New Sinclair vehicle

Clive, Clive, Clive... we love you and your revolutionary computers of the early 1980s, but what on earth are you thinking about with this thing...?


Yahoo! News - Clive Sinclair peddles world's smallest folding bike

More on Allofmp3.com

After reporting Allofmp3.com yesterday, I decided to have a good nose through the legislation that covers it to work out why it's so cheap. There's a whole FAQ about it here, but it all boils down to this:

Russian copyright legislation allows phonograms to be performed publicly without the authorization of the copyright owner for broadcasting and cable transmission. (Article 39) The Internet could be deemed to fall under this exemption. The copyrights involved have to be paid to a collecting society.

So effectively, in Russia the legislation for downloading songs is the the same as for playing them on the radio. Hence the price diferential between Allofmp3.com and iTunes.

Anyway, I decided to give Allofmp3.com a whirl after I established that it was both legal and my card details weren't going to be pinched. Further reading shows that the card transactions are dealt with by a secure, legitimate company that has been certified by Diners Club, which put me at ease somewhat. I bought $5 of credit, which at today's tourist rates (according to the bloke on Breakfast News today) is about �2.90. And I went hunting for a song I've heard on Rocket Science a few times just recently - Venus by Television. I found it, I decided I wanted a 192kbps OGG of it and it encoded that for me, and I paid the princely sum of five cents for it. After that I picked up a few tracks that I wished I'd bought as singles back in the day, and some more late 70s rock from Elvis Costello. In all, 10 tracks for 46 cents (or 26p).

I'm impressed with their dedicated software as well (which is completely optional, but on a Windows machine is a doddle to use). It's not much to look at but works like iTunes does.

Flies in the ointment? Well, looking at the FAQ mentioned above shows that the big Western trade bodies are put out about it, but tellingly the IFPI are resigned to the fact that under current Russian legislation there's not much they can do about it. I think they're holding out for a Westernisation of the copyright laws in Russia, but there's more pressing things to worry about in Russia than Western record companies.

Going back to the costing before I finish this over-long post - how can the industry defend charging 99p for a crippled data file of a single song for non-open software when I've bought CD singles on the first week of release with three songs and a video for the same price? The cost of manufacture is, well, zero for the online sale, and the distribution infrastructure is markedly cheaper online than for physical media. By my reckoning they're overcharging us by about 70p a song using these prices - greedy sods!

Legal Downloads (part 2): Allofmp3

Well, it seems there's one decent legal music download source. The slightly insanely named Allofmp3.com is a Russian-based music download site that will happily supply to anyone in the world. It's legal - the payments go through the Russian copyright people (apparently they do exist!) - and they get it right.

No manky DRM and exclusive reliance on Windows Media Player files here. In a lot of cases you can choose exactly what sort of file you get - MP3, WMA, OGG Vorbis (hooray!) - and even the handful of available lossless formats (including, incredibly, WAV files) - and what bitrate you want them at. An impressive number of tracks are available to be encoded on-the-fly to your prefered format. Genius! No restrictions on what you do with them once you've got them either - unlike all the other download services, you really do get what you pay for. In fact, you pay for bandwidth more than anything else. $5 gets you 500Mb, which is an absolute bargain.

Best of all, there's a fair amount of free downloads on the service as well. I've got some Massive Attack downloading as we speak - 128kbit MP3s, but hey - it's free. AND LEGIT!

And it doesn't rely on Windows. I can browse, buy and listen on a Linux box. Ace.

ALLOFMP3

Bye bye tree.

The last couple of days have been bloody windy in South Wales. Have a look at what the BBC News website has about it, for the general picture.

We've not escaped. Jayne rang me at work when she got home yesterday to let me know that our lilac tree (a good, sturdy tree as far as I knew) had been blown over in the gales. I rushed back to find everything in a bit of a state, as you can see here. (All pics are clickable for bigness.)



The view from our front bedroom shows the carnage as well.



So, with the wind rattling me and rain coming and going, I set to work with my late grandfather's 8" saw (my only saw, in fact) to try and cut the tree into manageable pieces for me to dispose of. Whilst doing this I discovered the base of the tree was actually rather weak - it looked dry and diseased. Some pieces just pulled away from others. I was reminded of the tree stumps in my junior school, where the elm trees had stood before the Dutch Elm Disease epidemic of the 1970s - the wood was dry and flaking. Quite how it had managed to stand up to the winds of South Wales for so long, I don't know!

Anyway, with my tiny saw and a heavy heart, I cut the tree up. I decided I wanted to keep some big bits to do something with in the garden, but all the small branches and twigs were cut off and the big sections cut into manageable chunks. In the process I discovered just how many ladybirds lived in the tree - I hope they find somewhere else in the garden!



A good while later, the tree-butchering was complete, as you can see.

We're all upset - humans and cats. The lilac tree going freaked out the cats completely, and the light is different in the garden now, and it all looks weird from our sofa. We had taken, especially on sunny days, various photos underneath the tree (as you can see in my haircut photos elsewhere on this blog) of friends, us on special occasions, the cats or just the passing seasons. What is disappointing is that we'll not get the chance to do that with our kids when we have them.

Lilacs are survivors though, and our lilac tree has many descendants that were growing around the roots. Instead of cursing them like I had been, we'll get nurturing them.

Rodeohead

Yes! All this time the world has been waiting for a medley of Radiohead songs performed in a good ole boys, Deep South, yeehaw-type fashion. And here it is!

Rodeohead

Genius! And as a fan of Radiohead... I love it!

PWP Wiki Processor

Found this last week, and it seems interesting. To a lazy geek like me, at any rate! You may be aware of Wikis - it's a quick and easy way of knitting yourself a website. All editing takes place online; you provide the content and it provides the framework, and it takes care of all the linking and navigation based on simple tags you put into your text. They're dead popular for intranets (I know this because we use one daily!) and anything that you need to update content on regularly. One of the greatest Wikis is Wikipedia, an online collaborative encyclopaedia of, well, everything.

Anyway, I've been wanting to get one running to go beside the blog for a while, and I've tried a couple before, but this one has caught my eye: PWP Wiki Processor. Unlike normal Wikis where the pages are always made dynamically and content is drawn from a database, formatted for display, merged with a template and eventually passed to the browser, PWP does this once and writes a static page on the server - kinda like the way Blogger works. The result is an incredibly low overhead for the server, and faster pages. As a result it does away with the database altogether and stores the content in flat files, as they're only needed when you're going to make an edit. Nice. (And more like the idea I had for my training project than the one I mentioned before.)

So, I'm going to give it a go. The syntax is a bit odd compared to the Wiki I'm used to, so I'm going to alter the processor to match it (so my new PHP book will come in handy, obviously). And I'll have to get a template that works and matches both the Blog and the Wiki. But I think it'll make it nicer for me indexing my musings, as well as taking care of some of the stuff that would be nice to gather together (like my techy projects - phones and Linux on a Mac and stuff). Hence my interest.

Sorry for going on a bit, I'm waiting for files to copy from my old work PC to my new one...

Haircut! Haircut!

I've finally got my locks cut off. It has been over three years since it's been this short - last time I had a trim (as opposed to a big haircut) was about a month before we moved back up to Ponty, which was two and a half years(ish). Anyway...


Before...


After!


Look at that, erm, poser =/