Category Archives: Call Me a Geek

The things I do and think about computers.

CDs vs. Downloads

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I couldn’t have said it better myself.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about the inconvenience of downloading music from iTunes. Yes, you read that right. I said inconvenience.

Sure, it’s great to download music immediately, when I want it, and pay only 99¢ per song. But what’s not so good is the restrictions on music use:

  • I must register every computer I want to play my purchased songs on and I only get 5 of them. That covers my desktop Mac, my PowerBook, my Mac test mule (for writing Mac books and articles), my Windows test mule for writing Windows books and articles), and my husband’s laptop. About a year ago I was faced with a not-so-unique problem: the motherboard on my dual G5 went bad and needed to be replaced — before I could unregister it from iTunes. I lost one of my computer registrations and had to do battle with Apple to get it back.
  • I can’t easily back up my purchased music. I need to go through some kind of procedure that I simply haven’t had time to explore. In fact there seem to be restrictions on how I copy the music, period.
  • Apparently, there is some loss of quality if I burn purchased music to a CD and then rip that music to a computer. I haven’t played around with this enough to have the full story, but I shouldn’t have to spend the time to figure out why my music quality should change. It shouldn’t change.

Fortunately, I have an iPod (or three) so the fact that iPods are the only MP3 players that can play iTunes purchased music isn’t a problem for me. But I understand that it’s a major gripe for other people.

I was going to write a blog entry about all this, but now I don’t have to. I just read a piece that expresses my feelings and frustrations on this matter better than I could. From Alpha Geek: CDs vs. Downloads on Lifehacker:

DRM, the chief source of all this grief, is the love child of Satan and Osama bin Laden. If I could pay 99 cents for an unprotected, unrestricted, 320Kbps MP3, I’d do it in a heartbeat–and it would be all over for CDs. Instead, online music stores treat us like thieving children, locking us into one bit rate, one file format, a limited number of CD burns, and other annoying handcuffs. Apple and Microsoft impose the worst kind of restriction: Songs purchased from iTunes and Zune Marketplace can be played only on iPods and Zunes, respectively.

And later:

Call me old-fashioned, but I’ve rekindled my love affair with CDs. They let me do things, to borrow from Old Blue Eyes, my way. See you in hell, DRM.

Thanks, Rick Broida, for putting my thoughts into words. See you at the CD store.

Broadband Available at South Pole

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But not at my house in Wickenburg, AZ.

According to Wired, high speed broadband Internet access is now available at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.

Can someone please explain to me why my Bluewire Internet connection at home — the only “high speed” connection available to me here — clocks in at a whopping 220 kbps? In Wickenburg, AZ? Right here in the U.S.A?

I’m a bit closer to the backbone here, no?

Speakeasy Speed Test

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See your real bandwidth.

When you set up your Internet connection with an ISP, you don’t need to believe what they tell you about bandwidth speeds. You can check it for yourself.

Although there are many bandwidth testers on the Web — your ISP probably provides one — I use one called Speakeasy Speed Test:

Take the Speakeasy Speed Test and test your connection speed! By measuring the download and upload rate from the following locations you are able to accurately judge your current line throughput or internet connection speed. To take the speed test, choose the server nearest you.

Speakeasy Speed TestThe Speed Test displays your results graphically using a speedometer-like meter. Here’s an example of what my terrible home Internet connection looks like with the upload test in progress. (Now you can see why I don’t want to move my office back home. I can just about pin the speed needle with my DSL connection at the office.) At the end of the test, Speakeasy plays a little advertisement and offers access to a search feature where you can see if their service is available in your area. (It’s not in my area, but then again, there’s only one non-dialup option available for my home and you’ve seen the results.)

While I’m not recommending Speakeasy — I know nothing about it — I do recommend this test. If you know of any others, don’t be shy. Use the Comments link to share them with the rest of us.

Only 2% of Web Users Use RSS?

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Depressing but not surprising.

A Reuter’s article titled “Untangle the World Wide Web with RSS” by Robert MacMillan explains what RSS is and goes on to discuss why so few people use it:

So, why are so few people using it?

Only 2 percent of online consumers bother, according to Forrester, and more than half of that group is 40 years old or younger.

For starters, the name is deadly for attracting “average” Internet users — people who use the Web and handle e-mail, but quail at inscrutabilities like “service-oriented architecture” and “robust enterprise solutions.”

Then there are the orange buttons you find on Web pages. Clicking one produces a jumble of computer codes. It’s hardly the path to popularity.

I have my own thoughts about this. After all, I’ve only recently developed my own way to use RSS effectively after several false starts with the technology. Here’s what I think (for that it’s worth):

  • Too many feeds have excerpts only, thus requiring you to go to the Web site to read the whole article. I admit that I’m guilty of setting up my feed the same way. (Two reasons: some of my posts are so long that they simply don’t “fit” in a Feedburner feed (which has a limited size) and many of my posts are format-intensive, making them less easy to read/understand in an aggregator window.) I’ve since resolved that issue by using my aggregator as a sort of “index” to new articles, allowing the ones I want to read to load in Firefox in the background while I browse new topics, and reading them when I’m finished browsing. That’s my technique, but it might not work for everyone.
  • Posts aren’t always easy to read in the RSS aggregator window. Much of a site’s formatting is lost — at least in my reader, Endo) and sometimes that formatting helps readability.
  • Not everyone likes to learn how to use new software that might make them more productive. I’m like that. After wasting so much time learning software I wound up not using, I’m very hesitant to learn new software I might not use either. That’s why it took me so long to get an offline blog editor, despite Miraz’s glowing praise about MarsEdit. (I wound up with Ecto; go figure.) And for the record, she was right — how could anyone maintain a WordPress blog without an offline post editor?
  • Some sites have simply too much content. I subscribed to RichardDawkins.net for a full 36 hours before I was overwhelmed with the number of new posts. While I find his area of expertise interesting (atheism), I simply cannot devote that much time to it. This, by the way, is the same reason I don’t subscribe to mailing lists.
  • If you don’t check your RSS aggregator regularly, you can easily be overwhelmed with the number of new articles to review/read. This is what caused my first few false starts. I solved that problem by deleting all of the preprogrammed subscriptions and adding just the ones I found and liked. (Which is why an article I wrote on Monday asked for suggestions.)

And, of course, I agree with the Reuter’s article author that RSS simply isn’t user-friendly enough to attract less experienced computer users. Clicking an RSS link or “orange button” doesn’t subscribe you to anything. It just displays the feed’s source code on the screen. How can that make any newbie comfortable?

But, given time, I think RSS will catch on and attract more users. It has to. With all the content out there, anyone serious about keeping up has to have a good tool to get all the links and summaries in one place. It finally sucked me in.

And, by the way, I now know why I don’t read the news on Reuters.com: they split each article up into so many pages that you spend more time clicking links for the next page than actually reading.

Tools to Help You Minimize Distractions on your Mac

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So you can get things done.

The biggest source of distractions for me these days is my computer itself. There are just so many other things to do with it (blogging, researching stuff on the ‘Net, e-mailing, playing with images, etc.) than the things I should be doing (working on my Excel book, writing articles for Informit.com, taking care of accounting matters, etc).

Evidently, I’m not the only person with this problem. It was covered on MacBreak Weekly, one of the podcasts I’ve been listening to these days. A summary of some of the tools discussed on the program is covered on 43 Folders: “MacBreak: Minimize distractions on your Mac.”

My favorite: Spirited Away to hide inactive windows.

If you’ve got the distraction problem as bad as I do, good luck getting over it.