Magnatune’s music podcasts
September 15th, 2007
The Magnatune music podcasts on the iTunes store are a terrific deal. There are nearly fifty different podcasts for virtually all kinds of music genres and every podcast is an hour of great music at 128kbps, without advertising and completely free, and it looks like new podcasts are added at regular intervals. It’s a great way to get into some of the really good music that Magnatune distributes. Just search for “Magnatune” in the podcasts section of iTunes store.
In addition to distributing good music Magnatune also has a Creative Commons license — you’re allowed to use all their music without royalties in non-commercial podcasts and the rates are also very reasonable for commercial use, based on what you are turning over. They also do a fair 50/50 split with the artists and when you buy stuff you get to choose what you want to pay, you have the right to give away copies to three friends (no DRM) and can download all qualities all the way up to CD quality WAV files. Highly recommended, lots of good music!
Boiled Frogs: Apple gets into nickel and dime crime
September 14th, 2007
Apple is the latest major company to get into nickel and dime crime, which is safe, legal and fantastically profitable. Their new iPhone ringtones function gets people to pay 99 cents for something they already own, and money for nothing is always the best best profit margin you can have. It used to be called theft.
Robbers used to hang out in the woods and collect loot from unwary travellers by threatening to insert sharp instruments into their soft parts or banging them over the head with a heavy stick. This is no longer necessary, there are much better ways to boil a frog nowadays.
Apple’s grey screen of death
July 23rd, 2007
Blue or grey – it’s still a screen of death!
Yesterday I had my first grey screen of death on my Mac Pro. It was probably caused by Parallels running in Coherence mode, with all the XP windows as discrete windows on the OSX desktop. At least, that’s my guess — it seems that it happened so fast that no logs were stored, I’m unable to find any of the panic logfiles that my searches suggest you should look for.
Interestingly, the same searches would seem to indicate that grey screens of death (normally referred to as kernel panics, apparently) occur just about as frequently on the Mac as they do on Windows machines, and for the same reasons: Read the rest of this entry »
Windows user’s (justified) fear of installing new software
December 22nd, 2006
On his blog, Nick Bradbury posts that many inexperienced users are afraid to install programs. Actually, it is not just inexperienced users who hesitate to install programs on Windows. Many experienced users do too, because they know from painful experience that installing a new application can easily make their system start malfunctioning in strange and creative ways. In addition to this, they also know that it may be impossible to really remove the application. This situation is partly the fault of Microsoft for making Windows the way it is and partly (possibly even more) the fault of the armies of lazy, slovenly programmers out there who think they can do anything they like on users’ computers.
What many Windows programmers do to their users’ computers is the digital equivalent of vandalism.
German high court nixes police hackers
December 13th, 2006
Germany’s Federal Court of Justice (BGH) recently ruled that hacking activities by the German police are illegal, according to a report published by the daily newspaper TAZ (die tageszeitung — it is not possible to link to the articles directly because TAZ requires registration for access).
It seems the German police have been using hacking tools to break into suspects’ computers via the Internet and examine their contents. It’s no big surprise that the court thinks that the police don’t have the right to do this. What is intriguing is that the police have apparently been doing this for some time, with the backing of official court orders. It makes you wonder what is going on in other countries.
Vista’s “fake” virtual registry
December 11th, 2006
Windows Vista protects itself against illegal Registry writes with a “fake” virtual registry, to which the illegal writes can be made without doing any damage to the real registry. The company I work for produces a little free utility that writes some Registry values to solve some problems with certain file types on network drives. In the process of testing this utility for Vista we have discovered some interesting facts about the way this virtual Registry works. We’re not yet 100% sure about all the ramifications, but it looks as though this is going to have far-reaching consequences for many existing programs. Many will seem to work at first but will then fail, many will have to be rewritten.
Nick Bradbury on software firewalls
December 6th, 2006
Nick Bradbury just put a great post on his blog titled Why do firewalls have to be such a PITA? Right, software firewalls are generally a serious pain, and so are “security suites”.
Computer security: It’s hopeless
December 5th, 2006
A couple of days ago I spent the evening helping a not particularly computer savvy friend to set up her new Windows laptop computer. Among other things, she wanted me to set up Skype for her and during the installation process I created an account and asked her what user nickname and password she would like to use. The resulting conversation made me realize that computer security is not going to happen in our lifetimes.
The Sony K800i as an MP3 player
December 4th, 2006
Steve Jobs and everyone else at Apple must sometimes wonder why their competitors make everything so easy for them — it must feel like shooting fish in a barrel. I just updated my cellphone account and got a new Sony Ericsson K800i as part of the deal. Among other things, this phone has full MP3 player capabilities, and since you can insert a memory card with up to 1GB of storage you could theoretically put quite a few songs and podcasts on it.
If only…
Vaio SZ: The world’s worst laptop keyboard
December 3rd, 2006
Alongside all their travails with the Playstation 3, the audio CD rootkit disaster and the fact that a Korean manufacturer (Samsung) is in the process of taking over their former position as Asia’s leading innovative tech company, Sony now has the dubious distinction of being the manufacturer of a series of high-end laptops with the world’s worst keyboard.
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