What would you do were you me? I have a samsung laser printer that’s treated me well. Its first toner cartridge, which lasted about 2 years, is finally dead. Replacing it will cost me ~$80. The samsung has two inadequacies – it’s USB only, so I have to swap the USB cable from laptop to windows PC to linux box, depending on what I want to print from, and it’s monochrome. I could get a networkable color samsung laser printer, the 300N, for $299. Were you me, would you drop the $80 on another toner cartridge for the non-networked monochrome printer, or would you spend a good bit more to get networking and color? On the one hand, buying the toner feels like I am throwing close to $100 away, but on the other hand, I don’t really want to be spending $300 at the moment.
Category: Techno Geek
Consider adding testdisk to your toolkit
I’ve lost partitions more than once due to failed linux installs, my own error, and data integrity issues, and over the years I’ve used many tools to recover. Almost all of them have been commercial solutions. Enter Testdisk, a free, open source, cross platform data recovery software. There are binaries and a recovery disk image there, as well as Photorec, a tool designed to help recover files from digital camera memory cards, which is another category of tool I’ve purchased in the past. Testdisk has the broadest format support I’ve seen in a tool and you can’t beat the price.
Freehand heads out to pasture
It’s been years since I’ve used graphics tools on any kind of regular basis, it’s been even longer since I used Freehand, and I was never a real expert in vector graphics tools, but once upon a time I used freehand daily, and it’s with a minor twinge of regret that I note it’s passing in this entry on an Adobe blog posting. Back when the Freehand vs. Illustrator debate was often as acrimonious as the Mac vs. PC debates, and I used to engage in it regularly with my buddy Kevin. I never cottoned to the Illustrator interface was my main issue with it, despite using it years before I became familiar with Freehand. Freehand’s fate was pretty much sealed when Adobe acquired Macromedia a while back, though I guess there was some hope that as in past mergers and acquisitions that Freehand would be sold off to someone, a fate that befell it repeatedly – in fact, Adobe owned it once before. There’s more coverage over on Tidbits if you’re interested, and the two wikipedia entries have a pretty good rundown of the evolution of the tools and the brinkmanship that kept them competitive and steadily evolving over the years. My question is, where’s the pressure on Illustrator going to come from now?
Friday two-fer – Flash based particle simulator
Here’s another friday fun link. This is a simple yet captivating flash-based particle simulator. Use the radio buttons at the bottom to pick materials and elements to ‘paint’ onto the canvas and watch how they interact – drop some seeds, for example, then some water, watch things grow, try and overwhelm it with an avalanche of sand, or lay down a small fire and pit it against a water fountain. There are tons of cool little interactions and rube goldberg inspired setups you can sketch out with this.
Examining open source and copyright from a different angle
I muse periodically on open source and copyright issues and I happened across a great non-software example of how letting things fall out of copyright is generally good for folks. Star Frontiers is a sci fi themed pen and paper roll playing game that reached the height of its popularity in the 80’s when Star Wars hype was at its peak. It was originally published by TSR, the folks who introduced Dungeons and Dragons to the world. TSR dropped the game from its product lineup in the mid-late 80’s, and eventually it became freely and legally available for download. A small fanbase have been keeping the product alive ever since. Recently one of those fans took it upon himself to do some major updates, ironing out issues with the rules, fleshing out areas that had been unfinished or vague, working on the aesthetics of the downloadable rulebook, and launching a ‘dungeon‘ like fanzine to accompany all this work. This has caused a bit of a renaissance of interest in the game, bringing a moribund product back into the limelight at places like rpg.net and exposing a new generation of gamers to a solid, fun game that had become unavailable due to the economics of publishing.
If this game was kept in copyright it would be dead now, sought after only for nostalgic reasons by collectors and played by no one. Instead it’s a living, breathing product with a fanbase and new content to keep it going into the future. This whole conception of reuse remix burn doesn’t just apply to music or digital media is the point I’m trying to make here – it’s equally applicable to dead trees and other kinds of intellectual property. And lest you think this is an edge case I’ll observe that things I’ve linked to in the past like Librivox (fan created audiobooks of rights free material), source code releases to game engines like Quake 3 (and the various fan projects these spawn) and other things I don’t think I’ve mentioned (the Marvel Super hero role playing game, the downloads, and the fan plans to revamp it) also illustrate the issue.
This is not about anarchy and fighting against rights owners opportunity to profit – this is about recognizing that it’s a complex issue and there is value to all of us on both sides of it, and our challenge is to find the right balance between protecting the interests of rights owners and the interests of everyone in a vibrant, flexible, imaginative marketplace of ideas. In my opinion we’re failing miserably at this at present.
Testing Youtube as a video delivery tool for wordpress
This post might go away, we’ll see. I want to test embedding youtube videos on my site as an alternative to tucking them away in my image gallery where my hunch is no one is looking at them. Below should be the video shortly.
Want Joost?
Joost is a new approach to streaming video to computers from the folks who designed Skype. Skype was a business model revolution, a direct challenge to the telcos and long distance companies and the pay per minute cost of voice communications, and Joost has similar aims. It’s p2p powered streaming television that in effect works like a video on demand service. It also cleverly forces you to watch the advertising since you can’t quickly switch channels like you can on your television when the ads start. This is counterbalanced by the fact that you’re watching on your computer, so you can turn the volume down and your attention to something besides the ads while they play. They’re also promising to implement community building tools layered on top of the content, things like chat and so on, which will also help distract you from the ads. The first of these features have just started rolling out.
All in all it’s pretty slick, and they’ve been signing a lot of content deals with different providers. It’s main downside right now is that there’s not very much worth watching on it – it’s sort of a greatest hits of all the obscure cable channels you never watch in your 250 channel lineup right now, but lots more is coming.
If you want an invite let me know and tell me which email address to send it to, they’ve opened the floodgates and are starting to let many users in. Joost works on macs or pcs and is free for the download.
The Windows key is evil, evil I tell you
I’d love to strangle the Microsoft product manager who thought it was a
Great tutorial on how to use handbrake to rip DVDs
I’ve mentioned handbrake in the past – it’s a great DVD ripping utility with an easy to use interface. Despite being easy to use you might still find this great tutorial on how to rip a DVD using it. It’s published on a mac site and uses Mac screenshots to demonstrate, but Handbrake is available on all platforms and the basic steps remain the same no matter which platform you’re on. Free, open source, cross platform, and easy to use.
Inexpensive multi-track audio editing software
So, this is pretty slick.
Dave's Place/Metamusing 