Blog and online presence

By , 2012-12-29 23:46

Once again, my dear old WordPress blog has been terribly negelected for the past little while. I do however have good reasons for this.

  1. Life and stuff has been busy this past year. This has given me a lot of new material to write about, but I’ve lacked the will to actually spend time and write any posts.
  2. I spend a lot less time tinkering with computers in my free time. When I do, a lot of it has to do with enterprise software and such which is not as fun to write about.
  3. OSx86 is no longer a part of my day-to-day. Since getting a job, and hence having the $ to be able to buy legit Apple products, there isn’t as much incentive for getting Mac OS X running on commodity PC hardware. Also, I’m not sure I like where Apple is going with their 10.7+ OS releases, so my hackintoshes and real Macs remain on 10.6.x.
  4. There are too many ways to post things on the Internet. Twitter. Tumblr. Google+. Facebook. Pinterest. LinkedIn. WordPress. Posterous. Evernote. imgur. reddit. Springpad. the list goes on and on. I can’t decide what medium to use and what I actually want out of the whole thing.
  5. My Internet “image”.  I have a pretty unique name – pretty sure I’m the only “Matthieu Yiptong” on the planet. So, when anyone googles my name, this blog is usually the top result. Nowadays it’s common practice for everyone from parents to employers to new acquaintances to girlfriends to google peoples’ names. Being slightly paranoid, I’ve been over-analyzing every potential idea I’ve had for a new blog post this year.
  6. Platform choice. This blog probably has more technical posts than anything else. One of my colleagues at work has switched to using MediaWiki for his personal technical documentation. This makes sense because it’s easier to organize and format documentation on a wiki than on a blog. There are even wikis designed for documentation. This may be something to consider.
  7. Domain name. I own matthieu.yiptong.ca, matthieuyiptong.ca and a few other domains. I’m trying to decide what the url for my blog should be –  whether or not changing it would be worth it and should I decide to change it, if there’s anyway to keep my google ranking and permalinks.

Hopefully now that I’ve gotten these reasons written down, I can get around to addressing each of them and streamline my blogging/posting/documentation in 2013!

Skip OOBE on Nook Simple Touch (NST)

By , 2012-12-09 23:25

I’ve been having issues with the OOBE on my Nook Simple Touch. It will simply not register to my BN.com account.

Fortunately, there is a way to skip the OOBE and get the device to a mostly-working state:

Skip OOBE:

On the first screen that appears on the NST without tapping any button.
1.Hold the right top button and move your finger from left to right on the top of the screen.
2.The factory button will appear at the bottom right of the screen, tap it.
3.Hold again the right top button and tap the right bottom part of the screen, where the factory button appeared
4.A button labeled skip oobe will appear, tap it, your done

For the Nook Simple Touch with Glowlight and Nook Simple Touch with 1.2 firmware, the “Factory” button appears on the top left, and the “Skip OOBE” button will appear in the blank space at the bottom right.

References:

You Will Never Kill Piracy, and Piracy Will Never Kill You – Forbes

By , 2012-12-08 19:50

Interesting article from Forbes. This is exactly the problem with media today.

Piracy is not raiding and plundering Best Buys and FYEs, smashing the windows and running out with the loot. It’s like being placed in a store full of every DVD in existence. There are no employees, no security guards, and when you take a copy of movie, another one materializes in its place, so you’re not actually taking anything. If you were in such a store, you’d only have your base moral convictions to keep you from cloning every movie in sight. And anyone who knows how to get to this store isn’t going to let their conscience stop them, especially when there is no tangible “loss” to even feel bad about.

The is of course some degree of “loss”, but it’s hard, if not impossible, to assign a dollar value to it.Who is to say that a customer, who when placed in this hypothetical store took a copy of every movie, would actually have bought a copy of every movie or any movie at all?

The other problem with the movie industry is that every “legal” way of watching a movie is a pain in the a**. For instance:

Buy a Blu-Ray/DVD (assuming you already own a player)

  1. Go to store/Amazon.
  2. Buy disc
  3. Go home/wait for shipment
  4. Insert disc into player
  5. Watch FBI warning
  6. Watch Trailers (or skip trailers)
  7. Watch movie.

Advantages of this method: You “own” the movie on physical media. You can pass it to your friends, look at the box, use the disc as a frisbee, whatever.
Disadvantages: Physical media. Waiting time. Investment in home video equipment.

Watch in theatres

  1. Look up showtimes
  2. (Buy tickets online)
  3. Go to theatre
  4. Buy/pick up tickets
  5. (Pay extra money for an pick up annoying 3D glasses)
  6. Find a seat in cinema
  7. Watch movie trivia
  8. Watch ads
  9. Watch trailers
  10. Watch movie.

Advantages of this method: Gigantic screen. Excuse to go out.
Disadvantages: Excuse to go out. Overpriced food. Crowds.

Watch on Netflix

  1. Get tablet/phone/Silverlight®-capable PC/approved set-top box or TV
    1. If using Linux (Ubuntu or Fedora), check this out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tfte5su5DIA. It popped up in my Twitter feed literally just as I was writing the previous line.
  2. Sign up for/log in to Netflix
  3. Find your movie (hope it’s there)
  4. Watch movie.

Advantages: Watch almost anywhere, almost instantly.
Disadvantages: Limited selection, requires active internet connection, don’t own anything – need to keep paying monthly fee.

Pirate

  1. Get some BitTorrent-capable device. (PC, Mac, Linux, BSD,  Android, your router, NAS, ….)
  2. Find a torrent of the movie you want.
  3. Download
  4. Watch movie.

Advantages: Own movie forever. Works on any device with proper codecs and processing power. No DRM. Free. Huge selection.
Disadvantages: Morality? Need more hard disk space. Some sites are questionable.

Clearly, “Pirate” is the most viable option. Netflix is a close second, but the inability to watch offline and limited catalogue are annoying.

Existing movie distribution channels are dated, inconvenient and expensive. What’s the solution? I don’t know. But there needs to be a big change in the way Hollywood does business if they really want to “stop” piracy. Not that they really need to, movies are still very profitable despite all their complaints about how piracy is killing them.

Some propose a sort of “Steam for movies“. Others would have Netflix’s model. Others still, iTunes.

I’m both excited and apprehensive about what’s to come.

via You Will Never Kill Piracy, and Piracy Will Never Kill You – Forbes.

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