You can now view the University of Waterloo’s Gazette feature article on copyright from May 16, 1979, on my web site. I became interested in this article when I first saw it on the Today in UW history web page. The page describes Canada’s copyright law as “antiquated”, which many would agree holds true today. Hopefully you will find this article useful for analyzing how copyright law was in the past and how it has adapted to meet new technologies. This article is especially relevant now with a new copyright bill likely to be tabled within the next 4 weeks (or maybe not). Those interested in doing something about Canadian copyright law should join a group like Waterloo Students for the Information Commons or Digital Copyright Canada.
(This post is for content owners, such as recording and publishing companies and independent artists, as well as for consumers. While it is aimed primarily at content owners because they are ultimately the people who decide how content is distributed, it is important that consumers also read it so they know how to facilitate the changes I propose.)
The Internet and its widespread availability to the general population (not yet true in many countries, but hopefully changing soon) have made distributing digital content to large numbers of people very easy. Books, academic journals, music, videos and many other creative works can be transferred from one computer to many others in a matter of minutes or often just seconds. However, most of that content is not allowed to be transmitted in that way. Why not? What can content owners and consumers do about it?
Continue reading ‘Content owners: Use web-based distribution now’
I am a copyright stickler. I try to discourage infringement of copyright laws whenever possible. As a result, my wishes often directly clash with the wishes of others that I socialize with. I suspect other copyright sticklers can relate. Though I wish more people cared about not infringing copyright, it’s difficult to change people’s minds on this issue so I won’t attempt to do that here. Rather, I will outline a situation where I felt uncomfortable discouraging copyright infringement in hopes that it will show you the social influences that make such a situation possible and how you can avoid encouraging such a situation.
Continue reading ‘A call for sensitivity to copyright sticklers’
When games run in Wine switch to full screen, Wine chooses the first available refresh rate for the requested resolution by default. This can be problematic because the first refresh rate is often the lowest. For example, Wine may choose 60 Hz when 85 Hz is available for the same resolution because 60 Hz appears first in the list of display modes. On CRTs, 60 Hz is quite flickery so it hurts the eyes after a while.
Why does Wine do this? Because Windows does it, or at least it used to. More recent versions of Windows default to 75 Hz if it’s available and then try other modes if 75 Hz is not available. In any case, a default resolution is selected that the user may want to change. Microsoft added a feature to dxdiag that lets the user specify an override refresh rate which is used instead of the default. This feature is documented in KB315614 (main article), KB230002, and KB217348. However, Wine did not include this feature…until now.
I wrote a patch to implement the above dxdiag functionality, which allows Wine users to specify an override refresh rate. The patch has been implemented in the most recent version of Wine (0.9.58), which is available in the Wine Ubuntu repositories, Debian unstable, and the other usual download locations. Instructions on how to use it are available on the UsefulRegistryKeys wiki page. The key to look for is “ForceRefreshRate” in HKLM\Software\Microsoft\DirectDraw.
The commit information for the patch, including a diff, is available on the wine-cvs list.
I finally decided to do something about StarCraft’s CPU hogging, which, among other things, causes my battery to drain much faster than it should when I’m away from an outlet. The result is StarCraft Power Saver, a tool that patches StarCraft to use less CPU time. For full details, including download links and a summary of the problem, see the StarCraft Power Saver web page. Any public questions or concerns about the tool can be posted as a comment to this blog entry.
A number of people have posted to the OLPC Community Support mailing list asking which Secure Digital (SD) cards work with the OLPC XO laptop. I happened to have several SD cards around so I benchmarked these cards with the XO laptop and also with an ASUS Eee PC. For further comparison, I also tested all of the cards with a Transcend Multi-Card Reader M3 on my Dell Latitude D800.
Continue reading ‘OLPC XO and ASUS Eee PC SD card performance’
I have been watching TEDTalks off and on since a friend of mine introduced them to me a couple months ago. They are videos of presentations done at TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design), an annual conference that “brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers”. I would highly recommend browsing through them if you have a minute; there is some really good food for thought (and action) in there. All of the TED videos are licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND (Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works) license, which allows them to be freely redistributed as long as they are not modified.
To make them more accessible to me, I downloaded all the TED videos and put them on a computer running MythTV. Read on for details on how I did it and links to scripts that will automate the process for you if you have a MythTV setup or if you just want to download all the TED videos.
Continue reading ‘TEDTalks download script and MythTV metadata’
With the help of Stephen Paul Weber, I have created a web-based tool that plots Canadian automated banking machines (ABMs) using Google Maps, which is called ABM Locator. The first version of this tool (0.1) has just been released. I suggest viewing the live demo if you’re interested in seeing it work.
You can get the source code from the Download section of the ABM Locator project page or check it out from Subversion (also on the project page). Please send any comments, questions, bug reports, etc. to the mailing list.
I have released instructions and code for connecting a magnetic stripe reader to a computer using USB. These are an answer to a common problem that people wanting to get into the magstripe reading scene face: a gameport or parallel port is required for interfacing with a magstripe reader and many computers these days don’t have either.
The project that got me interested in reading magstripes is Stripe Snoop. I highly recommend it if you’re interesting in finding out what information is encoded on magnetic stripes, such as those on credit cards, debit cards, hotel access cards, etc.
I couldn’t have done the project without Dean Camera’s help. He created the MyUSB library that the project uses to do the USB communication. The library is GPLed, which is why I used it instead of the Atmel-provided library, which has a much more restrictive license.
This past Monday I was involved in an event to promote awareness of open content. I have setup a web page that documents a bit of what went on, which includes links to all of the music and videos used for the event. If you are interested in getting some free music (all Creative Commons-licensed) or would like some ideas for an open content awareness event of your own, I would highly recommend checking it out.
