Housekeeping: Pants on Everything out of business

I’ve decided to discontinue the Pants on Everything mash-up RSS feed. In the end, it only served to complicate RSS options for new subscribers without providing much of a benefit over the original WordPress feed.

Feedburner only reported two subscribers of the mash-up feed, both of them me, so this probably doesn’t affect you. If you’re subscribed to Pants on Everything and I don’t know about it, you may want to subscribe to this feed instead. Sorry!

greghaspants agreed with “Since I joined Jyte, I’ve blogged about Jyte.”

Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time on Jyte. The site is based is the concept of user-created claims, which the Jyte community then votes on. For example, I posted a claim for users that subscribe to way too many podcasts. Since posting that last week, 5 people have voted in agreement and 39 have voted in disagreement.

Speaking from experience, browsing, voting, spying, and commenting on claims in Jyte can be fun, if a little pointless. Still, I’ve found that you can get a lot out of it with minimal time investment.

MySpace Spam

I think I’ll stick to Facebook, thanks.

Oh, to be a car salesman in Central Florida…

You might be familiar with the recent “Worst Commercial Ever” meme. Along those lines, I suggest watching The Family Man (via):

Update:  The YouTube video was removed.  You can still find a copy of the video over at iFilm.

“Pants on Everything” – Ready for Business

When we last discussed Yahoo! Pipes, I mentioned Pants on Everything, a merged feed of my posts from WordPress.com, Flickr, last.fm, and Twitter. The sort-by-pubDate bug was fixed sometime last night, so PoE is ready for public consumption (3/6/07: this feed is no longer in service).

Update: It looks like WordPress items are not getting their full content. A quick look around shows that Pipes is not publishing <content:encoded> in the pipe output; odd, since <content:encoded> shows up as expected in the Pipes UI. Hopefully this is just a bug and not intended behavior.

Update 2: A member of the Pipes team was kind enough to leave a comment.

Update 3: Lifehacker has posted a tutorial on creating a merged feed using Yahoo Pipes. Their experience was mostly similar to mine. If you’re interested in doing something like this, check it out.

Yahoo! Pipes – Some bugs, but still awesome

By now, you’ve probably heard of Yahoo! Pipes, that “web 2.0 RSS mashup GUI” thing (if not, read this). I decided to try out the service by creating a merged RSS feed of my activities on WordPress.com, Flickr, last.fm, and Twitter. It only took a few minutes to put together.

Pipes is in beta. There are still some important bugs in the service, most notably (from my experience) that sort-by-pubDate is not working. This applies to grouped feeds as well as single feeds — even Yahoo!’s own example of the “sort” module is affected (compare before v. after). Someone reported this bug as a “suggestion”, and if you’ve played around with Pipes I ask you to consider voting for it.

There also seem to be issues when feeds have non-standard date formats, causing sort-by-pubDate to not function correctly when performed on merged feeds (granted, if sort-by-pubDate is known to be broken in general, one can’t reliably look at this test case).

Also, there’s performance & stability. Pipes was down for a while yesterday adding capacity, so apparently the software driving this stuff isn’t lightweight. Navigating the site is not the speediest experience I’ve had, although it is well designed. In the end, what matters is that pipes themselves are handled efficiently and have good uptime; the logged-in experience is a lower priority (though not by much).

Pipes only launched two days ago, so kinks (get it? kinks in a pipe? ah, nevermind) aren’t unexpected. I hope these sort-by-pubDate issues are fixed soon — my Pants on Everything feed is almost ready to go.

Update:  Looks like sort-by-pubDate is fixed.  Woohoo!

Apple for a DRM free world

Steve Jobs’ recently published essay on DRM, Thoughts on Music, is getting lots of discussion around the blogosphere. In it, the genesis of Apple’s DRM system (FairPlay) is discussed, as well as it’s possible future. The possibility of a DRM-less iTunes music store is raised, saying that Apple would support the idea “wholeheartedly” if music labels would agree to it.

A number of DRM-less music stores already exist in the digital download space. My personal favorite is Bleep.com, because of their focus on electronic music and good MP3 encoding practices. They also sell FLAC versions of many albums for not that much extra, if you’re into that sort of thing. The only downside for me is that Bleep.com is operated in England, meaning that I have to deal with the US-dollar-to-pound currency conversion rate. Still, it’s money well spent.

Since Bleep largely caters to indie labels and audiences, there is a large chunk of music I have to buy elsewhere. Like the iTunes music store. In general, I have good things to say (I’ve only come across two songs with encoding errors, both fixed later on).

However, I’m beginning to regret some of the money I’ve spent there. iPods today are nice, but tomorrow I might want something different — and of course, songs bought in iTunes only work with iPods (the idea of FairPlay licensing is explicitly put to rest in Steve’s essay). There are ways to de-FairPlay songs bought from the iTunes store, but they are (A) bad for sound quality, (B) illegal, or (C) both. What makes this all even more frustrating is that iTunes music is not encoded at a very high bit rate. Yeah, it sounds alright, but it could sound so much better.

So, what to make if this latest development? Many people are speculating that this is an indication that iTunes will incorporate a DRM-less model, even if only for a small portion of the store’s catalog. Probably unprotected AAC. Probably indie labels at first. It will get lots of loving from the blogosphere, but the benefits of DRM-less downloads won’t catch on with the general public until a true iPod-killer is released. Whatever format Apple ends up choosing will be widely supported.

It’s also possible that Apple will improve their encoding process to use a higher bitrate. This is another area where iTunes pales in comparison to the competition (such as Bleep). If Apple wants iTunes to be competitive in the DRM-less arena, the issue of sound quality must be addressed.

So, what happens to those of us who already have music with FairPlay? Some scenarios:

• Apple does nothing. The masses de-FairPlay their own music using tools already available — if they care.
• Apple integrates the de-FairPlaying of music into iTunes. This would require iTunes to phone home, but after the ripping has taken place, the music is free from Apple’s clutches. This does not carry much benefit if a change in Apple’s encoding practices takes place.
• Apple lets users re-download their music. They let users redownload if you delete your music, why not do it when a new format is released? (I’ll tell you why: there is simply not enough bandwidth or infrastructure — there’s a lot of iTunes music out there that would need replacing). Still, if Apple changes their encoding practices, this method would help get everyone’s libraries up to speed.
• Apple purposely declassifies FairPlay. In the aforementioned essay, Steve talks about the secret nature of DRM systems as an integral part of their success. Imagine if Apple published the FairPlay spec, effectively making the DRM useless but FairPlay-enabled songs useful everywhere. This is highly unlikely, since this would invalidate all songs purchased in iTunes; I doubt that all labels would agree to a DRM-less system, let alone at the same time.

In any case, if Apple introduces a DRM-less system to the iTunes music store, I would love to see my current collection benefit in some way.

(Also, I wonder if the recent settlement with Apple Corps has anything to do with this. Might the Beatles catalog be the first DRM-less music to show up?)

Relax, this isn’t OS/2 — it’s Microsoft Windows 386!

Currently making it’s rounds on the blogosphere: a Windows 386 promo video. Do yourself a favor and watch the whole 12 minutes.

As others have pointed out, it gets particularly awesome around the 7 minute mark.

I’m using Windows, Windows, Windows 386,
so all my applications are running at once.
My report right now is scattered all over my disk,
o-woah-woah Windows, you’ll put these parts together real quick

I’ve got pieces in one spreadsheet, I’ve got pieces in another,
I’ve got pieces that have never been close to one another.
Some are in the database, where things are pretty stuffy;
some are in the word processor, that’s where it gets sloppy.

And so on.

Also: From the associated Metafilter thread comes word of this instructional video for Windows 95. “Look [Matthew Perry], I’m computing!”

Two Predictions for Tomorrow’s Macworld Keynote

See, there’s a little presentation taking place tomorrow in San Francisco. These days, you can’t go five minutes on the web without running into another set of Macworld predictions. Most cover the following: Apple phone, Apple set-top box, iLife 07, iWork 07, OS X 10.5, updated displays, new iPods, Blu-Ray, Beatles content, and probably more. *phew*

Since so many of the rumors have been covered elsewhere, I’m going to cover two items that I think have a possibility of making themselves known tomorrow. Please note that I don’t have much in the form of evidence; this is mostly conjecture on my part.

1. iTunes will see a major upgrade in it’s handling of video content. While TV shows seem to have done OK for Apple, I get the feeling that movie sales haven’t been doing so well. Apple designers probably want to make the iTunes movie experience closer to that of iTunes music. Meaning that we may see the following features introduced, in some form or another:
   • Intelligent, legal DVD ripping (by “intelligent”, the DVD’s metadata — episodes, chapters, menus — will be retained somehow)
   • Intelligent, legal DVD burning (hopefully including content purchased from the iTMS, but possibly just for unprotected videos)
   • Higher resolution video from the iTunes store (an iTV launch makes this even more likely)
2. This will be Steve’s last Macworld keynote presentation. In other words, Steve is getting ready to retire. Reports came out a few days ago that Steve Jobs had invited close friends to tomorrow’s keynote presentation. It’s very possible that he wanted his friends to attend not because of a huge product announcement, but because it may be the last chance to see him where he shines best. (Update: a post on Kirkville on the topic of Jobs’ retirement)

With all the rumors going around, people will be disappointed no matter what happens. Wired’s Cult of Mac blog wonders if the keynote could get out of hand.

Update: As a commenter here points out, it’s possible that Steve asked his friends to attend the Keynote because of a planned performance by ex-Beatles members. An odd prediction, until you consider rumors that Apple is announcing Beatles content for sale on iTunes. I like this idea.

Post Keynote Update: Wrong on both points. I’m still holding out hope that the first item will appear in some form before the Macworld expo is over, but that hope is fading.

Resolutions for 2007

Jeff’s post reminded me that I haven’t come up with any resolutions for 2007. Let’s see:

1. Start the Atkins diet (again), and stick with it for a year. Last time, I did it for eight months and was healthier that ever. This time, I’m hoping to make the switch for good.
2. Find a job. Self-explanatory.
3. Improve my finances. I intentionally left this vague, but this involves the usual: saving more, spending less, and paying off debt.
4. Launch an open source, PHP/MySQL application by the end of the year. I think I’ve settled on an idea; more on that later.
5. Buy the new Stars of the Lid album. Heh, I would have done that anyway.

Take a look at 2007 resolutions from all around the wordpress.com-isphere.