This approach has long been the favoured option of schools. Coming from St Paul’s, which under the stewardship of David Smith,is coming blinking into the light of a much less filtered internet, I had a fair degree of experience of coming up against, and going over, under or around, the web barriers. His argument, which I agree with, is that these barriers may put the minds of the staff and parents at ease, but they don’t actually address the issue, or indeed actually block anything for very long. The issue is, and always has been, education. During the course of the BBC program I listened to, they were talking with an exec from Microsoft who told the reporter that Windows (and OS X) have parental controls included, but they are turned off by default. The question was asked, why not have ‘kid safe’ computers on sale which have the controls turned on by default? The answer to me seems simple – these controls don’t really work. As I said they don’t block anything in a very robust way, but they also tend to be over-zealous about their blocking attempts. Again, at St Paul’s, they tried over and over to find a blocking solution which worked. Tom Turner, a current student and @dynamization on twitter, posted this today:

This kind of thing was a constant problem, and the incorrectly blocked sites where usually forwarded onto the IT Support who manually removed them from the blacklist, but that doesn’t change the fact that in this case a John Betjeman poem has been blocked under the category of “Swimsuit and Lingerie”. Are the parents at home, who aren’t even tech-savvy enough to go into Control Panel or System Preferences to turn on the blocking controls for themselves, really going to be able to be there to unblock every time a poem needed for English homework is blocked, and indeed would they know how?

At school this kind of thing was a constant pain in the arse. I know during my time, and no doubt still, a disproportionate amount of David’s time was taken up dealing with this kind of issue. Do we really want to be introducing this kind of crap into the home environment as well? It is about time the parents who, growing up in the ’60s and ’70s should hardly be shocked by kids wanting to explore sexuality, woke up and smelt the coffee. This kind of thing won’t be solved by a splash-screen telling you that ‘computer sez no’.

People three or four years younger than myself are even more accustomed to the internet. One of the stories mentioned in this BBC program was about a twelve year old girl in the US, who was prosecuted under child porn laws for taking a photograph of herself naked and sending it to friends. Now the fact that I think that the ruling is lunacy (I always thought those laws were to protect the child from exploitation, not to preserve moral beliefs) aside, I have no doubt that these kids have no idea that it is illegal to be looking at a picture of say a 14 year old, even if you are 14.

While blocking may be the simple solution, in my mind, it isn’t the right one.

Then along came Spotify.

First a bit of background (sorry history is the standard filler out there, even if we were warned against using it in our scientific essays…): Most people know my past thoughts on buying music in CD format – suffice it to say that I have a large iTunes library and own three physical CDs. I refused to pay for music with DRM included. I won’t be told what I can and can’t do with my media. If I want to copy it for a friend then I will. I actually get the reason that piracy has the music industry shit-scared, but that doesn’t mean that for a second I condone how they have gone about ‘protecting’ their copyrights. Therefore, in lieu of real alternatives, less conventional methods were employed for getting hold of my music.

I never really wanted to buy something like music without sampling first. I have no one taste in a genre, and so I can’t say that I will like everything by, say, R.E.M. and everything by their similar artists. To this end I usually tried to use the radio (whenever I listened to that – not really going to be a constant source of new music then..), hearing and tagging with Shazam or googling a line I remembered, and then getting the album which that track was on. My interest in David Bowie was sparked by hearing ‘Changes’ on the radio and then pulling down a copy of the Greatest Hits.

This worked up to a point, but there was no real way of sampling an entire album fully before paying for it. Last.fm worked up to a point when they introduced the ability to listen to full tracks, but they didn’t all of what I wanted. Recently I have come across Spotify, and was invited by @alexmuller. Finally I have somewhere to go to where I can search for a track, legally play it in full, and indeed play entire albums in full before I pay for them. There is the odd advert (oddly enough they all seem to be somehow related to the UK Government so far), which pays for my access to the content, and I am more than happy with that. They are not intrusive and I am happy with their presence. Of course I ignore every word between the beginning and the end, but then having been bombared with advertising on almost every entertainment vessel since I was born (God save the BBC and the licence fee I suppose, for the little respite it provides) I am pretty accustomed to that.

Once I am happy I like something, I can simply head over to Amazon MP3 (now my full time port of call for buying music), and within a few minutes (or hours depending on if I am connecting via LSOXS or not) I have my tracks in my library, importantly, in a format I can do whatever I like with. Regardless of the talk that MP3 is still copyrighted etc, the format is ubiquitous and has been the format of choice since day one. Maybe I will eat my words when I have a library full of music in a defunct format in a few years, but I think it will likely be a cold day in hell before that happens.

So I am finally happy. By now you have probably figured that is something I tend to admit to relatively infrequently. I can get my music in a way that is a) legal, b) convenient, and c) exactly how I always thought I should be able to. There is an R.E.M. album (Document, for those interested) sat in my Amazon basket along with some Kinks songs about to be purchased. The artist will get their very meagre cut from my payment, and I won’t get sued, arrested, black-bagged or any other form of financial/physical torture for enjoying it.

This has not been a comprehensive rundown of Spotify. Adam tested it a little more intensively, and seems to be using it in almost the same fashion as I am. Great minds think alike I suppose. Night all.

I started at Oxford this October as many of you know, and I have to say that the term, although only eight weeks long, has been incredibly intense. I was of course under no illusions that Oxford would be easy, but a essay being set during Fresher’s week set the tone for how the rest of the term was going to go. That being said, and while I do find myself working to the exclusion of almost everything else (except Spooks of course. iPlayer saves me again), I have really enjoyed the experience. As I am sure everyone says wherever they are in the world, be it Oxford or Bangor Tech, the people are great and the environment is fun. I never got the ‘Oh My God I am at Oxford’ revelation moment I expected, but I did find myself quietly grinning to myself at times. Although I have signed myself up for another four years of intense work and a life going at a pace that is constantly a little faster than I would like I am happy with it – experience tells me I will never pick the ‘easy’ path for myself, and so if I am going to be killing myself for these years I might as well be doing it in somewhere like Magdalen and Oxford.

During these few months the world has again changed. We saw Obama elected. Despite my cynicism around the elections about the timing of his family tragedies, I am very excited about the prospect of having someone who can string a coherent sentence together in the office of ‘the leader of the free world’ (said in suitably appaling American accent and mocking tone..). That title really does annoy me – it is self-appointed and arrogant. If the Americans were leading by any sort of example then maybe it would be justified, and maybe Obama will justify it, but time will tell. There are a few things which scare me about the US in general. The expansion of the borders to include everywhere within 100 miles of a border, thus allowing illegal stop and search in a large swathe of the US – the so called ‘constitution-free zone‘. The bringing home of marines to help operate at DUI checkpoints in California and elsewhere. Then there is Obama’s proposed citizen militia – many have drawn parrallels to Brown/Black shirts, and the dogs in animal farm. I just think of the finger-men from V for Vendetta. Time and time again it has been shown that if you give a man a badge, they assume authority and get drunk on it. You only have to look at the security people in airports who bark at you as God in their own domain to know that what little authority people think they have will make them feel superior and in the right.

No blog post of mine would be complete without the compulsory tech-related comments. The final Apple appearance at the Macworld show is this year, and the keynote tonight will be given by Phil Schiller. I am actually quite excited as I hope he won’t present it with the same smugness that Steve always did. Don’t get me wrong, the man is justified as being heralded as turning around Apple and making it what it is (I write this of course from my MacBook Pro), but the smugness and arrogance of the presentations sometimes made me feel a bit sick to my stomach at times. The question really is whether this heralds the end of Macworld as an event. Sad as it is, I feel that it does. I know that for me and some other Mac-centric friends Macworld is pretty much only about the keynote. We will follow it on twitter or engadget, and then forget about the other two or three days. I would love to see a show of hands in the Moscone theatre of who would have come to Macworld if there were no Apple keynote. My money would be on very few hands being raised.

As I write this, the final thing which springs to mind, mainly because it is a ‘breaking’ story, is that twitter was hacked. I wonder if it is coincidence that this has happened as the publicity of twitter has spiked recently. I saw a Daily Mail story lamenting how the celebrities share the minutiae of their days via tweets, and a few weeks back they were whining about Jonathan Ross having the gall to enjoy his suspension and to tell people about it. They had the stock indignant Tory MP saying that if he was enjoying himself so much then maybe it should be made permanent, yada yada, but the point is that twitter is being noticed. Barack Obama used it during his campaign, although since it has gone almost dead since the election, I reckon people’s hopes of tweets from the Oval Office along the lines of ‘Off to meet Vladimir. Oh Joy! *sarcasm*’ will not be happening. As twitter becomes more and more popular, not only will it be plagued with even more scaling issues like those we have become so used to with unacceptable downtime etc, but just like as the Mac platform gains Windows ground, they will become a bigger, juicier target for people wanting to have a bit of a laugh and gain some kudos with their friends. The recent twitter hack was achieved by gaining access to the twitter admin tools, as confirmed by @netik in a video interview with Leo Laporte. While I am very encouraged by their transparency on the issue, it is a pretty serious breach for something which is becoming so popular, used by many ‘big names’ as a platform.

Hopefully this toe-dipping back into blogging will spark me to write more stuff, but in the mean time, I hope all had a good Xmas and New Years, and that 2009 isn’t as much of a blackhole as it is looking like is it going to be.

It all began when a friend, Nilpesh, approached me about making the Word Document of the Diary he has been putting together from our School trip to China and Tibet last summer into a PDF. This has been a labour of love from the beginning and he has put a lot into it, and so when he asked me to help with the last section I was more than happy to. He is using Lulu to professionally print the diary, and they have a comprehensive list of requirements for PDFs if that is the format to be submitted.

With this in mind, I headed to Microsoft Word. Here we encountered the first problem – Word 2008 on the Mac totally ignored almost all of the formatting he had put together in Word 2007 on Windows. Saved in a docx file, one would assume that the two would be totally compatible, but apparently not. Why? Ask Microsoft, but God help us if this is to be the open format of the ages… Some two days later after Pesh had reformatted the entire document and saved in doc format, I fired up Word 2008 again, and to my delight it opened and formatted correctly. Head over to the print dialogue and click “Save as PostScript”. Word churned away, and eventually produced some .ps files. “Some?” we wondered. Why is there more than one .ps file? For some reason I still don’t understand, the export to PostScript function seems to randomly split the file at arbitrary points. As this is a 70-page document, I expect it is some processing issue or the file becoming too large, although each time I made a revision to the document and re-PostScripted, the spilts were in new places so I have no clue.

Now the question was, how to make a single PDF from these numerous .ps files? Distiller happily accepted all of the settings I entered from the Lulu support pages, and also happily churned out separate PDFs for each of the PostScript files, but I could not find an easy way to make a single file. To preserve the specific settings of the PDF I did not want to simply combine them using Acrobat. This would have been nice, but although Acrobat and Distiller are related and can do some of the same things, there seems to be no way to enter the specfic PDF settings into Acrobat in the same way as you can in Distiller.

Much Googling ensued. I found some places which told me how to create a ‘merge.ps’ file which basically contained some Distillerese telling it where to find the separate PostScript files and to process them in turn to create a single PDF. However, it seems that to close a security hole, the functionality which Distiller used to have has been disabled, and so the processing of ‘merge.ps’ promptly failed with a log file cheerily telling me “%%[ Warning: Empty job. No PDF file produced. ] %%”. So I guess that wasn’t going to work then…

A lot more Googling ensued, with me trying various alterations on the commands in the merge file to try to get Distiller to behave, to no avail. One final lucky search of ‘distiller 8 combine ps’ revealed the Holy Grail of PostScript magic I had suspected was lurking out there for the hunter who didn’t do the sensible thing hours before and throw up his hands. Fourth result was a macosxhints.com page. With nothing to lose, I downloaded the script and ran it. First thing it asked for was the location of ‘Distiller 6′. Thinking to myself that this was probably going to fail considering I was trying to use Distiller 8, I pointed it to the app anyway and proceeded. The script asked for the folder containing the PostScripts, which I duly supplied, and to my surprise Distiller sprung to life and began processing the files. A few minutes later, the final PDF was done with all the settings I asked for, and importantly, as a single file. Cue angelic chorus of ‘Hallelulia!’.

All credit to Carlo Notarianni for this script, to whom I owe a lot and who likely saved me many more hours trying to cobble together something to make this work.

As with most Apple products I have experienced, the experience as a user is lovely. The interface is revolutionary, and I don’t foresee a resurgence of buttons after this. Even the doubters are coming around to some extent once they use it. It is such a natural way to interface with your device, and comes into its own when something like a mouse or other cursor-based input device is not available. Of course this is not the first touch device on the market, and it won’t be the last, but combined with the hype that Apple products seem to generate purely by existing, and the fact that everyone who seems to use it can get to grips with it very quickly, means that I expect this will be one of the most famous, for a while at least. Indeed, my own mother, who by her own admission does not like technology, has come to, at the very least, not loathe this device. The big numbers of keypad dialling seem to be a big hit, and the simplicity of the SMS features have gone down well too. A QWERTY keyboard makes a world of difference it seems, as does auto-correcting typos.

Settings is relatively intuitive, although I am not sure why Bluetooth is in ‘General’. Took me a few minutes to find to pair the respective headsets to the devices. Speaking of which, I really like how the iPhone deals with headsets. When a call is made, it gives access to an ‘audio source’ list, from which the desired device can be chosen. This is especially useful when it is used to connect via bluetooth to a car hands-free, where some conversations need to become private quickly, and can be transferred seamlessly to the phones speaker and back again as need be. Again this is not a new feature, but like so many things, it is made easy to achieve, and so might as well be!

I am not going to do a feature by feature review, because these already exist all over the net in a much more polished form than I could accomplish. Suffice it to say that for most users this seems to be a very good choice of phone provided you don’t mind O2, and don’t mind being seen with this device. That said, for someone like myself, I still think my reasons for not wanting one are valid – 8GB is too little storage, and EDGE is old tech and is in fact a step backward for Europe. Like the loss of Concorde, and so the effective cessation of commercial supersonic flight, this kind of backtracking is pretty unacceptable. If and when there is a 3G/HSDPA iPhone with more storage, then I might consider getting one. Until then it is a toss-up between a Blackberry and a Nokia N-series. Suggestions?

Soon after this we saw OiNK, the hugely popular invite-only BitTorrent search engine and tracker, taken down and the owner/operator arrested by UK Police. Again it is a grey area, in my opinion, as to whether these people do anything wrong when not hosting any actual content. What I have found more amusing, and yet worrying, is the massive amount of misinformation that seems to have gone out with this story. Many of the quotes, from IFPI, BPI and Cleveland Police, imply that OiNK was a subscription service which users had to pay for, or that it was run for profit, both of which are untrue. The worrying lack of proper research into this, and the then misrepresentation, means that to the lay-person, the site and the community around it look much worse. Anyone who is not tech savvy, and even some of those who are, do not know how these things work, or what they are, and so when an organisation like the police is quoted as saying that the service was ‘lucrative’, this is taken as the truth. As far as we can tell, all donations to OiNK were used for the upkeep of the site, and key members of the community have stated that it was not run for profit. Who to believe? Both sides have an agenda here, and so it is your call. As a side-note, I called it a community for a reason. While the site has been taken down, the community has reformed in several places online, and I doubt that they will be kept back for very long. Another site, formed from the same users and philosophies, will launch before long and they will simply upload their content from OiNK to it. However, CEO of the IFPI, Jeremy Banks, is quoted as saying that sites like OiNK are “not a case of friends sharing music for pleasure.” At least I will now have no qualms lending a friend a CD for pleasure! The possible backdoors a statement like this opens for a file-sharing community could too be interesting.

With all this in the press, and the obvious political slants to it, it was inevitable that ministers and officials would wade in, under pressure from the record industry. One such minister, Lord Triesman, the parliamentary Under Secretary for Innovation, Universities and Skills, is quoted as saying that Labour would legislate if ISPs did not clamp down on file sharers. The record industry is pushing for such users to be automatically disconnected from the net, which seems like a bold move for the under secretary for innovation to be backing, especially considering the main demographic of file-sharers is those of University age, who are also the greatest hope for future innovation! Another example of the government sending mixed messages. While they make good points about the importance of availability of, access to, and investment in the Internet, they are trying to appease the industry, mainly because of the tax revenue it brings them, and in doing so alienates the users and contradict themselves. While it is understandable that record companies want to look after their profit margins, they do not seem to be able to push a policy which doesn’t cast them in a terrible light and make them even more hated. Along with artists dropping their labels left, right and centre, this would suggest that the industry, in its current form at least, is on its last legs.

Ultimately laws follow what is common practice. Actions are not currently in line with the legal situation, and this leads to these kinds of conflicts. Eventually of course the laws will change to reflect how we, the people, do things, but until then those with a vested interest in keeping it the way it was in the good old days will continue to use them to attack the easiest targets and make examples of them.

This morning, did a quick search, and found this. Perfect guide for a Mac user to get his/her iPod touch or iPhone scrobbling its plays when synced. This blog has since ceased to be, so I am reposting the info this article contained. Full credit to the original author though:

I found some very useful information last night on how to scrobble your tracks from your iPhone or iPod Touch. As you know I’m a big last.fm’er (?) and I’ve really been missing my iPod tracks on Last.fm. Here’s where I cobbled all this info from if you have any problems.

So here’s what you need to do:

• Don’t use the official Last.fm client and download iScrobbler currently at 1.5.1 here.

• Download this ‘Fake iPod’ .dmg file here.

• Make this AppleScript:

tell application “Finder”

open file (“/path/to/fake ipod.dmg” as POSIX path)

delay 15

eject disk “Fake Ipod”

end tell

• Put this script in your Library/iTunes/scripts folder (if it doesn’t exist just create the folder, it’ll work fine).

• Be sure to have iScrobbler setup to scrobble iPod tracks and set the playlist to ‘Recently Played’

• When you sync your iPod/Phone just click the script in the new ‘scripts’ menu in iTunes and the .dmg will mount make iTunes think an iPod is attached and cause iScrobbler to scrobble your recent tracks from the iPod.

• The .dmg will then unmount. To be honest it probably doesn’t need to be 15 secs. Just 1 would probably do

The only thing I found didn’t work from that guide was the POSIX addressing of the Fake iPod.dmg. Whenever I ran the script, I got an error about not being able to find the file. To circumvent this I replaced the line:

open file (“/path/to/fake ipod.dmg” as POSIX path)

With:

open document file “Fake iPod.dmg” of folder “Scrobble” of folder “username” of folder “Users” of startup disk

To Windows users, I am sure this will be rectified eventually, either through the last.fm official application, or through a similar method to the above. To Mac users, good luck!

On a lighter note, we saw The Pirate Bay getting hold of IFPI.com, the domain similar to that of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI.org), and establishing the International Federation of Pirates Interests. According to El Reg, they claim that they were given the domain and so are using it as they see fit. Never ones to miss an opportunity to ‘stick it’ to the lobbyists for the record industry et al. TPB are enjoying themselves.

We also saw Steve Jobs announce the SDK of iPhone and iPod touch (did somebody say U-turn?). Suddenly Apple realises that 3rd party apps won’t destabilise the platform after all, provided they sign off on every little bit of code that is (and take a cut from it?). Russell Beattie has put together a fantastic dissection of this official note from Steve on his blog, and it really cuts out the rubbish and spells out what we cynics see when we read the typical marketing bullshitese!

Ubuntu ‘Gutsy Gibbon’ 7.10 was released for download, and looks good. I am yet to download this release, but used Tribe 5 in VMWare Fusion on the MBP, and it seems good. I traditionally have used Ubuntu to breathe life into old hardware, such as my old Toshiba Satellite 2450-101 Laptop, which (provided you prop the screen open) works well enough. The Windows installer even seems to tax it now, but Ubuntu usually flies along. I look forward to playing with ‘Gutsy’, and eagerly await the name of the next Ubuntu incarnation (Crappy Cow?…)

When there are seven or eight twitterers out and about, doing similar things in the same area it works very well. Whether it be for covet mass communication during the service (not actually used of course…) or for coordinating the after-service jovialities, twitter was very useful. I use my twitter as much as possible in the every day environment of school, but the use of mobile phones in classrooms is understandably frowned upon, and this means that this is limited at best, except for the odd uncontrollable outbust of anger or hilarity…

An added bonus is that it in fact turns out to be a much cheaper way of mass texting. We all have our phones connected to our twitter accounts, and have notifications set up for each other, meaning that when we post from our phones, this is automatically forwarded to all of the others, and so I am getting a text to 8 people for the price of one. The way that twitter is established means that we can also reply to the sender directly (albeit less privately) and achieve much the same results as we would if we used bog-standard texting.

Being able to access the status updates from many different platforms, be it the web via a browser, the desktop via one of the many twitter apps (I am currently testing the mutli-platform multi-service AIR app Appily for this), or via the phone through texting, there isn’t really much else I could ask for from twitter. It has moved on from its original purpose of posting status updates though I think. While it is still used for status updates, it is also used to a large extent for general communication on the same level as a service like MSN Messenger or SMS. This can only be a good thing, provided those involved are using protected updates…