I have seen lots of ways to open beer bottles and other containers without the right tools, but this trick is new to me – seems to be highly effective. Worth remembering for emergencies!
(via boing boing)
A place in Spain
At the beginning of this year, the company I work for took over a smaller competitor. Some months later (surprise, surprise) cost cutting measures were announced, which included an offer allowing early retirement. After some thought Ruth and I decided it was an offer too good to pass up, and I signed up. So I finish work in the middle of next year.
We have been thinking for some time, that when we retire, we’d like to spend quite a lot of time in Spain – we have spent the last 4-5 years doing Spanish courses and looking around the different regions of Spain to decide where we might like to spend time when we retire. We settled last year on the region around Valencia. Valencia is a nice size – not too big, but plenty going on. There are also a number of nice towns nearby. So having signed on the dotted line at work, we went down to Spain to start doing some serious research – what property can you really get for your money?
Suicidal Music Industry
There’s an article in ars technica about “big content”:
Songwriters, composers, and music publishers are lobbying Congress to legislate the payment of performance fees into downloaded music. If music publishers get their way, they’ll be able to extract additional licensing fees from music downloads, movies, and TV shows containing their music, and even 30-second previews…
The people doing the lobbying are the mainly the major music publishers together with some hangers-on, who see revenues for CD and DVD sales dropping. They claim “you can’t compete with free”. You would think that they might eventually learn the message demonstrated by Apple’s iTunes, that you can make money competing against free services (in this case, illegal downloads) by offering a better or more convenient service. Just the same as the bottled water industry competes successfully against tap water.
In fact, there is no difference between competing against another competitor who is charging for goods or services, and those who give them away – if you don’t understand why, take a look at this explanation on techdirt or download Chris Anderson’s book Free: The Future of a Radical Price about competing with free products, which is as it happens, available free of charge.
If the music industry can only think of increased use of DRM as the way to survive and doesn’t understand how free competition works, their future looks bleak indeed.
DRM will always be broken sooner or later – the technically savvy find a way to prevent it protecting the content and people will find a way to pass the cracked content on. Only the uninformed honest customers suffer because their use of content bought legally is restricted, whereas the illegal content swappers are not. That’s no way to treat your customers.
If ISP’s are compelled to cut people’s access to the internet, if caught swapping content online, the swapping will simply move offline – today if you want to swap content offline you can lend your friends a hard disk full of content or use a legal media swapping service such as hitflip.com. The possibilities will expand if DRM spreads further. Indead, given the poor deals that artists get from established media companies, it surprises me that more artists don’t market themselves via magnatune or CD Baby and cut out the incompetent marketeers of the traditional music labels.
No brainer
I wouldn’t have thought you need to have a degree from the LSE to realise that the most effective way to reduce global CO2 emissions is to reduce the population. However that is what they have just stated in a new report (Fewer Emitters, Lower Emissions, Less Cost):
It’s always been obvious that total emissions depend on the number of emitters as well as their individual emissions – the carbon tonnage can’t shoot down as we want, while the population keeps shooting up.
This is the first time I can recall seeing someone “in authority” state what is blindingly obvious. According to the report, 40% of all pregnancies are unintended and every $7 spent on family planning over the next four decades would reduce global CO2 emissions by more than a ton, where a minimum of $32 would have to be spent on low-carbon technologies to achieve the same result.
Now let’s see the western governments finally take some sensible action on global warming for a change and ramp up aid programs for contraception and family planning in the countries with rapid population growth.
Are you going to get wet feet?
Valencia and La Albufera if the sea level rises just one meter
Flood Map, a Google mashup, shows which land will be under water when Global Warming raises the sea level.
(Via Boing Boing)
The Zweistil Bike
This cool bike is an entry for the 2009 James Dyson Award design competition.
There’s a neat video of the prototype in action on YouTube. The prototype can change it’s configuration while in motion!
So where’s the backup going to be?
Apple is building a new 1 billion dollar data center, five times larger than it’s existing one in California. Supposedly, to start offering “cloud computing” services (i.e. allowing users to store their data on the web, or use web-based applications).
Everyone’s major concern about cloud computing, is “What happens to my data if the service goes down?”. (Another one, especially for companies, is “How secure is my data if its not in my data center?”). Apple, being Apple, is sure to have addressed that issue. So if they are going to offer cloud computing services, where is their back-up data center going to be? Unless a second location for a similarly sized data center emerges, I would guess that its more likely to be for adding capacity to Apple’s content delivery services: iTunes and App Store servers, which have in the past been outsourced to companies like Akamai.
Expensive headphone recommendation
Matt Mullenweg, the father of WordPress (which is what this blog is powered by) has a really nicely designed blog over at ma.tt. But that that’s not what caught my eye today. I was reading his headphone recommendations and came to his remarks on ear phones for travelling. He swears by Logitech’s Ultimate Ears range:
…So you go to the website, take out a second mortgage, and plop down $900 for the UE-10 or $1,150 for the UE-11. They then point you to a local ear specialist, which basically means some-place that does hearing aids, where they will make a mold of your ear…
They do sound very good, especially at cutting out noise around you. But I don’t think I want to invest $900 to check them out.
Humyo doesn’t like long file names
I have just subscribed to Humyo.de (they also have an address at Humyo.com for english speaking users). Humyo offer an interesting service. You can backup 10GB of your local data to their servers for free, or you can pay €59.50 a year for 100GB of storage and also use a utility that you get as a subscriber that allows you to treat their storage as a local drive that you can copy files to and from. The utility (SmartDrive) also keeps the local and remote files in sync if you change them after they are copied to Humyo’s servers.
The data on their servers are encrypted, and the file transfers take place via an encrypted link.
So far so good. The service is attractive – for under 60 Euro per year, you have the peace of mind that even if your home burns down or your computers are stolen, your data is stored safely off-site and you can access it from anywhere in the world. Which means if you want to, you can access documents while you are away from home.
I started uploading data a couple of days ago, and after a bit, had the impression that although not all the data had been uploaded, the process had hung itself up. On investigating, I discovered that the SmartDrive for the Mac does not like long file names:
It is impossible to copy files to their server if one of them causes this error message. A multiple file transfer hangs and doesn’t always tell you that it has stopped, or why. If you transfer the file using their web browser client, it works fine. But after doing that I was shocked to discover that other files which I have successfully transferred using SmartDrive and which I can open on my Mac from the SmartDrive local image are not displayed in the web client (The “too long” file, MacLife-2006-05-Bankermächtigung.pdf, is the only one you can see in the web client):
Inconsistent data - Humyo local drive and via the web client
I’ve contacted Humyo – if they can fix the problems, then I will continue to evaluate their product, otherwise I will be cancelling my subscription – my data is too important for me to take risks that it may not be on their server when I need it.
Update (2009-08-15):
I received a helpful reply from their support team, after exchanging a couple of e-mails. I can use WebDAV to upload my files in the mean time, and
We have created a ticket for our developers in regards to your mac
issues. The situation with the mac client is that under beta testing
issues are going to be raised, once they have been reported information
is passed to our developers in order to resolve the problems. Following
this an update will be released to the website and used. As the client
is in beta we will be looking at up to 3 weeks in order to resolve the
problems you highlighted.
Pay-to-read on the internet
The newspaper industry has taken a deep breath and decided to jump into the waters, putting their content behind pay-to-read walls on the web.
I think they are going to get badly burnt unless they cooperate closely with each other.