Keys Corner

I can’t recall having seen such an idiotic idea for a long time:

Internet users could face an annual charge of up to £30 to download music, under plans to be unveiled today that aim to tackle illegal file-sharing.

[British] Ministers are backing proposals that would enable millions of broadband users to pay an annual levy which would allow them to copy as much – previously illegal – music from the internet as they wanted. The money raised would be channelled back to the rights-holders, with artists responsible for the most popular songs receiving a bigger slice of the cash.

Can you imagine anyone who can download unlimited music from the internet buying CDs as well? We buy most of our music from iTunes these days and only buy CDs rarely – and only if they are priced below the iTunes price of 9.99 Euro per album. Instead of supporting the music industry, this proposal will decimate it.

Where can I sign up? And when can I subscribe to unlimited film downloads too?

Update (2008-07-24 21:20 hrs):
Reading the BBC web site this evening, it seems the newspapers misreported the plans this morning:

Mr Taylor [of the British Phonographic Industry] said newspaper reports stating that online users could be subject to an annual levy to cover losses from file-sharing were incorrect.

Which is a pity, but does show that the industry hasn’t lost it’s marbles completely!

(via Dark Roasted Blend)

(Thanks Gill!)

Both Ruth and I use mind mapping when we are gathering ideas for a presentation or for a new document we have to write. Not all employers are happy with the idea that their employees install software on their PCs at work, and in Ruth’s case, where she is often consulting at a new customer every few months this can be quite a problem.

There is a nice, free web-based tool from MindMeister which you can use to capture the mind minds and get around that problem. And being web-based, it doesn’t matter whether you are using a Windows PC, a Mac or a Linux box. If you subscribe to their premium service, you can use Google Gears to work off-line on the mindmaps; the next time you are online you can synchronize the changes back to your account at MindMeister. You can also import existing files produced by Mindjet MindManager and FreeMind.

Update (2008-04-27):
Take a look at Vic Gee’s excellent site for more information on web-based mind mapping tools – thanks for your comment, Vic!

I’ve bought several external hard drives recently to use for backing up under Leopard. Getting them reformatted from the pre-formatted Windows NTFS partition to Macintosh Extended Journaled has been unexpectedly problematical – usually the best chance has been to reformat (on the Mac) to MS DOS FAT format and then try to change the partition to Macintosh Extended Journaled in a second step. But it seems to depend on the drive’s controller hardware as to whether this is successful.

Carl Bach has published a way of getting Maxtor drives re-formatted. In fact – in my experience – the method works very well for drives from other manufacturers too, even cheap no-name 2.5” external drives have allowed themselves to be changed to Mac format using his method.

According to AutoBild, the full-page advertisement they ran a couple of weeks ago for Cin King was viral marketing for a German car manufacturer.

Normally, viral marketing increases in brand awareness by getting people talking about or linking to the ads. I’m not sure how running ads for cars nothing like the ones you manufacture and also not mentioning your name in the ads is supposed to do that. Although AutoBild did name the company sponsoring the ads, I don’t think they really want to be named, so you can do your own research to find out who they are. I’m keeping my mouth shut here.

Before you order a new BMW 3 series or a Chelsea Tractor take a look at the vehicles on offer on Cin-King’s web site. I think you will agree they are truly unique – unlike the more common run-of-the-mill mass produced premium products:

If you are not convinced by the Slim Jim’s stunning looks, then consider the advantages of its seating arrangement:

And don’t forget to check out the vehicle accessories on their site at the same time!

(Found though a full page advert in this week’s Autobild)

Good news (the music is financed by advertising on their website):

As of today, you can play full-length tracks and entire albums for free on the Last.fm website.

Something we’ve wanted for years—for people who visit Last.fm to be able to play any track for free—is now possible. With the support of the folks behind EMI, Sony BMG, Universal and Warner—and the artists they work with—plus thousands of independent artists and labels, we’ve made the biggest legal collection of music available to play online for free, the way we believe it should be.

Full-length tracks are now available in the US, UK, and Germany, and we’re hard at work broadening our coverage into other countries…

In the past, I’ve tried a number of times to get a reasonable conversion of a bitmap graphic to a vector graphic. I have never been satisfied with the results, and have ended up creating the vector graphic from scratch. Now there is a free online tool, developed by Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, which really does the trick: Vector Magic.

Just look at the samples on their website. if you’ve ever tried to use Corel Trace or Adobe Live Trace, you’ll appreciate how much better the results from Vector Magic are.

(via CreativeTechs)

This calendar is currently at position 539 in the Amazon books best seller list. We got given a block calendar with 365 quotes from GWB last year and enjoyed his muddled quotes so much that we have ordered the countdown calendar for 2008.

Wishing you a great 2008!