Category: Uncategorized

I know, “Mid-June Update” sounds like a title with some sort of explanation needed… Maybe not, we’ve been doing this for nearly 7 years now, so cut us some slack! Summer is our slow time around here. Slow as in fewer postings, not slow as in nothing going on. So here’s a dump of all sorts of random thingies…

Things that have broken in the past two weeks:

• Air Conditioning
• Car (Dodge Intrepid, piece of &%$@!)
• Rio 500
• CD Player
• Crock Pot
• Ceramic mug

I’m sure there’s more, but that’s just what I can remember right now…

I was in Door County over the weekend, I highly recommend it. My big summer project involves removing all of the paint from our house, garage, and shed so that they can be repainted. (I do not highly recommend this.) The downside is that it’ll be many hours of work, in the hot sun, uphill, both ways… The upside is I get to use a power washer. Oh, and it should make our house look very cool…

I’ll be in Maryland next week learning Python, which should be interesting.

It’s my birthday this month… One month closer to death! Hooray! (The Greeks would be proud!)

MandrakeMove didn’t move it for me. It failed to work. Mandrake hates me…

In the Good News department, the digital camera is working again, but in the upgrade to Panther the card reader no longer works, so it’s now connected to the iMac running Mac OS 9, so importing photos involves inserting the card, copying the photos across the network, and then dropping into iPhoto. (Damn you Lexar!)

Oh, this site might be moving to a new server this month, and we might even switch to WordPress, but we’ll see – no promises, ok? Cool…

I’ve been thinking about ALLOFMP3, which seems to be able to exist because Russian copyright law is different from US copyright law. Of course you can access ALLOFMP3 from the US and even sign up with the site and download files, and this may or may not be breaking US copyright law. I think it does, but I don’t know because I am not a lawyer. (See Terms of Use.)

Let’s say it is legal in the US. the first question is, should you use it? Well, use it for what? If you just want to get a ton of new music you don’t have for cheap (pennies per song it seems) then that’s one thing, it’s probably not right. Are the artists losing money? Possibly, it all depends on the label I would think. My guess is for big labels you’re hurting them a lot more than the artists. I’d stay away from new independent artists (if there are any) as most of them seem to have some system in place to support them more directly. (Magnatune perhaps?) What if you just want digital copies of stuff you already own? I spent too much time last summer digitizing some old vinyl I’ve got, which involved connecting a turntable to my Mac, playing and recording the album (which hopefully did not skip and didn’t have any bad hisses or pops) and then splitting the album into tracks, and adding meta data, and… It’s a pain as you can see. So while I’ve got 5 or 6 Clash albums it would take me probably 20 or more hours to get MP3’s of them all.

Ok, so we’ve really got a legal and moral thing going on. I mean, if I were to sign up and download all the Clash material I already own on vinyl and cassette, does this violate US copyright law? Does it violate any US laws? Do I violate any laws when I digitize my vinyl collection? I don’t think it does, isn’t that part of the home recording act or something? My friend had his house burn down, and lost all the music he legally paid for. Was it ok that his friends made tapes of much of it for him? What if out old pal Cam goes back to Russia, downloads a few gigs of songs over there and tries to return home with them? Will he get hassled at the border? Does anyone know the answers? So let’s fast-forward, I’ve got all the Clash songs I want, which I’ve paid for once already, does the Clash lose any money from this? Does the label that put out the recordings? I wouldn’t have bought them on CD or as MP3’s because I’m the kind of person who actually would spend that 20 hours digitizing vinyl if I had to.

What do others think of ALLOFMP3? All sort of things apparently. It makes me sad to see people flock to it and think INCREDIBLE DEAL without considering any other implications…

So the final question, for all the money… Do I sign up and get digital copies of all those dang Clash songs I’ve been rambling on about? What say you?

Two interesting things came together this weekend. I heard about a keyboard that is built in the tradition of the Apple keyboards of old, and I read a Consumer Reports magazine that discussed the quality of PC‘s.

If you’ve been using Apple hardware for more than 10 years, you might remember that the quality of things produced by Apple was a bit better. Back then it was quite easy for the Mac-crowd to not only feel as if they had a superior operating system, but that they had superior hardware as well. Apple’s stuff was solid, and well manufactured, not flimsy and breakable, like so much of the hardware used to run Windows back then. Apple has always had the problem of costing a little bit (or a lot) more, but I’ve always felt you get quality for the price you pay. (Believe me, I won’t buy another Dodge!)

Today Apple still makes better hardware, and the Consumer Reports I read put Apple ahead of Dell and the others for reliability, least amount of problems, etc. This is of no surprise to people who use Apple hardware – it’s very nice – but years ago it was even better. I think things started to change when the first Macs without auto-inject floppy drives came out, the Mac started to lose some of it’s elegance that day, and it continued on as IDE drives started to replace SCSI hard drives…

Still, Apple had to make changes to become price competitive with the lower-quality products, because to the average consumer it’s still to some degree a matter of megahertz, or disk space, or screen size, or miles-per-gallon, or whatever… I think that more and more people are starting to see the value of the user experience, but to many it’s still just a game of numbers. When it comes to IT departments determining what tools a person needs to do their job, I sometimes think people should be forced to use Mac OS X for a minimum of one month before deciding that Windows is the best operating system for every desktop.

Apple had to lower itself to fit into the category of “good enough” while other companies seem to strive with all their might just to raise themselves up to such a label.

Wasn’t it just days ago I had a fresh Mandrake install? Yes it was…

Well, it lasted a day or so, until I tried to change the resolution on the monitor. A simple change to XF86Config right? Well, along the way things went very bad. Ok, everything went bad, really, really bad. I probably hosed something in mtab along the way, but the system was dead. So I thought I’d try a re-install. That didn’t seem to work either. Well, the first few times, but finally I got a complete install done, and it just woundn’t boot into Linux from BootX.

Thus ends my experience with Mandrake. For now anyway… If I get ambitions I might actually check to see if the CD‘s are good, I have a feeling disc 2 was the problem with the install. Don’t take this as a poo-poo on Mandrake, just my experience.

I hear Fedora Core 2 runs on PPC, but it still seems a little bleeding-edgy. I might try Gentoo now (since I found the CD) or perhaps go back to Yellow Dog, you’ll find out next week!