I'll start this post with a brief overview of some work I did on my computer, mainly over Christmas break. Vista was beginning to feel a bit sluggish, and since I had some time to mess with it, I decided to plunge into the adventure of tinkering with partitions, boot flags, installations, and so forth. I was also planning to try, once again, to get my Dell Media Direct button to boot Ubuntu. I removed Media Direct a long time ago (it's not all that useful, and takes up more space than a Linux distro), so the button didn't do anything, except maybe bring up the MD flash screen. I had tried this process before, following this guide, and failed then. It didn't work this time either, but don't stop reading; this could still be informative. Here is a thread on the Notebookreview.com forums that details my progress, since I don't feel like recounting it all here.
I now have a running computer, resplendent with the most recent version of Ubuntu, and a fairly customized version of Vista, even if I didn't get it vLited like I wanted too. Maybe next time... I'd need a DVD, a DVD burner, a lot of time and patience, etc. And I've set my MD button to turn off my screen in Windows! See this thread (I use Monitoroff.exe instead of the provided utility). Pretty smooth, and I think it's actually more useful than having it boot Ubuntu. GRUB does a good job.
Our local Radio Shack is been going out of business, so they recently had a liquidation sale, with prices half off. At the sale, I got a Sandisk Sansa 2GB Clip, a Vanguard MP-4 Monopod, a CB radio, and some electrical components that were purported to, if assembled correctly, act as a wireless FM microphone that transmits at (legal) low power with a 45ft range, to frequencies between 91 and 97 MHz, depending on the tuning of the coil and the frequency picked up by the microphone. Wicked awesome, I thought! However, the assembly was another matter. That PCP chip was smaller than I thought, my soldering skills are less than satisfactory, and I think I need a new tip for my soldering gun. However, somehow, when I finally got things put together late at night, it worked. I had to add a SPST toggle switch and 'N' battery and holder to the kit. Pictures below.
Oh yes, and I've also uploaded my first Youtube video. I was trying to get Youtube to automatically include a High-Res option, but it's not really worth it anyways, since the video isn't high-res to begin with, and the Youtube version isn't too bad. Just don't watch it in fullscreen.
A couple more things... more along the politics and art veins. This may make an interesting read, if for no other reason than to expand and circulate thoughts on economy and the principles that apply. It should be noted that the creator of this program is a successful entrepreneur. The other thing is about the band mewithoutYou. I could talk for quite some time on the subject, but the telos of what I have to say is really that their aesthetic is much more subtle, poetical, and powerful than a lot of what passes as art or music. Their lyrics and instrumental style portray a much broader, deeper, more sober and yet more beautiful picture of life than just about any current buzz songs that come to mind. Here are the lyrics to a song by mewithoutYou called "Silencer".
Don't waste your lips on words I've heard before
Kiss my tired head.
And each letter written wastes your hand, young man
Come and lead me to your bed
You gave me hope that I'd not lost her
And then thought it rather strange to see me smile-
as I don't do too much smiling these days.
She put on happiness like a loose dress
Over pain I'll never know
"So the peace you had, " she says,
"I must confess, I'm glad to see it go."
We're two white roses lying frozen just outside his door
I've made you so happy and so sad,
But which should I be more sorry for?
Come kiss my face goodbye,
that space below my eye and above my cheek
Cause I'm faint and fading fast, I see a darkness
And I shall be released.
I'll pass like a fever from this body,
And softly slip into his hands
I tried to love you and I failed,
But I have another plan.
My Lord, how long to sing this song?
And my Lord, how much more of this pretending to be strong?
When she stands before your throne
Dressed in beauty not her own
All soft and small, you'll hear her call
"you brought me here, now take me home."
I think they evidence a profound grasp of theological principles, the struggle of life, pain, beauty, and the true source of strength. At any rate, listening to a song like this gives me a whole lot more contemplate than many songs I could think of.
And finally, for what it's worth, here is a list of what I've read, am reading, and will be reading for a while.
Phantastes: A Faerie Romance
Call it Courage
A River Runs Through It
All the Pretty Horses
Camp 4
Royal Robbins: Spirit of the Age
The Great Gatsby
The Importance of Being Earnest
The Man Who Knew Too Much
My Name is Asher Lev
The Ball and The Cross
The Red Badge of Courage
The Princess and The Goblin
The Princess and Curdie
The Liberated Imagination
A Tale of Two Cities
Hans Brinker/The Silver Skates
The Silmarillion
Les Miserables
Well, actually, I know what it means, but I wonder what the implications are. Here are my thoughts.
The iTunes Store is already very popular among those who buy music by the file. But, it ties into the Apple system: iTunes (the app) and iPods. Nota Bene: the majority of mp3 players/DAPs out there are iPods. Not hard to notice.
Enter a DRM-free movement that puts pressure on Apple. Apple eventually concedes; at first part of the Store, and then they're going DRM free (I don't know if it's happened yet). Seems like a smart move to me. After all, why should we buy from Apple's closed system when we can buy from the myriad of other digital music sellers, torrent it, or rip it off a friend's CD? Two things that spring to my mind are convenience and the very wide range of materials available in the iTunes Store (to my knowledge).
Now what? Two venues: DRM free downloads from the Store and conversions of previously purchased material to DRM free.
It seems to me that new DRM free downloads will have the bigger impact. I don't know how well the news will spread, but I can guess that among average users, they might not hear about it for a while, if ever. Or if they even knew there was DRM, or even what DRM is (perhaps thanks to Apple's successful integration scheme). When an already popular source offers a sweeter deal, maybe it'll go boom even bigger. I can't really see it hurting Store sales. Now, the second part to this venue: the format. No longer will people have to use the notoriously clunky iTunes to play their purchased music. Heeello Foobar, Winamp, Amarok, Banshee, Songbird, and everything else that can handle .m4a. And this also means players; I have it in my head that some players out there do handle that format and I know that Rockbox does (Sansa e200 v1 FTW!). So, because of the last two things I mentioned, some people who didn't like the iTunes system before may now join up/come back.
The second venue is conversion of your old Store goods to the new DRM free format. Actually I suspect they're not so much conversion involved; I think Apple may be doing some file modding that just removes the DRM, as has been done before by, umm, certain tools. So how many people are going to pay Apple's fee to convert their collection? I can't say. But it would be interesting to get some statistics on it, or even some feelings from the public on converting their stuff.
One note here: I've assumed in this post that the conversion involves videos, and I'm assuming they are DRMed. I don't know either for sure; in fact, I've never bought anything from the iTunes Store, only witnessed a purchase once. I don't even have iTunes installed right now (Safari, though… free Lucida Grande font and I should use it a lot more for webdev testing, but then again, Chrome has WebKit, so… sigh).
And, on a somewhat related note, I find the lyrics of this song somewhat funny. It's about pirating music and bucking the system, I think. Lolz. Take a listen for you health.
MewthoutYou is releasing a new album in May! Suh-weeeet!!!!!!
It's called It's All Crazy! It's All False! It's All A Dream! It's Alright.
Pending track listing according to aholidayathesea on Last.FM:
- Cattail Down
- The Fox, The Crow, & The Cookie
- A Stick, A Carrot, & A String
- Bullet To Binary (Pt. Two)
- Timothy Hay
- The Angel of Death Came To David's Room
- A Fig With A Belly Ache
- Goodbye, I
- The Beetle King On The Coconut Estate
- Every Blade of Grass
- Whatever Goes, Let It Go
This is going to be sickness, 11 new tracks of mewithoutYou! If it's true… as of right now it looks like it just popped up very recently; I'd say it's still rumor status.
I really like Catch for Us the Foxes, so… sweetness. Oh yeah, and I like what I've heard of [A→B] Life. Less sure about liking Brother, Sister from what I've heard so far, but maybe I'll change my opinion once I own the album (whenever that is).
P.S. Release date cite: here.
I actually had gotten the security tab via a shell extension a while ago, but it seemed to be the source of instability problems, so out it went. There are other ways to do it, but MS lets you have it for free with the Windows NT SP4 Security Configuration Manager. I haven't tried it out yet, but it sounds pretty sweet. Not that I really need it, but hey, it's power for nothing.
Here's the download page, here's the FTP folder it's in, and here is a direct link. If you check out the FTP folder, the file you want is SCESP4I.EXE.
[found via Grand Stream Dreams]
Update, December 19, 2009: Having just had to install this due to a couple of folders on my external hard drive getting locked by my previous XP install, I can now recommend a specific install procedure. Run SCESP4I.EXE, select a folder in which to extract the files. Go to the folder, right-click setup.inf, click Install, and wait for the magic to happen. It will inform you, if I remember correctly, that you will need to restart your computer for the changes to take effect. That, fortunately, is not true. You can test this by right-clicking a file, going to Properties, and going to the Security tab. There it will be in all of its XP Pro glory. Enjoy.
Thanks to a comment on that DownloadSquad free music post I linked to a while back, I wanted to see if I could grab some free music from brother-sister.net, mewithoutYou's official site for their latest released album, Brother, Sister. Four songs from the album are available for streaming.
So, like the commenter, I installed the Firefox add-on Live HTTP Headers, which is kind of fun… it let's you see the HTTP calls the browser makes. So I pointed Firefox to brother-sister.net, and it let me see the calls the Flash element, in this case, was making when I switched songs. I saw that it was pointing to .swf files, Flash files.
Yesterday I grabbed all the URL's and downloaded two of them with Free Download Manager. Since they were Flash files, my idea was to convert them to mp3 (or maybe something else) or grab the sound out of them via decompilation.
The two programs I grabbed to do that were HooTech's SWF FLV to MP3 Converter trial and Decompile Flash Free Version. Neither would open the .swf files. I admitted defeat.
But, later that night, I thought… I did download something… and they were several megs each. Then it occurred to me that maybe they were actually MP3's, so I tried it out, and boom! They absoballylutely were! So, there you are, four free mewithoutYou songs with a small effort.
The following instructions are for Windows using Firefox, but the process is fairly similar with other operating systems and browsers.
The .swf links:
a Glass Can Only Spill What it Contains (track 5)
Nice and Blue (pt. Two) (track 6)
C-Minor (track 9)
O, Porcupine (track 11)
So, if those don't download and just sit there, just right click the links and select Save Link As… Or, if you have a download manager, add new downloads for the files… right click the links and select Copy Link Location to get the proper address and then paste them into your download manager.
Then, when the .swf's have finished downloading, open the folder you downloaded them to, and change the extensions to .mp3 (for example, change C-Minor.swf to C-Minor.mp3). This can easily be accomplished through right clicking the files and selecting Rename. If you can't see the extension (so C-Minor.swf would just look like C-Minor), you need to turn on known file extensions.
And there you go, you have your MP3's. And at a fairly good 112 Kbps quality. They don't have any tags, though so you could automatically tag them (put in information like artist, title, album, album year, etcetera) with Mp3tag or Auto-Tag in Winamp. Or you can manually tag them with a program such as Windows Media Player or iTunes (album information here).
Enjoy.
Also, I further tried out Decompile Flash Free Version and SWF FLV to MP3 Converter this morning using a real Flash file. SWF FLV to MP3 Converter seems to work OK, but it's only a trial; on exit you are told that it's a trial version and "The version only converts 50% audio and extracts 5 sound elements at most." Decompile Flash Free Version, however, extracted all of the elements of the same Flash file for me… for free. And it's not a trial. I extracted all the sound elements just fine. So, if any of you Windows users need a decent (to me) Flash decompiler and partial editor for free, this looks great.
Because of the ever expanding world of social networking some people complain about just another thing to update. I quite concur… if you have say five different services you want to post the same message to, it can be a bit of an annoyance. Or a drag. Or whatever you care to describe it as. However, I think that that problem could be at least partially solved by the use of services such as Ping.FM, an online tool that lets you update many services at once (though I have never used such a service… yet).
But, that's not what I do. I have a few services I have joined over the years, and in my mind I have a purpose for each. And here they are:
- Blogs (my current platform is Blogger): for posting longer stuff… sort of textual works of art sometimes: discourses, arguments, current events, reviews, etcetera. Also, questions to the masses, guides, longer write-ups on personal life and experiences, and so on. Or sometimes, just less formal stuff and perhaps shorter stuff.
- Twitter: for microblogging, as the service is described. Short things I want to say or just whatever I want to say; sometimes randomness or seemingly such. Also, it's good for plugging in updates and notices from stuff, like twitterfeed (pulls feeds to a Twitter profile). Also, I like that it's microblogging… it's limited to 140 characters, so it can make you be creative. It can be the art of brevity.
- Facebook: a great all around social utility for me. Text, images, and video are supported, so any such things may be posted. And what's alluring about this is that it is a sharing just within your circle of friends, not public (though I think you may choose to do so… I doubt many users do). It's very pluggable-in, which I like. You can post and link to your heart's content, and it's really popular with some people, which can make for perhaps the most effective means of communication to some people. Also, it has a community aspect within the privacy; many interactions between can be publicly seen by their circle of friends, who can easily join in. And, back to the pluggable-in aspect, there are many, many Facebook Apps, some of which plugin in to other services, or let other services plug into Facebook. And by the way, if for any reason you got confused, it's Facebook, not FaceBook.
- Delicious (previously called Del.icio.us): It's social bookmarking. Personally, I'm not too into the whole see what's up on Digg or Delicious thing, but it works good for putting a linkroll on my blog, so people can see what I've recently bookmarked, thus I share it with them. I use the bookmarklet, which works great for bookmarking pages I want to share. Also, it can create a record of where you've been on the web of sorts… not a strict statistical or analytical record, but a sort of what-I-thought-the-best-then collection. And you can add your comment to stuff you bookmark, which works with the collection idea. Not to mention if something isn't any longer in your browser history and you want to find it, maybe you bookmarked it on Delicious (or Digged it, for that matter). As I said at first, I'm not really too much into the see-what-floats-to-the-top idea, but maybe I would be if I had a better internet connection. I guess we might see in the future.
So that's what I use. How about you? What's your social networking philosophy? Or do you even have one?
This is it, the last day of eight years of Bush. And I honor him for his service to our nation; even thought he made mistakes, he still has stood up when it was right but not fun.
And today we remember Martin Luther King Jr., a black man who dream that one day his children would "not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." Well, I think you'd be proud today, Mr. King.
And, it really is amazing, a country that 40, 60 years ago still had a lot of segregation between whites and colored people. And now, a black man becoming arguably the most powerful man in the world.. tomorrow?
It's just… blowaway amazing, really.
And I ask that God will protect President Obama, shield him from those who would harm him, give him great wisdom, and turn his heart. I think it's really great that such an event could actually be happening, with a host of supporters in the nation, but after all, he was either one of the most or the most liberal congressmen in our nation. And we will certainly see his radical views affect our nation in big ways.
But, this is just crazy. It's almost hard to believe it's happening… both for the part of life that I've paid attention to politics (or most of it), Mr. Bush has been our president. I haven't really known anything else. But now, a Democrat, a very radical one at that, a black man, and a fairly young-ish President-elect, about to take power.
Puh-retty amazing.
Not to mention how much the inauguration… like $150 million or something like that. Insane. I can understand security and safety costs, but a bunch for partying, too? (I don't actually know the breakdown). Seriously, Mr. Obama.
So, I just have to say today, wow. Like, really wow. A new year and likely enough we're about to launch into probably one of the craziest times in our history. So hold on tight and pray like crazy.