So how much does it cost to buy off your fair use rights? According to my analysis, somewhere around $305,740. That is the amount that the National Association of Broadcasters and the National Cable and Telecommunications Association have spent in the last two years to buy the twenty reps who support the Broadcast Flag. This was prompted by my previous look at who is buying off Mike Doyle. I swear, stuff like this has me almost angry enough to run for congress.
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Last night I blogged about Mike Doyle’s support of the broadcast flag. I was fortunate enough to have an officemate overhear my call to Doyle’s Washington office (202-225-2135) and ask me what the broadcast flag was. I got my little chance to get on my soapbox and explain. My officemate quickly realized this would be bad for innovation, and saw the problems with it. He then asked me who was really paying for all of this.
The title sums it up quite nicely. Instead of making it easy for me to watch HDTV, they’re making it quite difficult. I called them last week to inquire about HDTV support on cable. I was told that I needed to get a cable box, that would run me $5.99 a month. For another few bucks I could get the digital classic package. Not too bad I guess. Anyway, today the guy arrived.
Last night I was pleasantly surprised to find that my new hard disk from Outpost.com/Fry’s had already arrived, despite ordering it on Friday and only paying for ground shipping. Note to the other folks from the Burgh, Outpost ships from Columbus, thus you get your stuff fast. Having received this nice shiny new 200GB hard disk, I needed a way to integrate into my system. I consider this disk to be a stop-gap solution until I can afford a RAID-5 setup.
Priblog is fast on its way to Dogfood state. I’ve just implemented comments into the system. It’s not pretty by any stretch of the imagination, but it seems to work just fine. They’re all foaf-enabled, so you can still have all your fun by pulling up information for users through the XML interfaces. In addition, the comment interface is entity agnostic, meaning that that roughly the same comment system will be used for photos and links too once I get a chance to add them.
I’ve been having some fun with MythTV as of late. I found out that Comcast now offers HDTV in my neighborhood, so I placed the call. It was going to cost me an extra $5.99 a month for HDTV, as I’d need a receiver box. Bullocks. Luckily, Evan told me a nifty trick I could try. We have just the basic level of cable, costs us $14 or so a month.
Like many people, I’m morbidly watching the upcoming disaster in south east Texas. I decided that now would be the time to play with Google Earth to see what it can do. I’ve been pretty impressed. Here’s a snapshot of what I just did:
Projected Path of Hurricane Rita overlaid on Google Earth
I’ve also posted a Hurricane Rita KMZ file for use with Google Earth. The images are links to the always updating ones on the National Weather Service’s page, so if they move the map much, you’ll get it all messed up.
Last week discovered Gizmo, the neato VOIP service from SIPPhone.com. After talking to some WPLUGgers, I was inspired to install Asterisk, the open source PBX software. If I actually had a land line, this might be more useful, but without one, I was determined to make use of it. As I found out, it’s pretty simple to do a gateway both to and from the PSTN.
The first thing that I discovered is that it is possible to have Asterisk behave as your Gizmo client.
When all the cool kids were raving about Skype, I went and signed up for an account. I haven’t used it much. I think I got maybe two calls on it, and both times I didn’t have a microphone handy to actually take the call. Something about Skype always made me a little uneasy. Maybe it was the fact that they didn’t reveal just how it worked. What encryption was in use?
Hot damn, it looks like I might actually finish the creation of Priblog that I’ve always been talking about. While I really like the idea of working with flat XML files, the fact of the matter is that performance matters to me. I hate how slow pyBlosxom becomes when it has to walk all of my entries. The additional overhead of firing off a python process on every page hit isn’t that great either.