NXTcomm and limbo sticks
Well NXTcomm is this week and that means all the big brass are all out in Las Vegas and that means its time to look for the party hats and limbo sticks here at the Galactic HQ of WTI . Its funny, looking at this show, I have no idea what that are going to highlight because we are done with that section of the project and have moved on. If you ask me what we are going to display at the next coming show I can tell you. For this show, I know that most of it will be Power Metering, that is a big push button for most of the people it the IT arena.
No, I wont be at this show, they are going to release me out in the real world in August in San Francisco for Linux World Expo.
To change the subject, I have to be one of the few people out there that doesn’t pirate music and I really try to get the kids not to pirate music also. Its hard, the RIAA has been heavy handed and unscrupulous for decades with both the people that buy the music and the bands themselves, but legal is legal and most of our music is bought from iTunes and Amazon. At first I looked at Amazon purchases like a big pain, but at better prices, better bitrates, no DRM and a transparent connection to iTunes, it is a better deal when available. Well, not better than getting it on Bittorrent , but that’s not quite legal.
So here’s how the weekend went, my daughter wanted the album “Now that’s what I call music, 28″ , yea I know, but she is only 12. She wanted to buy it on iTunes, I told her that if she does, it will only play on her iPod and not on the new Env2 Phone we got from Verizon, let me look on Amazon. We struck out there because it was only on CD on Amazon, and being a 12 year old, she wanted it right away (by the way it was on the bittorrent network, and it would have been done in 15 minutes). So we bought it on iTunes and I will burn a CD and then re-rip it from the CD. We purchased it on iTunes, I gave my daughter a blank CD and told her to burn a copy, which she did. She brought the CD downstairs and I ripped it on my computer, it came into my iTunes and guess what ? iTunes could not find the album name or the song names…sigh she must have copied the songs in the wrong order of the album. Sigh, ok back up to her computer and copy her songs on my external hard drive, oops it did not work, my hard drive is NTFS formatted, the Macintosh can on read it, no writes to NTFS. Back downstairs, get my thumb drive, back upstairs copy her files over, downstairs, copy her songs on my iTunes, put them in the right order, then burn the CD, now re-import them, remove her memory card from the Env2 (because it has a funky USB connecter, they wanted me to buy a new USB cable to make a few bucks, why cant they use a normal USB connecter), then copy the music files over to the memory card, upstairs put the memory card back into the Env2. Sigh, do you see a pattern here ? I should have just went to Bittorrent and gotten the songs. RIAA, why are you making it difficult for me to get the music I want to buy and move to my portable device ? Now do you see why people pirate your music without copy Restrictions ?
Oh, by the way after I went through all this, my daughter also told me she wanted her Nancy Drew sound track on the Env2. Sigh.
If you want TV shows (legal downloads) and video podcasts, try the Miro front end (for old timers this is the old Democracy player), It is cross platform, works well and finds a lot of content really easy.
If you do not mind some commercials and streaming TV, go to HULU, this is the officially sanctioned download place for TV shows that NBC has put together. You can not download it and watch it later, it only streams. But, it give you something to do in your hotel room in Vegas during NXTcomm (who says I cant tie things together).
Some random thoughts:
Why cant I use my iPhone to tether to my computer to get Internet access for my laptop ?
Firefox 3 is going to be released on June 17, 2008. Help set a record.
Unlock your iTunes purchases
Streaming live video content from your iPhone would be awesome
If you really want to piss people off, post a “Macintosh Laptops are to expensive” on a Macintosh forum.
Later
