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Browserling now has audio support! 🔊
1 week ago
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Saturday, April 5, 2008
Denied to pay for music
It is amazing how they do their best to prevent us from paying for music. I was listening to Dream Theater's great album Octavarium that lays on my hard disk in a free format when I decided to find out if DT has released anything after Octavarium. According to Wikipedia they indeed had released an album titled Systematic Chaos.
Nowadays I don't have much time for enterntainment and I don't have any music tracker accounts that I used to have in the past. I loved to use the trackers because they made it so easy to get what you wanted quickly and the delivered product was always high quality and actually worked on my devices. I have never bought a physical music cd because I consider physical objects very impractical compared to digital bits when we talk about music. In my childhood when we didn't have internet nor mp3 files, I wasn't so much into music. I only began listening music when we already had Napster and friends to help us.
With no access to music trackers I had to look for alternatives. The iTunes is infamous for selling music that you cannot listen to, so I decided to check if Nokia's music store sold music files that actually work because I prefer music that I can listen to.
So I went to the Nokia music store. They said they don't support my operating system and my browser. I'm running Firefox on Linux. Sigh.
Now my hunger for the album only grew stronger, because when something is denied your desire only grows. I hadn't kept myself up to date about Apple's current stand on DRM and I decided to give iTunes a try. In my lust I was hopeful and naive to think that if I pay for my music, maybe they would, after all, let me have music files that are not broken, ignoring all the bad reputation that I was perfectly aware of. The risk wasn't great, because iTunes allows me to buy one song for one dollar, so I could safely test it.
On my Powerbook, I logged in, gave my credit card details, searched for the album and bough one track from Systematic Chaos. I had to click a few times to get rid of completely useless user agreements, that Apple itself never reads, but the buying process was manageable. Of course it was more difficult than music trackers are, but I was surprised that I even managed to buy the song, because usually premium internet services do their utterest to prevent users from buying anything.
Now I had the song on my laptop. Next phase was the most dangerous one; transferring the song to my PC that is attached to my stereos. I was only one step from being able to listen the song that I had paid for, but no... after transferring the song via netcat it wouldn't work. The file opened in VLC but the track was blank. Clearly the file was broken.
I don't have any use for songs that work only on my laptop because I want to use my stereos to get a good sound. I don't have time nor motivation to switch my audio wires every once in a while. The lesson I learned was that if I want to get music, I must once again go and find some high quality music trackers that actually are able to offer digital music that works on my devices.
I was denied to pay for music. I was allowed to pay for air.
Nowadays I don't have much time for enterntainment and I don't have any music tracker accounts that I used to have in the past. I loved to use the trackers because they made it so easy to get what you wanted quickly and the delivered product was always high quality and actually worked on my devices. I have never bought a physical music cd because I consider physical objects very impractical compared to digital bits when we talk about music. In my childhood when we didn't have internet nor mp3 files, I wasn't so much into music. I only began listening music when we already had Napster and friends to help us.
With no access to music trackers I had to look for alternatives. The iTunes is infamous for selling music that you cannot listen to, so I decided to check if Nokia's music store sold music files that actually work because I prefer music that I can listen to.
So I went to the Nokia music store. They said they don't support my operating system and my browser. I'm running Firefox on Linux. Sigh.
Now my hunger for the album only grew stronger, because when something is denied your desire only grows. I hadn't kept myself up to date about Apple's current stand on DRM and I decided to give iTunes a try. In my lust I was hopeful and naive to think that if I pay for my music, maybe they would, after all, let me have music files that are not broken, ignoring all the bad reputation that I was perfectly aware of. The risk wasn't great, because iTunes allows me to buy one song for one dollar, so I could safely test it.
On my Powerbook, I logged in, gave my credit card details, searched for the album and bough one track from Systematic Chaos. I had to click a few times to get rid of completely useless user agreements, that Apple itself never reads, but the buying process was manageable. Of course it was more difficult than music trackers are, but I was surprised that I even managed to buy the song, because usually premium internet services do their utterest to prevent users from buying anything.
Now I had the song on my laptop. Next phase was the most dangerous one; transferring the song to my PC that is attached to my stereos. I was only one step from being able to listen the song that I had paid for, but no... after transferring the song via netcat it wouldn't work. The file opened in VLC but the track was blank. Clearly the file was broken.
I don't have any use for songs that work only on my laptop because I want to use my stereos to get a good sound. I don't have time nor motivation to switch my audio wires every once in a while. The lesson I learned was that if I want to get music, I must once again go and find some high quality music trackers that actually are able to offer digital music that works on my devices.
I was denied to pay for music. I was allowed to pay for air.
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Ubuntu Hardy and technical problems
I decided to try xmonad and in order to be able to use the Ubuntu binaries I had to upgrade to hardy beta. First everything looked good, but then I noticed that PNGs weren't displaying in Firefox. After googling, it seemed to be a display driver problem. I still have my old Geforce 2 Ti and I'm using the open source nv driver. After some xorg.conf tweaking I managed to get the png working but now I only had 800x600 instead of 1680x1050. Not nice. Better yet, the system had overwritten my xorg.conf.backup with its own version, so returning to the old settings became tricky. At one point I got the resolution working, but after booting it went broken again. This morning I got the resolution working again, after an hour fight with xorg.conf, but we'll see how long it will last. Of course, PNGs are broken again. Well, at least xmonad is great.
All this, studies and working have left me little time to continue with taocp recently.
All this, studies and working have left me little time to continue with taocp recently.
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