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Rob Griffiths

I just don’t understand…

I read today that pearworks has been forced to discontinue distribution of their awesome pearLyrics widget--this handy tool downloaded and displayed the lyrics for the currently-playing iTunes song. pearworks received a cease and decist letter from Warner/Chappell Music Limited, requiring that pearLyrics be removed from distribution. You can read more about it here on the pearLyrics site.

The reason for this posting, though, isn't to try to start a groundswell of opinion to get pearLyrics back on the market (though that would be a nice outcome). Instead, there's a Big Picture item here that I just don't get: why do the record companies care about the distribution of lyrics? Regardless of whether I own a CD by Band X or not, why does any record company care if there are lyrics servers out there distributing the words Band X's music? I understand that the lyrics are copyrighted, but it's not like the words do a lot of good to anyone without the music (do they? Is that what I'm missing?). And this isn't a case where someone's done something like scanned the latest Grisham novel and put it online for download--in that case, the product is the words, and the artist is clearly damaged by the distribution of the scanned words. But with songs, the words themselvese aren't really good for much of anything without the accompanying music and vocals, right? So why do the record companies care?

To me, this is completely 100% backwards from how it should be--I would think record companies would want people distributing lyrics to songs. That way, someone might stumble across a song with interesting words, and then go out and (gasp!) purchase the song. Instead, the record companies are going out of their way to prevent the distribution of lyrics. Can someone brighter than I explain exactly why they're concerned about this? Like Windows and $50,000+ Cadillac pickup trucks, I just don't get it, so I assume I must be missing something obvious.



I’m in the wrong business…

Disclaimer: This post is only very barely, just kind of a little tiny bit, related to anything in the world of technology. If that bothers you, stop reading now. :)

Moose Muffin bookA while back, someone gave our daughter Kylie a present--a book called If You Give A Pig A Pancake. This slender book quickly became one of her favorites, probably because of the large illustrations on each page.

So we were out doing the weekly shopping on Saturday, and noticed another book by the same author. This one's called If You Give A Moose A Muffin. Knowing how much she liked the other one, we casually tossed the moose book in the cart and proceeded to check out. We get home, and sure enough, Kylie thinks this one's a winner too.

Then last night, I'm entering the shopping receipt into Quicken, and I nearly choked when I saw what we paid for the book--$15.99! Amazon has it cheaper, of course, but it's still not inexpensive...especially when you realize what you get for the money:

32 pages, including the inside cover, and a total of 304 words.

Using Amazon's price, that's about 3.5 cents per word (or 5.3 cents per word for what we paid). By itself, that may not sound like too much. But had my Panther book, at 174,907 words, been priced similarly, it would have retailed for ... $6,121.75 (or $9,270 at 5.3 cents/word)! Zowie! On the other hand, if we could have sold even two or three at that price... ;)

Now, in all seriousness, this is a great book with funny text and wonderful full-page color illustrations, which probably accounts for the majority of the cost. Still, I've learned two things from this. First, always check the tag on a children's book before throwing it in the cart--the thickness of the book is clearly independent from the price of said book. And second, I'm going to put the other "Give A..." books on Kylie's Christmas list right now!



Digital cameras, now and not quite now…

As a follow-up to my Cameras, then and now… story, here’s what’s happened with digital camera evolution in our household over the last three years.

As noted in the other writeup, our current digital camera is the Canon PowerShot SD400, a marvel of features and compactness that we bought this past July. It replaced a Canon PowerShot S30, which I purchased in January of 2002. So just how far have consumer digital cameras come in three years? Probably a lot farther than this article will demonstrate, as I’ll only be speaking to the differences in the two cameras we own. But even there, the changes are pretty dramatic, starting with (of course), the size:

s30 vs. sd400

[continue reading…]



Cameras, then and now…

Sometimes, in the everyday hustle and bustle of life, I sometimes overlook just how amazing the last twenty or so years have really been. This weekend, for instance, we undertook a (very often put-off but very important) project to electronically catalog all of our important assets, personal documents (passports, social security cards, etc.), and bank access info. I built a simple FileMaker Pro database off a standard template, and then started populating it with data—including images of various things. Once it’s done, we’re going to burn it to a CD, print out the contents, and take both the CD and the printout to a safety deposit box.

In the midst of all this, I was digging through the shelves, looking for potentially hidden assets, when I came upon an old camera of mine. No, not an old digital camera. An old consumer ‘point and shoot’ 35mm camera, the Pentax Zoom 105-R, which I bought in the fall of 1993. Back in the day, this was a really decent consumer 35mm camera, and relatively portable for its time. I seem to recall purchasing it for, among other things, it’s relatively small size.

But it was while snapping a photo of the old camera with my Canon PowerShot SD400 that I realized just how far cameras have come in the last 12 years:

cameras compared

[continue reading…]



For the long hint-less weekend…

Two extra days with no hints, and I doubt I'll write much on robservatory during that time ... so what to do, what to do!? To make up for the lack of hints and new writing from yours truly between now and Monday, here are some ways to amuse yourselves...

Have a great Thanksgiving, everyone!

-rob.



A strange error message

I use Butler as my launcher of choice, which means I launch most apps by typing Control-Space, then typing a few letters of the program’s name. Today, I made a typo and instead of launching my targeted app, Microsoft Graph launched. This little program is usually called from the Office apps, not as a standalone. So I wasn’t too surprised when the app displayed an error dialog on the screen. I was, however, surprised by the contents of the dialog:

Graph Error msg

Hmm, so I can only run Graph within another program, yet I’m given a Yes or No option when asked if it should quit now? Being the type of person I am, I chose No. Graph proceeded to open, and function in a most limited way—most features failed to work, but I was able to build a basic graph of sorts.

Seems to me that if the program is only going to work within another program, that dialog box should only have an “OK” button on it. Click it, and Graph should quit. Ah, the strangeness of error messages. Not quite as good as “No keyboard detected, press F1 to continue,” but it still made me chuckle a bit this morning.



Spotlight’s odd definition of a match

Tonight, while doing some testing for the ever-growing discussion about my Macworld Spotlight writeup, I stumbled across yet another ‘feature’ of Spotlight that I just don’t get. I’m think I remember reading this somewhere in the hazy past, but it slipped my mind when I wrote the long article for Macworld. But after playing around some more, this new ‘feature’ has jumped well up on my list of Spotlight annoyances.

So just what is this ‘feature’ that bothers me so? It’s this:

Spotlight will, by design, not find exactly what you asked it to find.

At this point, you might be saying ‘huh?,’ but let me explain by way of a simple demo.

[continue reading…]



More on Spotlight…

Macworld logoI know that not everyone that visits here reads my stuff over on Macworld's site, so I thought I'd put a quick note here, too. Over on Macworld today, you can read my latest opinion piece, A Dim View of Spotlight.

This piece is a follow-up to my original Shining the spotlight on Spotlight article, which (confusingly enough) appeared here on robservatory in May (I wrote it prior to the Macworld changeover). If you read the original, you can skip the whole "what I said back then" section in the new article, and just read through my latest thoughts on why Spotlight still isn't quite everything it could be.

Executive Summary: I don't like the way Spotlight works at all, but I still think it has great potential. Read the story for the specifics on why I feel that way!



A tale of three hardware interfaces…

As some of you may know, I’m relatively paranoid about backups—you can’t have too many, and you can’t make them often enough :). The macosxhints.com site is backed up twice a day via a set of scripts that use ssh and scp (and are scheduled via cron). For my personal machine, I use two external hard drives. The smaller of these two (an older version of this 250GB Maxtor drive) is used throughout the day to make backups of my key files. It also holds secondary copies of key things such as my iTunes music collection, iPhoto library, and digital video snippets. The larger of the two drives is a LaCie 500GB Triple Disk Extreme. At the end of each day, I run a full backup of the machine to the LaCie disk, and then power it down. But this article isn’t really about my backup strategy; it’s about the three interfaces on the Triple Disk Extreme (TDE), and a simplistic comparison of their performance on my machine (Dual 2.0GHz G5, first gen).

The TDE is so named due to its FireWire2, FireWire, and USB2 interfaces. A recent conversation with Chris Breen about FireWire vs. USB2 on the iPods led me to run a few tests on my hard drive, just to see how each interface performed. What got me started down this road is some stuff that Chris wrote in a couple of different iPod reviews:

In my tests, a dual-processor 2GHz Power Mac G5 filled a 6GB mini in 15 minutes and 17 seconds over USB 2.0. Using a FireWire connection shaved a scant 18 seconds off that time.

…

The nano is also quicker to sync than other iPods. I synced the same 903-track playlist on a 4GB nano and a 4GB iPod mini. It took 9 minutes and 15 seconds to sync the nano. The mini took nearly 7 minutes longer to sync, finally finishing the job in 16 minutes and 13 seconds.

So while USB 2.0 may not fare so well with other devices, as far as iPods go, syncing performance doesn’t appear to be a problem.

I thought I’d use my TDE to run a few tests in the Finder, just to see how things compared there. Read on for my results…

[continue reading…]



Protect your iPod Nano’s screen…

Apparently the new iPod Nano is very susceptible to screen scratches (The Register article, Apple Discussions). My wife and I just bought a white Nano to replace her Mini, so these stories concerned me quite a bit—the last thing you’d want is to have the already-dimunitive screen scratched to the point where text and images are hard to discern. People are talking about returning their devices, class action lawsuits, etc. I really like the Nano, and would rather not return it. And since ours isn’t yet scratched, I thought I’d try some preventative medicine.

Knowing that it will be a while yet before any customized Nano screen protectors and/or cases ship, I took a (very minor) risk and thought I’d try to make my own. I started, of course, with someone else’s handiwork—these Treo screen protectors. These are probably the best screen protectors I’ve seen for the Treo; they’re basically invisible, and they don’t permanently mar your Treo’s screen if/when you remove them. I had a couple left over from my Treo (as the protectors come in a three-pack), so I did a bit of measuring and got out the scissors. A minute or so later, I had my completed Nano screen protector. I peeled off the backing, stuck it to the Nano’s front, and it worked perfectly — it basically disappeared once placed (though I intentionally cut the border slightly larger than the Nano’s screen). It’s hard to take pictures of, but I tried my best; click on either image below for a larger version:

Nano unlitNano lit

As you can see, the protector is nearly invisible (and yes, the perfectionist in me has since gone back and re-centered it horizontally) whether the Nano is on or off. Since I did leave a slight border around the screen area, that edge is visible in the shots above (but it actually looks sort of natural there). Had I chosen to make the cover the exact size of the screen area, it would be even less visible. However, by leaving a border, I’ve made it easier to remove the cover in the future without risk of scratching the screen itself.

One of the reasons I like this screen protector a lot is that it’s easily removable and cleanable. The instructions state that you can lift the cover with a piece of scotch tape, but I’ve had better luck carefully sliding the edge of a sharp knife under the plastic, then prying up the corner. Once removed, you can wash the cover off with water to remove any dust, let it dry, and then put it back in place. I’ve had this one on and off a few times now, and (so far) it hasn’t left any marks on either the Nano’s case or screen.

This may not be a perfect solution, and who knows how well it will hold up over time, but for now, it seems like a reasonable investment to keep the Nano’s screen in scratch-free condition. As always, though, your mileage may vary and proceed at your own risk :).