Posted by Doug
Thu, 25 Jan 2007 20:11:00 GMT
Today I’m officially (and finally) cable TV free! We’ve finally tired of paying the high monthly fees to get content. Sure, there are lower subscription plans, but none of them include a DVR or are High Def. So, we just pulled the plug. We’re simply going to rely on our Blockbuster on-line account plus our local library plus some iTunes plus some “backnet”.
I setup my old Apple G4 Powerbook (not the powerbook I’m selling on eBay) in the living room with the mini-DVI to s-video connector. Using the 1.3.1 version of Enabler (not the 1.3.5 version) I was able to install Apple’s Front Row to use as a front end for selecting and displaying shows.
I have a bunch of video and TV shows that I’ve “aquired” that are in .avi format. Using iSquint I’m able to convert those easily into the format that iTunes prefers. Also using Parsley is Atomically Delicious I can tag these with the special meta-data iTunes needs to recognize the files as TV Shows and Movies.
All in all I’m real happy with the solution. I’ve also got our family iPhoto album with all of the photos we’ve taken since we got a digital camera setup as a screen saver. So now the idle TV shows snapshots from the past! The kids love it. I think they might actually prefer sitting and watching the slide show of photos to some of the stuff they normally watch on TV when bored.
Posted in Movies, House, TV, Freedom, Mac OS X | 3 comments
Posted by Doug
Wed, 07 Dec 2005 14:38:05 GMT
I was saddened to read this story of Behind the Scenes of Image Theft. It’s about a photojournalist, David Leeson, and some images he took in Iraq. He gave some of his best images to the Army for them to use in their yearbook. This CD of images was then copied and passed around many, many times. The sad part is then the ever growing list of people who have tried to pass the images off as their own.
There’s a lot of talk about “information wants to be free”. Sharing information with your friends is one thing. Claiming authorship of said information is another. David’s tale demonstrates several times, what he wanted most was proper credit for the images. We’re not talking about someone who’s extorting lots of money or scamming the public for more and more money. Just a photographer looking for proper credit. This story clearly shows why we need copyright in the first place. It would be wrong to abolish copyright.
An interesting side note about this story. Mark Hancock, another photojournalist, recommends always ingest and never copy images from your camera. This is so that you can at least assign copyright to the EXIF data at the earliest possible moment. The interesting part of David Leesom’s tale is often people would discover he was the original photographer of his images by the copyright in the EXIF. I’m surprised none of the people who were stealing credit for the images had the sense to alter the EXIF.
It’s clear setting the copyright in the EXIF data isn’t foolproof. Almost any image editing program can strip all the EXIF when saving images. However, it is a tool in protecting your work. There are also lots and lots of Photoshop actions for adding watermarks to your images. I’m sure these type of batch jobs are possible in other image editors too. Obviously you don’t want to watermark your original images. I think that was David’s mistake. He gave out his originals without some means of enforcing his “terms of use”.
Posted in Copyright, Freedom, Photography | Tags EXIF | 3 comments
Posted by Doug
Thu, 01 Dec 2005 13:23:24 GMT
From Boing Boing:
Gisela sez, “I got tired of waiting for someone else to start the ‘No Xmas for Sony’ thing, so I opted to do it myself. There is an image that I have taken up using in my sig files around the Internet, linking it to Mark Russinovich’s blog on the Sony rootkit debacle. So far, in less than 1 hour of it being live, it convinced someone not to buy a Vaio, so I am quite pleased with it.”
Previous installments of the Sony Rootkit Roundup: Part I, Part II, Part III
Posted in Copyright, Freedom, Politics | Tags rootkit, Sony | 1 comment
