I’ve signed up for a twitter account again. Now that I use Facebook, it has some neat integration to control the current status messages that many people seem to be using nowadays. Now I can sync status updates across Facebook, Twitter, and my own web site. Sweet!
I’ve also removed the last.fm flash player from my site’s side panel. It felt like it was slowing down the site too much. I just replaced it with a simple link to “Listen to my music“.
A friend of mine asked me to help him fix his Windows machine from a virus that he got infected with. Since I switched to a Mac a couple years ago I really hadn’t thought much about viruses, they’ve really gotten pretty evil. This one compromised the machine and then tried to extort him to buy anti-virus software to cure it! Lol.
Anyway, as I was reinstalling Windows I got this screen:
It reads:
Surfing the Internet: safe, fast, and flexible
Windows XP includes the most secure version of Internet Explorer to date.
That’s reassuring.
If you are trying to figure out how to get your network working again after cloning a VMWare image from Ubuntu 8.04, I hope you find this post before you waste an hour trying to figure it out like I did.
After copying the VMWare files and launching the copied instance be sure to tell VMWare that you copied the image. This will generate a new MAC address for your cloned server. You will need to remove the networking udev rule though, in order for udev to figure out your new MAC address.
Just run this command:
sudo rm -rf /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules
Then
sudo reboot
If you keep a base install image on hand (highly recommended!), be sure to remove that file before you start to make copies from it. Then you won’t run into this problem again!
I’ve blogged in the past about what I think about DRM. I just thought I’d point everyone to a real world example. Microsoft is dropping support for MSN Music effective August 31, 2008. After that point any music that you legally purchased from MSN Music will no longer be able to be played back on anything new.
What does that mean? If you can play it now, nothing will change. You’ll only notice when you buy a new computer or need to reinstall Windows and all of a sudden you can’t play back your music!
This is the worst problem with DRM, it’s easier and safer to pirate the stuff than it is to buy it legally. Thankfully the music industry has figured that out, and is now selling tunes without DRM. The movie industry hasn’t though, and until they do, I don’t think movie downloads are going anywhere.
[ From Wired News ]
I’m sure you’ve heard about the Optimus Maximus keyboard by now, but, until I saw this video today, I thought it was just vapor-ware. This has got to be the most amazing keyboard ever. I can’t wait to see one in person!
Toshiba announced today that they will, “no longer develop, manufacture and market HD DVD players and recorders.” according to this Engadget article.
So Blu-ray it is I suppose. I’m hoping that we can just start to download 1080p soon though. I’ve been dreaming of a multi-terabyte storage array with a Mac Mini sitting at each TV in my house to hook into it. That’s not really far off as XBMC on OS X continues to improve. Hopefully they will get 1080p decoding working on currrent gen Mac Mini’s. That would be sweet!
I just tried the latest release of XBMC on OS X (0.1.1) today. Coming along very, very well. This release seems to be solid as can be. It supports the mouse now and in my 10 minutes of testing, worked great!
I’m thinking about moving my Mac Mini into the living room now.
I still find it hard to find good content in HD though. Most of the stuff says HDTV, but its only taken from HDTV, it isn’t HD itself. Even when I do find an HD rip though, it rarely has the higher quality sound with it. I guess I’ll have to wait awhile longer before I can finally throw away my Cable and Satellite boxes.
I wrote a simple chkconfig compatible firewall init script for CentOS/RedHat/Fedora based Linux systems. It is based on the Quick n’ Dirty script from vpslink‘s wiki.
It will setup iptables firewall rules allowing anyone to access user defined ports (22,80 by default). It also has the ability to whitelist and blacklist IP’s. I’ve tested it with chkconfig on CentOS 5.
As I type this Steve Jobs is still giving his Keynote presentation at Macworld in San Francisco. The most interesting thing that I was looking forward to was anything to do with movies on the iTunes store and HD. As it turns out, they will be supporting HD movies in the movie store, at least for rentals. Here are the rental specs:
iTunes Movie Rentals
$4 for new releases?! What are they thinking? Here’s a quick comparison with my Netflix account. In December, I rented 8 movies, and it cost me $15.07. Some quick math: $1.88 per movie. And that’s in HD!! That pricing scheme is absolutely ridiculous. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’d never spend that much to rent a movie anymore, not with great alternatives like Netflix around.
With Macworld starting up on Tuesday, there are lots of rumors going around about what Apple plans to introduce. Lots of blogs predict a sub-compact notebook, with USA Today reporting that it may be 50% thinner than existing MacBooks. The announcement I’m looking forward to the most however, is movie downloads. Movie rentals are expected to be announced on Tuesday, but I’m more interested in what Apple plans to do with their Apple TV set-top box and what extra may be had in the iTunes Store.
The battle between Blu-ray and HD-DVD is seemingly at an end. But, I think that we’re going to be downloading movies quicker than we think, making Blu-ray not really all that exciting. That’s why I’m looking forward to what Apple might have in store. I’m hoping that they’ll introduce HD content into the iTunes Store. That would finally make movies on iTunes exciting to me.
One problem remains though: DRM. The music companies have just now figured out that DRM on music is bad for business. But, the movie companies haven’t learned that yet. If you bought the latest movie release on iTunes, you’d have to plunk down $9.99 to $12.99. And then you could only play it on an Apple approved device: like an iPod, iPhone, Apple TV, or iTunes itself.
I don’t think that movie downloads are really going to take off until DRM is removed. It’s just too risky to spend $10 bucks per movie and be looked into a device that you can’t control. Until the studios realize that though, they’ll probably just fracture the market with many different DRM schemes and end up confusing the consumer. Just like they did with HD-DVD vs Blu-ray.
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