More on copyright and digital media in Aus

New laws target modchip users, and, you know, everyone else.

Two steps forward, three steps backwards. I can’t believe we’re being dragged into this crap. Slightly too angry about this (yeah I knew it was coming but hadn’t had occasion to address it) to blog rationally about the issue — insert usual remarks about my illegal downloading and installation of DVD CSS circumvention software, SharpMusique, etcetera, and the general criminalisation of broadly compatible open source software.

So apparently I cop five years in prison if I share some de CSS software with someone so they can watch content they’ve paid for. Guess what the maximum term for copyright violation is? Yeah, five years. Bastards. Solution: Download pirated versions of content that have broader compatability, exposing yourself to the same extent for vastly less effort.

Q.E.freakin’.D.

The Irony of Slowing Down

is that, whilst doing so, you were jaywalking and consequently unable to beat the oncoming bus. I decide to have a week off between jobs and go slow on uni for a day to recover from a near-cold and end up with conjunctivitis and a course of anti-biotics. I generally avoid significant illness so its nice to get this out of the way now, before summer starts properly!

So this is week #2 off work, with a fair amount of uni also not-attended so far this week (I managed an impressive three hours yesterday afternoon, and a lecture for the grammar english course on Tuesday evening, and managed to deliberately avoid, sleep through, or decide against attending the rest). I’ve a decent attendance record in most courses so far this semester so I didn’t bother with certs for the first half of the week… but then I had to go see a doc this morning about the eye and I’m supposedly on these meds for a week now. So, assuming they work in appropriate time, I’d still be rocking up to uni with a notoriously contagious thingy for the first half of next week… which means I might even end up missing more class. Which is ridiculous. Anyway I’ve got a lull in assessment at least… I was trying to write a pres earlier this week between phlegm-filled breaths, and ended up giving it unable to really speak… it’s about Renaissance thought in early modern Europe; unfortunately there was no opportunity to work in any plague allusions ;-)

Speaking of early modern Europe, there was the annual bookfest at University of Sydney from Saturday through to yesterday (Wednesday) which was so awesome. I say speaking of early modern Europe because I now have a collection on the subject (sans journal articles, etc., but there’s always Gale/ProQuest et al.) on par with that of Fisher library. The uni gets rid of low-circulation books, and also sells donations from the box you’ve probably walked past a thousand times and not really thought much about (if you’re a USyd student who at least pretends to study) on the way into Fisher on the left. Everything is dirt cheap… I went with Selo and we both by pure chance spent exactly $33, which netted us two A4 ream box sized piles of books. The first few days are prices as marked, but Tuesday it’s $10/A4 box, and on Wednesday it’s down to $5! I really wanted to go and have a look at what was left but wasn’t quite up to it. Everything is put out on Saturday so the collection would have seriously diminished by Wednesday, but given the sheer scope of it (it’s in the Great Hall of the Quad, and imagine if you will the entire floor space in there covered about three layers deep in books and you have an approximate starting number) chances are there’d still be some gems for the uncovering!

Yeah… so $33 would normally buy me five books, less if they’re academic reference/not classics/M&B (kidding). Did seriously well.

In other news, I’ve spent my recovery time battling with Wine to little avail. I tried installing it a few times (insert alcohol related jokes here) and got increasingly no-where, or sort of did, but then ended up hitting a brick wall (passed out in a pool of my own vomit, so to speak). So I installed Steam and spent $9.95 (USD! Tim was wrong, or at least Selo quoting Tim was wrong… either way, my receipt says USD) on Counter-Strike (to which I have moral objections, because the idea of spending money — even $US10 — on a free mod is preposterous) for the MCE computer which kicks butt (well, kicks butt once I figured out how to check the blindingly obvious “Widescreen” box).

Then I bought HL GotY pack on eBay that comes with four CDs or something and will hopefully install on Linux fantasically without Steam. Or, sort of with Steam but in a less-dependent-upon-it kind of way that makes everything run slightly happier. Good fragging times ahead, hopefully. Worst case I buy a decent wireless keyboard + mouse (yeah, one of those five-button things, I’m sold!) and use the MCE box instead… it’ll just mean higher framerates at the expense of having to walk downstairs, and probably a better gaming experience (can you say 5.1 and 32″ screen?) anyway. But it’s on Windows, and… insert idealistic rant here. Sigh!

Intoxication

I just tried Wine again for the first time in about twelve months (last attempt was with eTax, useless IE-dependent thing that it is, last year. After a bit of configging it worked but couldn’t submit because of that dependency… it saved a data file I could submit with Windows, though) and am astounded.

After zero-config, installers work magically, 3d engines function, and everything is generally incredible. I read this on someone’s blog earlier today: “with that I was able to install the latest Wine (0.9.18 at the time of this writing). This comes with better support for HL2 and WoW.” and consequently was afraid the version in non-backports Ubuntu would be ancient, etcetera, and generally useless.

No, the author is correct in saying “better support” — there is intrinsically fantastic support for pretty much everything. It’s incredible. Now I’ve just got to get some time in which to play various games. Linux, apparently, is no longer a barrier to entry, and Loki Games (R.I.P.) would face an ever-diminishing challenge as compatability layers keep growing in their sheer brilliance.

I’ve yet to try productivity applications, but am content with having tentatively embraced the gamer side of geek for one weekend. I’d love to give Dreamweaver a whirl, but am unlikely to be doing enough development work to justify it for the next couple of months. MS Office would be a pleasant addition to the repertoire, though OpenOffice is excellent for most applications. I’d never go back to using Word for preparing real documents, but perhaps for things requiring collaboration/versioning it’s the best choice. I’d probably get MS Office for creating Powerpoint templates/editing other people’s work before I had any real need for it myself, so these things are still pretty unnecessary. It’s just fantastic to think that it is, all of a sudden, a possibility.

The irony of all this is that I’m waxing lyrical about closed-source apps when the actual intent of this post is to extoll the brilliance of F/OSS’s progress. Purists would argue otherwise… but they’re wrong :-)

Kelly’s Steakhouse at Bondi Junction

Good food and even better steak knives. The knives are spectacular. Some fun was had stabbing lambs but we shortly desisted upon realising how much noise we were making as the knives sailed through the flesh and loudly collided with the plate beneath. Scared yet? ;-) I like knives :-)

Rare gutter

With added water.