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Broadcast Flag Struck Down

A ‘broadcast flag’ mandated by the FCC in 2003 would have required consumer electronics makers to abide by specific digital flags encoded into digital television broadcasts. The flags could restrict whether or not the broadcast could be recorded or in what ways a recording could be used. It would allow content broadcasters to tell you how you can use your television recordings. The whole situation is pretty crazy but a ray of light has appeared as a Court of Appeals has ruled that the mandate is beyond the scope of the FCC’s authority. The original mandate required that any devices sold after July 1, 2005 adhere to the flags so this ruling came just in time.

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Exploding Frogs

More than 1,000 toads have puffed up and exploded in a Hamburg pond in recent weeks. They have basically no idea why it’s happening. I suspect something along the lines of a mischievous young wizard in training, but I’m no scientist. This bit of weird news was passed to me by Tom.

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The RIAA resorts to Extortion

ARSTechnica comments on a case where a woman was contacted by a collection agency and ordered to pay $4500 or risk being sued for much more money. Her personal information was collected from Comcast, who provided the information of their own free will. They were not required to do so by any court order and they did not notify the woman or any of the other customers whose privacy rights they violated. The RIAA has previously filed lawsuits against a few hundred people and they have apparently now decided that the lawsuit method is too costly and have resorted to simply billing people directly via a collection agency. It saddens me that all of this is allowed to go on. The woman is suing Comcast over it so we’ll see what comes out of that.

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musings

AAC, iTunes and TiVo

I’ve had a TiVo for a little over two years after being pushed into it by a few friends and it really is a great little thing. It’s not majorly life-changing (unless you spend a large percentage of your time watching tv) but it is a big improvement over standard television watching.

About a year ago, the Home Media Option for the TiVo came out that added nifty features like the ability to listen to your digital music and view your digital photos. It also added the ability to move recordings between multiple TiVos in a house, but that isn’t very interesting to me since I only have one TiVo. I was most interested in the digital music player part of it as it finally allowed me to easily play the mp3 encoded music stored on my computer through my stereo connected to my TV.

The only real major downside of the digital music player part of the TiVo as provided is its lack of support for any file types other than mp3. I’ve pretty much completely switched to using AAC as my primary music encoding format. AAC features better compression (smaller files at the same audio quality) than mp3 and I think it represents higher frequency sounds better which results in a ‘brighter’ sound. I’ve also succumbed to the super convenience of the occasional iTunes Music Store purchase and all of those files are in AAC format as well, with an extra bit of DRM goop to make the major labels happy. So, the end result is more and more of my digital music is unplayable on the TiVo and I’ve been looking into other ways to shuttle my music around my house from where the files are stored to wherever I want to listen to them. So considering all of this, imagine my joy when I discovered that I now can play my AAC audio files on my TiVo, including those purchased from the iTunes Music Store.

While fiddling around with the new and very promising TiVo programming interface I ran across a message board post describing how to set up the latest Mac version of the TiVo desktop software (1.9) so it would transcode AAC files on your computer and send them to the TiVo as mp3. A self-described geek poked around in the TiVo install directory and found a utility program called SoundConvert that had references to the LAME mp3 encoder libraries within the binary. With some testing he discovered the TiVo Desktop software would automatically work with AAC files if it noticed the LAME libraries installed on your computer. I followed the link to the OS X LAME installer package, installed it and enabled music sharing in my TiVo Desktop preferences (after upgrading it to 1.9), and my AAC files were suddenly playable on my TiVo! They show up like all the other files (they didn’t show up at all before) and they play like any other file. A quick check on the computer acting as the server verified that the files were being transcoded before being sent out. Awesome!

Once I had AAC files playing, getting iTunes purchased music to play as well required one more step of questionable legality. I personally think it’s idiotic that I can’t legally play a song I purchased legally on my own device in my own house, but such is the idiocy of DRM. There are ways around the DRM iTunes uses such as JHymn, but you’re not currently allowed to use them in the US due to the DMCA. Anyway, I did try it on iTunes purchased music and it did work and I was able to listen to it on the TiVo. Unfortunately, since I first used JHymn successfully, Apple has made a back-end change that has rendered it unusable. I’m sure the JHymn people will get it working again before too long, but don’t head over there excited to claim DRM-free iTunes bliss just yet. I’ll update this when I hear of JHymn (or something similar) working again.

UPDATE (April 11, 2005): As reported by the main JHymn developer himself in my comments, JHymn is now working correctly again. TiVo and iTunes can play nice together once again. It is a forbidden love, but just as sweet.

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outside

About that Artic Drilling

Proponents of the arctic drilling plan claim it would only affect 2,000 acres of the 1,500,000 total acres in the coastal plain, but the part they don’t mention is those 2,000 acres are spread out all across the whole park. Check out the map and info on the NRDC Action Fund website. They are activists so their information is probably biased as well, but I know I certainly trust the activists more than I trust our current administration.

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Octopus Walking on Two Legs

Found via ARSTechnica, movie of an octopus ‘walking’ on two of its legs and using the others as camouflage. Creepy and kooky!

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musings

My TiVo got Smarter!

Continuing in my TiVo thread… during my geeking binge that included the discovery of how to play AAC files on my TiVo’s digital music player I also managed to teach my TiVo some other new tricks. The whole thing started with a re-visit to the TiVo Home Media Engine (HME) website. From there I followed a link to a whole HME portal site with links to a bunch of applications that can run on your TiVo. Some of the available applications let you look up maps via Google Maps, read your email, view your friend’s Flickr photos, and remotely control iTunes (intended primarily for use with that Airport Express thing Apple sells).

The most comprehensive HME project I ran across is called Galleon and promises to be a complete media server offering a bunch of features not provided by the TiVo Desktop media server provided by TiVo themselves. Among those features is an RSS reader, Weather forecasts, local movie listings, and my favorite… easy access to streaming mp3 radio stations. Excited about the prospects of all of this I quickly downloaded the third beta release and went to work trying to get it to work. It’s java so in theory it should work fine on my Mac but after spending a couple of hours fiddling with it I came to the conclusion that it does not yet work properly in Mac OS X. That was a bummer, but then I checked out JavaHMO, the project that spawned Galleon. JavaHMO is a similar sort of thing but it works within the much more limited Home Media Option framework rather than the newer and better Home Media Engine. JavaHMO is essentially ‘obsolete’ technology at this point, but it’s much more polished than the early releases of Galleon available now and it works fine on my Mac. I now have JavaHMO set up to stream mp3 radio stations and download RSS feeds from a few favorite websites. The streaming radio is the thing I wanted most and it works well enough for my needs.

Note that the HME applications require that your TiVo have the very latest version of its operating system and yours may not have it yet. If you look in the System Information area it should say version 7.1 with some extra stuff after it. The 7.1 version of the software also enables the new TivoToGo service that lets you download recordings from the TiVo to your computer and watch them later. You can’t yet watch the recordings on a Mac, but you can download them using JavaHMO or from the new web server built-into the TiVO. The web server interface has not been documented by TiVo as far as I know, probably because not everyone has it yet.

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Allofmp3.com May be Shut Down

Allofmp3.com has been selling unrestricted music downloads in a variety of formats for about 4 to 10 cents per song for a few years now. It’s a Russia-based business which claims to have legal rights to sell the music in this way to Russian citizens for personal use. Of course, they don’t do anything to verify that their customers are Russian and the site is available in English and fully usable by any English-speaker. It looks like the Russian authorities may drop the proverbial hatchet on the service and force them to pay copyright fees for the music they have sold. It will be interesting to see how this plays out!

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A Parent’s Primer to Computer Slang

If you feel like you are falling farther and farther behind your children in your understanding of technology and the Internet, you probably are! The first step in understanding the kids of today is learning to communicate with them. This guide should help you get started by revealing some of the common slang used in reference to computers and the Internet. It explains the meanings of coded words like !337$p34k and pwn3d and provides a clear description of key ways to decode other words and make up your own new ones.

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AmigaOS will not DIE

My first real computer was a Commodore Amiga 500 way back in 1988 or so. At that time I had no idea about the underlying technical awesomeness that was the Amiga, but I did know that all of my friends’ PCs and Macs looked pretty stupid compared to my Amiga. I remember wondering why anyone would buy anything but an Amiga. My family never bought another Amiga after that first one (though that one did last something like 7 years!) and pretty much no one else did either and the Amiga platform has been basically dead ever since. There have always been rumors that it might return one day and now it seems to have actually happened. The whole history of the platform is pretty amazing even if you don’t read through the whole article. I’m not quite ready to be an early adopter, but it sure is tempting. Anyway, read on.