Amazon.co.uk mp3 site

The mp3 shop on amazon.co.uk is superb and it beats the pants of most of it's competitors (although I still dearly love bleep). Here's why;

1. It is cheap
2. There is no digital rights management
3. It is quick
4. There is a good selection
5. They have linux versions of their download assistant

Today I have been downloading some great records;


Oxygene and Equinoxe by Jean-Michel Jarre and Koyaanisqatsi by Philip Glass


I've also been searching for treasure. Two sites I really love are cosmobells and 36 15 moog. Both are blogs written by collectors who find rare treasure on vinal and make mp3 files available. If you like electronica and old moog and synth music it is a hoarde of precious things the likes of which cannot be found or bought anywhere. My 'free' find of the day is High Tech by CLaude Larson

Microsoft and children in the developing world

The makers of the $100 laptop designed to give thousands of kids from the developing world access to a vital learning tool have announced that the Microsoft Windows XP operating system will now be supplied with the laptop alongside the free (and in my experience, far superior) Linux operating system. Users will be able to choose which operating system they want to use just after they switch on the laptop. The cost of the laptop has risen to $188 because the company involved can't demand that a country order a minimum number of laptops. With Windows XP the cost of the laptop has risen by a further $10 to $198, double the initial cost which means half as many kids will get their laptop. The project has also suffered delays because it has taken 1 year to adapt Windows XP to go on the machine. Even so the user interface doesn't work on Windows XP and the networking software that lets users talk to one another and share data also doesn't work. Scandal and shame.

Why are they letting big business in to profit from such a beautiful and altruistic NOT-FOR-PROFIT scheme? Because the users want it. The number of orders placed since Windows XP was made available has increased. I wonder how much pressure was placed on the governments of the countries placing orders. Of course, we all know that MS aren't in this because of education. They want to make sure their operating system and their software becomes dominant in the new markets in the developing world. This situation is akin to the companies who distribute free powdered milk to mothers in the developing world and then stop the free samples when the mothers natural milk dries up, forcing them to pay for the milk. Microsoft will raise a generation of children on Windows and then when they are adults they will be forced to use it and pay for it (out of familiarity, the same reason Windows is till dominant everywhere else), instead of taking advantages of all the goodness of FREE open source software.

File sharers banned from internet

The UK government is considering the idea of banning anyone from the internet who is found to be downloading copyrighted music or films. Here's why people download torrents;

1) Music in the mid 1990s was ridiculously expensive £15 for a CD album. It is no coincidence that file sharing developed as a response to these ridiculous prices.
2) VHS/DVDs/BLU-RAY video formats are a rip-off and always have been. I don't need expensive packaging for my movie. I don't need a format that changes every 10 years forcing me to rebuy everything. I just need the data stream. I should be able to download a film for £1.
3) The cost of legal downloads is just plain wrong. iTunes rips off UK customers mercilessly.
4) Choice online and in the shops is thin. I struggle to find some records that I could find on the high street a few years back.
5) HMV stop being a music retailer and went for DVDs and went for the pile em high sell em cheap greatest hits market.

The plan to ban people from the internet won't work. The government can't even enforce the driving ban properly. And drivers need a license. HM government have a fundamental misunderstanding of how file sharing works anyway. They seem to think people are swapping whole files like they did a decade ago. Nowadays each file is broken into pieces so small they can't be detected as illegal or not. How could they tell the difference between me downloading a fragment of a copyrighted song or me downloading a fragment of an mp3 file from an unsigned band that they uploaded for free? They could try and attack the infrastructure by killing the websites that host the torrent files but this would be a minor inconvenience and the torrent sites are doing nothing illegal because they are just hosting information and not copyrighted material. The last word comes from the internet service providers association

Internet providers are no more able to inspect and filter every single packet passing across their network than the Post Office is able to open every envelope

And they also don't want their best customers taken away.

YouTube

Is it just me or has YouTube got really slow and boring?

My iPod and Linux

This weekend I had a go at getting my iPod working under my Ubuntu Linux OS. The first problem was that I couldn't write or delete anything on the ipod, even as root. So I had to visit my brother to use his Windows XP laptop to wipe the ipod and reset it to factory settings. This helped with the write problems.

So far so good. Next I tried to write my music library to the ipod via the Amarok interface I use (which is, for every other use, superb). The files write OK but only in short batches. If I try and write more than, say, 10gb then something falls over and the whole thing crashes. The files are present on the ipod but the contents database isn't there (Amarok must write this after it writes the music files). The end result is that the music is there but the ipod clickwheel menu system doesn't show it as present. I need to read into this a bit more. My current workaround is to use Amarok to manage my music collection and gtkpod to do all the to and fro business with the ipod. Not ideal.

This is how things are with Linux in my experience. Lots of fiddling around to get things working. I don't mind this though because a) everything is free and b) when things do get working they are superb in terms of reliability and functionality. However, I must admit that at times this weekend I've felt like buying a Mac.

Nintendo Wii

I treated myself to a Nintendo Wii games console. It is superb. I've never been much of a fan of games consoles in the past but this is so much fun. Everything is much easier and more intuitive. A game of bowling is very much like the real thing. It is really easy to suspend your disbelief and really get into a game of tennis. I can't wait to try out some more games. I do hope that Nintendo keep supporting this console and making games for it.

Fed Up with my ISP

I'm fed up with my broadband provider. I signed up for this package on promises of a good and reliable connection with excellent customer support. More fool me. I never get anywhere close the connection speeds advertised. 101 kb/s is the most I ever get (at about 5am). I paid for the package up to 2MB but my local phone network is nowhere near good enough because I live in a satellite village of a larger town. The broadband company could have very easily checked local availability and offered me a price based on the speed they could genuinely offer. But no. I went for the package with the slightly higher speeds and tied myself into an 18 month contract to pay for something I'm not getting. And they know this.

The connection is unreliable too. I noticed that after a day or two of heavy downloading the bandwidth dips artificially to a rigid 20 kb/s. Again, I bought the package because it was advertised as having unlimited downloads and uploads but it seems an artificial cap is being applied if I use the service too much. The final straw comes with my personal webspace. This page, which has a paltry amount of space allocated has to be regularly updated to stay valid; if you don't change things regularly then they freeze the site because of 'inactivity' even though my visit tracker shows that the people who I set up this static page of information for visit it consistently in a steady trickle. Boo. When I call them I get diverted to a non-UK call centre where I have trouble understanding the operative and they have trouble understanding my accent. I know these people aren't stupid and they do their best but it doesn't work. I asked them for help setting up my free modem with linux and the line went quiet, they asked their supervisor and then said they weren't sure what I meant, a computer is Windows isn't it? Sheesh. As soon as my contract expires I'm going to pay extra to get what I pay for and before I switch I'm going to read every review and comparison of ISPs I can find. Hopefully by then I'll also have moved house to an area with cable internet. If anyone reading this has a suggestion that isn't spam then please recommend me do.

Goodbye XP

Microsoft has announced it will stop selling Windows XP from Jan 2008. They want everyone who buys a new PC from then on to move to Vista and existing users to upgrade. I wonder how long it will be before they stop looking after XP users? I will never buy a computer with Vista on or upgrade from XP. My next PC will be a Mac or a build with gentoo or Ubuntu or Debian on it. As soon as they stop supporting XP they will lose my custom forever. Judging by the response to Vista they might lose a few more customers too. If the stranglehold MS have on office PCs also starts to slip then maybe, just maybe the giant will start to wobble.

Internet baddies

Don't come too close. My computer has been infected by a nasty. I managed to get rid of most of it by cleaning the infected files from my registry and system32 folder and running sweeps with every manner of anti virus/spyware/malware tool. Why do people make these nasties? It's just pure vandalism. One theory is that these things are made by the people who then sell the cure. Or fraudsters looking for personal details. Anyway, I have got rid of the nasties but to be sure I now have to do a full backup and then shred my harddrive and reinstall Windows. On Easter weekend. What I wouldn't give to meet the swine who made the spyware/trojan/malware that got me.