Intel’s new ad film. Love it.

Films, Tech Intel, Intel Rock stars ad

Forget about all the shareware programs you’ve been using to download YouTube videos. Simply right click on the text in red below and select “Bookmark Link”. When you’re watching a YouTube video you like, simply click on the bookmark from your Bookmarks menu and it will reveal a link on the top right of the page that says Download MP4. Save that file to disk and you will have a high quality video that you can also add to iTunes and play on your iPod without any transcoding.

Easy as apple pie!

Here’s the link:

Get YouTube Video

Tech YouTube

I’m not sure whether this is an ad for Apple or Microsoft. Notice the way the woman wistfully says “I’m just not cool enough to be a Mac person.” Geez.

I’m betting this ad campaign dies still-born, just like the Seinfeld-Gates one did. You heard it here first.

Random, Tech apple, Bill Gates, Jerry Seinfeld, Microsoft

Ola to you regular readers! All five of you, including my mom. Sheesh!

This is Tone Loc‘s funny-ass hit from nineteen hundred and eighty nine. Please ignore the video.

For your listening pleasure, you may download the entire album here

or just the song here.

Which brings me to the state of content piracy on the internet. You used to have to be a bit of a nerd to know how to pirate music and movies in days past. Setting up a torrent client, finding torrent files, making sure your ports were open and mainting a decent share ratio was not for the faint of heart or feeble of mind. (Bonus geek cred for understanding the beauty and simplicity of how torrent sharing works.)

But all that has changed nowadays. All you need to do is be able to spell half decently & do a Google Search and sometimes not even that. The almighty Google suggests corrections. That and knowing how to open a .zip file opens up to you a cornucopia of copyright content, just begging for violation.

There are tons of music blogs on the web these days, most on Blogger (another Google property) that are dedicated to nothing but linking to entire albums of music, literally thousands of them, neatly zipped along with album covers, available for direct download, no shady file sharing or nasty P2P software needed, just a browser and a few mouse clicks. Here are two such sites I found this week.

http://3-2-0.blogspot.com/

&

http://thegodfathertrilogy.blogspot.com/

Google is the one, true overlord of the internet and has become as much of a verb as it is a noun. Absolutely no one has the cojonés or the money to take them to court and fight an extended legal battle. So the file sharing genie is now well and truly out of the bottle, once and for all. (If that is, there were any lingering doubts about the fact)

Copyright Associations can threaten indiviuals, sue PirateBay (and they are trying as I write this) and try to thumb the dikes, but it is all over. (I almost spelt dikes with a ‘y’ instead of an ‘i” before I realised what a grevious error that would be.)

So. The point I am trying to get at, in my usual belaboured and obtuse fashion is this:

Copyright, as we know it, is dead.

So. From now on whenever I post links to music, I will also try and post a direct download link to the song. For review purposes only, of course. If you like the music, you be sure to go out and buy the record now.

And delete that dirty, nasty MP3 file…

Peace & Love

Music, Random, Tech Funky Cold Medina, Google, music piracy, piratebay, Rapidshare, Tone Loc

The Hobo Dock, originally uploaded by SA-7™.

So, a couple of weeks ‘mi familia’ was nice enough to get me an iPod Touch 2G for the birthday. Woot!

Since I’m too cheap to spring for a dock I used my old Western Digital MyBook external hard disk and incorporated the dock insert that came with the Touch into it’s side. It took a heated cutter, some kind of liquid cement and a whole lot of patience. The edges are fugly right now because of the extra cement on them but I’ll clean that up. What would make this mod really cool would be to incoroprate a tiny USB hub into the MyBook so I’d have only one USB cable to the MacBook Pro. Click the image for notes on what’s in the picture. The Macbook Pro is at a wierd angle because it’s sitting on a laptop stand I made out of recycled cardboard after reading an article at Unplggd.com. If you use a laptop on a regular basis do your back and neck a favour and make one for yourself. Out of the frame on the left is a keyboard, mouse and a 22″ LG LCD monitor with extremely crap viewing angles.

Sorry for the shiite quality of the picture. Serves me right for using a camera phone.

Random, Tech apple, iPod Touch 2g, LEGO, LG LCD monitor, Mac Mini, MacBook Pro, My Book, Speck case, Tiger Beer, Unplugged.com, Western Digital

It’s strips like this, written for geeks like yours truly, that make XKCD one of the smartest, funniest web comics around. Click on the image to go there.

WARNING: Huge time vampire. But then, you’re already on this site so….

Random, Tech web comics, XKCD

This awesome clip from the animated show, ‘The Family Guy’ is doing the rounds of the internet. They’re taking the piss outta Microsoft’s Zune MP3 Player.

Tech iPod Touch, Microsoft, The Family Guy, Zune

So, I got an iPod Touch and I just got back from some Asian Band Festival at the Old Fort in New Delhi.

First, the concert. One of the bands performing was a Bhutanese band called ‘Who’s your Daddy?‘ and they did AC/DC covers. (I am not making any of this up)

All in all, a pleasant evening and even though I didn’t hear a single really great band, I didn’t hear anyone that sucked either. Perhaps because we left before Parikrama came on. (Don’t send me hate mail, I get off on it)

I finally saw a lot of groups that people have been telling me about for a while like Shair & Func and Skinny Alley and all I can say is that none of them really rocked my boat.

What did rock my boat was the Old Fort or Purana Qila. Forts still fascinate me in a way only people who spent their entire childhood daydreaming, will understand. The entire city of Delhi is dotted with these little tombs or isolated, dilapidated ramparts (in my expert opinion) from bygone eras, built by bygone rulers. You often come upon these little fragments in the most bizarre places, in back of beyond bylanes, in the middle of abandoned playgrounds, on the fairways of golf-courses.

When you are new to the city this is brilliant, like a little treasure hunt. But as with most great things, you soon get jaded and about these forts and tombs.

But every once in a while you see them at night, lit up and it reminds you of how fucking spectacular these forts are and how craptacular your own life’s work is when compared to them. It’s like the Mughals are mocking us.

Oh wow! You made a short-film? A TV Show? Well I built this fort that’s been around for three hundred years and it will probably be around for another three hundred years after you’ve been dead and forgotten kiddo. So tell me, who’s your daddy?

Crap. I gotta build a fort.

Read more…

Music, Random, Tech apple, Asian Band Festival, hacking firmware 2.2.1, iPod Touch, iPod Touch 2g, Jailbreak an iPod Touch, Jailbreak an iPod Touch 2g 2.2.1, mughal emperors, New Delhi, Old Fort, Parikrama, parikrama sucks, Purana Qila, Shair & Func, Shair and Func, Skinny Alley, Who's your Daddy?

I consider myself a pretty nerdy, techy guy. I’ve been around computers for twenty years now. I’ve built computers for friends, worked in tech support, I can edit video and audio with ease. Yesterday, to test the performance of a new hard drive I disassembled this laptop. Twice.

So why the fuck is it that in all my days I have NEVER found a single text editor that doesn’t make me want to throw the computer I’m using out the window? Am I specially-abled or something? Am I fucking retard? 

I’ve tried them all. Microsoft Word is the most vile of the lot, every now and then when I’m stuck on a Windows machine and confronted with doing any writing on it, my scalp tingles. So many years of Word crashing on me after I have slaved over some writing for hours has left me with an instinctual, feral, aversion to it. Oh and by the way, the fine folks at Microsoft that designed the ‘Autosave’ feature in Word? Please mail me for my home address so you can come over here and kiss my arse.  

Even simple stuff like dragging a margin or creating a hanging indent in Word damn near drives me to tears. Word on the Mac is better by an infinitesimally small amount. Geez. 

Open Office sucks too but I’ve always lived by the adage that you get what you pay for and Open Office is free. My point proven.

Apple’s Pages is bearable, until you start getting adventurous with the formatting at which point all bets are off. Also you usually have to export your work into the de-facto Word Format (so the 99% of the world not using a Macintosh can read your opus) which is another crap-shoot.

And now there’s a new joy in my life. WordPress! For the most part I still use the online interface. It’s actually that good, even for an old school ‘apps for everything‘ dude like myself. Except for the text editor.

Now and then when I’m making a post WordPress will decide to totally fuck with me by adding a line-feed where I don’t want it or right justifying something I want left justified. The previous post was an example. After half an hour of trying, I gave up on getting WordPress to format the post the way I wanted. I rewrote the entire post from scratch and this isn’t the first time this has happened. Brought to my goddamn knees by some HTML and some javascript. Pathetic.

So. Can anyone please tell me, why is a self-confessed ubergeek like myself flummoxed by what are essentially fucking text editors on steroids? Anyone?

Rants, Tech apple, I hate MS Word, Microsoft, MS Word Sucks, Open Office, Pages, Text editors suck, Wordpress

This is the new Microsoft OS for Smart-phones (for those masochists who don’t get enough of the awesome ‘Windows Experience™’ on their computers. Thwaack! Thank you sir! May I have another?)

Notice how even in the demo the phone isn’t actually doing anything.

Oh and BTW! My favourite part of all this? This might be Microsoft’s answer to the Apple iPhone. It’s iPhone killer as it were.

And what have they called it? The MyPhone! LOL. This shit just writes itself! I don’t even have to try with stories about these monkeys.

Thank you for coming ladies and gentlemen. Don’t forget to tip your waitresses. I’m here all week.

Random, Rants, Tech apple, iphone, Microsoft, MyPhone