Mokka mit Schlag » Pop Culture

I am not a musician or a composer. I can’t personally hear or judge the complexity of different songs and records. However I recently noticed that maybe I don’t have to. I’ve been reencoding most of my CD library using Lame. Lame uses variable bit rate encoding. I’m sure audiophiles will correct this simplistic explanation, but in brief Lame samples different pieces of a song with more or less frequency as necessary to match the music. A pure tone could probably be reproduced using very limited sampling, whereas a dissonant cacophony of white noise with no predictability would require a very high sampling rate. Lame also takes into count the nature of the human ear. Frequencies humans can’t hear can be thrown away, and frequencies we hear preferentially need to be sampled more frequently.
(more…)

The Guardian explains how copy protecttion is now even befuddling and bedeviling wealthy movie producers. When are people going to realize this stuff is more trouble than it’s worth? It’s not like I can’t go out onto the streets of New York City right now and find a pirated copy of Munich. Copy protection only hurts the honest, who in this case include people who might have otherwise voted for a Munich for a BAFTA award.

My parents recently bought a DVD player and asked for some old musical DVDs for Christmas. (Yes they’re a few years behind the times. That’s what makes them parents.) Personally I’ve been quite fond of my BlockBuster Online membership. It’s a huge improvement over the local video store, so I thought I’d look into buying my parents a one-year gift membership for Christmas, then I could keep renewing it every Christmas.

Short version: I went to the local discount DVD store and bought them a stack of DVDs instead. Why? Because Blockbuster wouldn’t let me buy my parents a gift. Oh sure, BlockBuster has a page on their site for a gift membership, but they won’t actually let me pay for it. In order to sign up my father would have to give them his credit card and agree to their terms and conditions. It doesn’t feel like much of a gift to me if it requires the recipient to pay.

Now I know there are reasons Blockbuster wants a credit card. Among other things, it helps them to avoid people walking off with their DVDs and never returning them. But is that really a problem? They’re my parents. I trust them, and I’m willing to put any DVDs they accidentally damage or lose on my card. Why won’t BlockBuster let me buy a gift for my parents? There’s another reason: they want to keep charging my parents even after the gift subscription runs out, even if they don’t want to continue the service. That’s scummy. That’s despicable marketing perpetrated by dishonest companies (not that there aren’t a lot of such companies out there). And who wants to give or receive a Christmas gift that comes with strings attached including an 8000 word contract and an indemnification clause?

P.S. NetFlix blew it too.

The Guardian has published a list of the Top 20 Geek novels. (More specifically “the best geek novels written in English since 1932.”) The list seems mostly correct to me except for the omission of the Lord of the Rings and perhaps To Your Scattered Bodies Go. One of the books on the list was a life changing and mind altering experience for me (The Illuminatus Trilogy!).
(more…)