-
![[FSF Associate Member]](http://server.ericsbinaryworld.com/images/fsf.png)
djotaku's twitter feed
-
- just started playing WarCraft III: Reign of Chaos. http://raptr.com/djotaku
- video did NOT kill the radio star. Radio is still around. MTV, on the other hand, no longer plays music videos. RIP TRL.
- Yay MD for the $170 electric bill credit!
- @harajukuroxy that stinks. My mom used to get a lot of migraines.
- My latest computer animation: http://server.ericsbinaryworld.com/dtbp/node/48
- My latest computer animation:
- Nearly done with my latest animation
- @minimoniotaku: the old momma joke was hilarious
- Using akmod-nvidia, built the latest drivers for nvidia and 3D works again! w00t w00t! Blender here I come!
- Dagnabbit. Nvidia doesn't support Xorg7.4pre so no Blender for me for a while
-
Jul
21
Is it obsolete? TV Stations
Category: Is it Obsolete?, tv | 
Leave a Comment
Today I consider whether or not TV Stations as a distinct programming lineup have become obsolete. More or less since the beginning of commercial television there have been TV Stations to tune in to. (eg ABC, HBO, TNT) These stations create and broadcast original programming or buy the rights to broadcast programming created by others so that I can pick it up on my television. Every year they decide which television shows will play throughout the day for the next year. This show should play on Thursday at 2000 because that’s when such and such an age group will be watching. That show should be on at Monday at 2100 because otherwise it might have to compete with a show from another network. Some shows have nearly literally lived and died based on the timeslot they were shown in. Sometimes shows are moved around to follow other shows to benefit from the inertia of the viewers of the previous show to carry this one until it either proves itself or fails.
I think that, due to recent technological innovations, this model is wholly obsolete. Take, for example, the concept of one show competing against another one based on being on the same time slot. Nowadays, thanks to digital video recorders such as TiVo or MythTV, viewers no longer have to make such choices. Depending upon how many tuners they have in their DVR they can record one show and watch the other or record both shows and watch a third. In fact, the idea of having to be at a certain place at a certain time to experience a TV show is quickly becoming antiquated. Why should I have to route my schedule around my entertainment? If I wish to watch a certain show at 1400 instead of 2100, that should be my right. And if I wish to watch it on my iPod or Nokia n8xx or my laptop while I commute, that should also be my right. After all, as long as I watch the show, what should the timeslot or location matter?
Additionally, other than HBO, Showtime, and Cinemax, none of the TV stations have a true identity anymore. Even Music Television mostly just shows reality TV nowadays. So the idea of a TV station is also obsolete. With my MythTV I don’t know if I recorded show X from ABC, FOX, or USA. It really doesn’t matter. What I think will eventually happen is that production companies will become more well known than the TV stations. I’ll know that I like David Kelley dramas, not that it plays on FOX.
I think the Cable companies (and FiOS) should instead make EVERYTHING available on demand. Every TV show should be available to watch whenever I want to watch it and I shouldn’t need a DVR at home to record it. It should just be available. Here’s how I envision it working: TV Studio X comes out with a TV Show and say they will make shows available on demand weekly. So every week a new show will appear on your cable network’s on demand infrastructure for you to watch whenever you want. So what the cable network would probably want to do in order to make economic sense of this is to have the episode and episode n-1 available in case you want to catch up. If you want to save up more programs because you’re going through a busy spell, you can rent a box from the cable network that allows you to save shows onto the hard drive. This clears up the cable network from having to tie up their servers with all this content. If they really want to provide an awesome experience for the user, they can also make it so that you can download P2P any episodes that anyone else has on their set top box.
All the technology for that already exists today. We could be TV Station agnostic and be able to watch shows whenever we want. What about commercials? Perhaps that, you argue is a reason for having TV Stations instead of my model. However, it should be trivial for the cable network to download the latest commercials along with your program and display them at the appropriate time. Therefore, the program you want to watch comes as 3 files and the set top box makes a playlist of program part 1, commercial, part 2, commercial, part 3. Or the TV Studios could just move towards advertising during the show. They already do that somewhat - just increase it. It’s pretty easy - you can make it so that on the program’s website (or maybe through the set top box) you can look at all of the products in the show and where to buy them. The studio gets a cut of the sale if I click on the suit one of the characters was wearing and then buy it. The advertisers should love it because now they’ll have a tangible connection between what’s being advertised and who’s buying. And it shouldn’t be too hard for them to advertise this way since most commercials are practically short films nowadays.
So I think there’s certainly a large possibility that TV Stations are obsolete. The only thing keeping them around is corporate inertia.
Share and Enjoy:
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
Jul
12
Play the web? Testing out additional functionality in Songbird
Category: Computers, Internet, Music | Leave a Comment
One of the killer features of Songbird is that when you view web pages with MP3s, it presents a very easy way for you to download the songs. I noticed on my last.fm home page that there were a few free MP3s available for download, so I decided to test this out.
I went to the Birdhouse because that seemed to be the way to type in an address to go to.
Then I put in the URL for last.fm and logged in. BAM! The interface changed to the following:
As you can see, all of the tracks listed as “free MP3″ are now listed in the bottom pane with a “download” button after it. Then all I had to do was click on the download button. It doesn’t get any easier than that!
Step 1: Open Songbird
Step 2: Navigate to web page with links to MP3s
Step 3: Download them
By default the songs are downloaded to the My Music folder. I changed that to a “Songbird” folder so I could easily find them and put them into the folder structure I use “Artist->Album”.
Awesome job on that front! Many kudos to the Songbird Dev team.
Share and Enjoy:
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
Jul
11
Last.fm is getting close to relaunching their site and I was invited to participate in the beta program. I think the new design has some great new features and I wanted to share it with you so you could get excited about it too.
Here’s the main page as it appears now:
The most important thing to notice is how cluttered it is. Look at the proposed layout under beta:
Notice how much cleaner it is. It doesn’t attack your eyes with gaudy sensibilities. Also, the info about my friends is limited to the last song they scrobbled. If I want to get more details, I can click on the names. This philosophy extends to the profile page. Here’s my current profile page:
Again, it’s very cluttered. There’s a lot of info and a lot of scrolling involved. Now, check out the beta page:
In addition to being a lot cleaner, it also has a lot more functionality. At the top is a radio ready to play songs from artists I scrobble. The charts are condensed and include info from the past 7 days as well as long-term. I like this because before it was only one or the other on the front page. Also, it appears that it will always show your last week’s worth of scrobbles instead of just updating on Sundays. Overall I’m extremely excited about the new last.fm layout.
One bit of warning, though: This is all beta and could end up radically different by the time they finally launch.
Share and Enjoy:
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
Jul
9
Taking another look at Songbird
Category: Computers, Music | 6 Comments
It’s been a really long time since I last looked at Songbird. In fact, according to my blog, the last time I checked it out was version 0.2 back in October of 2006. The UI certainly has a bit more polish. I submitted some bug reports on their Bugzilla about Metadata problems with WMAs and problems with podcasts. Eventually, I just got frustrated and stopped using it. I updated to version 0.4 a while back, but it still seemed a bit unstable. With Rhythmbox and Amarok meeting my needs on Linux, and with me hating Windows Media Player so much, I’ve pretty much stopped listening to music on my Windows computer.
However, in the most recent Linux Outlaws podcast, they mentioned how much they liked Songbird and how it had improved. They mentioned that it had been updated to include improvements from Firefox 3. (Songbird’s web browser code borrows from the Firefox core) Another reason I found to check Songbird out again is that one (or some) of the developers behind Songbird were also involved in Winamp before it was sold to whoever. (AOL, I think) I loved Winamp back in the day when I first got started with digital music.
When Songbird started up, the Birdhouse tab indicated that I had upgraded and it rescanned my music directories and updated the tags. I’m ok with that since the software is currently somewhere between alpha and beta, but I don’t want it rescanning my music with every single update once they’re out of beta, that would just be way too annoying. The other tab in the Birdhouse was a webpage showing a bunch of places where I could use Songbird’s functionality to grab music.
I then clicked on the library tab and it took a while to load up. Annoyingly, the Avenue Q album I added while the program was loaded did not automatically get put into my library. This is something Amarok and Rhythmbox can already do on Linux. I’m running Songbird on Windows - does it lack the capabilities to allow it to be updated without initiating another library scan? One negative off the bat - everything seems to be glacially slow in Songbird. They really need to make it more responsive as I click on the menu items on the left. Right now it just can’t compete at all with my Linux music players.
I installed a scrobbler plugin so I restarted Songbird. It’s a bit slow to start up, but not too bad. You just can’t want to listen to your music in a hurry. I found that Songbird now does a good job of reading the tags on WMA files. It also doesn’t stutter on WMA playback like it used to. Strangely, some of the songs show as having a 0 second length until you play them. This causes problems with the Scrobbler (last.fm) plugin because it thinks you’re listening to a 0 length track and refuses to scrobble it. You can see this in the screenshot below:
It still didn’t see Avenue Q. Am I supposed to manually rescan my hard drive every time I add songs? Unacceptable!
They seem to have added support with Shoutcast and have a whole bunch of Shoutcast radio stations involved.
One of the best things that Songbird inherits from Firefox is the ease with which extensions can be developed. Here are a few of the ones I installed to see what they were like. Here’s a tag cloud. It looks very nice, but I would have preferred for it to have different sizes for the tags depending on how many songs I have. Otherwise, what’s the real benefit of this over the default list?
Here’s a bunch of really cool looking charts and graphs. Looks like the type of thing I’d love, but as of now it appears to be pretty useless.
Here’s a really cool extension that downloads pictures from flickr that have to do with the song you’re listening to at the moment:
Overall, I think Songbird is still a little rough around the edges. It needs to poll for new songs added to whatever directory I choose (say, My Music) and automatically add them to my library. It needs to not think that WMAs have 0 second lengths until they are played because, for people like me, if you can’t scrobble your music, what’s the point of listening? They need to work on startup time for the program as well as the lag when I go to my library or other pages within the application. Also crucially missing are “smart” playlists or auto playlists, whatever you want to call them. I shouldn’t have to drag songs manually into playlists - not when everyone from Rhythmbox to iTunes to Windows Media player can already do that.
However, they seem to be the most exciting thing happening on the Windows music scene. The add-ons like the flickr integration bring a more to the experience than just listening to music. The integration of a web browser and being able to search for music to easily download are big plusses. I think I’m prepared to make Songbird my default player on Windows again.
Share and Enjoy:
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
Jun
30
I don’t recall if I’ve ever mentioned it on this blog, but I hate going to the movies. I’ve nearly given it up. The only exceptions are Pixar movies and the very few movies that I can’t wait until they come out on DVD to watch. So today I went to see WALL*E with my wife and slightly younger brother. It is, literally, the BEST Pixar movie ever created. The only reason I’m okay with the fact that they waited this long to come out with the movie is because it allowed them to get so awesome at creating movies that it looks beautiful!!!
First of all, like most Pixar movies, there’s a short film at the beginning. Right from the intro screens, you’re clued in on the fact that this is done in the slapstick, physical comedy style of the 1940s Disney and Warner Brothers cartoons. Let’s just say that my brother and I were laughing so loud and cracking up so bad, I’ll have to watch it at least another two times to catch everything I missed from my eyes watering up. It’s that funny - if you’re a fan of physical comedy. And, of course, Pixar has character emotional expression down to an art form.
Then the feature film came on and it was great. In a way, WALL*E is “An Inconvenient Truth” for kids. But to say that is to do a HUGE disservice to the guys at Pixar. Really, the whole point about how rampant consumerism caused the Earth the be so polluted that we had to leave is so that we could have this extremely cute robot cleaning up the Earth. So, it’s no spoiler that he’s the only robot left cleaning. Everyone was talking about this: from Pixar to some of the trailers for the movie. Basically, we caused such a mess that all human life is sent away and we leave an army of WALL*E robots to clean up the Earth. Eventually, the task is SO daunting that we’re left with our one WALL*E. He’s diligently cleaning up when the humans send a probe to see how the cleaning is coming along. This causes his love interest to enter the picture. Again, no spoilers yet. Now, when she first appears on the scene, oh man, it was exactly the type of humor that my brother and I love. We were shattering that theatre with our laughter.
I loved so much about the movie, the story, the visuals, the characters. But what really blew me away was how two robots who can only convey emotions by moving their eyes, heads, and hands (the robots can’t talk except for a very small amount of words, but I don’t want to ruin it!). My wife really got sad about something that happens to one of the robots - and it’s just a robot! And the way the “female” robot acted towards WALL*E’s advances, conveyed pure feminine energy. It was just great to watch. Now for a few spoilers.
<spoiler!!!>
Things I loved in the movie:
- the iPod and the role it plays with the movie
- the references to Space Odyssey 2001 such as the Auto Pilot looking like HAL 9000, the music when the captain first wakes up is the same as the music when the pen is floating in 2001 and the use of Thus Sprak Zerathustra
- My brother caught that WALL*E’s powered up sound is the sound of turning on a MAC
- the giant WALL*As at the space ship were great
- I loved the little OCD cleaner robot. He was, without a doubt, my favorite secondary character in the movie
- The robot sanitarium was a hilarious scene
- The part where the silhouette of EVA made WALL*E panic was pure animation history - I’ve seen that in so many of the old cartoons from the 1940s
- The part about how the corporation wanted to keep people fat and lazy so they were easy to control was a great social commentary - in fact the whole thing was great - it was much more sci-fi than I thought it was going to be
- Also, I loved how the story was revealed bit-by-bit like when he rolled by the area where the space ship took off and the videos went off. It had a very tragic feel to it because the videos seem to feel like the humans will be back really soon
- With the video only for the Auto Pilot to see where it says that the work was too much and the world became too toxic, I was left wondering:
- did the CEO and his workers die on Earth? IOW, did they remain on Earth to supervise the cleanup and were so sure of their machines that they didn’t take a ship to leave?
- did they see all the WALL*Es breakdown? Or did that happen after the humans were dead. I mean, WALL*E was around for 700 years!
- I loved the cameo by the actor who played the CEO of BnL.
</spoiler!!!>
Ok, I think I saw a Pizza Planet truck, but I blinked. Can anyone confirm that? Also, I kept my eyes open, but didn’t see any Pixar toys amongst the trash. On the one hand that could have been a conscious decision on their part to say that their toys would never end up in the trash. But I was really hoping for a cameo! If anyone spotted a cameo, let me know.
Go see it right now. I don’t know if it’s going to have an awesome opening weekend, but go see it if you enjoy animation at all you MUST go see it!
—–
Or you may know it as WALLE or WALL-E, but the commercials and wikipedia have it looking more like WALL*E.
Share and Enjoy:
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
Jun
24
Twitter-like Post: Da Hui
Category: Music | Leave a Comment
Back in High School I got The W’s Fourth from the Last album and one of my favorite tracks was titled “Hui”. I thought that, like some of the other songs on the album, it was just a nonsensical song and that calling the thugs on the beach “The Hui” was just because it sounded really funny. Well, I finally found out that the song was about a real-life gang of surfers called Da Hui. They get a brief mention in the Local Surfers section of the Surfing article in Wikipedia. Interestingly, The Offspring also wrote a song about “da hui”. Well, I’ll certainly think of that song differently next time I hear it!
Share and Enjoy:
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
May
30
Big Buck Bunny has been Released to the net!
Category: Blender, Movies, computer animation | Leave a Comment
Big Buck Bunny from Blender Foundation on Vimeo.
Here’s the Blender Institute’s latest movie. It’s much, much better than Elephants Dream. Check it out!
Share and Enjoy:
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
May
30
Gnome Music Player Showdown
Category: Linux, Mono, Music | 2 Comments
I’ve been reading a lot of reviews recently about the upcoming Banshee 1.0. (Arstechnica and Linux Magazine, for example) It looks like it’s going to be an awesome release, but I wanted to see where it is now and compare that to Rhythmbox. As I mentioned here, I switched to Rhythmbox in May 2007 (a year ago!) from Banshee which I had been using approximately from May 2006 (when Mono programs were first introduced into Fedora). Back then Banshee (and other Mono-based programs) were around version 0.1, but it was the new cool thing and everyone was talking about how awesome Mono would be for Linux. (This is before everyone turned against it and Miguel de Icaza) Eventually I left Banshee because it was slow and bloated (as are most Mono programs), couldn’t handle podcasts (which I had recently discovered), crashed when updating my large music library and when I changed Metadata it wouldn’t stay changed. Since then Rhythmbox has been meeting all of my needs. For Banshee to be worth switching to, it would have to provide all the features of Rhythmbox along with adding some new features.
So let’s take a look, feature-by-feature and see how they stack up. For comparison purposes, I’m checking out Rhythmbox 0.11.3 vs Banshee 0.13.1 - these are the latest updated versions available in Fedora 8. First of all, apparently Banshee is not able to detect when I’ve added new music into my music folder. Both Rhythmbox and Amarok do this, so subtract points from Banshee from the start.
Here you can see the difference in the way the programs look when they are first started up:
First of all, from a user’s perspective, Rythmbox has nice, intuitive buttons. Text appears under each button letting the user know what it does. While no one will have any problems with Banshee’s play, forward and backwards buttons, I have no idea just by looking if it’s in random mode or in a mode to play straight through my music.
Also, right off the bat we see that in this version of Banshee, although it can Scrobble my music, it does not appear to have any last.fm support built-in. By contrast, Rhythmbox comes with Neighbor Radio and the ability to add more radio stations based on similar artist, artist, and tags. Very nice features.
Banshee does finally have Podcast support, which is good. Banshee is also lacking support for Magnatunes and Jamendo. This is becoming a huge trend to provide a free version of the iTunes store. (Even Amarok has support for Magnatunes) So, here you can see what you get in Rhythmbox:
In addition to getting access to the Jamendo and Magnatunes catalogues for listening to, there are additional buttons added to the interface to facilitate the extra features of these services such as buying tracks or downloading albums.
Looking at the radio selections, Banshee wins on the sheer number and variety of stations it provides “out of the box” so to speak.
So I was just about to write off Banshee as a nice try, but something I’ll have to get back to when 1.0 finally comes out. Then I decided to play a song….
Here’s the kind of information being provided that makes me love Amarok! I’m not sure if this information comes from last.fm, but here I get similar artists, top songs and top albums by the same artist! Clicking on any of the songs from the top tracks switches over to that track. What I’d love would be the ability to use that to create a playlist. So instead of jumping to that song, I’d like to see it allow me to right click or middle-button click and get it added to a playlist. After waiting for the song to end so I could scrobble it, I clicked on the items and they take you to the corresponding page on last.fm - so that must be where the info comes from. I’d like to see that better integrated to include the functions I mentioned above.
Final verdict? I think that Banshee has great promise to take over as my main audio program in the future. Features such as the last.fm integration I mentioned above are just the kind of extra info I expect to get if I’m going to run a music player more complicated than XMMS. However, I’d like to see better integration with last.fm radio, Jamendo, Magnatunes, and any other such programs. I didn’t test podcasting since I have a ton of podcasts I’m currently following in Rhythmbox, but they appear to support it now. So I say stick with Rhytmbox for now if you want feature-completeness and keep a close eye on Banshee throughout the rest of 2008 to see what great suprises they have in store in 1.0. Of course, if you’re a Mono-hater, then you’ll be stuck with Rhytmbox, but I don’t see those guys laying down on the job and I expect the feature set to continue to grow and get better.
Share and Enjoy:
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.