Browsing the blog archives for April, 2003

Thoughts on Apple’s music store

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.

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Damn crazy Japanese

I’ll be keeping an eye out for a used copy of Ikaruga at TV-Spelsbörsen. It’s such a niched game that many will probably buy it, don’t like it and sell it again.

Also, it’s made by a bunch of crazy Japanese.

The new iPod looks darn sleek.

Via Penny Arcade I got wind of the next Phantasy Star Online game, and it’s going to be a collectible card game! To quote Tycho: “I don’t know if they could possibly have made a game that is more attractive to me.”

At the moment I’m playing Etherlords in Duel mode, which is major fun. It’s also a card game, where you use cards to summon creatures, cast enchantments and whoop your opponents using said creatures. There are several nice strategies available — my favorite deck is called “Clone Lord” and is based on cloning the creatures of the opponent and using them against him.

I like collectible card games. Nice, turn-based strategy. Etherlords 2 sounds promising.

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RSS feeds moved

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.

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Got anything to declare?

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

Retards.

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Blog log

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.

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To laptop or not to laptop?

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.

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Think inside the box

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.

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Bring your asbestos boxers

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…

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Growing up only happens to other people

There’s a phase in your life, usually the years before you hit the teens, where you somehow feel that it is important to act grown-up and eschew anything childish and immature.

Screw that, I say. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s stupid not to do something just because someone else might think of it as childish.

Thus, I feel perfectly fine in buying a Gamecube and sitting with a large smile on my face and playing Super Smash Bros Melée. Next Friday, Zelda: Wind Waker is released. Yay!

People should have a chat with their inner child more often.

Speaking of games, Tycho of Penny Arcade did a nice rant about a whole bunch of various shareware games: “I found a number of great games this weekend through various sources, and should you ever require respite from X where X equals some stupid bullshit, allow me to help.”

First out is Pom Pom, a company with a logo featuring a psycho-looking robot waving two pom poms. They have two games available; Mutant Storm and Space Tripper.

I found Space Tripper to be the most interesting of the two. It’s essentially a Defender clone, where you steer a space ship across a horisontally scrolling level and blowing stuff up. Apart from the arrow keys, you only need three buttons to control your ship: shoot, switch weapons and turn the ship around.

It’s a very simple idea (based on the 20-something year old Defender), but it still works. No story, no plot, just action. And big bosses.

Starscape from Moonpod Games looks very promising and entertaining indeed. Unfortunately, you can only play for 20 minutes in the demo version before you get kicked out of the game. That sucks… You really can’t get a good feeling for the game in 20 minutes. But I liked what little I played — should I happen to get a credit card or equivalent in the near future I’ll probably shell out $25 for the full game.

Via Jason Kottke I found Enigmo, a puzzle game similar to The Incredible Machine, if you happen to remember that one. Unfortunately I don’t have a Mac with the juice to play it.

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In Google we trust

Some search engine queries that led people to my site.

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