So, Apple unveiled their shiny new toys today. The Apple Music Store is a good idea, but the music selection is still very limited. Of the twenty random artists in my music collection I searched for, I got zero results. Unless you count some random redneck country hillbilly music when I searched for God Module.

As Magnus noted, Apple makes the typical corporate thing and presents an obvious thing as something they just invented; in this case fair usage rights. Though you can only listen to the music on three different computers. While consumers do have fair rights, the companies aren’t forced to make it possible to exercise that right.

This, however, is the wave of the future. $0.99 for a song or $9.99 for the whole album is very affordable — you can either pick just the songs you like or get the whole album for less than a hardcopy would cost. What I haven’t been able to find out is if you are allowed to re-download songs if you lose your local copy in some way, or if you have to buy them again. I suppose Apple already has thought of this and tied the purchased tracks to your account.

Here’s an older post where I rant about evil record companies.

To the horde of you who get my feeds from /index.rdf and /index.xml: they now live, and have done for several months, in another place. Refer to the links in the sidebar for new URLs.

The ones in the root dir were actually symlinks to the new location, but now I’m generating a proper Error 301 (Resource moved) for them instead. Thanks to Mark for the howto.

OK, who do I shoot for thinking up the idea with a web site that’s only available between 7 AM and midnight?

Retards.

Either someone was using a spoofed referrer, or the International Atomic Energy Agency had a link to me on their front page. I vote for the first option.

Bloggers have nothing better to do than inspect their httpd access logs.

As it happens, I have a heap of money in the bank that I don’t know what to do with. For the first time in my life, my income is a fair bit larger than my expenses.

I’ve been thinking about buying myself a laptop. An iBook, to be more specific. Apple recently beefed up the iBook line with 900MHz G3 CPUs for the high-end iBook. The configuration I’m looking at — 900MHz, 384 MB RAM, 60 GB hard drive — would cost about 17,300 SEK. While it’s a nice laptop, you can get an equal or faster x86 laptop for far less than that.

It’s not the speed that’s a primary concern for my laptop needs, though. And I’m still not convinced that I actually want one. There are other things (read: toys) I could spend the money on. I’ve been thinking about buying a new TV as well.

To be honest I can afford both an iBook and a TV, but I would prefer to save some money for a rainy day.

Well. No hurry. I’ll think about it some more.

Dean Allen has a new pet project with the very nice name of Textbox (wish I had thought of it first — would be perfect for a blog). Textbox will be a web log hosting service running his own homegrown Textpattern system.

At the same time, Ben and Mena Trott, masterminds pulling the strings at Six Apart have announced a web log hosting service running their own Movable Type, which also is the system running my site if you’re new to the blogging thingie.

I sense a trend here.

Says Linus Torvalds:

Ok, there’s no way to do this gracefully, so I won’t even try. I’m going to just hunker down for some really impressive extended flaming, and my asbestos underwear is firmly in place, and extremely uncomfortable.

I want to make it clear that DRM is perfectly ok with Linux!

There, I’ve said it. I’m out of the closet. So bring it on…