BrewBlog

It works!

This is a follow up to my last post regarding the keyboard in the dishwasher.  The keyboard does work!  Huh.  After a couple days of drying it did not work.  The little light came on and a few keys worked but other keys produced the wrong letters or would spit out many multiples of a wrong letter.  But after a week of drying it worked perfectly.  So there you have it.  I wouldn't necessarily say it would work on every keyboard but I would guess that it would work on most.

Will a computer keyboard work after it's been cleaned in the dishwasher?

My keyboard at the Mothership has gotten really grungy after many years of use.  It has a pretty good cheese buildup on many of the keys and the front part where I rest my wrists.  There is also a lot of crumbs, hair and who knows what else in between the keys.  It's just gross.  I started to order a new keyboard and a co-worker gave me grief for claiming to be "green" and wasting a perfectly functional keyboard.  He painted the picture in my mind of a bunny happily hopping through a grassy field and then a discarded keyboadard falls from the sky a clobbers the bunny.  Another co-worker had heard that it was possible to wash the keyboard in the dishwasher and it would clean it without ruining it.  I was intrigued by the idea and decided to give it a go. 

I washed the keyboard in the dishwasher by itself on the top rack.  The result of the cleaning was very good.  I'd say 95% of the grime and gross was gone.  The big question though is was it still going to work?  I let it sit about a week to completely allow it to dry.  Do you think it will work?

Before:

The clean:

After:

The "In Rainbows" Quandary

Quandary is probably exaggerating how I feel regarding Radiohead's strategy to release their latest, In Rainbows.  But nonetheless, while I appreciate their attempts to open things up and do things differently, I prefer to get my music through the usual channels.  And I'm not surprised by the publics reaction because people are hopeless creatures of habit.  Radiohead is offering up their latest release for download from their website for whatever price you want to pay.  There is really no catch other than that you have to login to their website and register with the usual information.  The "pay what you want" angle is interesting because you can pay nothing and download it.  Despite the offer to get their music for free the peer-to-peer music freeloaders are stealing In Rainbows in droves.  Bit-Torrent users downloaded In Rainbows 240,000 times the first day.  Seriously, is anyone surprised?

I'm not sure what Radiohead was going for here but it doesn't matter.  I really like Radiohead but I have a feeling they are elitists and think they are super special.  My guess is that they sat around and tried to think of something unique to do and assumed whatever they came up with would work because their fans are loyal and their music is too special to steal, etc.  I could very well be off base and I don't have anything to support what I'm saying.  It's just a guess.  I went to their web site and downloaded it, paying $10 for it.  I figured that was fair for the bits and no actual CD.  I'm very much looking forward to listening to it.  But are the masses that are used to stealing music via Bit Torrent or whatever really going to go to a website register and enter their information to get the music for free?  No.  Also, are they really going to then select zero dollars (or pounds) and expose themselves as cheap asses?  No.  People would rather steal something at no risk than go to a web site and declare that they want this music for nothing.  They know it's not worthless yet they want to spend nothing for it.  It's just too easy and thus too tempting.  Did Radiohead think their little idea was going to curb this urge?  Come on.  I'm not trying to come across as different than everyone else because I've taken without paying.  I think the difference is that I pay a lot and occasionally seek a freebie, even though it's rare.

And it's not just the money either.  Not everyone wants to register at a website so that they can buy music they should be able to get anywhere.  I'd rather have just bought it at the store or Amazon or whatever.  I can somewhat relate to the "screw the record label" angle some bands take but this felt more like an ego thing or a "we're being cool" thing.  If I had to register separately to purchase the well over 1,000 CDs I've purchased I'd be less motivated to buy.  Of course I supposed over time I may save money by picking my own price but still. 

Woot

Woot is a daily deal on-line store and community that sells cool stuff cheap.  It started as an electronics distributor but now sells a wider variety of things.  I say a friend in the hallway at the Mothership and he was telling me about it.  He was mentioning that Woot sells wine and I had never even heard of  Woot.  It's a cool concept.  Wikipedia has a Woot entry if you like Wikipedia.  I like Wikipedia's take on Woot's marketing style.

"The company’s marketing style is irreverent. Product descriptions often mock the product, the customer, or Woot itself. Product drawbacks are preemptively acknowledged and buyers are advised to beware."

They have some cool gimmicks, such as the "Woot-Off", "Bag O' Crap" and "Wootcast".  The Bag O' Crap (listed as "Random Crap") is a bag containing dollar store type items but occasionally contains an expensive item.  It's a lottery of sorts and people love them.  The Bag O' Crap sells out in seconds and is hard to get.  The Woot-Off is a deviation from their usual single item for sale model where they offer one item after another for a set period, typically resulting in sales exceeding one million dollars.  Customers can see how may items are left and get user reviews of items in forums.  The stats they offer are fun and even interesting. 

This site looks cool and I'm definitely going to check it out often.  It's a perfect kind of thing to subscribe to with RSS (link below).  There is also Wine Woot and Shirt Woot.  Check it out!

Web:  http://www.woot.com/
RSS:  http://www.woot.com/blog/rss.aspx

Blogging in MS Word

A while ago I read about blogging in Microsoft Word 2007 and was wondering if it really would integrate well. I use Type Pad for my blog (obviously) and have been curious about whether or not this would work. I must say that I'm impressed with it. This is the first time I actually tried it and published something. It's easy to set up and get going. It's clear as to where to put the title and selecting the category is easy. You can manage multiple accounts or blogs, which comes in handy for me because of my blog (this blog) and Jackson's blog. You can publish instantly or publish as a draft. What I like about it is that if you choose not to publish you can simply save a local copy of the document like you would anything else and open it later to finish or publish. The primary reason this matters is because you can draft something offline. You can always type something in many programs and then "cut and paste" from that program into the blogging tool but I really don't like to do that. Once you do that the formatting gets goofy and I want to spend as little time as possible tweaking things for aesthetics but I want my blog to look good at the same time. Just cutting and pasting from Word isn't the best idea.  However, publishing directly from Word seems to work well.

Still, why does that matter? Often times I'll be working on a draft of a blog entry and I'll be somewhere where the wireless network connection is flaky, dropping me periodically or whatever. For example, a route table change can make me nervous because if my browser hangs and I'm in the middle of a post, I can potentially lose it. It's happened and it's frustrating. My work around when it looked as though I was going to lose my connection was to copy the text to the clipboard and then I can always paste it back if I had to start over. This didn't happen often but if I draft everything in Word, I don't have to worry about it all. It's surprisingly good.

What do seals, rainforests and internet radio have in common?

They all need to be saved.  http://www.savenetradio.org/ is a coalition trying to keep Internet radio from going into extinction.  I first heard about all this because Pandora would be one of the many casualties.  I blogged about Pandora back in June of last year.  Basically, the Copyright Board ruled in favor of a strict hike in royalty rates for webcasters pay to record labels via SoundExchange for streaming Internet radio.  By strict hike we're talking about a 300% increase!  This ruling would go into effect on May 15 and is retroactive back to January of 2006.  Nice.  If this ruling goes through as planned, you can say goodbye to Internet radio.  Smaller companies will go bankrupt and bigger companies will quit that part of their business because it will no longer make business sense to keep it going. 

According to the article, terrestrial radio pays nothing to SoundExchange and satellite radio pays only 3-7% of their revenue to SoundExchange.  The relevance there is that the record labels aren't making a killing there so there is little to gain for directing listeners back to FM.  The thing I don't like about it the most is that FM radio SUUUUUUUUUCKS.  Internet radio and satellite radio both offer a much much needed variety.  Bands that deserve to be recognized and discovered have a good way to do so through Internet radio.  We need more variety, not less.  FM needs to learn a lesson or two about what people want.  The record labels are just pissed because their profits are down.  The Internet is here to stay.  The old farts in the radio and record label business need to get a grip.

There is hope though.  The Internet Radio Equality Act can save the Internet radio industry.  I'm also pleased that this is a bipartisan effort so we need not get mixed up in the politics.  http://www.savenetradio.org/ has a lot of very good information about all this.  Congress can get behind this by simply voting in favor of the Internet Radio Equality Act.  Over a million people have already written, faxed or called their representatives to get this passed.  Let's hope this or something else is done to save Internet radio.  It's good stuff and people need it whether they know it or not!

 

Clix2 by iRiver - I must have this!

I love my current MP3 player, the iRiver HP40 that I blogged about in October of 2005.  I've had it for quite a while now and it's been holding up very well, which was something I worried about with hard drive players in general.  Apparently it's not a problem.  Anyway, I've been wanting to get a newer, smaller player that would be a bit friendlier at the gym or wherever.  I'm willing to give up a lot of capacity just to have something small.  The flash players back when I got my HP40 were typically well under 1GB and were fairly small.  I know flash is the way I want to go for my second player since I'm going to continue to use my HP40 and it has an impressive 20GB capacity and does everything I need it to do.  A flash player will get me the smaller size and it will be lighter and hopefully give me better capacity than then flash players from four years ago.

After doing a little research I've discovered that the new flash players are better than ever.  They are smaller, lighter and have better capacity and battery life.  So which one should I get?  Many rave about the Apple Shuffle and Nano.  Those are ridiculously popular.  They are a little pricey but worth it if that's what you want.  I do like them.  I looked at many that all seemed to have one or many things going for them.  I began to wonder how I would narrow it down when I came across the Clix player by iRiver.  After looking at the features and reading the reviews, I was thinking I had found a winner.  After all, I like my current iRiver player and I like all the features and the fact that it does not require any proprietary software.  I can use the standard file system to manage my music just like I always have.  Then, while looking more into the Clix player I came across the brand new Clix2 player.  It's available in Korea and is on it's way to America in March (2GB and 4 GB models) or April (for the 8GB version).  The Clix2 was unveiled at the CES in Vegas, of course.  This player looks AWESOME!!!  I must have it.  And hey it's my birthday at the end of the month.  Perfect.

Links:

• http://www.iriver.co.kr/event/clix/c_event.asp
• http://www.clixhere.net/blogicles/showentry.php?e=10
• http://www.slipperybrick.com/2007/02/iriver-u20-clix-2/

DRM needs to be better

The initial denial of and resistance to digital media by so many companies has resulted in rushed and poor DRM technology implementations.  We've seen many examples already.  Prices are going to go up as a result as well.  If it worked and was "fair" then it would be hard to complain.  From a business perspective I totally get the need to protect content and I'm not debating that.  But the collateral damage we've been seeing from DRM efforts have users frustrated and customers should be wary of these efforts from companies like Macrovision.  It's no more acceptable to me then if I were to buy a sweater at the GAP and when I got home I had to rip a hole in it to get the theft deterrent off of it.  I bought the sweater so why do I have to rip a hole in it?

Link: Boing Boing: TiVo's "self-destruct button" destructs.

TiVo's "self-destruct button" destructs The Macrovision DRM in the new TiVo Series3 recorders is so broken that just having the wrong piece of equipment attached to your TV can cause it to register some shows as un-savable to your VCR, DVD recorder, etc. TiVo characterizes this as a glitch, but that's not the whole story.