Pete Ashton's Weblog

When you go to a Google Video page you often have the option to download the movie. The first option is for "Windows/Mac" while the other option (which isn't always there) is for "iPod/Sony PSP". Now, you'd think given that the first option is for operating systems while the latter is for devices that option one would be a nice useable file while option two would be tied to the device in question. Nope. Downloading for Windows/Mac gives you a file that will only play in the Google Video Player. Personally I've already got QuickTime and VLC and don't need another player. However, the iPod/PSP file turns out to be a plain and simple MPEG-4 file that will pretty much play on anything anywhere. And, if you're so inclined, can be edited, remixed, whatever.

Along with Podcasting (where simple mp3s are often used) this is an interesting and somewhat unexpected side effect of the iPod and other video devices. Rather that streaming or wrapping the file in some DRM, content providers are obliged to release their stuff in open formats to get to their audiences. That's not to say they make it very clear. Which is why I've written this. When you see "iPod" think "a format I can actually use how I want" whether or not you have an iPod.

Step one - find out their ID.

First, check the URL of their Flickr page. If it looks like this:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/12345678@N00/

then you're in luck. The ID is "12345678@N00". Make a note of it.

If it looks like this:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/wittyname/

scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on the "Feed" link. This has the ID buried in it as shown:

http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=12345678@N00&format=rss_200

Step two - Prep your feeds.

Go to your Recent Activity page. Again, scroll down to the bottom and copy the Feed URL. Mine looks like this:

http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/activity.gne?id=51035602859@N01&format=rss_200

Replace my ID with their ID and paste it into your feed reader. You'll now be informed of any comments left on that persons photos.

This, of course, is not that evil. The information is there on their Flickr page for all to see - this just makes getting it easier. And I think it can be interesting and useful to follow the responses people make to a photographer you're interested in and keen to learn from.

However, you can also track them as they move around Flickr thanks to the Comments You've Made feed (again, this is mine):

http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_comments.gne?user_id=51035602859@N01&format=rss_200

The morals of doing this are somewhat grey. When I figured this out I monitored a friend's comments for a couple of days and while I didn't stumble across anything untoward it did feel kinda creepy, like I'd been bugging their phone calls or something. So I stopped and can categorically state than I'm not monitoring anyone's comments feeds.

But I could if I wanted to, as could anyone. And I felt you should be aware of that. If it's private, take it to email.

You are, however, welcome to follow me should you have that desire.

Back in August 2004, Jez, cutting edge baboon that he his, invited me to join him on this new thing Skype. Once I worked out what he was on about I declined. The last thing I want to do is hook myself up to my computer like some futuristic cyberzombie and anyway, we had flat-rate phone calls in the house. I could call anyone in the UK for free using the normal phone. Not that I use the phone that much these days, but that's another story.

Fast forward to a couple of months back and my mum is heading off to New Zealand. Skype had, it seemed, become mainstream, as indicated by the fact that my mum knew about it. Given that she's one of the very few people I actually phone on a regular basis Skype suddenly had a use. And so, last night, I had my first VoIP Softphone conversation over a distance of 14,000 miles, for an hour, for free.

Skype, as Jez said back then, completely rocks. The setup is simple, the interface pretty clean, especially if you're used to Instant Messaging, and the quality, even with a shitty microphone, very good. In fact there's no lag whatsoever even when calling New Zealand. And, interestingly, it's much more comfortable talking into a mic than with a poorly designed phone clamped to your ear.

Consider this a belated recommendation, especially if you have relatives abroad who you're used to calling for hours on end. (Mardou - take note.)

As you might have heard, Apple are apparently going to start sourcing their chips from Intel who have traditionally built chips for Windows-based PCs. On the surface this is incredibly boring news unless you get excited about such things. As long as the damn thing works who cares what's under the hood?

However, according to Leander Kahney at Wired's Cult of Mac blog, it's a little more interesting that it first appears. It seems Apple are interested in the new Pentium D chip which has copy protection built into it. With this in place Apple can approach Hollywood and develop an online movie store whereby people can download movies and watch them via their Macs, either directly off screen or piped through to the TV or however Apple decides to allow.

And even if the shift to this new chip is seamless (which it appears it might be) it's mildly annoying because it means when you buy a new Mac it'll be crippled at a fundamental level. You can see signs on this with the iTunes / iPod setup where it's made difficult to copy music within it. Flatmate Andy can listen to my music over our network but he can't access the original files from within iTunes. Similarly I can't plug his iPod into my Mac and copy the music over. That said, I can give him direct access to my music directories and can use a third party piece of software to decode his iPod so it's not the end of the world. iTunes might be crippled but it's possible to bypass that. With this crippling build into the hardware itself there will be no bypass.

Now this is merely an annoyance and if you don't like it then just don't download the movies in question, but what's worrying me is that future media software from Apple will be designed with this DRM crap as it's priority. I wouldn't be surprised if "iFlicks" or whatever doesn't play AVI files, the predominant format for p2p sharing, rendering them pretty useless for anyone who doesn't want their files crippled with DRM.

(Aside - I'd be quite happy to pay for unencrypted downloads of TV shows and movies. BitTorrent is great but it does tend to get choked and the choice available is pretty mainstream. If the TV studious could work out how much each viewer is worth in terms of advertising and set up a paypal-style honour system I'd be happy to stick a quid or so in for each episode of Lost I've watched, so there's no reason I can see why a pay-per-view members only BitTorrent service run by the studios distributing DRM-free files wouldn't work. Piracy will always happen to popular stuff but plenty of folk are willing to pay for it, as long as it's not crippled with DRM)

More to the point, this marks a subtle shift in the nature of what a computer is. Currently you can do pretty much anything you want with a desktop computer if you have the skills and time to do so. This sort of hardware based copy protection turns the desktop computer into something resembling a microwave oven. Yes, you can program it, but not much. Certainly, most people using Apple products don't have the desire to do pretty much anything with them, but taking away that potential just to please a industry that doesn't understand that its future is changing is just dumb.

Apple kinda got it right with the iTunes / iPod setup. They never publicise that you can use it with all your existing CDs and all the music you downloaded from p2p systems but everyone figures that out pretty quickly. The iTunes Music Store, while relatively successful, it's really just a trojan horse to stop the music industry complaining. The DRM is very weak (just burn a CDR and rip it back) and any crippling is pretty easy to circumvent. The record industry thinks everything is okay while the rest of us get on with our lives.

But this new hardware crippling, I just don't like it. We'll see to what level it does cripple the Mac and the influence it has on Apple's software releases and hopefully it won't be that huge, but I suspect it will prove that you can't get into bed with these short-sighted fuckers without getting corrupted.

Here's a good piece of advice from the realm of tech support. When greeted with a caller who says the piece of hardware "just isn't working" advise them to unplug the power cable / USB / whatever and blow any dust out of it. This allows the irate caller to realise they didn't have it plugged in to begin with without losing any face. Ha ha. Stupid users.

The other day when I was networking the flat up, stretching Ethernet cables up stairs and under doors, the modem just stopped working. Switching it on and off didn't help. It would run through the four flashing lights before settling on "standby". At a loss, I phoned tech support. After a few minutes he gently told me to press the "standby" button on the top of the unit. There's a standby button? Oh, you mean the black blob set into the black unit with "standby" written on it in tiny black writing? That standby button that I never noticed because I've set this up in the dark under the stairs?

What a tool. But at least I had it plugged in.

About two and a half year ago I bought a router to network the computers in my flat and share a broadband connection. It all went horribly wrong, the experience being so bad I never wanted to return to the world of hard-wired routing ever again, and thanks to Sam having a wireless laptop I didn't need to. However, in my new flat we won't have any wireless capable computers so I've had to buy another router. I was recommended the Belkin 5-Port Network Switch router retailing for £20. Here, then is my experience with it.

1) Plug in router to mains

2) Plug ethernet cable from Airport Basestation into router (without turning it off first)

3) Plug ethernet cable from Mac into router (without turning it off first)

And it worked.

Networking - not that scary after all.

Recently I've been working on a new website, brendadada central, and I've hit something of a major stumbling block right at the last stage. Everything about it works fine except one thing and I can't for the life of me find a solution. I'm writing this in the vain hope that someone out there in internetland can help. Google, do your business. (Regular readers feel free to skip all of this.)

Do I know anyone with a decent working knowledge of the Lynx browser who might be able to help me figure out why it's acting inconsistently and erratically in regards to running cgi scripts and paying attention to cookies? Anyone?

A year or so back there was a flurry of MetaFilter clones, applications that did what the engine behind MetaFilter does so you could run your own version of MeFi should you so want to. At the time MeFi wasn't letting in new users so there was a demand for the likes of MonkeyFilter et al.

Time does march so swiftly on the webernet.

For reasons that will eventually become clear, I'm in the market for a MeFi clone, but it appears the time has passed. MetaPhilter seems to have stalled and I can't for the life of me find somewhere to download it from, FreeFilter just looks kinda scary (I will take another look at it when my head stops throbbing) and the explosion of copycat blogging tools has made figuring out what other CMS's are like something of a headache.

What I want is basically the MeFi experience where anyone can sign up and post and moderators can be assigned to do the moderating. Actually, some kind of forum software that is malleable enough to be turned into a blog-style layout would do the trick.

Anyone got a clue on this?

I have a small problem which I'm going to attempt to solve in the next few days but before I do I want to share my proposed solution with you lot just in case I'm about to make a blunder. Oh, this is computer related. [Significant proportion of readers switch off.]

When I got my hands on my lovely new-ish Mac it had inside it two hard drives, one of 60GB, which we'll call Drive A, and another of 40GB, which we'll call Drive B. I decided to set it up with A as my boot disk and B housing my mp3 collection. In the scant months that followed I have managed to accumulate 39GB of music. (In the wacky world of byte-counting 37.4GB of music on a 38.34GB capacity drive, but you get the idea.) I can't afford to buy a bigger hard drive at the moment, nor am I able to borrow someone's external one, but I'm fast running out of room for all the music that flows my way and iTunes isn't desperately happy about the library being spread over two drives. I need a quick fix solution.

Drive A usually has 20-30GB free and could have more if I backed up some of the random shit I've grabbed off the net. A quick blast with the excellent Disk Inventory X shows everything that isn't in my Home directory takes up 10.4GB. Here's what I'm thinking of doing.

Back up my personal files onto DVDs and delete from Drive A leaving at least 40GB of space.

Copy my iTunes library over from Drive B to Drive A whilst keeping my ratings and playlists intact. (A quite simple operation - change the iTunes Music folder location in Preferences, then go Advanced > Consolidate Library and everything will copy over.)

Delete everything on Drive B.

Using rsync, backup everything on Drive A to Drive B except the music files, remembering to make B bootable.

Switch off the computer and physically swap A and B over, making B the master and A the slave (Doncha love the SM connotations?) remembering to fiddle with those weird slots on the back of the drives.

Switch on, hopefully booting with Drive B. If everything has worked, delete everything on Drive A except the music files. Copy my personal stuff back into my Home directory and re-consolidate the music files if necessary.

And, um, that should be it, giving me an extra 20GB to fill with mp3s, which should last me until about April. While somewhat longwinded it does seem a little too easy. Have I missed anything?

I have a lead on a potential job that would involve DTP with something like QuarkXpress. I haven't used to DTP package for years, what with the web and all, so I'd like to get my skills back up to scratch. Problem is DTP programs seem to be quite expensive. Does anyone know of an open source / free / very cheap package? It doesn't have to be hyper modern or anything - we're just talking text and a few graphics and the ability to output PDFs for professional printing. Mac OS X preferably, but PC stuff also of interest.

Every time I get a piece of pseudo-spam from Amazon these days it's pushing multi-region DVD players for £29.99 and I get slightly peeved. Not because they're selling them but because the DVD drive I bought quite recently for my Mac isn't region-free, having that stupid "5 changes and you're locked" thing going on. It strikes me as very stupid indeed that a piece of specialist kit for my computer than can do pretty much anything I want it to is not as good as a cheap mass market player in this regard.

So it was with some glee that I discovered, via Cult of Mac, something rather cool. The excellent VLC player (which plays pretty much any movie format under the sun) ignores region coding. Disable the annoying DVD player app that comes with OSX, open the disc in VLC and it plays. No firmware zapping necessary.

Score yet another one for open source, methinks.

(I don't know if this applies to Windows but I'd be surprised if it doesn't)

[Update: a new Cult of Mac post has more on DVD ripping and video playback]

A year ago, when bluetooth was just breaking out into the mainstream I saw a truck driver with a wireless bluetooth headset clamped to his ear connected to his mobile phone. A few months before that, when cameraphones were just breaking out into the mainstream, most of the bin men I was working with had one, though they didn't really know what to do with the pictures once they'd taken them.

Today I was sitting in the canteen at work and I heard a baby crying, which was out of place to say the least. Looking to my side I saw a man and two women from the cleaning staff watching a home movie, with sound, on one of their mobile phones. And not just a 10 second clip - it went on for a good five minutes. It wasn't the technology that surprised me though. It was how utterly normally they treated it, like it was nothing special to have a digital video camera and television in the palm of your hand. You expect hip young urban professionals to have this type of kit and to make a fuss about it but when perfectly ordinary people are using this level of technology as a perfectly ordinary part of their perfectly ordinary lives then I suddenly become aware that truly I am living in the future.

Or that mobile phone companies are seriously fucking with people's sense of priority.

Another techy thing I've just figured out on my Mac, so bear with me non-Mac folks and Mac folks who don't care for such things. I've been wondering for a while why, given all the fancy networking stuff that comes with OSX, I couldn't bring some FTP functionality into the Finder, rather than having to use the command line in Terminal. Turns out I can, kinda.

In the Finder click on Go, then Connect to Server (or apple-K). Then type in your ftp details like this:

ftp://username:password@ftp.domain.com

(ftp.domain.com is whatever address you use in your standard ftp program)

Your server will now appear in the Finder window along with the disks and stuff. Now, I can copy stuff from the server no problem but uploading seems to be an issue - the permissions just aren't working for me or something. If I can make this work both ways then SubEthaEdit (see previous post) will be even more useful. Anyone got a clue?

If you have a website, need to edit documents on there (other than in your blogging CMS), do a bit of coding, frequently use FTP and have a Mac... okay out of my regular readership that probably just me then, but on the off chance, you should check out SubEthaEdit. I'd heard of this app a while back but it had generally been praised for its collaborative tools allowing many people to edit the same document and for changes to be tracked. Since I never need to collaborate on a document I figured it was of no use to me but it turns out to be very useful indeed in some quite subtle ways. Firstly, it's free. That's quite a major thing in my book. Secondly it's basically a text editor with no fancy formating widgets which means when you save your document it isn't filled with OS specific carriage returns and the like (very important when editing program files). I've tried Emacs but it runs in the Terminal and frankly I'm too lazy to figure it all out. Thirdly, it's designed for coding with different modes for languages including HTML and CSS so tags are highlighted leaving raw content visible. But most importantly it integrates with the FTP client. So I browse through the server using Transmit and control-click on a document to edit it in SubEthaEdit, which it does as it I've opened it from the Finder. I edit and when I save it automatically FTPs it back up to the server. Oh, and it can do all sorts of fancy collaborative stuff too if that's what you're into.

There are two downsides. Firstly files edited remotely aren't saved in the "recently opened" list and I can't see a way to bookmark them. And secondly there's no spell checker, which is essential for a myopic pseudo-dyslexic like me. But there are mere quibbles. So that's thumbs up for SubEthaEdit.

I'd been put off paying for music from the iTunes Music Store and it's not because I'm a skanky music pirate or anything. Okay, I am a skanky music pirate who tends to only buy stuff he can't get for free, but that's not really an argument against paying for digital downloads. The problem I had was with the Digital Rights Management (DRM) system, called FairPlay they load onto each track which essentially limits the number of computers the track can be played on and prevents it being converted into another format such as mp3. It's actually not as bad as some DRM systems but it's still more restrictive than buying an actual CD. In short, when you pay for music from iTunes you don't own it. You've licensed it to play only in iTunes on five different computers and, more critically in this day and age, only on the iPod. Should Apple go out of business and not be able to authorise any new computer you might buy, that music is then lost. If the tracks cost pennies then this wouldn't be a problem but they're charging about the same as HMV. So screw 'em.

(Sidenote - while checking up on what the iTunes DRM actually is I came across this gem: "Sharing is intended for personal use only.")

That said, I was pretty sure there was a way around this. You can burn a normal CD from your DRMed tracks and then rip it as unrestricted mp3s. All I needed was a reason to actually buy something from iTunes to check this out. Thankfully my good friends Dave and Anita sent me a £10 iTunes voucher for my birthday and eventually I found something I wanted. I signed up and downloaded the album, which was a painless and efficient process, and burned a normal CD, the sort that plays in most stereos, directly from the "Purchased Music" playlist the store created for me. This then appeared in the sidebar as a normal CD with all the track details intact. I imported it in mp3 format and sent a few tracks to Dave to see if he could play them. He could. The DRMed tracks were then moved off to a separate directory and my music collection remains DRM free. And the end result is I'm a lot more likely to buy stuff from iTunes now. All they need to do it add all those obscure and deleted albums I'm wanting and everyone will be happy, but that's another post for another time.

Extra time: about five minutes. Extra cost: a 30p CDR. And people actually bother to crack this?

So Jez is still hacking away at the Gmail Radio experiment and today presented me with an m3u playlist file that streams tracks grabbed offa Gmail and stored on his server, which was cool in itself except any ogg or m4a files were converted to mp3 and the text of the emails that accompanied them was turned into robot-speech. The end result was a radio show generated on the fly by a range of different people. Once you understand what's going on here the potential becomes clear and mildly exciting.

Take this slightly different model. There are lots of mp3 blogs out there hosting songs. Automatically grabbing the mp3 files and creating an audio stream would be easy but it misses an important aspect - what the blogger has written about the song in question. With this system you'd get all the tunes from a range of blogs automatically but also the comments that go with them. An audio version of a blog aggregator if you like. Of course you've still got the raw information about the song, who posted it, etc, so as you're listening to the stream you could check the site, see what's being played and follow the link back to the original post. Wouldn't that be cool?

All you'd need would be a server with half a gig or so of space and unlimited bandwidth (which, if I'm not very much mistaken, and I suspect I must be, you can get here for $15 a month) to run the program on. Get it to check a selection of mp3 blogs on a 6 hourly basis (say via their full feeds), grab the mp3 files and commentary, convert it into a stream and you've got an eclectic radio station with presenters talking about each song, all automatically generated.

A similar but quite different thing is going on at Radio Paradise, which I'd recommend you check out as it's what mainstream rock radio should be like if there was any justice in the world. (I've been listening to it for three hours straight if that's any recommendation.) Essentially just one couple, Rebecca and Bill Goldsmith, in the small town of Paradise, California choosing the tunes and programming the stream, but what takes it to the next level is the listener interaction. As the stream plays the current track is displayed on the main page. Follow this link and you're in a forum where members can comment and vote on the track. More interestingly is a second stream, the Listener Review Channel, featuring songs they're considering for the main playlist, usually suggested or uploaded by listeners, with a simple voting system in place. While the station is ultimately controlled by Bill and Rebecca and has their stamp all over it, this filtered listener interaction adds subtle layers to the experience not just for those involved in the fora but for the non-interacting listener as well.

The model I'm thinking of is again similar but different. The core would be the members only music sharing site mentioned yesterday which is a no-brainer but think about all the data it's generating. A lot of this can be thrown back into the mix as you'd expect but what's exciting me is the idea of using this selection of music generated by a large-ish pool of folk to create some kind of external service. A public radio station that's above board and legal generating cash by whatever means are applicable which gets fed back into the community. And it's all run by robots.

Cool, huh?

So I set up the Gmail account for sharing mp3s as mentioned last week, gave the login to a few friends and it's all be going swimmingly. (If I haven't told you about it, no offense. I've just been randomly going through my chums, all of whom are compartmentalised differently in my mind, picking out those whose music tastes I know and probably missing key folk. Sorry if I've slighted you.) Basically we're abusing the Gmail service in a most blatant way and if the account doesn't get shut down at some point in the near future I'll be amazed. What with 20+ people all logging on to the same account from different addresses, sometimes at the same time they're bound to notice. That's if they care, of course, and plenty of other people are abusing the Gmail service in varying degrees. At least we're seeing the ads unlike those who are using it as a virtual drive. Although Jez isn't - he's hacked a way of downloading the mp3s and automatically streaming them, and to top it all his system converts the emails into speech and streams them too, which is rather boggling when you experience it. Like some kind of community radio take to it's logical extreme where every listener is a presenter.

Why do this? Well, other than that it's cool and fun I have in the space of a couple of days magically created an online community that works. That we're infringing copyright is a mere unfortunate byproduct (and since it's a closed network not really a huge problem) - the point is it's the music that binds it all together. It's been said many times but it bears repeating that music has some kind of fundamental importance to the human condition, be it singing along to the radio on the factory floor, going to clubs, concerts and gigs, sitting around a fire with a guitar or sharing tapes and now mp3s with your mates. If I was going to create a community I'd build it around music, even if I wanted to get other stuff out of it. Music is the foundation - talk about other things will come from that foundation on its own.

This Gmail experiment (and seeing as it's probably not going to be sustainable long term once a few hundred people get on board it's definitely an experiment) along with the seeming ease with which Jez has hacked cool things out of it has made me think more about developing this kind of community into something that isn't wedged somewhat uncomfortably onto an email service. In essence it'd be a closed members only site (membership gained by invite only) laid out in a similar way to MetaFilter. Songs are listed in a pile system where once the limit is reached the bottom one is deleted to make space (which might sound familiar to some people...) That much is straightforward and nothing new really, but it's the essential basics on which to build. Some of the developments will be planned out (such as a streaming radio service) but most of them will just evolve and the most interesting ones will probably come about independently of the site itself as people meet new people and stuff, be is music or more likely something else, happens.

The main stumbling block will be paying for the storage and bandwidth but that's surmountable given the community aspect and by keeping it small (500 members should do it and a fiver a year to cover costs isn't too steep). The other problem will be security. Sites like this that I've seen tend to be web-only and introducing audio streams and the like that can be played in apps like iTunes is going to be tricky to keeps members only. The trick will be keeping it secret, so if it does come to pass (and if it does it won't be for quite a while) you won't hear about it here. First and second rules...

24 hours later and MT-Blacklist has blocked 185 comment spams, meaning they got nowhere near my database, and moderated 63, meaning they were accepted but not published pending my approval. Only one of the moderated ones was valid, sent to a post from last May. Of course in this time I've had no legitimate comments so here's a request - please comment on recent posts on the main page (not in the archives - anything over 21 days old is automatically moderated). Don't try and trick the system - just be yourselves.

I've upgraded Movable Type (the system that runs this blog) to 3.11 and it shouldn't show as I haven't played with any of the new features yet, principally because they're the sort of things that involve overhauling great chunks of the site and that sort of shit can wait. What I have done is install MTBlacklist which should hopefully block comment spam which has been getting to be more and more of a pain sometimes reaching over 300 spams a day. With any luck the "Post with new comments" box on the sidebar will become useful again and I'll finally be able to include comments in the feed. Of course there's a fine balance to be struck here and if you find your comment is blocked let me know. Of course I'm now sitting here actually wanting the spambots to come so I can blast them away with my metaphorical new gun. Unfortunately MT-Blacklist doesn't follow through to the source and kick the spammer in the bollocks for me, but one can only expect so much.

(If you've never noticed comment spam here that's because I clear it at least twice daily, once over breakfast and again after work.)

So the AirPort wi-fi base-station is ready to pick up and I'm like "cool" because I've been wanting to do this for a while what with Sam and I sharing the broadband connection over one cable and stuff, but I'm also kinda nervous because this is networking and I don't understand it at all, but it's an Apple product so it should be very simple to set up, so I follow the instructions and the Airport setup program says I can't proceed because I don't have an Airport card in my Mac, which I knew because my Mac is old and they've discontinued the 802.11b card I'd need so I'd had to buy a third party wi-fi card to slot in the USB hub, and this is recognising the base-station, which in turn is recognising the cable modem but I can't tell it how to talk to the modem because I can't get into the setup utility to talk to it because I don't have the Airport card because they've discontinued it, so I phone the nice people at the Apple re-seller who sold me this kit assuring me it'd work and they say some shit about finding the Hex password and putting this in the wi-fi card control panel and I write all this down because it doesn't quite make sense and following it through discover that this isn't the problem in that I already have an active network, just one that isn't talking to the ISP because it hasn't been told how to, so I start searching the help and connect to the base-station via Ethernet, stumble through some forms and when I'm way passed the point where I no longer know what I've done let alone what I'm doing, fire up Firefox and discover I'm connected, and switching on Sam's Windows laptop I discover she's connected too.

Yay!

I'm getting a new computer soon and part of the incredibly good deal is that I'm trading in my iMac which has served me well for getting on six years. As such I'm noticing for the first time how incredibly mucky it is.

(I've since cleaned it...)

I have a permalink dilemma. I want a permalink that will be both short and permanent and I don't know how to get one.

Webmonkey is no more. If you've ever asked me about learning HTML over the last few years the chances are I pointed you towards Webmonkey, probably with the line "don't bother spending twenty quid on a big fat book - everything you need is here". I've also found myself using it when I couldn't remember if #000000 is white or black or whatnot. It wasn't perfect and definitely isn't XHTML compliant but it did the job well enough so that anyone could do their own site. And now it's going. I hope Lycos keep the existing pages archived up there - the reports seem to imply that it's new content that's being axed rather than the entity as a whole. Lots of blogs have been saying they'll miss it even though they never use it anymore but I still reckon it's got a lot going for it. Of course, I've probably missed any new tutorial sites thanks to my Webmonkey blindness - any current tips in the comments please!

Tom points to a little notice from the Radiocommunications Agency on the illegality of mobile phone blocking devices. A few years back I dreamt of a device like this that would cut out every annoying phone on the bus/train and give me a bit of peace, and it turns out they've finally been developed. Of course they're against the law but surely they could be legally used by certain institutions - the Quiet Zone coaches on trains, for example, in libraries or other "no cell phone" zones. Since there are signs already up I can't see how anyone could object. I still harbor the fantasy of being able to zap those tedious, retarded monkey-assed baboons on the number 33 though...

Does anyone know how to play .avi files on a Mac (OS X)? Come to think of it, does anyone know how to play them on a PC?

Next stop, the potential evils of AAC...

Been having quite a few computer adventures this last week so it's only fair to document them.

First up, the iMac got an overhaul. It's getting on four years old (a Grape job) and was getting ready for retirement. But then Dad discovered it could take more memory. And a larger hard drive. So we figured it could probably run OS X thus giving it a new life. It was a bitch getting into the thing but a relatively painless experience all said. It's now gone from 6 to 80 gig. Which is nice. OS X to follow soonish.

Then on Saturday, at the same time as the plumber was initiating our current cold spell, the cable guy came round to install broadband. I was very skeptical as to why this was necessary having got broadband myself twice now, but it turned out cable broadband is different from yer standard phoneline ADSL, requiring a new cable and it's own box. It's essentially a router with both USB and Ethernet ports and sits there always on and connected. In theory any computer plugged into it is automatically online. In other words Sam's PC laptop works perfectly but my iMac, still being on OS 9, needs a bit more work. As I had to dash off to Banbury I didn't get all the details off him but they should come through the post soon. So we have broadband! Which means hardcore streaming radio! Yay!

As he was setting up the router he suddenly went all apologetic saying the PC had just gotten the Blaster virus. Bu it wasn't his fault, really. Honest guv, these things just happen. I had a look and realised to my embarrassment that the virus had been there for a good few weeks. We just thought the laptop was crap. Of course, I can claim ignorance in my defense, being a Mac man. And so for the first time in my life I de-virused a computer, which was an interesting experience.

More adventures no doubt to follow!

It's funny how things turn out sometimes. My old (well, four years old) iMac died last night, or at least the hard drive did. I was trying to get it to read a dodgy CDR and it had frozen but I didn't have a trusty paperclip to hand and after hunting around the kitchen decided to unplug the bugger. Which you shouldn't do. But I did. And the hard drive suddenly didn't exist. Oh, it existed and could be reformatted, but it everything on it was lost.

Now, 12 months ago this would have been a problem but it's actually something of a blessing. That little iMac is going to get OSX in a couple of weeks, assuming it can cope, and I was going to have to spend ages backing it all up and then probably ages again putting my old stuff on the new machine. Now I suddenly don't have to worry about this because the fates have taken that option away from me, and since I had all my photos and mp3s on CDs and all my writing online it's not a problem at all. Okay, I've lost four years worth of emails but is that really a great loss?

So what should have been a crisis is more of a release. That seems to be a mantra for my life recently.

I see Apple have finally released the G4 iBook and, assuming I gather enough cash together, I'll be getting one in the new year. The plan will then be to go wi-fi with my old iMac plugged into the airport basestation and cards in both the iBook and Sam's Wintel laptop. After the farce of my last networking experiment I'm keen to get this one right, so has anyone else using the airport to network a Windows PC and was it a painful or painless process? It looks like it should work okay...

This question just popped into my mind. Essentially, does an RSS feed of something negate copyright?

Take for example the Tapestry RSS feeds of major syndicated newspaper strips. Newspapers pay a resonable fee for the right to publish these strips in their publication becuase they know they bring in regular readers (along with other 'minor' features such as crosswords, cookery pages, horoscopes, etc.). These papers don't often put the same strips on their online editions because they don't want to lose paying readers (for example, the Guardian recently started charging for their online crossword).

More relavently, the websites for these strips are chock full of advertising. The RSS feeds from Tapestry are not. They just have the strip, a link to the site and nothing else. So reading the strip on an RSS aggregator (such as Bloglines) removes this income.

All fine and simple. However, what if I were to include the feed for, say, Peanuts on this site? Would I be breaking the law? Sure, the work is copyrighted but it's being made available, in full and with no extra bits, via RSS.

Is this a bad thing?

In an entirely expected and inevitable move TypePad have explained to their relatively newbie users exactly what that "Syndicate this site (XML)" link that leads to a load of gobbledigook is for.

Just had a mail from my O'Reilly source (woo, look at me!) saying that they're installing a WiFi point at Foyles bookshop in London. So that's your breaking WiFi news from pa.c. You're welcome.

No posts tonight, not even on the organic link farm, because I've spent the evening putting the finishing touches on Matt Abbiss' new stripblog. Actually it's the same as his old one only it's now on Movable Type rather than Blogger. While it slightly pains me to say so Blogger realy doesn't seem worth it for serious blog stuff any more. Maybe I've moved on and am looking back with more experienced eyes, or maybe the fact that the archives had vanished and the option to "republish" don't exist any more had something to do with it. Anyway, had some fun playing with the layout (nice and simple is always deceptive) and talking Matt through the joys of MT. All in all it was very painless. I might be on to something here...

Now I'm not really a hardcore Windows basher. I know that in the final analysis all operating systems have their flaws and they all need a decent amount of tailoring and modification to make them work the way you want them to. However, my experience of regularly using a Wintel computer in a library (as part of the highly laudable People's Network) has put me on a path of frustration.

Thanks to LMG for this one. Say you want to send a TrackBack ping. (Huh? You what? Read this and see if it helps) but you're not using Movable Type. Youy can now use the WIZBANG STANDALONE TRACKBACK FORM. Why should you want to do this?

Say for some reason you write something of note prompted by a post on my blog. Fill out the details on the form and send it to the TrackBack URL for my post (you can find this by clicking on "TrackBack" below). Them as if by magic, a link to your post is listed on my site. Neat, huh? Trust me, it is neat. And simple. You just need to get used to the idea.

(The WizBang form looks to be a simple implementation of the Standalone TrackBack module from Movable Type so we can expect many more of these in the future. A good idea would be to have a included with MT which I can make available to people to ping me, as it were.)

Amusingly I can't ping Darren at LMG about this link as he's still using Blogger ;)

This is not a moan or a gripe but something that's been puzzling me of late. I can understand why bandwidth restrictions exist on budget website hosting plans because this costs money (though I'm not sure exactly how). Disk space also costs money and in the past I've accepted that 100meg is enough, especially in the pre-digital camer, pre-broadband days.

But a standard budget PC has a 100+gigabyte hard drive. Storage is bloody cheap at the moment. The memory card in my camera has the same capacity as this site while you can buy a 700meg CD-R for 50p. Fotopic gives people 250meg for free. I thought there was a catch but then I realised how relatively small 250meg is.

So, and this is the question, why do bandwidth and storage capacities increase at the same rate for all the hosting packages I've seen? I currently use about a third of my monthly bandwidth allowance but am having to start deleting stuff to keep within the storage limits. I'd like to increase storage but keep the bandwidth the same, and I can't imagine it'd cost that much more to do so.

Why do I want this? Well, I now have hundreds of photos I want to put online. I don't expect a vast increase in visitors by having them there, but I'd like them to be there. So, anyone know of a package of around US$13 a month with about 500meg storage?

This article on The Register is interesting. I was wondering recently whether I could get stats for my sites which cut out 'Google noise', and this seems to be addressing the same issue only from the other direction.

If my blog was taken out of the Google search engine, but still indexed by Google in that when someone searches for my name they find me, I reckon everyone wins. Disturbing Search Requests, while very entertaining at the time, is getting tiresome now. I don't really like people who are typing in searches for kiddie-porn coming here. Lets cut the Google noise from weblogistan.

The article is put in context by MeFi, as ever, but I still like the idea of filtering Google away from my site somewhat.

I have an old Apple Powerbook from 1992 that is gathering dust, but I don't want to throw it away as it stood me very well through the late 90s - almost all my zines were produced on it. A thought occured that it might be able to run a basic flavour of Linux. And yes, Linux/m68k for Macintosh should work on it. Maybe. No time to look into it now (and I'll probably need the iMac to hand as well - it's currently in London) but intrestin, none the less. (Related: Low End Mac resources for old Macs.)

I've installed the Word count plugin on the site and it's in use on the Farmblog so you can see whether a post is going to take up an hour of your time to read or not. Here's credit where credit is due.

Boing Boing points to an article on Salon about Re-Code.com, a service which lets you print out barcodes. Nothing strange about that. BugPowder pointed to a similar a legit service a while ago. What's controversial is Re-Code are 'encouraging' people to enter in barcodes of cheap products, print them out on sticker-paper, and place them over the barcodes of expensive products, thus paying way less. Because a barcode is a barcode, no-one is going to notice, especially not a tired, overworked and underpaid shop assistant (I should know). The point being, 99.9999% of people don't know how to read barcodes, yet they're ubiquitous. Wall-Mart are already pissed off.

Of course, this is just making shopping cheaper for people with computers, internet access, decent printers and the means to buy fancy sticky-paper, so not much of a social revolution there. I think the point (other than a good scam) is to address the fear of barcodes that started in the 80s - that we would all, in the future, have a barcode tattooed to our necks that would hold special information about us. This fear came about because ordinary people can't read them, so you don't know what's on your barcode. Re-Code lures people in with the promise of cheaper shopping but then educated them about how barcodes work. By showing how easy it is to subvert the system the fear goes away. Dunno how useful or effective this is, but interesting none the less.

FreeFilter is a free open source version of the stuff that powers MetaFilter. Interesting...

I've installed Gallery on this site here. Nothing there at the moment - it's for photos from the farm. It was great fun installing it. Took me right back to installing MT what with all that telneting blind.

Interesting, this w.bloggar thing. It's a desktop Windows application for writing weblog posts offline. Should prove useful for getting my farm blog posts ready without using up the dial-up. Let's see if it works!

Just upgraded to Movable Type 2.63 (which is what I run this blog with) - an incredibly painless process I must say. This post is to check it all worked. Any probs you encounter, do let me know.

While doing so, I was interested to read about the proposed Movable Type Pro due out this summer. Lots of interesting new features that seem to blur the distictions between a weblog and a forum, and which look super keen for something like BugPowder.

I was going to email this to my dad who's having problems getting broadband in his village after experiencing the joys of DSL when he was in the States, but it's easier to post it here than try to email from Anna's computer, and it's worth spreading around...

Frustrated at the slow roll-out of broadband access, people all over the UK are clubbing together to do it for themselves in the hope of building a free network for all.

"One night in the pub he sketched out a plan of how it might be possible, using wireless internet equipment from a company he recently helped set up called LocustWorld. "I showed it to the landlord, who is also a local businessman, and he put me in touch with Bill [Noyce]. Amazingly, he was thinking along exactly the same lines."

Mr Jukes and Mr Noyce invested £1,500 of their own money and bought five MeshBoxes from LocustWorld. They installed them at strategic high points around town, bolting on antennas to rooftops to boost the signal. One, of course, is strategically pointed at the pub.

Kingsbridge cannot get standard residential broadband access because the local BT exchange hasn't been upgraded yet. So the network will bring access that would be impossible to provide otherwise.

via boingboing

Good ol' Hammers wrote a nice little article in today's Guardian Online section about the WikiPedia and the general joy of all things Wiki. A nice place to start if you're wondering what I'm on about with the BugWiki project.

Bought a very big book today. It's the biggest techy book I've ever bought. It's very impressive and worrying and got some "blimey" comments at work when I bought it, but flicking through it, it should let me do what I want to do. I hope. Eek.

On Friday I thought I was a computer genius. Today I think I'm a dunce. Fact is I'm on a road to knowledge but I'm not sure exactly where I'm at or how I got here or what I'm going to use to get further along. It's all bits and bobs of knowledge which, on the face of it and compared to what I knew 6 months ago, are quite impressive, but when it comes to the crunch are just bits of knowledge that haven't been glued together properly. Once again I find myself wanting a teacher but I'm the most experienced person I know in the local area. I could pay to go on a course, but I'm not sure which course I should be going on. And I sure don't have the time or energy to do one right now. And yet I want to know more. I've tasted a bit and now I want it all.

It's all gone Luke. Where's my Yoda? (continuing this analogy, because I like it, Jez is my Obi-Wan - was there at the start but now he's a long way away and all I get are ghostly emails prompting me in the right direction. Anna is Leia - a princess in the republic of Blogistan fighting against the evil empire. Andy Konky Kru just has to be C3PO, though not in a bad way. This is a web game in the making - if you're Luke, who are your friends?)

I haven't had a proper play with it yet, but first impressions of Linux are very positive. The installation, from a £30 (£20 to me) Red Hat book+cd pack, was painless, though I couldn't work out how to keep Windows ME on the system. So I decided to just get rid of it. I don't think I'll bother putting it back on. The X Windows interface is as good as Windows if not better - I'm particularly impressed with the Workplace Switcher which gives you an infinite number of desktops, and other little widgets look pretty cool. I think I might migrate all my internet stuff over to the Linux box and just keep the Mac for graphics. Everything seems so bullshit-free on Linux and the fact that the BugPowder and PeteAshton.com servers run on Unix/Linux means I can integrate myself with them easier. And then there's the fact that it's built for programming... Why didn't I do this earlier?

It's done! I now have a Linux box! I think I'll go to bed now.

So far so good - everything intalled and ready to go. However, the installer recommends I create a boot disk. This requires a 3.5" disk. When did I last use a 3.5" disk? Can I find a 3.5" disk in this flat?

Wish me luck...

BugPowder's design is giving my a minor headache, in that it ain't looking good on all platforms. The question is, do I simplify the CSS and make it look okay quickly, or do I spend a bit of time figuring out why the CSS isn't working and learn something in the process. I think I'm erring towards the former - that bugger was supposed to be put to bed a week ago and I want to move on...

Don't know how else to describe it in the title really! You know when you used to hover the mouse over the titles under some of the weblogs listed on the sidebar and it would bring up an excerpt of the post in question for some of them? Well it doesn't any more. Problem was if the post had quotation marks in it it messed with my html, which explains the magic shrinking font phenomena. They might be back, they might not.

I thought the idea of the LazyWeb, whereby you post an idea you think others might have already solved or be happy to solve on your blog and sit back and wait, was way cool. I didn't realise LazyWeb was an actual site! Intriguing...

You wouldn't think I'd spent the whole night from 2.00am on the computer judging by this blog, but I have. My brain is slow, my eyes are sore, my back hurts and BugPowder has re-launched. I just hope everyone likes it...

And so, to bed...

Okay, I'm resorting to the lazyweb. What I need is an RSS-XML feed reader that with either a) run on Mac OS9.x or b) run on this server that will both let me add my own feeds rather than just trying to replicate Google News. I can find plenty for OSX and plenty that run on other servers with a dictated list of feeds, but nothing that might replicate the rapidly growing collection of feeds I have on the sidebar there in an easily updateable and maniplulateable manner.

What I really want, I guess, is netnewswire for OS9.x. Anyone know if there's anything approximating that around?

Stumbled across this while digging deeper into Jez's site - he's got an RSS 0.91 feed for the Updated UK Weblogs. Rather a neat little thing to play with should you have the tools / knowledge. I have some ideas...

Interestingly there's naff all available on RSS feeds - even the recent XML books don't mention them in passing - so it's to be expected that one would be around the corner. Content Syndication with RSS looks to be a good one mainly because it's written by Ben Hammersley and comes from the O'Reilly stable. Watch for it in March.

When you scroll down the sidebar on the right you might notice something new. After some of the weblogs I've linked too are « links that look like this ». These are the last three posts posted to that weblog. When you hover over some of them you'll see the text of the post itself, or a summary thereof. Neat, huh?

These are taken from the XML-RSS feeds of said weblogs and integrated into this blog using the mt-rssfeed plugin. While this might be technically impressive/baffling, what it does mean is when you look down my list of blog links you can get some idea of what they're about and whether you want to visit them. Which can only be a good thing!

Just spent an hour or two messing about with WikiWiki and, despite Jez's reservations I think it could be a really useful tool. I like the way you can set up subjects that you'd like to be defined but haven't got time to now and leave them for someone else to do. Anyway, here's BugWiki, the BugPowder Wiki. It's hosted on this site for now but if it proves useful I'll move it over. Feel free to contribute!

Let this post record that at this moment I became seriouslyintrigued by the posibilities of WikiWiki. And let it be noted that it was brought to my attention by Tom and Darren.

Does anyone know anything about ADSL ethernet routers and Macs who lives in London and would like to come and help me sort the fucking thing out? Tea / cake / pizza by request.

As far as I can tell, this is what I want it to do...

Thanks for all the feedback and advice - all very useful. I think this could be the answer. It's an Ethernet router than allows the USB ADSL modem I've already got to be used.

Once we have this, all we'd need would be an Ethernet cable for rob and we'd be sorted - total cost: about £170.

The alternative would be buying a normal Ethernet hub (£50), an Airport (£250) and a new ADSL modem (£100) connected to the Airport via Ethernet. £400 total, which I don't have.

I've also been looking at iMacs on eBay with the idea of buying a second hand one to have in another room, inspired by this story about the computer in the kitchen. You can pick up a decent iMac, better than the one I have now, for about £300. Something to look at in the new year. Plus there's the storage idea - I can't expand my hard drive on the Mac easily, but I could buy an external hard drive and slot it into the network. As for wifi, it can always be slotted in in the future. I guess. But that's all for later.

Right now the Ethernet/USB router looks like the best bet. Anyone think different?

Okay, Mac people. I need some help here.

I have broadband ADSL. This comes into my computer via a modem which plugs into a USB socket. I connect to it via remote access in the same way I connect to the net via the internal modem.

I want to network my iMac to Rob's iMac (both running OS 9.1) so that Rob can access Broadband via my computer. I also want BT not to know that we have two Macs connected to the same ADSL line because this is breaking the agreement I have with them.

I know this can be done. But I don't know how. We've managed to get the two Macs talking to each other via an Ethernet cable but we can't get Robs iMac to get online because the Ethernet connection is not a modem and he needs a modem. Currently he has access to my files and programs but not my modem.

How do we do this? Preferably without buying any more stuff.

This chapter of the rather good We Blog book (the best of the recent crop of books on blogging if you want my opinion, and I've seen a load of them) is now online. If you want a good explaination of RSS syndication this is the place to go.

On the wind down from the CSS marathon, I thought I'd have a look at mt-rssfeed plugin from tima for Movable Type. I was expecting it to baffle and bemuse me but figured, what the hell. Low and behold, I cut and pasted the code into a template and, boom, it worked. First time.

So, for the third time today, a new thing on the site: Pete's Portal

Tonight I have read the entirety of the CSS book, which is not bad for me, and I reckon I understand most of it. However, the eyes are starting to droop so off to bed. Tomorrow I shall implement the CSS book.

Yes, I'm totally nocturnal, but it's not a problem - in fact it's essential.

I've taken these three days (wed-fri) off work, partly to have a wee break before the Xmas rush starts in the shop but also to spend some quality time with the computer and learn stuff, and boy am I.

Yesterday (which started about 3.00pm) I didn't get much done computer-wise other than fool around on the web but today I met up with Kath who wanted a Photoshop book and while getting it for her I picked up this book on CSS because I was hitting a mental brick wall learning about them. A good buy indeed. Kath and I spent the evening reading our new techy books and I'm already half way through it.

At the same time I've been looking up RSS stuff, as usual prompted to by reading Ben Hammersley's RSS blog and getting all excited about it but still not really seeing the full potential. Yes, I can create an RSS feed but I don't know what to actually do with it. Came across this list of RSS readers and, more interestingly, SoapClient, a web based reader which showed me that the feed I'd set up for this site is bollocks because the links don't work. Which was nice to know.

At the same time I'm brainstorming with ideas of how to use Movable Type, not just as a blogging tool (though one idea is to have a private-ish blog to keep track of all the projects I've got on the go and to store references for them, thus freeing up this blog a bit - more of a knowledge blog or Kblog if you like) but in other environments such as a photo gallery for Kath.

More importantly, I'm planning to master these things before I start using them, unlike in the past when I've just dived in a learned as I go. Hence I was going to launch BugPowder on Movable Type today but I'm going to master both MT and CSS first.

I feel like I've started opening a door that first opened a crack about three years ago when I sat in a pub with Jez and a scrap of paper and he explained how Slashdot worked.

Because I spent the day asleep (I eventually got up at 10.00pm) I've been up all night and decided to make the most of it, so I've installed Movable Type on this site and have been playing with it. The installation took a good hour or so but it was worth doing for the sense of achievement. I've since spent about 4 hours setting up a blog all of which has been productive and a learning experience. The project is to replace the BugPowder and TRS2 blogs with one MT blog utilising the powerful archive and category functions MT has to achieve some of the aims I've got for BugPowder, mainly that it should act as a real resource and community site for UK small press comics. Having imported both blogs into MT (don't worry, the old ones are still there) I've been playing about with it all and I'm very impressed. If I was looking for something to get my teeth into, this is it. You can have a look at my efforts so far here though bear in mind I've barely scratched the surface...

Now, some food and then off to the PO Box for the first time in months, and then to work to face the music.

A few people have asked what RSS and CSS are. Sorry for being all geek on your ass - I hate it when people do that.

Here's a good introduction to RSS while here's a somewhat random tutorial on CSS. When I said "full on CSS" I meant the structure of the whole page is now CSS (except the table) so there are no font tags or anything like that, and it's all held in a seperate .css file. If I want to change the look of the site, all I have to do it edit that small file rather than edit every page, etc. That's the theory anyway.

Having mastered the RSS thingy, I started thinking about a redesign, only this time using CSS. This weekend I have no major plans (other than the pub meet on Saturday) so I think I will mostly be learning new things. Watch for a Monday launch!

Now, I wonder if anyone is going to bother to use my content elsewhere on the web...

Actually, I think this is a cool thing, and it's not as scarey as I thought it would be. Everyone should publish this way and once a critical mass is reached it'll be rather useful indeed.

Aparently one must have titles enabled for RSS to function, which is a good a reason as any to start using titles.

If all goes to plan, this blog should be syndicatable by RSS through this link. Fingers crossed...

A few months ago I came across this rather groovy tannoy announcement microphone and took it home with the intention of maybe using it for something at some point. And I wonder why, despite my efforts to downsize the crap I own it never seems to reduce...

Anyway, I was thinking last night that it would be nice to be able to speak ideas straight into the computer rather than type them out, possibly as a way to tell some stories or even do interviews with people and such, and since I had a good mike all I'd need was some voice recognition software. Other than stumbling up Tottenham Court Road, which is not possible today, can anyone recommend a decent voice recog system for the Mac? Not OS X though. I've googled and while they do exist they either cost a lot of money or have crap sites I can't order from. Ideally a little $20 app I can download, for free would be perfect.