Hooray for free Apple hardware! (Kilala.nl (Cailin Coilleach)) by Cailin Coilleach

Last week my colleague Albert mentioned that he had some old Apple hardware lying around that he needed to get rid of. Since the thing was still working, he though it a shame to just throw it away and so he was looking for a good home for the thing. Loving Apple classics I naturally obliged :)

I'm saying "classic" here, because the Powerbook 540c in question is supposedly one of the best laptops Apple's ever made. At the time (1994) it was nigh on revolutionary, with all kinds of features that'd never been seen before in a laptop. The 540c was even voted #2 Best Powerbook, right after the venerable Pismo G3.

As Albert promised, the Powerbook still runs perfectly well. It's got OS 7.5 on it and Word and Excel are even installed. Unfortunately one of the batteries is shot to pieces, while the other will still hold a nominal charge. I reckon this laptop will make a nice, first computer for our daughter to play games on in a few years. I'll just have to hope that the SCSI drive in it will hold out.

There's all kinds of improvements that I'm thinking of for this beasty. For one, I'm thinking of recelling the working battery with new NiMH batteries. I'm also looking for a way to get the laptop to work with Compact Flash cards. On the one hand this will make file exchange a lot easier and on the other it will make a perfect replacement for the SCSI drive. Apparently the 540 is perfectly capable of booting from a CF card. Unfortunately both of these improvements will cost at least a bunch of bucks apiece and for now I'm not at liberty to just spend money on old hardware.

Thanks Albert! You gave us a nice little plaything. We'll take good care of your old laptop :)

Posted in: apple , free , powerbook , powerbook 540c

More on "Lessig for Congress" (Martin Gordon's Blog (cptncelchu)) by Martin

Ars Technica has a great article today on Professor Lessig's potential run for Congress that I mentioned yesterday. The article does an excellent job of outlining Lessig's platform in far better detail than the one sentence I gave it. What's particularly interesting about his position is his desire to build a Creative Commons in Congress, where "[i]f politicians begin foreswearing PAC money, the theory runs, voters may come to see the failure to refuse lobbyist dollars as a badge of shame rather than simply the way things are done." This sounds like a very necessary change and requires the proverbial "Washington outsider" to really get going - Lessig is that outsider. Further, the article elaborates on the difference between Lessig and his greatest rival in the race, Jackie Speier. Lessig mentions that there aren't many differences, but that a focus on technology would give him an edge and that even though many prominent California Democrats have thrown their support behind Speier, the rush to consolidate support has frustrated voters who want more options. As I said yesterday, I can't wait to see how this plays out.

Technorati Tags: Larry Lessig, Lessig, Congress, Tom Lantos, Jackie Speier, Creative Commons, Free Culture, Change Congress, Draft Lessig

Posted in: books , copyright , free , government , information , internet , politics

Lessig May Run For Congress (Martin Gordon's Blog (cptncelchu)) by Martin

I wrote about Professor Larry Lessig's shift in focus from Free Culture to corruption in Washington when he gave his last Free Culture talk. Since then, a seat has opened up in Congress as a result of the death of California Congressman Tom Lantos. Lessig posted on his weblog earlier today that a Facebook group and the draftlessig08.org website have caused him to actually consider running.

I think Lessig has a great chance of winning thanks to support from the tech community. Having him in Congress would not only be excellent for his next project, but would also help along causes that current Congress members are either too tech illiterate or too influenced by money to really address the right way (one such cause being Net Neutrality).

There's no word on when he'll make a decision, but along with the rest of the tech community, I wait with bated breath.

Technorati Tags: Larry Lessig, Lessig, Congress, Tom Lantos, Free Culture, Change Congress, Draft Lessig

Posted in: books , copyright , free , government , information , internet , politics

Larry Lessig's Last Free Culture Talk (Martin Gordon's Blog (cptncelchu)) by Martin

Larry Lessig will be giving his last talk on the topic of "Free Culture" in about an hour. I had the pleasure of seeing Professor Lessig give this talk in September of 2006 as part of the Penn Reading Project and I think the ideas he presents are fascinating and have had a great impact on me. We've come a long way in some areas, such as in the slow death of over-restrictive DRM, but we're still a ways to go in other areas, such as the predatory litigation undertaken by the music and movie industries. As the blog post announcing the talk mentions, Professor Lessig will begin focusing on corruption in Washington, a topic I'm admittedly less interested in.

Technorati Tags: Larry Lessig, copyright, creative commons, DRM, intellectual property, Free Culture

Posted in: books , copyright , free , information , internet , movies , music , open source , penn , speech

Free Fiction: Holy Nepotism (Stonetable) by Adam

I occasionally join in the weekly Flash Fiction challenge with the good folks over at Absolute Write. Every Sunday, a prompt is given and you have ninety minutes to write something inspired by the prompt. It's a fun exercise, and a good way to experiment with different styles/genres. This particular piece is based on the prompt "root". I did shop this around to a few magazines that took humor like this. I did collect three rejections, one being a "near miss". Rather than shop this around, I decided to post it here. Read now: Holy Nepotism Posted in: fiction , flash , free , writing

Free NY Times Select for .edu's (Martin Gordon's Blog (cptncelchu)) by Martin

Scott points out that the New York Times premium content, NYT Select, is free for current students and faculty. It only requires a .edu address, so alumni with lifetime addresses would likely fly under the radar. YMMV

And because it wouldn't be a 2007 blog post with a Twitter mention…

I've signed up but still haven't gone through the registration yet. Twittervision is too time-consuming for me to have enough time to even skim the New York Times.

Technorati Tags: free, newspaper, NYT, New York Times, New York Times Select, education, edu, students, faculty, academia, university, college

Posted in: education , free , news , school , traditional media

DreamHost Gives Free Webhosting to Non-Profits (Martin Gordon's Blog (cptncelchu)) by Martin

My webhost of almost two years, Dreamhost, is offering free hosting to non-profits, forever. This isn't a cheapo 10MB plan either, it's their Strictly Business plan, which offers 500GB of storage and 5TB of bandwidth a month and costs $80/month.

Technorati Tags: Dreamhost, hosting, webhost, nonprofit, free, business, bandwidth

Posted in: business , free , nonprofit

Penn Unveils Ruckus Music Service, Alienates Mac/Linux Users (Martin Gordon's Blog (cptncelchu)) by Martin

I just got an email from our Undergraduate Assembly chair announcing that Ruckus will be available to all Penn students for free (read: factored into tuition):

The Undergraduate Assembly, working with GAPSA, College Houses and Academic
Services, the Residential Advisory Board, and Information Systems and Computing
proudly provide a FREE, legal, music downloading service to all Penn students.

http://www.upenn.edu/computing/music/index.html

The Ruckus music library contains over 1.5 million tracks of music!

Ruckus offers:

* Unlimited downloads of music to your computer
* Downloads that are legal, virus free and sypware free
* New releases added every Wednesday
* Albums download in under a minute
* Online community, allowing you to trade playlists, share
recommendations and connect with friends
* Hundreds of movie titles and many current and classic television
series for an extra fee
* For more information about Ruckus at Penn, read the FAQ
-NOTE: Does not upload songs to iPod-

For what it's worth, here is the Daily Pennsylvanian article on it and the University FAQ page.

I do have to say that this is a huge disappointment. While I don't necessarily condone piracy and I do understand the University's need to cover their asses, they could have tried something a little more out of the box. Penn alum, Larry Lessig, spoke here for New Student Orientation. Why not work something out with Creative Commons? I'm sure the Podsafe Music Network wouldn't mind the exposure if they were willing to work out a deal. eMusic offers DRM-free (and hence cross-platform) music. What about a straight subsidy for a subscription based on the student's choice? I'll take $100/year from the iTunes Store over a worthless subscription to Ruckus. Now, I'm not discounting the evils of Apple's closed system, but if you want everyone to use your service, make it work on the devices everyone already used (I know this is impossible in the current state of things).

This is just stupid, stupid, stupid. Despite being pretty OS-agnostic, the University is now indirectly adopting Windows as the default OS choice. Imagine campus sales rep: "Well, the Mac would be ideal for your photography/filmography major, but you won't have access to the music service you're forced to buy into." And what about the 80%+ marketshare (probably a lot higher in college) the iPod holds? How do you explain to Joe English Major that his iPod can't play the music he's listening to on his PC? Even Microsoft's own Zune music player won't play PlaysForSure music from other services.

Is this new music service going to make music piracy disappear on campus? Absolutely not. Mac and Linux users gain nothing from the service and will continue to acquire music by the same means they used to. Windows users with iPods are in the same boat. They'll continue to pirate music or buy it from iTunes so it'll play on the iPod. Those that are able to might try it out, but it's not going to replace conventional means. Meanwhile, I'll be subsidizing this little experiment while listening to my free podcasts and live recordings.

Technorati Tags: University of Pennsylvania, Penn, UPenn, DRM, copyright, music, online music, Ruckus, subscriptions, Windows, PlaysForSure, Apple, iTunes, Creative Commons, iPod, Microsoft, Zune, eMusic, student government

Posted in: copyright , drm , file sharing , free , internet , music , online , piracy