iTunes plus is DRM free

at long last, drm free tracks are entering the iTunes store; complete albums, music videos and individual tracks. Right now, it seems there are fewer albums that can be bought individually on iTunes than can be bought as albums.

rocking with mythtv

The parent's TiVo died, after about a week of no DVR, my brother and I found a tv tuner card and a box to take vga to component. This thing rocks! If you buy the right kind of card, you can get xubuntu to just work. Myth front-end auto-starts with the box, if you log out, it will log back in after XXX seconds. You can add a second tuner card fairly easily. Recording priority has an add-subtract priority selector that can do +/- 20 from default.
hdtv tuner has problems searching for channels; and I have yet to find a way to organize the programs so more than one person can choose to get rid of it before a show is deleted. Also, it does take a little while to find some of the options.
Over all, I like it. If space becomes a problem I can set up a render farm, and have each linux box in the house re-encoding an episode, to make that work, you will need to mount your data folder on every computer, this is not officially supported. I can even watch the episodes on my mac since the myth front-end runs on ppc and intel macs.

found again

I blogged early on about a website I lost, I knew it gave you a nice graph of last names, and showed you how popular each name was chronologically. So you can see not only what names are hot, but when they peaked.
Here it is
go, play; knock yourself out!

VLC on OSX

I was using VLC to make a local copy of a WMV stream; the dang thing took me a while to figure out; even then... I copied a WMV stream; re-encoded into mp3, saved as .mov; and ended up with Microsoft ASF

I guess all the settings I did on the stream transcode wizard are ignored... I see why many windows users dislike MS wizards; they just don't work as advertised... I will post again when I figure out what went on. The wizard is found under file on the drop-down menu.

P.S. Wish me luck; I'm learning Spanish! I am a slow learner of such things, and I am being thought by this nice girl from Brazil. Language isn't my thing; but some things are sticking!

AWS price change

Amazon dropped the price for data transfer on S3 C2 and SQS. The new structure is only $0.10 a GB upload, and $0.18 for download, with a price break at the 10TB and 50TB mark. I'm sure most users will never see 10TB of data sent in a month, but it could help big business.<\p>

There is one small catch; there will now be a charge for get put, and list requests; only $0.01 for 1,000 get/put requests, and $0.01 for 10,000 list requests. See there page for full details.