January
Uh-oh
Look here, I have money in my pocket. I’m willing to share it with authors and publishers, in exchange for their works.
I’ve been walking to work, 40 or 50 minutes, because of the snow. I thought it might be nice to listen to an audiobook while I was doing it. So I had a bit of a browse, and it seems the place to get them downloaded from is audible.co.uk. It’s illegal to rip CDs in the UK (This BBC article is the newest info I could find on it, if anyone else knows anything more I’d be grateful) so I can’t purchase a CD of the book I wanted and rip it to listen to on my phone. I foolishly purchased a copy of the book from audible.co.uk and tried to download it to my phone only to find out the audio format was not something my phone could read – and don’t get me wrong, my phone supports quite a few audio formats! They have software that allows you to transfer the book to mobile devices, but not for Android. I could burn it to CD and then rip it into a non-proprietary audio format, but as I said earlier, that’s not legal.
The biggest mistake I made was to assume that the book would be in a commonly supported audio format before purchasing, believing statements on the audible site like “Chances are if you have a mobile audio device, it’s compatible with Audible”. It’s nice that they use software to enforce “honesty” on behalf of their consumers without quite managing it themselves. (They do have a list of compatible devices, but with a statement like that it seems silly to double-check that they support a rapidly expanding mobile OS like Android!)
If you Google “dragon keeper audio book torrent”, you’ll quickly find what you want, in .mp3 format. It seems such a shame that copyright management only harms people trying to deal legally and fairly with the publisher. I don’t think I’ll be attempting to purchase an e-book or audio book any time in the near future. I’m calling my “purchase” of this book a waste of money and leaving it at that. I won’t download the torrent, even though it seems ridiculously unfair. But seriously, do you wonder WHY people pirate things when honest consumers are treated like criminals already?
These are a couple of comics that are true repositories of teh awesome.
- The Oatmeal releases amusing one page comics, including important reference charts such as How to use an apostrophe, Why it’s better to pretend you don’t know anything about computers, and how everything goes to hell in a zombie apolcalypse.
- The second (strip featured above) is XKCD. It’s actually witty and intelligent, with few cheap gags. The author makes fun of Ender’s Game, Portal, and many other wonders.
On a completely unrelated note, I’m going to change my webhost in a couple of months. It’s silly to avoid blogging because you don’t want to cope with the slow server…
Most people I know won’t have to guess, since I’ve plastered Facebook, Twitter, all my IM statuses with it, but I got a letter saying I’d been accepted for British Citizenship in the post this afternoon. I need to call up Notts county council to arrange my Ceremony ASAP, as if it’s not performed within three months you need to reapply. (Ack!! another £720!?!? how could anyone possibly miss it?)
They even got my name right, after the initial Linacre mixup. I’ll finally have the right name in a passport for the first time since I left NZ and changed my name to Yochannah (from Yohannah, which just looks weird to my eyes nowdays). My Israeli passport doesn’t have my middle name (Joy) in it for some reason. But my British documentation shall have Joy, and shan’t have Linacre. It shall be Correct. Finally.
Next stop: red passport. Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
I am so so so so so so so so so happy to have my life as I would choose to make it accepted, legally and (prettymuch) irrevocably.
I seem to have a plethora of invites for services one might need, if one was a geek, I suppose.
Google wave: Everyone wants invites, then get in to google wave and say “ok, now what?” It’s funny. But you know you’re not cool if you don’t try google wave, right?
Jolicloud: Are you into netbooks? This is an interesting little OS and works better (so far) than Eeebuntu NBR did on my Eee701. (The rumour mill says Chrome OS is coming soon. Eeep!)
Brizzly: A twitter and facebook web client. Better than twitter because it shows inline pictures and expands shortened URLs. The auto-refresh is a bit dodgy, however. Unblocked at my work currently, although who knows for how long?
Anyone interested, let me know your email address and I’ll send an invite or three. Random strangers are allowed to apply.
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