Kermit's revenge

I'm moving my blog from LiveJournal to my new personal website at Skyfaller.net, following in the steps of Nick. The rumors about LiveJournal being in danger of shutting down certainly triggered this move, but it's something I've wanted to do for a while, to have more control over my own data.

I would like my loyal LJ readers to follow me to my new site, and to achieve that I'd like to make sure that my new blog has all of the features of LiveJournal that my readers find important. Why do you use LiveJournal? What makes it a good experience for you? What features of LiveJournal do you think are useful, and distinguish it from other blogging sites? I have already added a number of features to my blog that LiveJournal has:

• Threaded commenting - This is included by default in Wordpress 2.7 but not all Wordpress themes have been updated to use it yet. You also have to turn it on in Settings->Discussion->Other Comment Settings->Enable threaded (nested) comments, it isn't on by default.


• Reply notifications by e-mail - Below the comment field is a checkbox labeled "Notify me of followup comments via e-mail". If you check that box, you'll get an e-mail when someone replies to your comment (if you've filled out the e-mail field). I'm using the Subscribe to Comments plugin.


• Not having to enter identifying info every time - I've enabled OpenID using this plugin, so all you have to do is enter in your LiveJournal URL in the website field and it will accept your comment. No need to fill in your name and e-mail each time.

What else should I do? Please let me know in the comments.

Originally published at Skyfaller.net. Please leave any comments there.

I am in love with this panorama photo-stitching program called Hugin. Perhaps it is because it is open source and cross-platform. Perhaps it is because of the adorable logo, which is a person hugging a panoramic photo. But most likely it is because it makes really beautiful panoramic photos for me with almost no effort on my part. All I did was take a few pictures by spinning around in one place, feed those photos into Hugin, and ta-da!





Aren't they pretty? Why don't you download Hugin too and give it a try?

Today I'm in Burlingame, CA at the First Annual Seasteading Conference, sponsored by the Seasteading Institute... it's all about building floating platforms on the ocean and living on them. I'm liveblogging it on my identi.ca, and there are other people using the tag #seasteading08.

Tomorrow and Sunday I will be at the Free Culture 2008 conference at Berkeley, hosted by Students for Free Culture of course and its Berkeley chapter. People will be microblogging that with the tag #fc2008.

Is anyone else on Identi.ca? It's an open source, decentralized Twitter-like microblogging project, and it is pretty awesome. Among other things, you can post to it using a Jabber account such as Gtalk or LJ Talk, and it can send you your friends' updates over Jabber as well. (I understand this functionality has been broken/disabled on Twitter for a while.) Anyone can install their own version of the software driving it, called Laconica, and friend people on other Laconica services (such as Identi.ca itself).

If you want to follow my posts or "dents", just subscribe to skyfaller on identi.ca or use the RSS feed you can find on that page.

Hope to see you all there!

Frequently I find myself waiting for the nightly builds of some open source program to fix some bug, or to add a feature that doesn't exist in the stable version of the software. It would be wonderful if there were a good way to be notified when a bugfix or feature appears, either in the unstable or stable versions.

For instance, right now I need some open source software that can capture a screencast from the output of my computer screen. VLC is supposed to support this, but that feature does not work in the stable version on OS X. The next version of VLC, 0.9.0, will apparently have a GUI for recording output from an iSight camera or your screen, but although the GUI is there in the unstable builds, it doesn't succeed in saving to a file yet. I would like to be notified when VLC supports recording screencasts on OS X.

For another example, I would like to start using Thunderbird 3 with the Lightning calendar/todos add-on... Thunderbird 2 has been boring and stagnant for a long time, and I'd like to help the Thunderbird 3 effort in any way I can, at least by testing the nightly builds. However, there is a showstopper bug which prevents you from switching back and forth between the mail pane and the calendar pane (it gets stuck in calendar mode), and until that is fixed Thunderbird 3 is unusable for me. I have subscribed to the bug so I get an e-mail every time someone submits a patch or makes some uninteresting comment on the bug, but really I just want to know when the darn thing is fixed so I can use Thunderbird 3 again. I don't want to get all of this extraneous e-mail.

What I'm imagining is a sort of social networking interface, or perhaps a Digg/reddit voting interface like Ubuntu Brainstorm, for bugs/features, where you can get a feed for each bug / feature request, or "friend"/"favorite" them on the website. Then you can either track all activity on the bug/feature request, or simply get a single update e-mail when the bug is fixed or the feature is implemented. This would be really awesome as a global interface for all open source projects, but a more realistic goal may be for something like this to be released as an easy to use/install open source package which all projects use and thus the interface is at least familiar even if it is not a single interface/website for every project under the sun.

Will someone please create this for me? ;-)

I have been very disappointed in my law school grades the last two semesters. My highest grade 1st semester was a B+ in Torts, and my highest grade this semester was a B+ in Criminal Law. This is unacceptable.

I have decided that I will not shave my face again until I land at least one grade of an A- or above in a law school class.

This could be a relatively brief beard-growing episode, since I am taking a class on Copyright at the law school this summer. My final exam is in 5 days on July 10th, and hopefully I'll have my grade back around the beginning of the semester. I could get an A in that class and terminate my beard after about a month.

Or I might not get an A until the end of the fall semester, which could mean growing my beard into January or beyond. But hopefully it will end sooner!

Wish me luck.

More posts to follow about the details of beard growing when I find time to research it.

I still can't believe what a useless POS iMovie '08 is, and I can't believe that Apple hasn't fixed it by now. It was released in August 2007, it's been almost a year and Apple has released several point releases for OS X since then. Would it be so difficult for Apple to open iMovie '08 up to 3rd party add-ons so that people can put back in the features that Apple removed? The loss of slow-motion/fast-motion is really killing me.

Oh well, back to iMovie '06 HD. I guess Microsoft isn't the only company that releases "new and improved" products that are actually downgrades.

UPDATE: I just realized what iMovie '08 reminds me of: the Matrix sequels. It has lots of potential, but none of it is realized; it has plenty of good ideas, but the implementation of them is horrible.

I am trying to make a video using free stock footage from the internet. It is very difficult! For some reason I thought it would be easy, because I frequently use free stock photographs from e.g. Flickr when putting together presentations, and I have no trouble finding high-quality, Creative Commons-licensed photos. Video is clearly different, unfortunately.

Here are my requirements/preferences for stock footage:
(1) Downloadable in high resolution/quality - This is problematic, because most video on the internet is in low-resolution Flash formats. Even when it is possible to download the flash file (which frequently takes some hacking), the video is too low-resolution to use for serious video-editing. Ideally I would like the video to have a resolution of 640x480 or higher.
(2) Freely licensed - Ideally I would like to use public domain or CC-licensed footage, with a license that permits me to make derivative works. This basically reduces my options to the Internet Archive and a few video-sharing sites such as Revver, most of the stuff on YouTube and its ilk is not freely-licensed.
(3) Actually relevant to the topic I am covering - It is actually rather difficult to find footage illustrating a particular concept/idea... the current state of video search is pathetic.

Does anyone have any ideas for websites / sources that meet these criteria?

I've had some success with the Internet Archive, but it has been a long and painful process, and I wish I could find some other options as well.

( My trials and tribulations with the Internet Archive. )

Muxtape finally came back online so that I could try it out. Here is my muxtape! It's filled with songs that I have found myself singing in the shower recently.

PROS:
* Muxtape allows you to upload whatever songs you want, which in comparison to Mixwit makes it better for handling obscure songs. Also, this allows you to better control the sound quality than Mixwit, since Mixwit leaves you reliant on whatever song files are floating around the Web.
* Muxtape doesn't use Flash or some other silly proprietary technology, yay! It uses javascript to make your browser temporarily download and play each song in the mix automatically.
* Yes, you read that right, Muxtape is already downloading the songs to your computer, just not in a permanent location. That means if you want to save the song permanently, you just need to find each song's temporary location, rename it to an .mp3, and stick it in your music library. In Firefox, I did this by:
1) viewing the source of the page
2) finding the funky number that identifies each song
3) going to about:cache and searching for the funky number
4) saving that file to my desktop
5) renaming it to .mp3 and sticking it in iTunes
You could also use a Greasemonkey script like this one if you want to make it easy on yourself, I'm told. I don't use Greasemonkey, so I couldn't say.

Muxtape is simple to use, if you have the songs that you want to use on your computer. And honestly, how can you make a good mixtape out of songs that you don't possess?

CONS:
* Muxtape only allows you to have one mixtape per account. LAME. I have lots of mixtapes I'd like to share, what am I supposed to do with the other ones? Make 50 accounts? What a pain in the ass. (Use another service / method for the others, I guess.)
* Muxtape limits you to 12 songs per mixtape. Most of my old mixes were developed for mix CDs, which can comfortably fit 18-20 songs, if they're mostly short pop songs. In fact, my shortest old (completed) mix was 13 songs in length. This is a new mix I made specifically for Muxtape to fit in the 12-song limit.
* If you don't have the song you want to use already, you'll have to go download it. Fortunately, between stores like the Amazon mp3 store or emusic.com, p2p networks, and music search engines you should have a pretty easy time finding whatever song you want in mp3 format.
* If you want people to be able to download your playlist and take it with them on their iPod, there is no easy way to do that, not even if the listener pays money and buys all the songs. Seriously, Muxtape has "buy" links next to each song (which go to Amazon), how hard would it be to have a "buy them all" link that saves itself as a playlist in your iTunes library? Hard, I guess, because there is no such feature for sharing playlists in iTunes, but why isn't there?

RESULT: Muxtape is an excellent solution for exactly one mix of 12 songs or less. That's not a solution for the general problem of sharing mixes.

I've been thinking about the future of the music business lately (in the context of my long-distance band Wrong Side of Dawn), and one issue that interests me greatly is the future of the mixtape, which traditionally was a very important way that people shared music with their friends and provided viral marketing. It's unnecessarily hard to share mixtapes with one another in the internet age! There ought to be an easy way to just save a bunch of songs as a bundle, a playlist which you can just double-click on to load it into iTunes, Songbird or your music player of choice as a playlist, with the songs automatically in the desired order. I have not found a good way to do this. Have you?

At any rate, I decided to try the fancy web 2.0 interfaces for making and sharing mixtapes on the web, to see how well they work. First I wanted to try Muxtape since that's what my friends seem to be using, but their website is currently down, so I looked in the comments to blog posts about Muxtape for alternatives. Incidentally, I have to agree with the BoingBoing comment "I miss Webjay." Webjay was nifty when I was playing with it roughly 4-5 years ago. At any rate, the major competitor that I found in the comments was Mixwit, which seems to offer a similar service to Muxtape. Embedded below is the result of my attempt to use Mixwit:




It's a flash player, so my apologies to free software advocates and Linux users who don't have a fully functional flash player for whatever reason (Adobe has not released a Flash player for Linux on the PPC architecture, for instance).

PRO: Mixwit does not require you to upload songs. It can find song files for you that are already on the world wide web using music search engines SeeqPod and SkreemR, and it lets you embed those songs in that nifty little flash widget.

CON: It is difficult to find some more unusual or unpopular songs floating around the Web. Of course, an eclectic taste in music is essential to making a good mixtape, and it is slightly disastrous if you cannot put less popular songs on your mixtape to impress people / hawt chix with your musical knowledge. For this mixtape, I was unable to find "Lonesome" by Unwritten Law, "Dance Craze" by Millencolin, shockingly "You've Got To Die For The Government" by Anti-Flag (I thought that was a classic), and "Eat The Meek" by NOFX. I replaced "Dance Craze" with "Twenty Two" which is a very similar song that I was actually listening to around the same time, but which I thought was not quite as good... also "Dance Craze" mentions both pinball and dancing, two things which I enjoy greatly. The other three songs had no good replacement, there just weren't any other songs by those bands that I could find online which impressed me as much and/or fit with this mixtape the way I wanted them to.

The only solution if the songs are not already online is to upload the songs to some other website yourself, perhaps on a music blog or something, so that you can import the hyperlink to the songs into your mix. This is something of a barrier to entry, since many people do not have a personal website where they can upload whatever files they want. It would be better if you could upload the songs directly to Mixwit, but that would dramatically increase hosting/bandwidth costs for Mixwit, and it would be a copyright minefield / death wish. I'm not sure how much I want to host other people's music on my personal blog without permission, so although I'm not ruling that option out for the future (MP3 blogs have been doing this for years without any ill effects), for now my mixtape remains simply incomplete.

RESULT: I remain dissatisfied with the state of mixtapes in the internet age.