What was I saying the other day about being wary of SecondLife?
Cam and The Podcast Network got scammed over SL “real” estate.
But if SL is the Wild West, is Facebook a totalitarian regime? Evidently FB has a team of BOFHs who will apparently suspend your account for any number of reasons.
Pondering switching from expen$ive Photoshop to free Paint.Net, but want to be able to read all your Photoshop files?
Just download this plugin, unzip and copy the DLL into the Paint.Net Filetypes folder. Easy.
Caveat: it doesn’t support absolutely everything in PSD files flawlessly. Discussion here. But the files I’ve been dabbling with (actually converted from CPT to PSD using an ancient copy of Corel Photopaint) work fine.
Amazon launches DRM-free music sales (in beta) with 2 million songs available at US$0.99 each (cheaper for top hits).
Unfortunately when they say it’s “Play Anywhere”, they mean “anywhere in the USA”… the Terms of Use reveal:
As required by our Digital Content providers, Digital Content will, unless otherwise designated, be available only to customers located in the United States.
And given I logged in for a look with an account attached to an AU shipping address and an AU email address, I’m not sure why they didn’t proclaim that point loudly, rather than hide it away in the Terms. Otherwise, they wait until you try to buy before prompting you: Amazon MP3 Purchases are limited to U.S. customers.
Drat.
Cory Doctorow writes on Boing Boing that it looks like the newly released iPod models have a checksum in them that prevents third-party applications from synching with them, which impacts people on Linux. Nice.
Oh well, we’ll just have to wait a week or two for someone to crack it, I guess.
Back in the day, we couldn’t just jump online to find out what was happening in the geek world. No, we had to go down to the newsagent and buy a magazine.
Along with emulators for many old platforms, increasing numbers of old mags from the 80s and 90s are now available online.
Commodore: Australian Commodore and Amiga Review (via Dan). ZZap! 64. Lots more at the Amiga Magazine Rack
But the ultimate in technical mags for Commodore machines would have to have been The Transactor.
Acorn: The Micro User, Acorn User
Sinclair: Crash
There’s plenty more out there (including some sites that just index the old magazines, rather than provide actual scans). Well worth an explore to nostalgically relive your favourite computer platform.
I was wandering through my local Coles supermarket last night and found a $40 M-TV brand SD Set-top box. I figured that sounded like a good deal so bought it. It plugged in, tuned up, worked well and supported my 16:9 TV. It proved that the digital reception issues I’ve been having are not the fault of the TV cards.
This morning the sound had almost died. Very quiet, and with popping and such overlaid.
In the hardware industry, this is called “infant mortality“. If the cost of handling returns is high, you try to catch the early failures by running a burn in test. We did that at my first job, because we were experiencing massive infant mortality rates – they all worked fine right out of the box, but run ’em for a day and poof! they were dead. So we built a rig to have them scan a barcode over and over again, and software to capture the results and check for accuracy. Shipped a bunch of duds back to the manufacturer, who smartened their game up, and stopped pissing off our customers.
I guess STBs sold by supermarkets don’t have high return handling costs.
(Skip the lecture, go straight to the instructions — but note the update.)
I’m yet to be convinced that microblogging (eg Twitter, or those status updates in Facebook) is genuinely useful. Maybe, maybe not. But I’m willing to try it out.
Problem is of course that if you use multiple services, you don’t want to be having to update them all individually. If such a concept is going to work, you’ve got to be able to update once and have it cascade to everywhere.
Facebook has an app to push updates out to Twitter. Which would be fine, but for those outside North America, you can’t update your Facebook status from anywhere except within Facebook. (North Americans can use SMS from a mobile, but others can’t.) Okay, so maybe you’d want to do it mostly when in front of a computer anyway, but I do like about Twitter than you can update from anywhere… anybody can SMS a number (it’s based in the UK, so for me it’s costing 50 cents… so I’d better not go mad using it) so no fiddling with mobile web access just to post an update. Twitter also takes updates via IM (such as GTalk and Jabber). I also like that it’s open; people can see what’s going on without registering.
I normally hate words like synergy and leverage and convergence, but that’s what’s gone on here. Alex King has written code that updates WordPress from Twitter every 15 minutes. Christian Flickinger has written code that updates Facebook using PHP, with a hack using the Curl library (since Facebook doesn’t actually accept inputs like this) that logs into Facebook’s mobile web page and does the business.
And Blake Brannon has put the two together, so a Tweet (that’s Web 2.0 talk for a Twitter post) will cascade to your WordPress blog, and then on to your Facebook status.
Neato, huh? Now that really is leverage. If it works. Which it does for many people, but it didn’t for me. I was having problems with Blake’s code; probably an issue with my Web ISP’s configuration. I ended up splitting it off to a separate WP plugin, which was messy, but allowed me to use the code in isolation, and figure out the problem.
It may be an issue that only affects particular versions of PHP or Apache or something — I’m no expert — but the problem was the Curl call couldn’t write to the cookies file. Creating the my_cookies.txt file and making it writable (777) and modifying the code slightly to specify where the file lived solved it. Another issue involved Curl being unable to use the FollowLocation flag, but it turned out this wasn’t needed.
I also ended up with Blake’s (modified) code in a separate file to Alex’s, rather than inserted into it as Blake intended.
Update 2007-08-31: Blake’s been told that automated access into Facebook is against the Terms of Service. It’s unclear if Facebook will actively go chasing those who use or distribute code like this, but it would seem to pay to be cautious. Sorry.
I think that’s all the steps. Good luck.
Thanks to Blake for his assistance on this. And to Alex and Christian, whose code this is all built on.
Now, I know there’s a lot to like about Facebook.
And I know the way it’s open to developers to fiddle about with it is part of its success.
But this in turn gives it a usability problems. For example, I noted a video on my home page, shared by someone I know. It looked interesting.
So I click it.
It doesn’t play the video. Nuh uh. Because I’m new to Facebook, instead it shows me a scary security dialogue offering to add the Facebook Video application to my account. And because we all know these days to be very wary of security dialogues (they mean something bad might happen if I choose the wrong option, right?) I have to very carefully read all of it.
WTF?! Five security options, an application description and a disclaimer and a link to the Platform Application Terms of Use, plus a link in case I’m Afraid of abuse by this application? I JUST WANT TO WATCH THE FREAKING VIDEO!
You don’t get this problem with YouTube. Well, not if you’re one of the 99%* of people who already have Flash installed. (Hey, Facebook Video uses Flash as well, as it happens.)
*This is a guess, though from memory it’s something like that.
Seriously, all this is too much information. (And it turns out the first option is compulsory for this application — if you decide to be ultra-careful and don’t say Yes, you can’t have Facebook Video.) For something which is not actually an infrastructure security issue (unless I’ve seriously misread how Facebook works, all this lives inside your browser; nothing’s coming down to be installed on your computer), but is more of a privacy issue, I’d argue that sensible hidden defaults, only shown if the user is interested, would be more suitable for this kind of thing.
Now, as to why you’d post video hidden away in the Facebook walled garden, rather than on Youtube where anybody can find it… I can only assume that you don’t want too many people to see it, that you’re being fussy — you only want your “friends” or a particular demographic watching. It’s a little counter-intuitive when for most, it’s hits/views that are what we’re looking for — the more the merrier.
I guess that’s why I’m a Facebook cynic in general.
Why did nobody tell me about this before?
Play Commodore 64 games online, using Java
One issue though: I haven’t figured out yet what simulates the Run/Stop key, which some games use to start.
(via Pete)
A followup on the Pinnacle 310i tuner I got last year.
It gets some brilliant results when capturing, especially from digital TV transmissions. Playing back a recording on the MG35 media player is a joy to behold (and that’s off the SD signal… the HD signal, from a true HD programme, is incredibly nice when playing back on the PC, though it appears the MG35 can’t handle that high a data rate very well).
But the software it came with is a steaming pile of crap. When I installed it I noted with caution its use of SQL Server Express Edition and its probable load on the PC, and the clunky interface, but didn’t really mention the response times. It’s slow. Really slow. To start up the app takes what seems like an age (and is probably about a minute). To change the channel or start/stop recording also takes ages. It makes it a poor substitute for a twenty year-old VCR you might have lying around — at least if you see something appear you can get that recording quickly.
Pinnacle have apparently seen the light on this, and launched what they claim is a lightweight “TV Center Pro” with a lot of the fat taken out.
Having zapped the MediaCenter from the box and installed the latest drivers, I can see a clear difference. It’s not superfast, but it’s an improvement. I’m still having issues with capture from analogue though. Okay so I can defrag my drive, but that’s only going to help to a certain extent. And annoyingly, capture inside Pinnacle Studio or MS Movie Maker doesn’t suffer from the same sorts of problems. There’s just something in the overhead of the TV viewer software that slows it all down.
I did try the open-source Media Portal, but couldn’t get it to work. Kept crashing. Windows Media Capture is also worth looking at for just capturing (as an alternative to doing it from within the video editing software).
ArsTechnica has an interesting article that should provide some tips; they use VirtualDub VCR+Sync.
Jeff Attwood writes about the perils of Walled Gardens — basically free-to-access Intranets which hide their useful data away behind registration where search engines can’t get to it.
I did join Facebook, but like Jeff, I’m wary of it for another reason: should one rely on it for keeping in contact with people when it could (theoretically) all go bellyup tomorrow?
Who remembers SixDegrees.com? A lot of people (myself included) got onto it and put in a bunch of data about ourselves, and tracked our friends, and got involved… and then it shut down.
Remember Friendster? Similar story. It’s still out there, but has fallen out of favour (for whatever reason). Which is a problem, because as people abandon their profiles, the data becomes out of date, and therefore useless.
Who’s to say this won’t happen again at some stage with Facebook, or Orkut, or Twitter, or any of the others?
Can anybody get an open, futureproof social networking tool running? Or is Jeff right — that the best we have is the Internet itself. It’s open, it’s timeless, it’s universal. Search for me on any search engine and you’ll find me. You won’t find my Facebook entry though.
Okay, okay, so Google works better for looking for specific people. It’s not so good for browsing for old contacts (Oh! I remember him!) or when you can’t remember the name. For many Aussies, Schoolfriends (aka Friends Reunited) has a critical mass of old school contacts, though many people don’t visit it very often.
Maybe one day somebody will create an open, useful, perpetual and commercially successful social networking service.
Henry Lowood curator at the Stanford University History of Science and Technology collections has named the 10 most important video games of all time: Spacewar, Star Raiders, Zork, Tetris, Sim City, Super Mario Bros 3, Civilization, Doom, Warcraft and Sensible World Of Soccer. And I can understand why he’s gone for the most influential, rather than the most popular.
Pacman didn’t make the grade, but the new Pacman Championship edition for XBox 360 has just come out (available via XBox Live). And it appears to be a re-design (not just a graphical revamp) that attempts to bring new gameplay in, while not trying to break the fundamentals of the game (like the 80s and 90s Pacman sequel games did, trying to make the field 3D, or turning it into a platform game). Pictures. Review from Joystiq.