Philip Lenssen at Google Blogscoped has a great little webform that lets you whack out seemingly-authoritative statistics-laden webpages like this one, just like the big boys do!
Custom stats at your fingertips Read More »
On March 29, 2006 there will be a total solar eclipse, which is when the moon moves directly between the sun and the Earth. It won’t be visible here in the U.S., but even if you don’t live in Brazil, North Africa, Turkey or East Asia you can join in the fun! The San Francisco Exploratorium is hosting a big eclipse party starting at 9pm Pacific time, and they’ll be hosting a webcast of the eclipse live from a Roman amphitheater in Turkey.
The most important thing to remember when viewing an eclipse is never view an eclipse with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope! That’s because the sun will fry your eyeballs like a grape in the microwave. So to enjoy next week’s eclipse webcast safely, just follow these simple instructions to build a pinhole eclipse webcast viewer.
Build your own Eclipse Webcast Viewer Read More »
Sony BMG recently settled the class-action lawsuit brought by EFF over their DRM-rootkit fiasco. If you purchased one of the 113 CDs that were affected, you’re probably eligible for some combination of cash payment, replacement CD and/or free music download. Just click here or on the image to the right for details.
Sony BMG DRM-rootkit settlement Read More »
MP3.com has the skinny on battery life for portable music players, with this little gem on how much decoding the DRM on purchased music costs you:
Take, for instance, the critically acclaimed Creative Zen Vision:M, with a rated battery life of up to 14 hours for audio and 4 hours for video. CNET tested it at nearly 16 hours, with MP3s–impressive indeed. Upon playing back only WMA subscription tracks, the Vision:M scored at just more than 12 hours. That’s a loss of almost 4 hours, and you haven’t even turned the backlight on yet.
We found similar discrepancies with other PlaysForSure players. The Archos Gmini 402 Camcorder maxed out at 11 hours, but with DRM tracks, it played for less than 9 hours. The iRiver U10, with an astounding life of about 32 hours, came in at about 27 hours playing subscription tracks. Even the iPod, playing back only FairPlay AAC tracks, underperformed MP3s by about 8 percent.
In other words, you pay between 8 and 25% of your battery life for the privilege of not being able to listen to your music where ever you want… now that’s customer service!
(Thanks to Nerfduck for the link!)
Update 3/23/06: Some folks are pointing out that comparing WMA or AAC format with DRM to MP3 isn’t a fair test since it conflates the effect of DRM with the effect of the format itself (a fair test would be to compare WMA with DRM to the same files without DRM). And Ed Felten at Freedom to Tinker comments that regardless of whether the test compares apples to oranges, wouldn’t it be nice if we could choose which fruit we wanted to eat?
Battery cost of DRM Read More »
I very much like this audio commentary by 1982-Accadamy-Award Winner Linda Hunt. (Real Audio, 3:50, broadcast on KQED’s 3/3/06 California Report)
It’s not about you Read More »
Check out Bound By Law: Tales from the public domain, a comic about fair use and copyright in documentary filmmaking written by a cartoonist, a columnist and a filmmaker, all of whom also happen to be law professors specializing in intellectual property. Available for free download or paper-book purchase, and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.
(Link via Dr. Wex at Copyfight.)
Educational comic on copyright and fair use Read More »
So if you were designing the label for a night-time cold medicine, where would you put the instructions and proper dosage amounts?
If you answered “put it underneath the label, so the customer needs to peel it back to read it” then you might have a bright future in product-packaging!
I don’t know what kind of FDA-regulation constraints these designers are up against, but really — couldn’t they do better than this?
Great moments in design Read More »
I saw this sign on the MBTA a few days ago, a part of their whole post-9-11-world Transit Watch Program.
Is it just me, or did this whole “Traitors Are Everywhere”
Stay alert! Trust no one! Keep your laser handy! Read More »
We all know that talking on a hand-held cellphone while driving is dangerous (OK, except for that guy in the SUV that cut you off this morning). Cognitive Daily has nice summaries of a couple recent studies suggesting that talking on hands-free cellphones while driving is also dangerous due to the higher cognitive load, and furthermore that talking to a passenger sitting in the car may be no better.
Face-to-face & cellphone same for driving? Read More »