My friend Erin mentioned a site to me I hadn’t heard of before: http://www.televisionwithoutpity.com/. They provide recaps of television shows with snarky commentary added in. I just got done reading the a recap of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode ‘Villains. It captured the essence of the episode completely for me. Now they just need to release the recaps of the last two episodes of the season.

I just read about SVCD. Why oh why did I waste my time with just plain ol’ VCD? I also discovered that I have one of the more kickass lower end DVD players out there. The reviews for my player are quite great. It looks like this thing will play everything I can throw at it.

The results are in! I can burn VCDs. Right now I’m watching the first episode of Read or Die on VCD. So far the quality of the picture is pretty damn good. It isn’t perfect, but for things that aren’t yet available over here it isn’t bad at all. I can see it relying on how good the Divx file I’m using is, but these were really good transfers.

Hmm. Now I need to look into converting the Sifl & Olly episodes I have to VCD.

Right now I’m playing around with different video stuff. I’ve got a ton of divx files and mpegs and I’ve discovered that it is possible to burn them onto a VCD. And as an added bonus, my DVD player will play VCDs. I know the quality isn’t perfect, but I’ll be pretty curious to see how it goes.

Right now I’ve got the first episode of Read or Die converting to a format that I can burn to VCD. It’s about 1/3rd of way done right now, but I’ll report on the quality when I’m done.

This weekend I’ve been using Mozilla almost exclusively. They just put out their last release candidate before releasing a 1.0 version of the browser. I have to say I’ve been quite happy with it. Tabbed browsing was always one of my favorite features in Opera and I’m so happy to have it available in Mozilla. When I get back to work Tuesday I’m going to see how well it works for me to use on a day to day.

Okay, please, someone tell me if I am missing something here. Comcast is being sued over web recordings. I heard about this a while back, but didn’t really read much about it. Now that I do I’m a little disturbed.

I’m not a huge fan of Comcast. I think a lot of their policies about how you can use your connection through them are lame. But, if I understand this article correctly it appears they are being sued for running a caching proxy server. I bet most large ISPs do in fact. For most companies it is a way to provide faster access to their customers.

Basicly, it’s a kind of network service that watches all the web traffic on their network. Say you go to a web site. The proxy server keeps a copy of that web site in its memory. That way if you or someone else go back there within a short amount of time it can just give you the information out of it’s cache instead of going back to the original web site. To the user, they see increased response time (since you don’t have to go all the way back to the original site).

Back to my original question. Is there something here I’m missing? Is comcast doing something out of the ordinary here? Does this mean we all have to get rid of our caching servers? Anyone know what vendor Comcast got theirs from (or if they rolled their own)?

Rudyard Kipling. “Take everything you like seriously, except yourselves.” [Quotes of the Day]

Last week Reuters ran a news story talking about defeating sony’s “copy-proof” protection with a magic marker. NewsForge has an interesting article talking about how Reuters has just violated the DMCA by doing so.

Under the 1998 law’s sections 1201.2(a) and (c), it’s illegal to “manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof” that is primarily designed to circumvent a copy protection. That’s in part (a), and Reuters and its customers might be able to argue that the story wasn’t “primarily” designed for that purpose.

But Reuters would have a lot of trouble getting around 1201.2(c). It outlaws the manufacture, etc., etc., of any “marketed” product or service that allows users to circumvent copy protections.

There’s no question that Reuters marketed the story. Selling stories to its customers is the way it makes money, and several copyright lawyers suggest the “bad intent” language of those sections can easily apply to news stories. Reuters would have to be massively na•ve to believe that hundreds of music-sharing fans around the wouldn’t test the magic marker technique on Sony CDs as soon as they read the story.

Personally, I doubt anything will come of it. I do think it’s about time for a really good First Ammendment vs DMCA court case, and this is such a great opportunity. And hopefully they won’t come after me for posting a link to that article. 😉

A while back I noticed a neat feature over on s l a m called radioScan. The idea was that you could pop up a window that let you search the titles of posts in a blog.

While I thought that feature was kind of neat, it wasn’t quite what I was looking for. I wanted something that would include a list of recent posts on my web page. I dug into the code and figured out how to make it work. The hardest part was figuring out how to exclude posts that didn’t appear on the home page. And, for people looking to learn more about programming Radio Userland, I found a great programming pointers page.

The Shifted Librarian has a cool post about back-blogrolling. It is when someone has written code so that if you want them to, they can see how often you visit their site.

I wonder if that would affect how often I view some sites. A lot of time during the day if I’ve got a spare bit of time I’ll just cycle through my unmonitored blog listing. It might feel odd being so obviously monitored.