It’s definitely something to consider. I have a lot of digital information that GoddessJ will need access to if I get run over by a beer truck, if only to let my friends and associates know about my demise, but I don’t want to put her in an uncomfortable potential legal position by giving my passwords to her before that time. I have a few friends and family members in other countries, maybe they could help.
(Via BoingBoing)
Several years ago, before GoddessJ got the MP3 religion, she always carried huge “books” of CDs around with her when we went on long car trips — until on one trip she lost a case containing a dozen or so of her all-time favorite CDs, and realized that she’d never given those CDs to me to make MP3 backups of them. (She still hasn’t managed to replace all of them.) After that I went through and recorded every CD we owned, and she started religiously giving me all her new CDs to back up.
I went to record her two latest acquisitions a couple days ago, and discovered that one of them (Paula Abdul, Greatest Hits: Straight up!) had some kind of manufacturing defect. (No, it’s not DRM. 🙂 ) The first eleven tracks would play perfectly, but the last seven got progressively worse… they would always come out with “skips,” no matter what drive I tried them in, and the further back the track was, the more damaged sections it had. The last couple were all but unplayable, they were so bad. The disk itself had no scratches or other visible flaws, not even a stray fingerprint, so I’m not sure what could have caused this.
I knew that some programs were better at handling this sort of thing than others, so I checked around the ‘net and discovered a program, Exact Audio Copy (EAC), that was designed specifically for this kind of problem. It keeps trying until it gets the complete file or you lose patience and tell it to give up. It’s a Windows program, but it works perfectly in Linux (under WINE) as well. And it’s freeware too! I installed it, set it up the way I wanted it (which took a little experimentation), and let it rip — pun completely intentional. 🙂
It spent twenty-three hours grinding away at it on my laptop’s internal drive, and still hadn’t managed to get through the last half of the last track. I moved the disk to my external CD drive, and after a little more than an hour it was finished. And the files sounded perfect!
I highly recommend EAC for anyone who backs up music CDs.
An amusing graphic comparing styles of online journalism today against those of a few years ago.
Getting kind of desperate, Microsoft?
Interesting… I’d heard the story of the QWERTY keyboard arrangement before, but I didn’t realize that it was developed in the 1800s.
I fully support experimenting with the keyboard layout. I’d gladly adopt a different keyboard — but only if I could be sure that it would be available on all the systems I need to use. That’s why I never moved to a Dvorak keyboard, even though it’s demonstrably better.
If, in the early nineties, the governments of the world had realized just how much power the Internet would offer their citizens, I have little doubt that it would have been quietly strangled in its cradle. Since they missed that opportunity, they’re trying to censor it instead — even in democratic countries that should know better, like Britain and Australia. Fortunately, enough people are resisting their efforts that I doubt many of them will go through.
Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.
— Justice Louis Brandeis, Other People’s Money, and How the Bankers Use It, 1933.
Ever since I gave GoddessJ a Wii for her birthday last month, I’ve been amused and amazed at all the different add-ons for the controllers: plastic implements that make them look like tennis rackets, swords, pistols, even faux cooking utensils. But in my opinion, this one takes the cake.
(For the record, we don’t have any of these, and don’t plan on buying any.)
(Via BoingBoing)
There are so many nuggets of gold in this article that I don’t know where to start. For example:
What allows people to work, and love, as they grow old? By the time the Grant Study men had entered retirement, Vaillant, who had then been following them for a quarter century, had identified seven major factors that predict healthy aging, both physically and psychologically.
Employing mature adaptations [better known as “defense mechanisms,” and described in detail earlier in the article] was one. The others were education, stable marriage, not smoking, not abusing alcohol, some exercise, and healthy weight. Of the 106 Harvard men who had five or six of these factors in their favor at age 50, half ended up at 80 as what Vaillant called “happy-well” and only 7.5 percent as “sad-sick.” Meanwhile, of the men who had three or fewer of the health factors at age 50, none ended up “happy-well” at 80. Even if they had been in adequate physical shape at 50, the men who had three or fewer protective factors were three times as likely to be dead at 80 as those with four or more factors.
Here’s another one, which suggests (to me) that our political leanings might be something we’re born with:
[…] He also found that personality traits assigned by the psychiatrists in the initial interviews largely predicted who would become Democrats (descriptions included “sensitive,” “cultural,” and “introspective”) and Republicans (“pragmatic” and “organized”).
Sponsoring this kind of “longitudinal study” sounds like a really good way to employ obscene amounts of wealth.
I can see this annoying, rather than helping, several of my acquaintances (such as a girl who prefers Lego sets rather than dolls). And I’m sure there are some people for whom it would always choose the wrong gender.
On the plus side, it means guys might not be subjected to quite so many ads for chick-flicks or cosmetics. As a guy, I consider this a very good thing. 😉