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Spotify and some history

I have been playing with Spotify. This is the music streaming application, which originated in Europe and is the spiritual successor to Pandora, in my mind.​

​The dream of perfect recorded music enjoyment has been developing quickly over my lifetime. Mp3 will likely be remembered as a turning point in mankind's notion of possession. I was born in the early 80s, and the idea of "Information is the new commodity" has been in the parlance of society the whole time.  I think very few people outside of the technology field really internalized this idea until Napster and Metallica had their little spat. I can only hope that this is where the story begins, and not with iPod 1.0, because that would be a real shame.  The start of popular culture's desire for a new medium began in 1999, when some has-been rockers thought they saw money left on the table, when in fact they were missing point altogether.

I was personally one of the 300,000 or so Napster users who were kicked off due to our possession of metallica .mp3s. I remember that day clearly, because many of my highschool friends had a similar daily regiment as I did. Before school, we would queue up about five .mp3s downloading. At lunch we would drive home and check the progress, and add more if by some miracle those five were completed. Immediately after school, we would repeat this process, and in the evenings we would make mix cds for ourselves and friends.​  The morning I was kicked off, I had assumed the whole system was gone. When none of my friends had any problems that morning, I went back to read the fine print, and discovered the truth. I had downloaded two Metallica songs, for the sole purpose of learning the guitar for our band's cover versions, and now I was cut off, along with about three hundred-thousand other saps.

This came as no real surprise to me, given my terrible luck for situations like this. What truly hurt was how Napster continued to function for all my buddies, including those who downloaded Metallica after the initial cutoff. I am fairly sure it took over a year for the whole system to be shutdown.  ​

Various other file-sharing systems came and went, and brought with them their insane pop-up ads​ and malware. It took roughly two years of full-blown chaos until bit-torrent was invented, and order began to triumph over chaos.  Amateur programmers invented bit-torrent. The efficiency of the programming is astounding.  It highlights the real mental leap one has to make when thinking digitally.  A bit-torrent file is essentially a paint-by-numbers template, which is miraculously small in size. Once a user has a .torrent file, they can simply find the color paint they need by effectively shopping locally. Instead of having to be connected to a user with the completed picture, all one needs is a glimpse at a million incomplete pictures. Now, the completed picture (or song, or movie, or entire catalog) is never actually moving through any centralized hub, such as Napster.  It is very difficult to really fault anyone, and the data transfer is so efficient, that even a throttled connection can pirate music with a hundred times the effectiveness I had ten years ago.

So now, we live in the wonderful world of the dead and dying recording industry.  They were always parasitic vendors of plastic, who never really served any purpose. It would be interesting to go back in time, and convince led zeppelin to just buy a record pressing machine, and destroy the system in 1976. I suppose they would also have to give out actual reel-to-reel versions to encourage sharing. It would never work. The real first opportunity would be around 1997. Maybe David Bowie and Trent Reznor team up to release Earthling and The Fragile online only. It would likely take you a day to download from a single source like that. Maybe just time out trying to reach it. Maybe they could actually prepare fans for it, and everyone would be content. 

Regardless, it has been a transitional two-decades for the music industry. I believe we are finally reaching the sweet spot, in a sense. Napster may have alerted the world to this technological shift, but Apple sure as hell monetized it correctly. The savvy among us see our options, but iTunes has enabled everyone over 50 to engage with the potential of .mp3.  In a bigger sense, iTunes made a huge section of baby-boomers actually attempt to use a computer.​

And now we have Spotify. This is a terrific system of music digestion. Personally, I rarely use the radio option. This is the mode where you select a song, and Spotify attempts to make an endless playlist based on that song. Other possible names I might give it include "Ruin this song for me". This is why I always hated Pandora.  I can't really vocalize it, but I can't choose a 'sound' without just wanting to hear that artist. I like spotify, because it simply behaves like iTunes, but your catalog is infinite. 

​

categories: Sociology
Monday 09.24.12
Posted by Robert Bruce Anderson
 

mater tabula

Once again i have repaired my​ system with no outside help. Turns out my initial diagnosis was correct, the motherboard was cooked. In theory, the problem could be repaired, but the level of expertise is beyond me, and the ultimate pricetag on employing an expert would surely be higher than that of a new board. 

Ergo, emit mater tabula nova. I was pleased to see it fire up on the first try. The CPU, RAM, and my SSDs are all totally fine. ​ My system lives again.

The other major casualty of the storm was my negative scanner. This device is a sorta relic of the mid​-00s, when digitizing media was a big selling point. Turns out, scanning old pictures is fairly tedious, and most people don't recognize the difference in quality.  These devices have become irrelevant. If you need to scan a few negatives or slides, struggling photo shops can help you. If you want to scan a couple thousand, you might want to invest in some industrial equipment. The middle ground is somewhat forgotten about.   

This means the software is not supported under ​windows 7, so third party versions become necessary.  All the hurdles were worth it, as the third party software and drivers are often more robust than the dated ones from Nikon.  Everything was actually working, but then, lightning.

So to make a long story short, I bought a new scanner as well. It has a transparency mode that allows me to scan any size negative or slide, and is theoretically better than the dedicated film scanner. Now i just have to dial in the settings. The biggest downside is its speed. I want it to make archive quality digital versions, so i am not terribly surprised, but ​my current rate is about 12 frames every 15 minutes. 

Rather than starting chronologically, i have begun with my trip to Brazil. It was formative and exhausting and definitive.  Looking at these frames again ten years later certainly reminds me of a few things.​

categories: Sociology
Wednesday 09.05.12
Posted by Robert Bruce Anderson
 

Crisitunity

All i see around me are money holes that beg to be filled: my two dead pcs, my aging laptop, my tablet that refuses to agree with my demands. My parents TV seems to have lost its HDMI port. The casualties of lightning keep increasing. I try to be thankful for the toys i didn't lose, but I worked hard to build my rigs, and now they are mostly dead.​

Necessity breeds creativity. I took my parent's tripod which came with their Hi8 camcorder from 1993. Camera tech has gone through about four generations since then, yet tripods remain largely unchanged.​ Gotta love solid design.

All of my computer issues have given me a newfound respect for potential interconnectivity. My phone, my camera, my tablet, my computer - all should be simple to connect to each other. Proprietary programming and simple stubbornness prevents this from happening.​

categories: Sociology
Tuesday 08.21.12
Posted by Robert Bruce Anderson
 

simplify

I always figured I could accomplish everything i needed using only ubuntu and a five year old laptop. Everything else was just indulgence. So far i have only run into a couple massive roadblocks

  1. My frigging film scanned is about six years old, and will not comply with my lifeboat here. The device activates, but ubuntu cant seem to see it at all. I had to use some workarounds just to get it running under windows seven. All the internet can teach me on the subject is that scanners are an endless vortex of proprietary software which is almost never supported for more than a year or so.

  2. ​iTunes does not currently make a linux version of their software. There is pretty much no hope of apple ever investing any time on that particular project. I don't really care about the store, but currently my phone and pad are stuck with no way of loading or unloading data. There are workarounds for this, but the music and photos are pretty much stuck on the devices until i either sync or reformat.

  3. The read/write speeds on usb devices is shockingly slow. This is making backup an issue. I have a 500gb external that i rarely use, but getting data off of it with my laptop is a nightmare. It seems to work fine on my mothers apple, so i guess i will seize her machine this weekend.​

​This has forced me to prioritize my work. I have been cleaning up and organizing all my scans, and put the new film acquisition on hold.  Every time i get frustrated, i remind myself how i could have left my laptop at home while i was in Canada, and come home to a completely dead workspace.

I will say this has been weirdly satisfying. My system of backups functioned correctly, sort of. It is nice getting a taste of what computing might be like if i was a homeless person.​

categories: Sociology
Friday 08.17.12
Posted by Robert Bruce Anderson
 

ubuntu

Ubuntu is a free operating system based on Linux. Linux is a sort of relic of the early 90s. Back then, everything had open doors, inviting you to mess around with the coding. Every computer was a bit like a Jenga tower. It was totally stable, but if you messed with it at all, well...​

The real kicker is how the only functioning machine I have left is the weakest of the lot. Any enthusiast will ​have a minimum of two functioning rigs, and my third was really just an experiment.

So, there always existed an increasingly marginal group of computer enthusiasts who want to build their own roads and bridges wherever possible. It exists out of spite, in a sense. The coders want a sandbox badly enough to create it themselves, and offer it for free to anyone who wants it.​ This is admirable.

From a frontier perspective, Linux is fantastic. It satisfies ones' need for tool creation, while also offering all the convenience of massive online knowledgebase. ​

From a user convenience perspective, Linux is kinda testing my limits. Did I mention my windows boxes are dead? I save everything in triplicate, so currently my laptop running ubuntu is my lifeboat.​

categories: Sociology
Thursday 08.16.12
Posted by Robert Bruce Anderson
 

Why we backup

​

Ten years of personal computing and only once have i ever had a catastrophe close to last week. I was out of town, and best i can figure, lightning struck my house. Lots of circuit breakers were switched, and my modem from Brighthouse was fully dead.  ​

The more exciting bit was what happened to my system, which is still kinda being decided. I have two rigs at home, and one laptop for travel. My secondary system is a dual core gaming rig from 2007, with an LGA 775 socket motherboard. My primary system has the 1155 socket with a quad core 3ghz processor. Both are currently completely unresponsive.​

My secondary system houses a copy of my music and pictures, and is capable of minor gaming.  My primary system is the nicest computer I have ever owned, and it has around 300gb of data that I cannot currently access. I think both have lost their motherboards.

Pretty much every major computer issue begins with an error message onscreen. Barring that, the motherboard comes equipped with lights, and sometimes numerical displays, which indicate where the problem lies. If the motherboard shows no life at all, then it could be a faulty power source.​

The method for diagnosing a dead psu is fairly entertaining. It involves plugging the box into the wall, then using a paper clip to connect two protruding wires. Fear not - electrocution is unlikely. Sadly though, both my psus work fine, and the problem lies elsewhere.​

Lacking a motherboard, I cannot continue with diagnostics. This means lightning has cost me atleast 300$, possibly more. Theres no reason I need two systems, but a single motherboard is gonna run me around 150$, and that might only buy me the ability to learn my hard drives, video card, and cpu are all cooked.  ​I can't believe that I could become a person who needs to buy computer advice.

categories: Sociology
Thursday 08.16.12
Posted by Robert Bruce Anderson
 
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