that many, and naturally, my favorite artists are not represented by the Big 5. “Beefheart” turns up nothing. Even artists as significant as Air are nowhere to be found. Similarly, only Radiohead’s lamest album (“OK Computer”) is present. Somehow, it’s more exciting to browse and be excited by the possibilities than it is to search for what you really like. But as a commenter at MacSlash put it:
Are you all retarded? The reason they used the top 5 lables is because they are THE TOP 5 LABELS. This is an opportunity to make money, not appease emo-pop indie geeks.
Exactly. And it’s probably a no-brainer that Apple will at some point offer a submission mechanism for “indie” artists. Meanwhile, it’s about time someone created a simple mechanism for people to get off on quick-n-easy music downloads without simultaneously reaming the very artists they allegedly respect and support. Turn that beat around… got to hear per-CUSSION!
I’ll test the new AAC codec support later.
Put iPhoto’s slideshow feature to the public test last night. Mimi Chakarova came back from India with hundreds of incredible images (not yet online). Arranged them in iPhoto 3 and added another hundred slides of text blocks – captions, poems, etc. Set the interval and timed the segments, then ripped chunks of audio tracks in iTunes and stitched them together in QuickTime Pro. Told iPhoto to use the resulting audio track as the sound track for her album. The result was an absolutely breathtaking 25 minute presentation, which we output through a high-quality projector and very good speakers to a room of around 100 people. Went off without a hitch. Nobody was more amazed than her – she had never done anything remotely multimedia before, but pulled this off in two days with about 30 minutes training.