Just in case you were curious, my longest post is "Making a ruckus over Ruckus" with 761. I've written 9675 words in 53 posts. That's on average 10 wpd and an average of 183 wpp.
A couple weeks ago Greenpeace had a naming contest name a whale. Well of-course the internet being what it is, tubes and pictures of cats with ill-formed grammatical statements, there was an overwhelming push to have the whale named “Mr. Splashy Pants”. And after the final voting, out of 30 possible names and 150,000 votes, Mr. Splashy Pants took home 78% of the vote.
Now since the internet has chosen a name for the whale, it is time to save him. So lets in an effort to try to keep the Japanese from hunting and killing these amazing creatures, sign the petition, and donate a little money if you support the cause.
Ruckus, a music service that universities and colleges are starting to use to try to keep their students out of hot water with the RIAA. Students of participating institution can sign up with their school provided e-mail address and download music for “free”. The ability for it to be free, includes tight licensing for the downloaded music courtesy of Microsoft’s WMA DRM.
Ruckus is pretty cool, the quality is acceptable, and you can’t really beat “free”, but… as soon as you leave the institution providing the service, the licenses that allow you to play the DRM‘d WMA files will expire, and you will have lots of unplayable music files. Along with that, DRM‘d WMA files can not be converted to be used on iPods or some other portable media players, and if you use OSX or Linux, your also out of luck. If none of these things bother you, you can stop reading here, otherwise keep reading…
Now the solution kind of goes into a gray area, at least with Ruckus, DRM, and the concept of Fair Use. The real thought behind Fair Use is you have already bought the license to the media, now you are trying to unprotect it so that you can use it in other ways, i.e. Putting a copy protected DVD, that you bought, onto your iPod. The gray area you run into is, with Ruckus, you never really paid for the media, at least not directly. So do you really own the same rights to it that you would if you directly paid for it or not? I don’t really know… What I do know is how to get rid of the DRM that your music is infested with.
Keep in mind, as with all things, someone has to pay for it. So if you like the artist, support them.
-First, you need to obtain FairUse4WMA. You can get it from the zip archive, here.
-After you extract the files, I found the easiest way to remove the DRM from the files was to use the FairUse Commander.
-When you open the FairUse Commander, you need to set the path to FairUse4WMA.exe, which you should have just extracted.
-Select the folder that contains the files with the DRM, and I leave the “Find only protected files” checkbox enabled.
-Next, check the “Use output folder” checkbox, and select a place to put the un-DRM’d files.
-You can choose whether or not to leave the “[NoDRM]” prefix, but check the “Batch DRM Removal” checkbox.
-Click the “Search for Media Files” button, and verify that the music inside the gridview is the DRM’d tracks that you want to un-DRM, then click the green “Remove DRM!” button.
-You should have WMA files in the output directory that are DRM free!
If you have problems, you can check out this article. Contrary to what this article says, however, I have been able to remove the DRM from Ruckus tracks without removing Windows Media Player 11 from my system, so YMMV. Good Luck!
Since FairUse4WM is no longer being developed (read cease and desist), in order to free our DRM’d WMA music we must turn to another method.
To everyone who is having problems getting FairUse4WM, I have some unfortunate news. After trying a few things, I can no longer get it to work either. I think SP3 for XP may have updated WMP and that might be causing the problems, but there is no way to know for sure.
Since FairUse4WM is no longer being developed, there’s not much we can do but to move on to a different technique. I would suggest using TuneBite. It allows for ripping at a higher speed than 1x with their proprietary high speed driver. This makes ripping the DRM for a CD worth of music doable in about 10 minutes.
I don’t really like this solution as it requires you to transcode the songs from one format (WMA) to another (MP3, AAC, etc…), thus resulting in a loss in quality from the original lossy source.
I really wish being able to use media, in which we have been given (or have purchased) a license to use, would be simpler. If you feel the same way I do, please check out DefectiveByDesign, a group opposed to the DRM imposed on us by big corporations.
I was reading through my previous blog entries today and I saw that I had an entry about BF 2142. At the end of the post I made a comment about how it feels like good games are few and far between. Well at last there is a game to fill that void. Bioshock.
Unless you live under a rock and/or hate video games, you’ve probably heard of Bioshock one way or another. This game has everything including amazing graphics and remarkable story, and even some controversy about little girl characters in violent video games.
Bioshock starts you off in the year 1960 as a character, Jack, who has just been involved in a plane crash in the middle of an ocean. He is the only survivor. With pieces of the plane wreckage burning all around, you see there is a large lighthouse type structure. As you head towards the structure, very little is known about what lies ahead. You begin to learn more about Rapture, the underwater city, and its oddities as a character named Atlas coaches you though the beginning parts of the game, in what feels like a very immersive and plot-driven tutorial. As you get deeper and deeper into the story, it gets more and more twisted. I personally have only played about 4-5 hours of this 20+ hour game, and I am throughly impressed with every aspect of it. The visuals are very impressive, especially the water effects. The music and sounds add a sense of eeriness and work into the time period quite nicely. Everytime I play this game, I feel like I am walking around in a huge immersive piece of artwork.
I think, whatever type of gamer you are, if you enjoy a game with a deeply captivating environment, an incredibly amazing story, and a little bit of scare-factor, then purchasing Bioshock is a no-brainer.
I don’t read too many news stories that effect me in a way that this one has. I’ve known now for a while that Microsoft was trying to get their new Office Open XML document format ISO approved. I figured that Microsoft’s OOXML format was good enough, and that it would be a good thing to have an “Open” format as an international standard… Boy was I wrong.
I suppose in principle, a ISO open format would be a wonderful thing, but OOXML is definitely not ready to become that format. In her article, Stéphane Rodriguez lists 13 different scenarios where the Whitepaper results from Microsoft don’t seem to actually be valid. She even goes as far as listing the exact steps necessary to reproduce the results. From a programmatic perspective, OOXML is amazingly bad. A programmer could probably spend a good couple years trying to write code that would be able to work with these remarkably unpredictable XML documents. Some of the elements in the VML part of the documents aren’t even valid XML elements!
It is good to see that someone (among others) is standing up against bad standards. Microsoft is inciting a format war, that doesn’t necessarily need to exist. They are afraid of being left behind as governments and other public bodies see the need for an open format, and are starting to move to ODF. Bob Sutor, IBM’s vice president of open source and standards, said “What the world needs today … is a real open standard versus a vendor-dictated spec that documents proprietary products via XML. ODF is about the future, Open XML is about the past.”
Last Monday, the popular college social site, facebook, made a change in how the data was presented. When I logged in, I was pleasantly surprised to see a “NewsFeed” that displayed all of my friends activity over the last several hours/days. But I quickly noted that it seemed not as many people were happy about this new feature as I was. Groups such as “I HATE THE NEW FACEBOOK” were beginning to form, and by the middle of the week, one group had amassed over 700,000 members! They called the new features ’stalkerish’ and did not like that they took up so much room. Over and over I repeated to myself, “What are these people thinking? All of the data was already there, now it is just consolidated! Web2.0 people!”
So on Friday, Mark Zuckerberg posted an open letter apologizing to the community, and said that they had hoped for a more positive response, but after two straight days of coding, new privacy controls are in place. Techcrunch posted their unbiased opinion on the whole matter.
I personally agree with Michael Arrington from Techcrunch,
“If this feature had been part Facebook since the beginning, their users would be screaming if Facebook tried to remove it.”
Alwell, Facebook is growing, and at least it is listening to its members.
So says Ed Whitacre from AT&T. He supposedly believes that there should be more of a business than just ISPs providing ‘free’ access to websites and services. Everything can be commercialized, and this makes it better right? WRONG.
The nation’s largest telephone and cable companies — including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner — want to be Internet gatekeepers, deciding which Web sites go fast or slow and which won’t load at all. They want to tax content providers to guarantee speedy delivery of their data. They want to discriminate in favor of their own search engines, Internet phone services, and streaming video — while slowing down or blocking their competitors. These companies have a new vision for the Internet. Instead of an even playing field, they want to reserve express lanes for their own content and services — or those from big corporations that can afford the steep tolls — and leave the rest of us on a winding dirt road.
WE as an internet community need to stand up and tell these companies that they can not do this. Please go to SaveTheInternet.com and write your congress men to tell them they need to support Net Neutrality. Don’t let big business kill the internet.
Well, first senator Ted Stevens makes himself look like an idiot, in front of all of Congress, now we have another idiot among the crowd. Don’t get me wrong, Comedy Central has some funny shows, and I’m sure that Steven Colbert can be funny at times, but this is just annoying. Colbert told the audience to find the Elephant article on Wikipedia and to change it to falsify information. He calls being able to change information to suit your reality ‘Wikiality’. All I have to say to him is, you are certainly a large douche. Thanks for trying to destroy what millions have worked hard to build. At least the antivandalism bots caught him, and the rest of the idiots trying to change the page. Not to mention, Colbert got banned.
Other tech news today includes someone who put a cellphone into a rotary phone case. Not really sure why, other than the ‘what the heck’ factor. It is completely portable, after all. And someone wrote some software that mimics a wiki, but works like notepad. So you can supposedly write pages of notes, and the program will be able to collect popular terms, (such as bach, in their example) and you can find all of the entries that match up to those tags. Sounds pretty slick to me.
Kevin Rose and Jason Calacanis are going at it with remarks about each others sites. Just goes to show you how passionate these guys are.
Jason has offered to pay the top 10 ‘diggers’ from digg to find and post stories on Netscape. This has upset Kevin, and a lot of the rest of the digg community, since digg.com has always been about community submitted material. There are no ranks, labels or special rewards for digging the most, or submitting tons of stories. Honestly, that’s what I think makes it so good, and is part of the magic formula that makes digg function the way it does. Leo Laporte gives a recap of all of the stuff that has been going on in his article. Hopefully this will all end without bloodshed.
By the way, if you haven’t switched to Firefox yet, it truly is an amazing browser. Not to mention, free. If you have switched, convince someone else to do the same. They’ll be happier with out ActiveX and virii destroying their system!
