Rubénerd Blog :)

Can that time really be right? Back in Singapore my dad and I combined have well over 130GiB of music and I don’t remember seeing a time like that!

I’ve figured out why some iTunes users have been reporting problems with subscribing to the Rubenerd Show through the iTunes Store. I deleted my own subscription, searched for "Rubenerd Show" in the iTunes Store and resubscribed to only be given a small circle and an exclamation point.

When I right clicked and chose "Show Description" I was given the above dialog box. No wonder it isn’t working, it’s trying to access new shows from http:///show/feed/ for some reason!

I don’t know how or why this happened. I’ll be contacting Apple about this to see if I can get it pointing back to the proper URI again. I believe my good friend Felix Tanjono submitted my podcast to the iTunes Store back in 2005 back when Australia and Singapore didn’t have access to it.

While I’m sorting this out you can still go to iTunes, choose the Advanced menu and click Subscribe to Podcast, then enter the following address as a stopgap:

http://rubenerd.com/show/feed/

Sorry about this, I don’t know how this could have happened :-(.

Despite having an Australian iTunes account and having purchased a few random tracks over the years, I’ve largely refrained from buying digital download music online. For me it’s been a case of value for money: sure online downloads are cheaper [most of the time] than an equivalent CD but I don’t have the freedom to rip the audio at quality levels I want for the devices I want. Perhaps the fact I’m also obsessed with future proofing myself plays a part too.

Going to Apple.com today though I found one more reason to dislike audio downloads online ;-). If I wanted yawn inducing, generic, mass produced, disposable, forgettable music I’d tune into a terrestrial Top 40 station. Coldplay aside of course.

Do I sound old yet?

I guess I’ve always been the type of person who likes collecting things, perhaps a bit too much for his own good.

Case in point I reinstalled Leopard on my MacBook Pro this evening so I could reformat the drive as case sensitive. As I was about to copy over my iTunes music library from one of my backup drives I noticed big the folder was, and how huge the Podcast folder had become!

I guess I’ve been downloading and listening to podcasts since early 2005, and they do build up! The question is though, what do I do with all of them? Some of the shows in this folder are no longer being produced or are even available anymore I think, and it’d be a shame to delete this collection after downloading for so long. In a nostalgic way it’s fun to listen back to old shows to see what people thought was exciting a few years ago. Look, it’s an iPod that plays video! Google will never buy YouTube! Ants on Mars! Irn-Bru in New York!

It also raises another question: if I don’t delete this folder, how large will it be in 2009? 2010? 2020? Will I need to contemplate buying even more terabyte hard drives or invest in a Blu-Ray burner and stacks of double sided discs just for this stuff?

So much for podcasts being free right? :-).

Nothing more to say. Fortunately the admitted it and changed their policies. Wait, that was something else to say wasn’t it? I guess I’ve never been very good at reining in verbosity.

It was another one of those "I knew it wouldn’t work but I was hoping it would" kind of situations. Amazon has released a MP3 download service that has no Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) tacked on and unlike all the other so called "iTunes killers" it is a pleasure to use.

And surprise surprise you need an American postal address before you can finish the transaction! Yay!

Seriously can music companies really be angry over illegal downloads if they don’t care about their customers overseas? The local Singaporean music association has their painfully embarrassing “Be HIP” campaign which does nothing to create new methods of distribution which clearly people want and would use, then blames us. Pure genius.

The Ruben is a cranky geek episode! With special guest Elke Schade.

New iPods introduced

What Elke thinks of the new Nano, what I think of the Touch, Apple disabling Linux support, downloading cover art in iTunes.

Local Singapore news

World’s largest water pumps being built in the Marina Barrage, what prevents people from being sucked in?

Facebook news

Microsoft buying a pointless chunk, profile gluttony, voting for the Aussie Greens, Elke’s rant on registration woes, I use Twitter to pretend I update my profile, CSS customisation would mean death.

Ruben tries to make Mr Kloss proud

Why doesn’t everyone use metric, what they teach you in school is pointless, why the whole Product Red scheme is no good, why can’t Microsoft even create a spreadsheet app that multiplies properly, why are all men on television fat and stupid?

And the ratholes…

Lava lamp confusion, Lance Armstrong’s LiveStrong armbands, eating grapes, failing MadPlayers and tossed salad and scrambled eggs.

Download MP3 to listen ↓ 54:46 minutes, 25.10MiB

You can also stream this episode and view its Internet Archive page.

I did a clean install of my MacBook Pro yesterday and did a software update. All the software, firmware and whatnot are the latest versions.

But joy of joys, the latest version of iTunes 7.3.2 has been giving me nothing but grief. It’s the first Mac OS X application in five years that I haven’t been able to Force Quit, or kill in either the Activity Monitor or by looking up it’s PID in top in the Terminal and typing kill PID. Nothing. Nada.

That said though, it looks like I’m not the only one with this problem.

So now I know what Mai was angry about at the end of that last post…

In the criminal justice systems of the countries I have lived in (and given my server logs, most probably yours too) it’s not only accepted that you are innocent until proven guilty, it’s the law.

DRM, or digital restrictions management is a series of technological measures implemented by paranoid corporations to protect them from the biggest evil force in the world: consumers. Give a consumer the freedom to use the content in the way it was originally intended to be used and they’ll end up just ripping you off and not use your technology to use said content right? Horror of horrors!

This arrogant position of most media companies will be their undoing eventually, but in the meantime it just bugs me that they’re taking advantage of consumers and taking away our rights that are written in law and unwritten in common decency.

Steve Jobs from Apple even admitted that he wouldn’t be using DRM in iTunes if media companies were reasonable. I’m a tad skeptical, but at least he said that instead of nothing.

Now there seems to be some legitimate reasoning behind DRM. By theoretically preventing the copying of media they can protect themselves from piracy. The problem is DRM is rarely used for this purpose; instead of protecting themselves media companies seem instead to be using it so they can re-sell you the same content over and over again. Why let someone buy media to play on their TV, their portable media player, their phone and in their cars when you can sell it over again for each one?

But the part the really boils my blood is that by using DRM companies are sending out a clear message: they don’t trust us with their content. They assume we’re all out to destroy them, and that we have nothing but malicious intent. They’re treating us like little kids; it’s beyond contempt.

DRM: Guilty until proven innocent!