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EMusic and the Hoarding Instinct

Lots of bitterness out there about how today marks the end of the all-you-can-eat $9.95 music download program at emusic.com. As of today, your ten bucks “only” buys you forty tracks/month, i.e. 3-4 albums.

I was turned on to emusic days after starting to poke around the iTunes Music Store, and quickly discovered that not only was emusic much cheaper than ITMS, but it also had a catalog more in line with my tastes. Like most emusic users, I went on a month-long download binge after the announcement that the business model would change to resemble something remotely profitable. Today we are returned forcibly to our senses.
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Broadcast Flag — The FCC’s Jolly Roger

Just getting up to speed on the recent broadcast flag ruling, and it’s as depressing as I had feared. Nutshell version: Devices capable of handling HDTV streams or signals must incorporate an FCC-approved encryption module by July 2005. In other words, government-mandated and controlled PC and television design.

“the order “totally eliminates the ability to send that (HDTV) data over a PCI bus to a Firewire port or to a digital VHS recorder–except in analog format.”

This means you can’t use something like a Hauppauge card to record a digital TV stream to your hard drive — that would be giving the consumer way too much flexibility in the way they work with media.

And if you don’t care about HDTV, remember that this is a slippery slope. The consumer’s ability to work with recorded media is now regulated by the government, and enforced by hardware vendors. HDTV first, anything the entertainment lobbies want regulated next.

The question is, what exactly will happen to media in the presence of the broadcast flag? As I understand it, you’ll still be able to record, but that recording will only be playable on the same device that did the recording. That means no taping Trigger-Happy TV and lending the tape to a friend. You get the picture.

Get your HDTV receiver or capture card now, before they’re gubmint-crippled.

bIPlog has more.

Music: Astralasia :: You Never Blow Your Trip Forever
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First Album

The first record I ever owned* was the Partridge Family’s “Up to Date.” Actually, I acquired this and a copy of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” at the same time — they were given to me by a cousin who was “growing out of them” (and growing into ABBA). Yesterday while jogging Amy and I came across a box of 8-track tapes, and there it was — my first album, albeit on different media. A Donny Osmond collection and the Star Wars soundtrack was also in the pile. So sad that someone had just tossed these aside, as if worthless. Well, I guess I don’t blame them. It’s not like anyone but Pagan Kennedy can play 8-tracks anymore. But still. Brought back great memories to see this cover, with the birthdays of each of the Partridges on it. I used to wonder whether these were the real birthdays of the Partridges, and if so, did they get flooded with presents every year.

* Full disclosure: I actually did have a couple of children’s records before this — some kind of Mickey Mouse adventure in a recording studio and a record where all the instruments of the orchestra had personalities and we got to know them and their voices. But those didn’t count because they were given to me by parents, i.e. not hip.

So what was your first album? (LP, CD, cassette, 8-track…)

Music: Partridge Family :: Come On Get Happy
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Good Karma Ballot

The author of Bolinas’ Measure G wears burlap around her legs and neck, and paints her face in dark chocolate sprinkled with black pepper. She’s lived on the streets and in the woods for ages. The measure she wrote reads:

“Vote for Bolinas to be a socially acknowledged nature-loving town because to like to drink the water out of the lakes to like to eat the blueberries to like the bears is not hatred to hotels and motor boats. Dakar. Temporary and way to save life, skunks and foxes (airplanes to go over the ocean) and to make it beautiful.”

Nobody really knows what it means, but the petition gained enough signatures to get those exact words onto the ballot. Early polls indicate the measure will probably pass.

Music: Les Baxter :: Mozambique
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Panther Notes

I’ll skip the detailed Panther observations — plenty of excellent overviews and reviews out there. A few scattered notes after working with it for a few days:

– Move over sliced bread – Expose’ is even cooler.

– Finally, Cmd-Tab works exactly like Windows Alt-Tab, not just kinda.

– Everything is snappier. Boots faster. Probably a result of the fact that journaling is now on by default.

– The new Finder took a bit of getting used to, but I’m down with it. Glad it’s finally switched from aqua to metal. The layout is great, and improves with tweaking. But I have no idea what they’re thinking with network vols accessed via browse not mounting on the desktop (they still do when accessed via Connect to Server). Inconsistent, weird, not helpful. There must have been some logic there, but I’m not sure what it is. And I still can’t get links to network vols to work across boots without breaking, so I still have to mount shares manually after each boot. Not sure what I expected when they bragged about improved networking. There’s more compatibility, but less usability. Feh. I’ll live.

– Something no one seems to mention in reviews is the addition of a “Create Archive” option on context menus – zip anything in place, no need for 3rd party stuff. I’ve missed this from BeOS.

– Open/Save panels are just dynamite now. Switching today between Mac and PC, doing a task that required a lot of open/save operations, and the difference was almost painful.

– Dedicated panel for keyboard shortcuts. Set any shortcut for any system-wide or application specific action. A world of possibilities here.

A lot of cool stuff I’ll seldom use, but will be glad for when I need them: Built-in faxing. Fast user switching (apps aren’t quit when logging out); cool rotating cube effect while switching users. Color labels in the Finder. iChat AV (still gotta clear time to play with that one).

All told, totally worth it.

Music: The Mekons :: Poxy Lips
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If Voting Could Change Things

Mary Hodder posted an entry in the J-School’s bIPlog on the leak of certain internal Diebold memos. Diebold is sending cease and desist letters to universities whose students link to said leaks, and Swarthmore is falling for it. What’s really amazing about the memos is what they reveal about the attitude of the company to which our government has given millions of dollars to build voting machines. Choice quote: “If voting could really change things, it would be illegal .” Mary’s story was slashdotted, and we’re at 20x traffic today. The XServe’s handling it without a blip.

Music: The Minutemen :: Tune For Wine God
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rsync redux

Completed the new backup system last Friday. Now have a perfect daily mirror of half a dozen backup locations, as well as incrementals rewinding every day for a month. The cool thing about rsync is that it doesn’t need to copy GBs of data to make a mirror – uses checksums to send diffs, so a day’s changes are updated into the reservoir in seconds. Any files destined for deletion or change are copied into a folder named for that day of the month. My script steps through an arbitrary number of backup locations, and maintains separate mirrors and incremental sets for each. Fun to be shell scripting again, rather than PHP. It’s been a while. Running as a crontab, trouble-free so far. So much sweeter than the DVD backup system we had on the old Win2K server, which required my physical presence.

Music: Embryo :: Every Day Is Okay