When I was a media specialist (school librarian), I used to read a book called The Toll-Bridge Troll (say that three times fast). It was about a mean little troll that would stop people, usually poor innocent children, at his bridge and demand they pay him a fee for crossing. One smart little boy decided that he couldn’t afford the “penny a day” fees the troll demanded from him, and…
The world is open source.
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Argh! Pirates Going to Jail
It looks like the three men held responsible for The Pirate Bay torrent file sharing site are going to prison. A Sweedish court of appeals upheld the judgement against them, which includes a $6.7 million judgement (as if those men really can afford to pay it) and a sentence of one year in prison. On the plus side, their sentences were reduced to a few months. Nevertheless, organizations like the…
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Wikipedia’s Extortionist Fundraising
Wikipedia is trying to raise money. That is nothing new. It is run by a non-profit organization called the Wikimedia Foundation. Ever so often, they have fundraisers, much in the same way PBS or NPR might truncate your favorite show with a pledge drive. This is normal and an acceptable part of non-profit media. This year, however, Wikipedia has come up with a new strategy. Rather than having a picture…
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Jupiter, Netbooks, and Super Hybrid Engines
One of the unique features of the Asus Eee PC is a function called Super Hybrid Engine (or what I like to call SHE) , which I’m told has nothing to do with the hybrid engine pictured above. On a Windows-powered machine, simply press Fn+Space to send your Eee PC into super speed (High Performance) or ludicrous speed (Maximum Performance). When on battery power, it offers a PowerSave mode just…
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Easy Samba Setup with KDE
As promised, I wrote an article about setting up Samba in KDE. It is not immediately obvious how to set it up in KDE, but it is easy if you follow the steps I have illustrated. I have tested this method, so it should work for most Linux distributions and other Unix variants, as long as they have standard KDE installations. Boxee recognizes Samba shares immediately. All you have to…
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Network Shares for Boxee: Samba Beats UPnP
The Boxee Box is making big news, but for those of us who are not rushing out to spend $200 on a new device for our TVs, Boxee is free to download and install on any computer. I have it installed on my Asus EeePC 1201n running Kubuntu, which has an HDMI output, along with my 25-foot HDMI cable. Boxee works well playing videos from the Internet or from the…
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Hulu Plus: Close But Not Quite
I just finished watching the latest episode of The Event on my Sony Blu-ray Disc player, using Hulu Plus streaming video. It played well with a clear HD picture, and it was nice to sit in front of the TV to watch it, rather than at a computer. Despite that good experience, Hulu Plus falls short in other areas. For one, the presence of ads, even with a $10 per…
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Truly Readable E-Books (Thanks to HTML5)
Reading a book on a website is a bit like holding a book upside down and turning pages with your nose. Because most websites are designed with standard HTML, there is no easy way to give a user true page-by-page performance. The result is the incessant scrolling and clicking that you do with normal web pages, only magnified by however many hundreds of pages the book has. The ideal solution…
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Hulu Plus, Sony Bluray
This morning, Hulu Plus seems to be available on our Sony Bluray Disc Player. I watched a sample video without any problems (other than our bad DSL connection – thanks AT&T), but the quality was good. I have not actually signed up, but it appears as though the app is ready. Just two days ago, Hulu released a statement saying the app for Bravia TVs was ready but not for…