Archive for May, 2007
Baby, this DVD is driving me crazy
Mrs Bigmouth and I headed off to hospital yesterday for a 20-week pregnancy scan (everything’s fine, thanks) and on departure, the doctor gave us a shiny disc. Excellent, I thought. We’ve had one of these before. It’s a CD with some screenshots of the scan.
It turns out it was even better than that. It was a DVD containing about ten minutes of video footage. If you’ve done the parent thing and watched an ultrasound scan you’ll appreciate just how mind-blowing it is to actually own a video of your unborn baby; if you haven’t, you’ll have to take my word for it.
So we came home, watched the DVD about 100 times, and then decided to make a backup of it. And we figured our respective mothers would appreciate a copy too. So I stuck the DVD into my DVD recorder, hit One Button Copy - a brilliant invention, I reckon; it copies the disc to the hard disk and then wallops it on to a blank DVD - and nothing happened.
Hello, DRM!
It wasn’t deliberate DRM, but it was DRM nonetheless. Because the doctor used a Sony DVD recorder, and Sony’s a big fan of DRM, the disc he burned was copy protected automatically. Which means that if you have mainstream copying hardware or software it can’t be backed up, and it can’t be copied.
Incidentally, this was a private scan (this year, the NHS in Scotland doesn’t fund 20-week scans) that cost a pretty large sum of money, so the DVD in question is probably the most expensive disc I’ve ever owned.
There are, of course, ways around DRM, so I duly downloaded a dodgy DVD ripper, cracked the copy protection, backed up the disc and ripped the video to my Mac, so I can use iDVD to make as many backups or copies as I want. But how many people in the same situation would know to do that, or know where to look?
We all know that DRM doesn’t work, and that if you’re determined to get a dodgy copy of something you can do so fairly easily. And yet the content owners’ DRM obsession means that while I can easily download a movie torrent, I can’t easily copy the video of my own unborn baby.
Biffo’s book
Mr Biffo’s book of chatroom silliness, Confessions of a Chatroom Freak, is very funny. I laughed so hard I ended up in America!
Admittedly I was on a plane to America at the time.
Not so funny: the tacked-on “blog entries” that were clearly the suggestion of the publisher. And the typography’s a bit crap.
A temporary interruption to one small aspect of the overall process
The title is a quote from one of the vote-counting organisations, describing the Scottish elections. In some cases the number of spoilt or rejected ballot papers outnumbered winning candidates’ majorities ten to one.
The problem, I’m sure, is that the two different voting papers - one national, one council - use two completely different systems. One uses a cross, one uses numbers - a disaster waiting to happen. I think I ended up voting for the Prime Minister of Chad.
Bloody hell. Some sections of Hollyrood reckon they could run an independent Scots economy? We can’t even run a voting system for a few million people. I suspect even a piss-up in a brewery might prove too much of a challenge.
Case study
If you travel a lot with your laptop, may I humbly recommend this little backpack from Incase? I bought one this week after my existing laptop bag gouged a nice deep cut in my shoulder. It’s got a dedicated laptop sleeve big enough for a 17″ machine, enough room for all the crap you carry when you’re travelling, and it’s got secret pockets for stuff like passports, keys, iPods and things like that. Best fifty quid I’ve ever spent. My one came from the Apple Store but I’m assuming you can get them from the usual laptop-related shops too.
Plain old laptop bags seem like a great idea until you’ve lugged them around for 24 hours.
Why blog?
Oh no! I’ve been memed! I’ve been tagged by Rutty, who’s passing along the “five reasons why you blog” meme. So here are my five.
Friends first
The single biggest reason I blog is because I get so much email, I’m terrible at replying quickly. Blogging means I can demonstrate that I’m still alive and keep in touch with friends, without the trolls and other annoyances that infest messageboards.
Writers have to write
I spend a lot of time writing stuff in exchange for money, but there are stacks of things I feel ranty about that no right-minded editor would pay real cash money for (and there are loads of things that may be worth paying real cash money for, but I don’t know the editors in those fields). If you’re a writer, you write whether you’re getting paid or not. Although if you’re getting paid you tend to pay attention to things like grammar, making sense, that sort of thing. Heh.
Is it just me, or…
One of my favourite quotes about writing (and shamefully, I don’t remember where it came from) is: “We read to know that we are not alone”. I think that’s true, but also in these web 2.0 days we write, or upload to sites, to know that we are not alone. Blogging is pointless without feedback, good and bad, and IMO flickr is pointless without comments from other flickr users. One of the great things about the net is that while only a small number of people might think the way you do, it’s never been easier to find and to interact with that small group.
Everybody is smarter than me. Apart from him, him and her.
I know a little bit about a lot of things, and nine times out of ten there are other people who know much, much more, and whose input means I get a little bit smarter as a result of their responses to what I do. Admittedly for every one of them there are another nine people who call me a cock, but hey. You can’t stop your family from finding your website.
Because sometimes, you forget
If I ruled the world, I’d make every internet user re-read the things they said online five years ago - good and bad. It’s easy to become jaded and forget why certain things got you excited, and of course it’s easy to forget how stupid you can be sometimes. Rereading old things can bring that enthusiasm back, and remind you of how dumb you can be sometimes.
I’m not going to tag anyone here, but if you fancy adding your own five then please do leave a link in the comments section.