I would like to thank all my dedicated readers for sticking with me during the last 5 years, during which I did not make any serious blog entries. Your dedication has not gone unnoticed.

That said, this is not a serious blog entry.

Back on a Mission

Didja miss me?

This is slowly turning into a music blog :)

This article from Tom's Hardware Guide has me curious. I'm interested to hear what other people suggest I listen to. But there's always some risk in letting amateurs take the reins.

Um wait a minute. That perfectly describes this and most other blogs.

Risk is good.

About those maps..

Quick update: Google Maps now supports Safari and Opera.

Radio Schmadio

This admittedly lame post is only to inform you that Wired News has a nice article about the state of the radio airwaves. I haven't even finished reading it yet, but so far it's good enough for me to recommend it.

EFF the System

I would like to take a moment to thank the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or EFF, for their service to society. The EFF is a group of people who stand up to fight companies that use hardball tactics to limit our freedoms. Somehow these companies, which include tech corporations and media conglomerates, have managed to buy all kinds of lawmaker influence. As a result, it seems that someone introduces new legislation or lawsuits to limit the way people use products every day.

What's their rationale? Protection of their intellectual property, of course! They seem to believe that they have the right to control how you use the music, movies, games, and television programming that you pay for. Why do they care so much? Well, aside from trying to stop piracy (good luck), I honestly don't know. Maybe they get a kick out of making our lives less enjoyable. Maybe they want to preserve the grand visions of the artists they employ. Maybe their wives/husbands have been irritating them a lot lately and they're taking out their frustrations on average citizens. Most likely, they simply think they can get more money from us by restricting what we do.

While the power and apparent mental retardation of the federal government may seem daunting, the EFF has done a pretty good job of standing up for people. Please check out their site to get a better understanding of who they are, what they do, and why they're important.

Some direct links:
EFF Home
Extinct and Endangered Gizmos
DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act)
Digital Rights Management
The Sad State of the Patent System

MacDollars

Apple is doing well. No, not the New York State Crispin apple on my desk (although it looks quite healthy). Everyone has an iPod. Everyone wants a Mac Mini. Their stock went up. Their stock split.

The downside to all this is that Apple's competitors are jealous of the "cool" status that Apple has earned. Now we are doomed to a three-year period where every company wants to be a hip, fashionable status symbol. This will annoy me, perhaps more than the U2 iPod commercial. I'm hoping that, in the midst of all the posturing, some companies really will launch some creative and useful products that walk the line between form and function. While I do see this trend as a positive one, I hope that people remember that image isn't everything. Sorry Intel, you'll never be cool.

To Apple's competitors: Don't try to be another Apple. Don't try to be the next Apple. Do your own thing, do it well, and you will be rewarded.

DRM = Dumb Restrictive Malarky

CNet reports about some legal trouble for Apple and Sony in France. The heart of the matter: buying music from them forces you to listen to it through only their media player.

My take: I hate sue-happy people. But I also hate DRM (Digital Rights Management).

My less-wishy-washy-take: If the lawsuit has any impact, it won't help the non-French world anyway. I really don't care about this particular legal action. The marketplace must strongly show its disapproval of DRM. But to do so, we need a non-DRM alternative, which I discussed last week when I wrote about mp3tunes.com.

So what do we do?

Good idea. Please do better.

So legendary semi-successful net entrepreneur Michael Robertson is at it again. The guy who brought us mp3.com and Linspire is trying to bust back into the music market. His new invention is mp3Tunes.

First of all, a little background. mp3.com was one of the first sites to make music available easily and, in most cases, freely. Of course most of the music was from amateurs and hobbyists, so mp3.com turned into a big places for wannabes to get some attention. That's a harsh way of looking at it. Although there were some very talented musicians posting music there, you had to sort through a lot of junk to find it. I should know; I had an mp3.com page myself. Then Mr. Robertson had a very good idea. His idea was to make a Linux distribution that seamlessly ran all Windows software. The name? Lindows. There were two problems: 1) Microsoft wasn't too fond of that name, and initiated a lengthy court battle. 2) It didn't really work. So you ended up with a simple user-friendly Linux distro that didn't interest too many people.

His new child, mp3Tunes, also starts on a good premise. You know how there's the iTunes Music Store, Real's music store and Real Rhapsody, Walmart's music store, and a bunch of others? Well, they all kind of suck (except maybe eMusic), because of all this DRM nonsense. You pay for a crippled file with all sorts of restrictions. Even if you don't want to be a criminal, it's still better to download music illegally because you don't end up with a file that you can't bring to work or put on your mp3 player or burn to a CD and give to a friend. If I buy a song from iTunes, and I happen to be using Winamp at the moment, I can't listen to that song. I have to wait for frickin' iTunes to load (Yawn. Let me skin you iTunes! please! I'd be patient if you were sexier!).

Realizing this, mp3Tunes will sell non-DRM music files. Great! That's perfect, right? Well, no. I don't expect any major labels to go for this, after they've expended (err wasted) so much energy getting all this DRM stuff working on the other sites. Would the average user prefer non-DRM files? Hell yes. Is there a market for this? I'd say heck yes. If I was going to buy some tracks, and they were available from many sites, my money would go to mp3Tunes.

However, at first glance, mp3Tunes is in trouble. First of all, the web site stinks. There isn't enough room for complete band names and song titles, so you've got a lot of "..." at the end. Are you interested in the track "Pour me..." by the band Cape Wi...? Then you've come to the right place! Secondly, and more importantly, I've only heard of a handful of the artists on the site. That's bad. It looks like mp3.com all over again. No casual fan is going to bother looking through their catalog if they don't see a single recognizable name on the front page. It's that simple.

So I hope Mr. Robertson doesn't drop the ball with this one. He's recognized a problem with the current situation, and I hope he can pull some strings and make the site work.

Lightening the photo load

Cnet has an article about some emerging hybrid cameras that are finally hitting the mark with respect to still image capture and video recording. $500 for a 5Mpixel still with 640x480 video recording? Hey, that's not bad, assuming the image quality is decent. There's also word that consumer-level hi-def cameras will start rolling out late this year, at around $600 (!).

Map it all with mapping no regrets

I'm pleased with Google Maps. In fact, I'm generally pleased with everything Google does, but that's not the point. Give it a shot. Despite some tiling glitchiness, I don't think I'll be going back to Mapquest or Mapblast anytime soon.

Imagine if Terraserver had the slick interface introduced by Google Maps. Talk about hours of wasted time.

Now imagine if Google and Apple had a baby. It would be user-friendly and reasonably priced! (That is to say that Google's offerings are usually free and Apple's are usually expensive)

Introducing... the page you're reading right now.

Aren't there already a million zillion technology blogs out there? Well yes, as a matter of fact, there are. So why am I making another one? Well, I've been blogging for a couple years now, and my audience is mostly just friends and some other random people. They enjoy hearing my lame stories and my dumb links and goofy Photoshop jobs. However, I've found that I've been posting more and more about tech news, gadgets, engineering, and computers, but my audience probably doesn't care about most of that.

So now I have this new outlet for my thoughts about these things. I'm hoping that I can attract some readers as the months go by, and maybe stoke some discussion and provide well-written opinions that represent the perspective of the average semi-nerd.

So feel free to comment as you see fit. I'm looking forward to years and years of successful online journalism, both critically and financially.

(I'm kidding about that success stuff.)

Hello World

Blogging is a way of life.

Well, at least it's better than Myspace.com.

Please come back soon.