Back when people still had to pay for music, money served to limit and define consumption. You could only afford so many records, so you bought what you could, listened to the radio or watched MTV, and ignored everything else. Those select few who did manage to hear everything—record store clerks, DJs, nerds with personal warehouses—could use this rare knowledge to terrorize their social or sexual betters, as in the pre-internet-era film High Fidelity. Napster made all of that obsolete. Today, almost every person I know has more music on his computer than he could ever know what to do with. You don’t need to care about music to end up like this—the accumulation occurs naturally and unconsciously. My iTunes library, for example, contains forty-seven days of music. According to the column that counts the number of times I’ve played each song, roughly a sixth of that music has never been listened to at all. In the 21st century, we are all record store clerks.

I’ve still got some stuff on the NAS in my office that dates back to the glory days of Napster (Comsat Angels and Teardrop Explodes compilations, I’m looking at you…). The “free” part sure didn’t hurt, but I think a lot of it was the sudden accessibility of all this music I’d never heard before.

Generally, I find the amount of attention that many Linux review tend to devote to the installer to be excessive. Still, it is the first experience a lot of people will have of a Linux operating systems, so it’s pretty important that it not be a mess.

As for the 10.10 proposal, I really like the idea that it will auto-detect stuff like the keyboard layout and the timezone. The mock-up of the drive partitioning dialog is pretty sweet too:

I have installed Ubuntu more times than I can count, and I *still* find this step to be confusing. I understand drive partitioning and I know what I want to do, but translating that into reality via the confusing jumble of sliders, radio buttons, and drop-down menus the installer has historically provided can be a challenge.

I do wonder, though, whether it is realistic to think that a newbie-friendly drive partioning wizard is possible. In my experience, most day-to-day computer users do not know what a partition is, or why it might be necessary.

If they are really expecting non-technical users to be using this installer, they’d be better off presenting a plain-language question like, “Do you want the ability to keep using Windows on this computer, or do you want to get rid of everything and use only Ubuntu?” If the user picks “Keep using Windows,” then send them into the partitioning dialog. While it probably violates some sacred and arcane rule of UI design, I can see some benefit to having some “Tell me more” links in the partioner that would allow the user to pull up additional detail about what partitioning means and what options they have.

I’m sure it probably violates some sacred and arcane rule of UI design, but I could see some benefit to having some sort of “Tell me more” link

Anyway, the old behavior was that when updates to the OS or any installed-from-the-repositories applications were available, you’d get a little icon in the notification area. Clicking the icon would bring up the Update Manager.

In 9.04, they changed it so that instead of generating the notification area icon, Update Manager would open automatically. I guess the idea was that the notification icon (and perhaps its associated notification bubbles) was too annoying, or that people were likely to ignore it and end up with unpatched, out-of-date systems. That’s fine, except that Update Manager opens somewhere in the background. What keeps happening to me is that at some point, while switching windows or desktops, I discover it’s been sitting there for god knows how long with a bunch of updates that I need to run.

Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to restore the old behavior. In Gnome’s Configuration Editor, go to the update-notifier section under “apps” and uncheck the “auto_launch” box:

After that, hey presto! You get the notification icon whenever updates are available.

The good news is that they are having a going-out-of-business sale. For the low-low sum of about fifty bucks, I picked up:

• Tremors
• Hard-Boiled
• The Evil Dead
• [REC]
• The Hunt For Red October
• The Shining
• Robocop
• The Descent
• Zombieland on Blu-ray

Frailty and Event Horizon were also in my hands at various points, but I ended up putting both back on the shelves. I’m sort of regretting the decision about Event Horizon now. It’s not a great film by any stretch of the imagination, but I have always had a soft spot for it in my heart, in the same place that I keep Starship Troopers.

I will admit that I feel somewhat conflicted about this haul. On the one hand, the last video store in town is going out of business, and the first and only time I step in the place, I am a vulture picking at its corpse. On the other hand, I got some pretty great movies for not much money.

It seems like video stores are the new independent book stores—local businesses that are being run off the road by big corporate villains. In this particular case, the store was a Movie Gallery (formerly Hollywood Video), and the entire chain is being liquidated across the country as part of its parent company’s bankruptcy filing. Lest I take any solace in the fact that this isn’t a case of the local independent shop shutting down because I didn’t give them my business, the company points to Netflix (and other similar services) as the primary reason for its bankruptcy.

Netflix, of course, is where I have been getting all my movies for the last 5-6 years. The selection and convenience was just too good to pass up, and when I *did* feel guilty and go into an actual video store, I was always disappointed. I suppose the worry is that, once all the bricks-and-mortar video stores are gone, Netflix will be free to reduce its selection, up its fees, and trim back the services it offers. However, by that logic, I guess I should have kept shopping at Movie Tyme Rentals on the south side of Indianapolis instead of going to Blockbuster for their much bigger selection.

Alright, enough conscience soothing—I should go watch [REC] or something.

Unbeknownst to me until relatively recently, they’ve also got a Windows version:

I’ve been using Clementine on my work laptop for a few days now, and so far, it almost exactly fits a need I’ve had a for a long time: a simple, low-overhead music player that runs on Windows, has a clean interface, and still supports a media library. These sorts of apps seem to be a dime a dozen on the Linux side of the fence. For Windows, not so much, and the few that *are* out there tend to be fairly ancient and crusty.

I say “almost” because Clementine does have one glaring ommission—any sort of support of mobile devices. There is no synching and no playing of tracks from a smartphone or iPod connected via USB. At home, that’s not a big deal, as all my music is stored on a NAS and accessible via Samba. Sadly, when I’m at the office and behind the corporate firewall, it means I’m still stuck with MediaMonkey to play the iPod through my laptop.

Maybe Banshee will get their Windows version working someday…

My former Senator has, unsurprisingly, found yet another excuse for some grandstanding. According to the Washington Independent:

To discourage businesses from outsourcing their operator services, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) is proposing legislation to tax businesses that set up help lines overseas. The levy, under Schumer’s bill, would be a quarter-cent per call.

Generally speaking, I find it difficult to take seriously much of anything that issues from Schumer’s mouth, press office, or his multitude of press conferences. He picks obvious, easy targets, and then chases them with pointless legislation that usually doesn’t go anywhere.

In this case, I find myself even more skeptical than usual. Schumer’s got a real twofer here: everybody loves to bitch and moan about call centers (they’re like the Postal Service in this regard), and hey, who doesn’t hate out-sourcing? Trouble is, making it more expensive for companies to use overseas call centers isn’t going to make those companies open call centers in the U.S. It’s going to make them even more enthusiastic than they already are to phase out human interaction altogether.

Instead of using your offensively fake Indian accent (HILARIOUS!) to complain about the customer rep you talked to, now you’ll get to complain about having to navigate an endlessly branching automated phone system.

PlayOn is a Windows-based application that allows you to watch online video content—from providers like Hulu, Amazon VOD, Comedy Central, and YouTube, to name a few—on your television via your PS3, Wii, or 360, as well as a few other supported devices. The process is fairly quick and painless, and I was able to get the service running on my PS3 in less than five minutes. The software will run you $39.99 for your first year, and $19.99 for each subsequent year. All you need is a networked PC and console.

I bought a PlayOn license a year or two ago, and have used it on and off to mostly watch Hulu content via my Popcorn Hour box. While it generally does the trick, the problem is that it has never been particularly reliable. Hulu has worked most of the time, Netflix worked a few times, and Amazon VOD has never really worked. None of these services is a primary source of video for me, and the license was cheap when I bought it, so these issues have never really bothered me all that much. Their user forums, however, tend to be filled with lots of very unhappy people complaining about how Service X has suddenly stopped working.

It’s hard to really blame the PlayOn guys for any of these problems. They seem to be trying to make a good product, and their support team has been very helpful and responsive when I have contacted them about issues. The problem is that they have an impossible task before them—they’re trying to keep hitting a constantly moving target, with, so far as I can tell, little to no support from the services to which they’re connecting.

In the case of Hulu, they have an actively uncooperative “partner”.

Good intentions and technical ingenuity only get them so far, though. My experience has largely been that when I am able to watch stuff via their app, and I don’t end up having to reboot both my computer and my media box at least once each, it’s a pleasant surprise. Maybe it’s just my setup, but that doesn’t make for a reliable solution. I can’t really see paying a yearly fee for their updated version.

Ultimately, consumers want freedom, said David Shanks, chief executive of leading publisher Penguin Group USA.

“Our fondest wish is that all the devices become agnostic so that there isn’t proprietary formats and you can read wherever you want to read,” Shanks told Reuters. “First we have to get a standard that everybody embraces.”

Awesome! Not only is this someone from the publishing industry talking sense about open standards, but it’s the CEO of one of the sister companies of my employer!

Then I read on to the next paragraph…

The issue, he said, is the fear of piracy and how to set a common digital rights management system to thwart it.

Sorry, Shanks—you lost me. It’s not so much restrictive proprietary formats that you’re concerned about, it’s that there are too many restrictive formats, and you don’t know which one to go with. The books you publish will be copied and shared and re-used in ways that don’t immediately lead to profits for your company. Live with it, and give up the pipe dream that if you just hit on the right marketing and management scheme, you’ll be able to preserve your income without making too many changes to your business.

Although I have been thinking on and off about getting a Kindle myself, my knee-jerk response was “See, that would never be a problem with a *real* book.” That’s a stupid reply, though. “Real” books can get lost, left in airports and coffee shops, and damaged to the point of unreadability, and there are plenty of other bits of technology that we carry around and rely upon which can break. Sure, it’s annoying when my phone stops working, but I don’t point my finger at it and start yelling about how it was all so much better when we had telegraphs.

I have read plenty of critiques of the Kindle and other e-book readers that complain about its form factor, or how these devices will never manage to replicate the mystical relationship people seem to have with ink on paper. I fail to find these objections compelling. During the last few trips I have taken, I would have been more than happy to be carrying around a light-weight e-reader instead of an 800-page paperback.

The question that came to my mind a few minutes after reading Josh’s post was, “What happens to all his books now?” My guess/hope is that he replaces his broken Kindle, connects the new one to his Amazon account, and hey presto! Everything is there, just like it was before. Still, that question is what troubles me about the Kindle—the lock-in to Amazon’s service. I buy a bunch of Kindle-edition books from them, and then I’m dependent upon them maintaining support for the service and for my device. While that might sound like a good bet, I’m sure all the people stuck with unusable media due to abandoned DRM schemes or vendors who have gone out of business might say otherwise.

I should state here that I *hate* the term “lifestreaming”, but can’t think of a better replacement. The idea, however, is pretty cool—have one site that pulls in the updates from all my other various public online activities.

While the idea of lifestreaming isn’t particularly new, I hadn’t really found a workable, non-annoying way of doing it. Sure, there’s the WordPress TwitterTools plugin that sucks a daily digest of my Twitter posts into this blog, but then there’s Flickr, and Delicious, and the stuff I share and comment on in Google Reader, and a bunch of other random sites. Apps like FriendFeed and the now AOL-owned SocialThing make various runs at the problem, but then you’re dependent upon those 3rd-party sites. If they go down, get bought, change their policies, etc., you and all the data you’ve added to them are at their mercy.

Sweetcron seems like a pretty cool solution. It’s a PHP app with a MySQL back-end, and aside from a few minor quirks, it’s pretty easy to get up and running on any LAMP-stack host. Themes are extremely limited, and there aren’t many bells and whistles, but the first issue can be solved with some CSS knowledge, and the second is more of a feature than a bug.

I’ve got a very bare-bones instance running at http://stream.downdb.net/. I’m using one of the pre-installed themes, so it’s pretty ugly right now, and most of the templates still have the filler text provided by the guy who wrote the code. I also need to figure out how to have it *not* pull in a ton of random tags from Google Reader. Still, it’s a nice little app, and I really like that it lets me keep using all the various external services, but pulls my data in to a single site that I own and control.