Skip to main content

Gadget Wisdom

Category: Lifestyle

0 Responses

Amazon MP3 Drops Linux Support, Adds DRM-Lite

DRM Is Killing Music

As we’ve previously mentioned, we’ve been redoing our music collection. Now, after weeks of part-time ripping, and some cleanup, it is time to upload the music to various sites, as a test.

Amazon has discontinued its music downloader for Linux and is no longer allowing Linux users to download the .azw file for use with a third-party application. The AZW files are used to download an entire album when purchased.

This occurred concurrently with the rollout of their new Cloud Player product, which included one other fun feature. DRM. Not on the file level. Amazon proudly sells DRM-free MP3s, but to upload or download albums, you need to authorize your device. You are allowed a maximum of 10 devices, you can deauthorize a device and the slot will reopen thirty days later. This includes Android devices. If you don’t do this, you can only download albums one track at a time.

We wanted to see who else was pointing out that this is a DRM-like feature, and came up with an interesting analysis of same by The Leisurely Historian. His theories are: (Comments are ours)

  • Compromise negotiated with music labels over cloud player – This seems the most likely. But, is increased monitoring of download/uploads really an unreasonable restriction? We made a complete backup of all of our Amazon purchases locally and we can copy it anywhere(even back to Amazon Cloud Drive, ironically.
  • Back door to DRM – We agree that DRM on Kindle and Video has been good to Amazon. But they can’t reverse course on music. So, they’ve created this hybrid model to support keeping people in their ecosystem.
  • This is all about User Tracking – This is quite possible. We have the tab…”You listened to ___, people who listened to ___ also bought ____.” This is the classic Amazon upsell method of getting you to buy more, based on offering you things they think you will like.
Basically, Amazon wants people to use Cloud Player and the Cloud Player apps. This keeps people inside their garden. So, bad enough we are forced to boot up Windows, which we never use, to retrieve/upload our music…but there is no indication from Amazon that they plan to restore Linux support in the future.
Even if they do not want to write Linux apps, they could provide developers with an API to build support into their products, but third-party support is not what they want on any platform.
Just to be fair, the web player does work on Linux. And, while we gave them $25 for a year of service, it does not mean we will next year…although it would cost more to store the same amount as data on Amazon S3(although there is always Glacier). It is just disappointing.
Related articles
Published on August 27, 2012
Full Post
0 Responses

Send Once, Read Everywhere – Kindle Everywhere

English: Amazon Kindle wordmark.
English: Amazon Kindle wordmark. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Earlier this week, Amazon launched the Send to Kindle Browser Extension for Chrome.

This adds to the Kindle ecosystem by allowing you to send web content to your Kindle, and choose to read it, or archive it for future use as part of the Kindle Personal Document Library.

Amazon continues to try to build the ecosystem of the Kindle. There are several third-party applications that had similar functionality, and multiple read it later services. But, one of the brilliant moves made with the Kindle is that it is completely platform agnostic. Amazon may make a Kindle Fire, and the e-ink line of Kindles, but they have desktop apps, mobile apps, a browser based reader, and continue to add functionality to the ecosystem completely independent of any hardware.

This is all part of the plan. People may complain about the walled gardens of certain closed systems, but if you can use your content on everything, then that is as close to open as you can get without actually being so.

Personal Documents was a good move on Amazon’s part, because it allowed reading of any document. People had been side-loading their own content anyway. Some even bought a Kindle and only acquired public-domain and free e-books. It makes the platform more valuable, which the tendency to buy from Amazon. Not only is your paid content there, but your personal content.

This is the sort of all-encompassing presence that turned Google into a verb for “To Search Online,” and iPad a synonym for any tablet(much as we correct people when they say so). Kindle is becoming a synonym for e-book, because of their presence in the market.

Once again, Amazon is getting our business because they have made it so easy, and removed the restrictions…although we hold out hope for more liberal policies in certain areas, we have already accepted the compromises.

That said, Send to Kindle is one more option that allows us to put more into the system, and makes it easy to do so, offering more options and integration than existing third-party options. Thus, it is worth a look.

Related articles
Published on August 17, 2012
Full Post
1 Response

Mandatory PSA: Secure Your Digital Life

The KeePass Password Safe icon.

Every tech pundit out there has been talking about the heartbreaking story of Mat Honan of Wired and how hackers used social engineering to gain access to one of his accounts, and the chain reaction results.

One of Honan’s problems stemmed from how his accounts were daisy-chained together. `The recovery email for one account led to another, account names on different networks were consistent, etc. Figuring out how to mitigate this requires some thought. We have multiple email accounts, and it will probably require some diagramming and planning to figure everything out there.

Then there are passwords. We admit to people all the time that we don’t even know half our passwords. We use a two-pronged attack on this. One is the open-source, multi-platform app KeePass. KeePass offers a password vault stored as a file, encrypted using a single Master Password. All of the passwords in it are generated by the program and impossible for most people to remember.

We also use Lastpass as a service. Lastpass has a plugin for every browser, offers one click login, form filling, and more. The basic service is free, but the premium version adds mobile support and additional features. We’re not using half of the options that it offers, even with the $12 a year we give them for premium.

But, as part of a redundant philosophy, you should have your most important passwords in multiple locations. Also, having passwords even you don’t know in vault means you can easily change your credentials regularly for individual sites, should you choose to. do so.

Two factor authentication, although it could be a bit more user friendly, is enabled for all Google accounts and Lastpass. This is not a challenge for hackers to hack. There’s nothing very interesting there anyway.

In security, the mantra is trust no one. Try to walk the line between paranoia and rationality very carefully.

The second issue is backup. This is an area where we could be better. We have a backup plan that needs to be upgraded. We have various cloud backup solutions, and a few local ones. They need to be unified. We’ll get back to this in a future post, once we create a checklist.

But, for those of you out there, let’s cover a few basics. Periodically, extract your online data and store a copy somewhere, both locally and remotely, in addition to your cloud storage. Try a relative’s house. The likelihood of you and your relative both suffering calamities is probably slim. Remember that sending your data to a remote drive and deleting your original copy is an archive, not a backup.

Make a plan, automate as much as possible, because manual action is so easy to get behind on.

So, backup, secure your accounts, do some planning…we’ll be back with more. Consider yourself warned.

Related articles
Published on August 12, 2012
Full Post
2 Responses

Ripping Music Revisited

Bundle of CDs.

Amazon MP3 Tech Support is useless. Of course, as friendly as Amazon is, they have been consistent useless to us. From insisting our package would be delivered when UPS insisted it had been delayed to the latest, asking us to email log files repeatedly to an address that sent back it did not accept incoming emails…and it was apparently correct as we’re still waiting.

At the beginning of the month, we wrote about Amazon upgrading Cloud Player. It prompted us to break out our music collection and try uploading it. Now, we’ve gone back and forth about cloud based music, having tried the now defunct mp3tunes, Moozone, Google Music, and Amazon Cloud Player.

We’ve also bought a lot of DRM-free MP3 files from Amazon during sales. Amazon is great at sales.

So, it made sense to give Amazon a shot, as they’ll store anything you buy from them for free. Their new model is $25 a year for more song space than we can use, and a good amount of general file storage. If only they had full Linux support and/or an API. But we hope this will come soon, at least for the Cloud Drive.

So, we uploaded the entire collection overnight. However, it was several messed up in the metadata department. We spoke to Amazon, and they did not offer any suggestions. We’d had similar problems with Moozone and with Google Music.

Deciding the problem was likely with the decisions made during the initial ripping, we made the decision to rerip the entire collection. Armed with an old laptop and an external hard drive, we’ve been slowly making our way through the collection.

One of the issues came from the decision to originally rip into the Ogg Vorbis format. Now, this was a freedom based decision. We wanted to support open standards, and still do. But, the limitations of this have come to bite us many times. Most notably that Moozone is the only cloud storage that offers decent Ogg support without transcoding, and Moozone appears to be dead in terms of development.

That alone wouldn’t have caused us to go back and destroy all the old files. We’re not audiophile enough to try 320kbps or FLAC, but the original files did show some encoding glitches, and we will be encoding at 256kbps MP3 as opposed to the originally quality of roughly 192kbps, but the big issue was metadata. Our metadata was in horrible shape, and made it impossible to find things.

The hardest type of album to deal with, of which we have many, are ones with multiple artists. ID3 tags initially did not have support. The Album Artist tag came later. In fact, up until more recently, our audio file tagging program on Linux, Easytag, didn’t support the Album Artist tag. It now does, which is most helpful. The other helpful tool was the free MusicBrainz Picard, available for multiple platforms, which encodes files with metadata from the MusicBrainz database.

Even with this, being the musical mavericks we are, there are plenty of CDs we have that have nonexistent or incomplete entries in these databases, that we’ll be going through manually. Also, this has inspired us to fill some gaps in the collection. Some of the files were encoded from audio cassettes, and we’ve been using Amazon Marketplace to purchase selected used CDs of said content for cheap, allowing high quality copies to be made.

It may be time to finally throw away the tapes., however, and go completely digital. As we migrate further from analog media, it is odd we have no intention of chucking the vinyl. What makes vinyl so nostalgic and tapes..not?

So, the above chronicles the journey from freedom loving Ogg user in search of a cloud to freedom-hating individual seeking to be locked into one platform…or not. The truth is, no matter what, we’re committed to a local copy. Cloud services are wonderful for keeping a backup copy, and pulling music on the go when you have a hankering for something from your collection, but trusting any service 100% is foolish, and we all need to be more diligent about that.

Our ripping is being done with Linux based tools. Audex is currently handling the ripping, Easytag the tag editing, and Picard filling in extra metadata. Amazon is providing cover art and data for manual correction as needed from their vast library of pages. This is vastly different from last time. Although things have changed, and ripping music from CDs isn’t as popular as it once was in this digital age, would be curious to see what people think, which is the purpose for this post.

How do you build a perfect digital music collection, what tools(Linux-based preferably) do you use to build it, and what do you do with your collection?

For one, we’ve never created a single playlist. Playlists are the mix-tapes of the modern era. Perhaps it is time to find the mix tape we made in the 90s…Songs to Be Depressed By, and recreate it for the modern era. (Songs to Be Depressed By were actually uplifting songs)

Related articles
Published on August 11, 2012
Full Post
1 Response

Amazon Cloud Player Updates – Matches Competitors

Amazon MP3 LogoWe’ve had a long road in cloud music. Back in December of last year, we compared the limitations of Google Music to that of Amazon MP3. At the time, Google won. The Amazon web player was not feature filled, the Google Music interface won, for ability to enter metadata, among other things.

But that has changed. Amazon announced a new revamped cloud offering. The most significant innovation is one that iTunes already offers, and that Amazon will now as well. Amazon will scan music libraries and match the songs on their computers to their catalog. All matched songs – even music purchased elsewhere or ripped from CDs will be made instantly available in Cloud Player as 256 Kbps audio.

Cloud Player now allows editing of metadata inside the player, a feature Google has had for some time.

Amazon Cloud Player is expanding to the Roku Box.

And, unlike previously, music purchased prior to the announcement of Amazon Cloud Player will now be available in your box. This was always a pet peeve, as Amazon knew the music was purchased…you bought it from them.

The new Cloud Player offers two options.

  • Cloud Player Free – Store all music purchased from Amazon, plus 250 songs.
  • Cloud Player Premium – Store up to 250,000 songs for $25 a year.

Amazon Cloud Player is now separate from Amazon Cloud Drive. Drive will now be used exclusively for file storage. 5GB is offered free, and 20GB is available for $10 per year.

In both cases, this is a compelling offer. However, there are some things missing. No Linux client for the desktop apps for either Drive or Player. No API for third-party development, which we’ve mentioned before.

How does this compare to Google Music? Google Music, since we last visited it, sells music itself…offers limited download functionality, and still has several limitations. Amazon is looking a lot more compelling.

Related articles
Published on August 1, 2012
Full Post
0 Responses

Mixing up the Workflow and Avoiding Overload

This is not the first time we’ve talked about our workflow. It has evolved over the years. Our workflow currently consists of a Read It Laterservice and a

If This Then That. com

long-term bookmark archiving service.

When we started, the Read it Later service was Instapaper. We adopted Pinboard as the long-term archiving service. It is nice to know all the reference material we might use is stored for later use.

We later moved to Read It Later, which has recently rebranded as Pocket. The problem is we have 11,000+ bookmarks in Pinboard, and near 3000 in Pocket. Just reading all the stuff we need to learn to keep informed is a challenge.

[asa]B006GRYADO[/asa]

Clay Johnson’s The Information Diet discusses this problem, and makes a large amount of suggestions on the subject. He refers to the idea as infoveganism. This is not to say we totally agree with Mr. Johnson, but we see the point that information overload is a problem.

Last year, Ars Technical posted an opinion piece titled, “Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity.” Perhaps RSS is but so is the alternative, social media. Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, etc are all sources of often repeating information. Who can keep up with all that?

The secret to a good workflow is to wisely choose your information flows, keep your inbox empty, and try to schedule spring cleaning for your accounts the same as anything else.

As part of that, we’re trying out ifttt.com, which allows you to tie together parts of the Internet. Using If This Then That logic, you can tie things together. For example, since Pocket support in Pinboard doesn’t allow bookmarks to be added when read, ifttt.com can add this functionality. There are dozens of suggested tieups between sites that otherwise would not be possible.

It is time to liquidate the Pocket account, get up to date, prune the Reader accounts again, prune the Twitter followers…

What is your workflow?

Related articles
Published on May 4, 2012
Full Post
0 Responses

The Asus Transformer as a Productivity Device

Asus_EeePAD_Transformer_TF101_49
Asus_EeePAD_Transformer_TF101_49 (Photo credit: blogeee.net)

Last time on Gadget Wisdom, we were asking the question of whether a tablet can be your primary computer.

After we wrote this, we headed off on a long weekend with only an Asus Transformer. This is the original Asus Transformer TF101, not the newer Transformer Prime, but the concept is basically the same. If you want the benefits of a tablet, with the option to produce longer form content as needed, this is a perfect choice.

The tablet is wonderful for consumption of content. There are not enough tablet apps for Android, but there are enough to make us optimistic for the future.

Let’s go over a few of the apps we’ve started to use…

 News Reading

  • Reader HD (Free Version, Ad Free Version) – The best Google Reader app for Android tablets, in our opinion. The developer is very responsive with bug and feature requestss

There are a variety of magazine style news readers that draw from a variety of sources. Even Reader HD offers a magazine mode. We hope the promised version of ReadItLater Pro for tablets arrives soon, but the current version is adequate.

Word Processing/Document Creation

We have yet to find the best document suite for Android tablets. The Transformer comes with Polaris Office, which is not offered in the market. We also have copies of QuickOffice HD and DocumentsToGO.

We’ve actually been using a simple text editor, DB Text Editor, which is built into the Dropbox Android client.

We blog, and use WordPress, and WordPress for Android (Market Link) was recently updated and now supports tablets. It is still, like many things, not perfect. Nor is using WordPress in the browsers, but these things continue to get better..

Browsers

There is a build-target for a full build of Chrome for Android, but so far, there isn’t a full browser for Android. But the choice of browsers is not bad. While there is a tablet version of the popular Dolphin Browser, it is still in beta and has not been updated in a while. The HD version works fine for now, as does the Android version of Firefox. We hope to see more in this category in the future.

Email

Gmail is an example of what a good tablet app can be. It works nicely, efficiently, and it is a reference for many other apps.

Finance

Mint’s Android app(Market Link) just updated this week to support tablets. It shows that any app can become an indispensable part of one’s productivity if properly designed.

In the end, the market for tablet apps on Android is expanding. There are many good apps so far, including many we haven’t mentioned. There will be more, and the ones we have will only continue to improve.  So, what is the conclusion?

An Android tablet is one of the best options out there for content consumption and simple productivity. For word processing, with the addition of the Transformer’s keyboard dock, it means you can handle your on-the-go and travel word processing. We wouldn’t use it as our primary computer, but having it around means you can use your primary computer less and be more mobile around your house.

[asa]B004U78J1G[/asa]

[asa]B004U78628[/asa]

[asa]B0067PLM5E[/asa]

[asa]B00685ZDB2[/asa]

Published on February 4, 2012
Full Post
3 Responses

The Responsive Developer

John "maddog" Hall - Linuxcon2011
Image by Beraldo Leal via Flickr

Twice in 2011 we had the pleasure of attending a speech by Jon Hall, who is the Executive Director of Linux International. In both cases, he told a story of the early days of software, about companies that were small enough that the service department was the programmer himself.

As these new small startups, and this 1-2 person software companies spring up to make mobile apps, or cloud apps, or what have you, you have the same situation. You can contact a developer of a mobile app, in many situations, and get them to work with you, or have them seriously consider feature requests.

The developer of Poweramp for Android, a popular music player, was recently on Twitter asking people for feature requests to consider, for example.

We recently have had a lot of luck in this regard. We emailed a developer, and they looked into an edge case issue to see if they could address it. We made another suggestion of another, and today they sent us a beta to test and give our opinion of. And these are mobile apps. Most mobile apps are less than five dollars, more are less than ten. That a developer is willing to take you seriously when their profit from you might be less than a fast food meal is also very inspiring.

Compare that to another medium sized company that took two days to explain the status of a shipped item, or the large company that took three days to arrive for a repair appointment. Some companies have grown to the point where the service staff are barely able to support their product.

Is smaller better? Can these small companies provide good service and make a decent profit? Either way, it is worth considering. At the least, before you leave a bad review, contact the developer and discuss the matter.

What do you think?

Published on January 11, 2012
Full Post
0 Responses

Choosing a Cloud Photo Service

How things change over the years is astonishing. A few short years ago, the idea of storing so much of your personal information on remote computers would be

Flickr buddies rememe 2.0worrisome. In fact, the ability to get all that information in the cloud would be limited, with slow internet connections.

Now, everything is Cloud Cloud Cloud. Now, as we mentioned before, never put all your eggs in one basket. always keep copies in multiple places. But backup services are a separate issue for another day.

What we were looking for in a photo service was not what everyone was looking for in such a system. Some people want their photos to be social.

Flickr,, for example, states that its mission statement is twofold…to help people make their photos available to the people who matter to them, and enable new ways of organizing photos and video. There are tons of great images on Flickr, and it has a great community if your goal is creating a community around photo sharing. There are a lot of serious photographers on Flickr who want to share with other serious photographers.

Flickr offers a free service, and a $25 a year Pro account. The Pro account gets you unlimited uploads, storage, and bandwidth, and ad-free browsing. But Flickr is run by Yahoo, and Yahoo’s performance of late has been less than stellar.

Google’s Picasa is also popular, and is transitioning to Google Photo, which is part of Google’s rebranding of their services with an eye toward social. As part of its integration with Google Plus, the service now allows unlimited photos, but the terms of service allow Google to use the uploaded photos to display, and for promoting services royalty free.

Facebook has become one of the most popular places to store photos. However, it suffers from the same pitfalls as other services. It is free, but the quality and organization is limited by Facebook’s desired function.

So, we went to Smugmug. It is the most expensive option, but with that comes reliability and control. Most serious photographers agree that it may not be a place for sharing, but it is a place for photographers.

Smugmug offers unlimited uploads, a variety of privacy and safety options, prints, customization, and is ad-free. You can use your own domain name(Power Account) and customize your gallery theme. All photos are backed up, and you can download your entire collection easily. They offer three levels…Basic($40/yr), Power($60/yr), Pro($150/yr).

The Basic account allows for most of the functionality you could want. The Power account adds the ability to use your own domain name and further customize the site, and it adds video support for clips of 20 minutes or less, and right click protection to prevent people from saving your images. The Pro account is for those who sell their photography.

And if you like to share your photos, Smugmug supports sharing to Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Posterous, and WordPress. If you don’t want people to share from your galleries, this can be turned off. You can also turn off external linking of all kinds. So, you keep control of your photos, but you have the power to do whatever you wish with them. It has given us a chance to take our photos out of an archive where they were never seen, and start getting them in presentation order.

What do you use for your photos?

Related articles
Published on January 9, 2012
Full Post
4 Responses

Firefox vs Chrome

Chrome Needs Color Management
Image by wabisabi2015 via Flickr

We’ve just recently returned to Firefox after some time with Chromium, Chrome’s open-source brother.

In the time since we’ve left, Firefox has iterated so fast. In the last calendar year, it has gone from Version 4 to Version 9. It did so mostly by eliminating minor version numbers. Every version is now a major version.

Over the last year, there have been a lot of changes. Firefox 4 was the first to bundle Firefox Sync, which syncs browser settings. The speed of Firefox has increased sevenfold, and the memory usage, a common complaint about Firefox, is down 50%.

The Browser Wars are an arms race to see who can make their browser faster. Recently, Chrome overtook Firefox for the first time. But it has issues, despite its features.

Chrome creates a separate process for each tab, which protects against any single failure bringing down the whole browser. However, this can have pros and cons. Both Firefox and Chrome have reputations for memory issues, although Firefox is more famous for this, the two browsers use more or less memory at different times, because of this design. Firefox has made a good push to reduce its memory usage.

While our situation might not be typical, the new Firefox is definitely seeming more snappy than it once was. There are things in Chrome that are not currently available in Firefox. One of the nicer ones, although Chrome unfairly calls it an App, are the large bookmarks of commonly used programs on the Blank New Tab menu. We’ve been able to reproduce this in Firefox, however, using a plugin called Fast Dial, which creates the same sort of visual bookmarks.

We aren’t the only ones who enjoy Firefox, while looking for some, but not all, of the features of Chrome. We located a Firefox extension to enable the HTML5 desktop notifications according to the API Chrome implements. This allows an open Gmail window, for example, to pop up a notification.

So, in the end, Chrome and Firefox both offer compelling features, and we’ll keep them both installed, but we keep running back to Firefox. It just suits us. And it suits many others.

What do you use and why?

Related articles
Published on January 1, 2012
Full Post

Get New Posts By Email