A new torrent has been uploaded to U2Torrents.com.

Torrent: 4810
Title: 1992-11-27 .dvdf - Philips DCC Presents Zoo TV Featuring U2
Size: 4.25 GB
Category: ZooTv
Uploaded by: MrTheEdgeSTB

Description
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It's been some time since I've uploaded anything. Anyway, in the spirit of the new tour, thought I would share one of my fav's.

I uploaded this originally about 3 years ago, and it got some pretty decent response. I don't see it in the Zoo TV catalogue currently, so perhaps an encore is in order.

Philips DCC Presents Zoo TV Featuring U2
AUGUST-OCTOBER 1992
PRO-SHOT Video
Lineage - unknown (to me!) - MTV (VHS/PAL) -> DVD-R
Video - NTSC
Audio - Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo

Track List:
1. Television, The Drug Of The Nation (w/interference from Zoo TV)
2. Zoo Station
3. The Fly
4. Even Better Than The Real Thing
5. Mysterious Ways
6. Until The End Of The World
7. Trying To Throw Your Arms Around The World
8. When Love Comes To Town
9. Satellite Of Love
10. Interference from Zoo TV
11. Bullet The Blue Sky
12. Running To Stand Still
13. Where The Streets Have No Name
14. Interference from Zoo TV
15. Desire

- Ripped using SmartRipper v2.41 from PAL version (MTV)
- Remastered using Sony Vegas 5 to convert to NTSC, correct edits and synchronization issues (during end of Zoo Station beginning of the Fly); added original intro footage (video) back in from Czech version (audio contained broadcaster overdubs); mixed in composite audio for that segment from Television The Drug of the Nation (Zoo TV DC 1992-08-16) and audience noise from Zoo TV Sydney
- Reauthored using Sony DVD Architect 2 including new menus and navigation

Synopsis:
This is a great pro-shot compilation from the third leg of Zoo TV, dubbed the Outside Broadcast Tour. It was broadcast in various forms around the world in late fall 1992, with MTV carrying a substantially longer program in many markets (which included some documentary footage from the home video release "Zoo TV - The Videos, The Cameos and a Whole Lot of Interference from Zoo TV") at about 90 min, this version which edits out the aforementioned and runs 75 min, and the grotesquely edited Fox TV version in the U.S. at about 50 min w/ commercials.

This version retains a lot of the fun extras, including the "Zoo Non-product" commercials, the Adam Stalker (night vision) video, many of the Kurt Loder interviews, the Bill Clinton radio phone-in, the random Zoo Confessionals throughout, the Rona Elliot (bogus) live interviews, the Pat Kenney show with the Doppelgangers doing "Horses" whilst U2 sits in the audience, and the Anaheim (1992/11/14) finale call to the White House.

The source footage and audio has long been an obsession of mine. Originally I thought it to be entirely from New York Yankee Stadium. However, after obtaining the KTS disc "Outside Broadcast" which claims the audio to be all from Houston, TX (1992/10/14) which had same audio for many tracks, and subsequently getting the KTS pressing Zoo TV Live Transmission which is entirely audience recorded from the Houston show, I began to doubt that this TV special was from a single concert. This was later confirmed by reading Bill Flanagan's excellent tour biography "U2 At The End Of The World". Basically the band spent numerous nights in Los Angeles editing the special prior to heading to Mexico for the last 4 nights of the 3rd Leg.

So after embarking on a fevered mission to collect audience recordings from as many of the 3rd Leg Zoo TV shows as I could (including most of the famed ones), I was slowly able to make audio reference comparisons and determine a probable lineage (one that the band has even gotten surprisingly wrong on many of their recent commercial offerings that contained select songs from this special). So, based again on hours of listening comparisons, here's what I've come up with:

1. Television, The Drug Of The Nation (w/interference from Zoo TV) (unknown - lots of spliced footage)
2. Zoo Station (New York, 1992/08/29 - while David Salz is talking you can barely make out Bono saying "It's all right - Babe Ruth's in the house tonight" in the background)
3. The Fly (Houston, 1992/10/14 - audio definitely ("Achtung, y'all!"), video could be composited, perhaps including Dallas 1992/10/16, from the looks of the stadium)
4. Even Better Than The Real Thing (New York, 1992/08/30, at least through 1st verse and chorus, possibly to the bridge; Dallas, 1992/10/16 from the bridge to the end (just "Edge", instead of the usual "Sliding down..." or "Sliding down the surface of things")
5. Mysterious Ways (New York, 1992/08/30)
6. Until The End Of The World (Dallas, 1992/10/16 intro (Bono shouts "Hold on!" before the opening main riff) through just before the bridge (again, just "Edge..."); New York, 1992/08/30 bridge to the end - not sure when the video switches, but the audio second half is definitely NY night 2)
7. Trying To Throw Your Arms Around The World (Dallas, 1992/10/16 - Bono chuckles during "Your lips move but you can't talk...") whilst looking at Larry, who apparently flubbed part of his solo spot; and Bono to girl "You wanna dance with me, child?" - I have a crappy Dallas audience that fits this all to a T)
8. When Love Comes To Town (New York, 1992/08/30 - based on performance and Larry's wearing his black vest)
9. Satellite Of Love (Dallas, 1992/10/16 - before Lou Reed's solo, Bono says "Lou Reed - live from the moon")
10. Interference from Zoo TV
11. Bullet The Blue Sky (Toronto, 1992/09/05 - this is well documented, amazing performance; video might include some of New York night 1 and/or 2, but clearly you can see in some shots the giant Ferris Wheel in the background that is part of a carnival park in Toronto)
12. Running To Stand Still (Dallas, 1992/10/16 - the audio fits most nights, really, but the video has the same stadium appearance as Satellite, and Dallas was one of the few nights Bono did only 3 "hallelujah's" at the end of the song instead of the usual 4)
13. Where The Streets Have No Name (New York, 1992/08/30)
14. Interference from Zoo TV
15. Desire (New York, 1992/08/30)

Anyway, it's quite a trip and certainly highlights great moments from the tour. A real gem. I tell you what - if they ever decide to broker a deal and get the rights back for production as a real commercial offering, I will be the first to throw this boot in the trash and buy the real deal. In the meantime, hope this tickles everyone's happy spots!

Enjoy!
MrTheEdgeSTB
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

You can use the URL below to download the torrent (you may have to login).

http://u2torrents.com/torrents-details.php?id=4810&hit=1

Take care!

U2Torrents.com

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[Continuing a set of interviews by Game Developer magazine EIC Brandon Sheffield for GameSetWatch, he talks to Thatgamecompany's Kellee Santiago on a multitude of neat topics regarding downloadable games and the Flower creators' future.]

Kellee Santiago is cofounder of Thatgamecompany, known for genre-shaking downloadable titles such as flOw and Flower, which both push the boundaries of games and their emotional resonance, but also give Sony something to point to in the way of artistry in the PSN space.

Thatgamecompany has been growing, slowly but surely, to where Santiago can now step out of the defacto-production role she often held on top of her studio running duties, so that she can now look externally, to see how TGC can potentially help other smaller indies, or expand the company's offerings in targeted ways.

We spoke with Santiago recently about changes within the company, the potential of a Flower expansion, PSP Go and Project Natal, as well as the viability of a TGC game based on an emotion like rage:

Thatgamecompany's Next Steps

Can you talk a little bit about what's next for you guys?

Kellee Santiago: I have to admit that it's probably going to be a little frustratingly vague just because we're in the middle of just solidifying the details on our current PSN project.

But I think the last three years we've spent building up this brand of Thatgamecompany and what it is. We hope what people are getting from us is Thatgamecompany is about providing meaningful experiences and unique experiences through video games.

And as I see us going forward and growing as a company in the future, I think what we'd like is to bring more titles under that brand. Whether that's us growing an internal team to handle multiple projects or by going with more of like a label structure where we have "Thatgamecompany presents," and we're able to help other teams that we see and other projects that we see that we really want to see come to light, that would fit under that brand as well.

Interesting. So, not exactly like a publisher, but like a liaison or something?

KS: Hmm, a liaison? Yeah, I think it would be kind of... That's partially what we've been doing in some ways, and I think just formalizing that as a business plan maybe.

How would you say you've been doing it already?

KS: I think we've become involved with a lot of the other indie developers. I mean, we're all more connected now than we've ever been before thanks to venues like the Independent Games Summit.

What we've also tried to do in addition -- I mean, I always say that we're one of the few companies that hopes that other people copy us, because we don't want to be this little niche random thing. This is where we want things to go. We want a lot of games to be made like ours.

What we've also been trying to do is when we see stuff that's awesome, or if people come to us asking for advice or connections or something, we always try and set them up. In these interviews, I think we try and drop a lot of projects, you know, names, and try to gain exposure for the indie dev scene as a whole.

Talking about the next project I didn't realize that you were necessarily tied to PSN. I just knew it was with Sony. It didn't connect for me that it was PSN specifically.

KS: Well, the goal has always been digital distribution.

New Platforms

What do you think about PSP Go then?

KS: The PSPgo... It's interesting. I just remember Jenova saying that when he was in Shanghai, he saw a lot more people having PSPs than DSes. I mean, this is totally anecdotally, but that they were very much like fashion accessories, and that they would watch media on it or something or browse the internet but not really play games. And I could see the PSP Go continuing that, like being that. I don't know as a game system... $250 is a lot of money.

That's true.

KS: [laughs] I thought that was expensive, but...they're also putting out a lot of major franchise games on PSP, so it will be interesting to see if that helps more people on PSP playing games, checking out the new stuff that's there as well. Fat Princess is going to go PSP.

It's definitely been a piracy vehicle previously, so it will be interesting to see how the PSPgo does in that regard. I also wanted to ask you what you thought of Project Natal -- it seems like a Jenova kind of thing.

KS: Yeah, well, I was going to say, it certainly falls under a lot of the... Or touched on the things that I know he's been interested in as far as that. Especially when you think about accessibility, removing the controller completely.

I guess one of the major criticisms that I've heard the last couple of days is people saying, "Well, how are they going to first-person shooters on it?" It's like, "Well, maybe they don't do a first-person shooter."

And maybe it's about making new games, allowing for different kinds of games. We don't have to think about games that already and how they're going to translate to that control. I think what it is is it allows for new designs to emerge.

My question is how much of it is real.

KS: Yeah.

The New Hire

So you have Robin Hunicke (previously a design lead at EA) now. How did that come about?

KS: It grew really organically. I mean, as you probably know, we got her fresh off of shipping Boom Blox Bash Party. So, I think as she was wrapping that project, she was thinking about her next steps. She's just one of those people we also like to bounce ideas off of, so we started talking about some of the ideas we had for our current project, and it just seemed like a really great match.

I think that with our experimental game design process, one of the issues that we've had in the past is tightening up the production of that and tracking it and developing a better process for it. And Robin just really has a passion for designing a team experience around creating these kinds of games that we saw as a huge value.

My question will be how many incredibly strong personalities can Thatgamecompany hold without exploding? I know that even as a small team, it's difficult to get everyone to push in the same direction.

KS: Well... [laughs] I mean, part of that is Jenova growing as a director, and I think he has. I think that also allowed for this to happen on this project. I mean, hopefully we want there to be lots of strong personalities at Thatgamecompany because we want to be a company that attracts the best and the top talent.

You can find a lot of people who are willing to do whatever you tell them, but when you want to continue to create unique games and unique designs, you need people who will also step up as leaders and also champion their ideas and bring new ideas.

Flower

Certainly. Jenova talked a bit about whether there would be a Flower update. Can you talk about that at all?

KS: Again, there's nothing to confirm or deny right now. We're unfortunately still so small that it's hard to divide our resources effectively. Flower was certainly designed as a complete experience.

One of the ethical challenges we face as a company is that we really strive to provide meaningful experience to the player. So, in the past, when we've thought about developing expansions or developing downloadable content, it becomes very difficult because we really, really want to make sure that it's very meaningful, that we're not just trying to get more money out of people that love our games.

So, that's added to this challenge of Flower being a complete experience as well. So, when we think of what to add and what would be meaningful. It's very difficult. At the same time, it's regrettable right now that we haven't been able to support those fans and those players in a better way because the outpouring of expression after that game and the emails we get have just been amazing. We would really like show them that we care about that.

BIt's quite difficult when of course you sort of want to go on and do your next thing but people still want more of what you've already got.

KS: Yeah, yeah. Hopefully, part of that is satiated by just our next project, and that will be another Thatgamecompany project, and I think the players of Flower and flOw will enjoy it.

Right. But how long is that going to take?

KS: Right. [laughs] Yeah. And also, when we think about the projects, I mean, right now, as I was saying, it's like our current project is requiring an all hands on deck sort of approach, so it makes it difficult to then try and manage downloadable content or an expansion. But it's something we're trying to improve.

I guess you could go with like external help like you did with the PSP version of flOw, but I don't know if that's appealing.

KS: Yeah. I think that's also something where now that we've gained Robin as a producer, that will allow me to focus more on that stuff, hopefully opening up the opportunity of doing exactly that.

And certainly the code for Flower is a lot better, so in that way, it will be easier than flOw was. [laughs] Yeah, poor Supervillain had like the worst time, and I just really, really give them mad props for dealing with that.

I guess that's what happens with indie teams' early projects. It's like, "Well..."

KS: "No one's ever going to look at this ever again." [laughs]

As long as it works.

KS: Exactly. As long as we ship it.

On Rage

Are you going for a specific feeling for the next project?

KS: Yes, but we can't talk about it right now. But we always start with emotions, and this is no exception.

Well fine! I assume that... I always wonder what would you all do with an emotion like rage, or something like that, which I know is really outside of what Jenova wants to do. But I've always found that curious.

KS: Well, part of our mission statement is to create games that communicate emotions that aren't currently available on the video game apartment. Rage is well-covered.

Right.

KS: But that's not to say it's out of the realm of a Thatgamecompany game because if one day, we've moved well beyond, I don't know, the emotions that are communicated today, which I can't see because I think there will always be an audience for this -- I mean, I'm so stoked for God of War 3. I think it would be really interesting, that's all I can say.

I think it would be interesting to start a game with, you know... Well, maybe God of War, you know, that's what they captured so well, with that like visceral rage, and then designed everything around that.

I'm really interested with this Six Days in Fallujah project that keeps getting picked up and dropped and dropped...

Well... Have you actually seen the gameplay?

KS: Nah, I don't know.

That's the thing. A a lot of indies are coming out to stress the importance of Konami, but having seen it, it didn't look very complex to me -- like just another male power fantasy video game.

KS: I wonder, because I know some of the guys at that development studio, and their heart is in the right place. So, I guess I was excited by... Well, maybe partnering with Konami, they would have been able to get it to a very meaningful place.

But yeah, you're right. Intention isn't everything. There has to be execution behind it.

Netbooks are netbooks. Usually based on Intel's Atom chipset, and generally not that fast. What you gonna do? Well, I upgraded the SSD in my Hackintosh. Not just to bump the drive from 32 to 128GB, but for SPEED.

The drive is one of few things easily upgradable on these devices. On the Dell Mini 9, its a matter of removing two screws on the back plate, and two screws that hold the drive in place (which, if you've never seen a netbook SSD drive before, looks more like a RAM module.) The 64 and 128MB modules take up the space reserved for the WWAN card, so don't go that route if you have WWAN.





While I was able to restore my Mac OS X Time Capsule backup, it wouldn't boot til I used the DellEFIbootmaker (allows you to boot into the drive you just restored) and then ran DellEFI to restore the partition to a bootable condition. Oh, the Leopard install process which you use to restore won't read off of a Time Capsule, so you have to copy the restore file to a USB drive before hand. Anyhow, none of this is the point.





Look at how much faster the writes are, especially the random ones. The only sacrifice you end up with is a bit of big block read performance.

It's a bit of a shame the stock SSDs had these compromises in the first place, though. If you're buying a netbook, its worth checking the forums for results like these on the models you're interested in, and perhaps buying a low capacity stock model, and upgrading to an aftermarket drive later. (The Super Talent drive I tested wasn't cheap, though, at $200 for the 64GB model and $380 for 128GBs.) Kind of ridiculous next to the cost of a $200-$300 netbook, I admit. *shame*

One other thing to consider: The runcore SSD upgrades for netbooks have little microUSB ports on them, so you can load up and back up files/images from another machine. Handy for Hackintoshing, for sure, but I think they top out at 64GB, taking up only a single wide form factor.
[Super Talent Dell Mini 9 SSD]

Getting the most out of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen requires a steady hand, a keen eye, and the ass muscles of an Olympic athlete.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is an action adventure game based on the movie of the same name, telling the story of the return of Megatron and the rise of an even more diabolical enemy from the dawn of time. After a sub-par product from Traveller's Tales for the first film, Activision handed over development duties for the sequel to California-based Luxoflux, the team behind the video game adaptation of Kung Fu Panda. While the new developer brings much to the table, including robust multiplayer on top of the required single player mode, certain aspects of the game are a real pain in the ass.

Let's tense up and roll out!

Loved
Big, Beautiful Bots: No matter what my opinion might be on the Michael Bay-bots versus the more traditional designs, I have to admit that Luxoflux has done an admirable job of recreating the movie machines for the video game adaptation. The developer knows this, kicking off every mission with a crane shot of your character so you can appreciate all the work that went into creating him before the firefight begins.

Heavy Metal Combat: Revenge of the Fallen does an admirable job of depicting giant-robot-on-giant-robot combat. Bullets, missiles, and fists all pack a seriously satisfying punch, and each robot has a different set of ranged weapons and special abilities than makes going back through missions with different characters to try and top your score a worthwhile endeavor. The combat may not be perfect, but it works for me.

Pimping Your Rides: An upgrade system allows you to convert Energon based on how well you complete your mission objectives into power enhancements for your entire team. The selection of upgrade choices is a bit strange – you can power up your melee damage but not your ranged, for instance – but the system does allow for the player to tweak their abilities based on how they prefer to play.

Massive and Multiplayer: Many licensed games are developed with single player in mind, tacking on a multiplayer component at the last minute to add to the feature listing on the back of the box. It feels as if Luxoflux reversed that trend, creating an enjoyable multiplayer experience and then adding the story mode as an afterthought. The multiplayer mode contains more characters (with more on the way in the form of DLC) and quite frankly more excitement than the single player experience. Sure, you'll have to deal with listening to a bunch of early teen boys cussing up a storm...I guess that really isn't that much different than any other online console game.

Unlockables: Despite the fact that I already own all of them on DVD, the unlockable episodes of the original television series may have contributed somewhat to the relative lateness of this review. Just saying.

Hated
Triggered Transformation: Luxoflux has managed to take the one aspect of the Transformers that every other Transformers game has gotten right, and do it wrong. Press a button, and you're a car. Easy, right? Instead, the developers map transforming to the right trigger. Squeeze the trigger and you are a vehicle, with the amount of pressure you apply affecting your speed. Release the trigger and you are a robot. It's the mechanical equivalent of clenching your ass cheeks, and while the special moves you can perform when popping out of vehicle mode can make the release somewhat enjoyable, all in all it's just embarrassing.

We'll Call Them Vehicle Physics: Revenge of the Fallen plays fast and loose with its vehicle physics. Ground-based vehicles aren't so bad, with physics akin to your more arcadey racing games. Flying vehicles, on the other hand, are simply sad. Planes bounce off buildings in comical fashion, and maneuverability is quite limited, with even the simplest of aerial maneuvers out of reach thanks to the simplistic controls. Perhaps it is a matter of game play balance, but car should never be able to keep pace with a jet. An airplane moving at 60 miles per hour is an airplane on the ground.

Welcome To Dullsville: I suppose if I our planet actually did have giant robots doing battle in the streets on a regular basis, we'd probably pack up all of our interesting scenery and leave town as well. While the robots in Revenge of the Fallen look spectacular, the environments simply feel like a collection of random structures with different skins on them, which I suppose is what they are. There's just no real character to the setting.

The Story Unfolding: I somehow managed to avoid seeing the film before playing the game, which might be why the story feels like a disjointed series of occurrences rather than a full, compelling narrative. Balancing telling the tale of the game while trying not to delve to deeply into the plot of a film is a tricky maneuver, and one Luxoflux didn't manage to pull off gracefully.

Required Missions: Sam has been whisked away to a far off land where he could be in great danger! We should rescue him, but first, we need to clear the Decepticons out of one particular area, because we haven't unlocked the rescuing Sam mission yet. Unlocking missions in Revenge of the Fallen requires that you complete a certain number of missions previously, which leads to telling your best human buddy to cool his jets while you rescue generic power plant A and B from the enemy.

Of all of the failings of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, the transformation feature is the most damning. It's the main focus of the property, and it deserves to be done correctly. Perhaps my main issue is that you can't simply transform and then pan around the vehicle, admiring the details. Instead, triggering a transformation also triggers movement, so you never get the chance. Instead of alternate modes, they are simply travel forms that disappear when they come to a stop. Call me crazy, but I'd just prefer a Transformers game where I can press a button once and BAM - I'm a Camaro.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is an odd title that manages to succeed in categories that licensed games generally fail, while floundering in areas that should have been easy to get right. It's a movie tie-in that excels at multiplayer yet flails where the actual story is concerned. I'd use the term ass-backwards, but those muscles need a little rest.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was developed by Luxoflux and published by Activision for the PS3 and Xbox 360 on June 23rd. Different versions from different developers exist for the Nintendo DS, PSP, PS2, Wii, and PC. Retails for $59.99 USD. Reviewed the Xbox 360 version. Played through Autobot and Decepticon story modes to completion, and played multiple multiplayer matches across all game types.

Confused by our reviews? Read our review FAQ.

By Angela Gunn, Betanews

[NOTE FROM THE M.E. For over two decades, I've made a living in one way or another from being "the Windows guy." And in recent months, what you've been seeing from us at Betanews has been Windows 7, Windows 7, Windows 7 -- at one point, ten times in a row. Last month, I concluded our ongoing series about my picks for Top 10 Features in Windows 7. And I received a number of letters from folks who claimed that Linux did this first, or already did that several years ago, or does this better.

Really, now? Well, perhaps so. To find out for sure, I've commissioned a new Betanews series that seeks out whether, for features that Microsoft touts as supreme or new or of special value, similar functionality exists in some form or fashion for users of Linux client operating systems. To make sure I get a fair answer on this -- one that isn't biased in favor of Windows -- I've asked our Angela Gunn, who has more experience with Linux than I, to start digging. And to make sure she's digging in the right place, we've asked Jeremy Garcia, founder of LinuxQuestions.org, one of the Web's leading Linux user communities, to lend his voice to our evaluation. You and I are about to find out, once and for all, the answer to the musical question...]

Our subject today is full-disk encryption, that useful security tool that keeps data on your hard drive safe even if the drive itself is in peril. It's the feature that Microsoft would have you spend an extra $120 for when upgrading to Windows 7 Ultimate. We'll compare the Windows approach to the problem with that of a leading Linux contender. (Mac folk, your turn may come. And then again maybe it won't.) And to make dead sure that we're balancing out the Windows fans on staff (looking at you, Mr. Fulton), we've asked Jeremy Garcia, Founder of LinuxQuestions.org, to provide insight into the comparison.

With data and computing devices ever smaller and easier to lose (or abscond with), companies in data-sensitive industries as well as the federal government have gotten serious in recent years about protecting the data on a drive even when the drive itself has been compromised.

Enter full-drive encryption, which protects data at rest (DAR) -- that is, even when no one's actively trying to access the data, it's safe. (Arguments that data is only at risk when not at rest will be entertained in other articles; that's not what we're doing here. Also, though Seagate popularized the term "full disk encryption," it has passed sufficiently into common usage to be an effective category descriptor.) FDE also provides some protection from PEBKAC security vulnerabilities, encrypting temporary and swap files and relieving the user from the hideous burden of protecting individual files or folders.

Many would argue that BitLocker has no place in a conversation about full-disk encryption, because it doesn't encrypt the full disk; the boot volume is still separate, so really it's just a variety of volume encryption. Still, BitLocker is the go-to utility in the Windows realm for Vista machines and (soon) Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 machines -- not the only FDE option, or even necessarily the most robust, of course, but the one that's most easily available on modern versions of the operating system, since Microsoft bakes it right in. It's included in Vista Enterprise, Vista Ultimate, and Windows Server 2008. It utilizes Trusted Platform Module (TPM), the secure encryption processor present on some motherboards.

Redmond was, frankly, late to this particular party, releasing BitLocker in 2006. As for Linux, excellent encryption has been available for years for all levels of encryption -- individual files, whole folders, or entire drives/volumes. TrueCrypt began life in 2004 as a Windows-only product branching out to Linux in late 2005. (Linux Unified Key Setup, or LUKS, is another open source alternative that's included in Linux kernel versions 2.6.x, Garcia reminds us.)

"As you might expect, the Microsoft option is not Open Source...so you really have no idea about the quality of the implementation or the flaws it may contain," Garcia told Betanews.

Now let's take a look at these full disk encryption options feature-by-feature:

Trusted Platform Module support TPM is technology that doesn't sit well with everyone, and there are perfectly good FDE options that don't make use of the "Fritz chip." BitLocker can use TPM if it's there, but can be set up not to use it, especially for non-Intel vPro platform computers. "To use BitLocker on a computer without a TPM, you must change the default behavior of the BitLocker setup wizard by using Group Policy, or configure BitLocker by using a script," states Microsoft's documentation. "When BitLocker is used without a TPM, the required encryption keys are stored on a USB flash drive that must be presented to unlock the data stored on a volume."

Algorithms BitLocker uses the AES encryption algorithm in CBC mode with a 128- or 256-bit key, plus an extra "Elephant" diffuser; though AES is a public-domain algorithm, Microsoft's implementation is closed-source. TrueCrypt offers several AES flavors (AES, AES-Twofish, AES-Twofish-Serpent, Serpent-AES, Serpent-Twofish AES), all with a 256-bit key, along with Serpent, Twofish, and Twofish-Serpent. The mode of operation in all cases is XTS, which is the IEEE 1619 standard for disk encryption.)

Multifactor authentication BitLocker allows additional layers of authentication -- a PIN, a thumb drive with a startup key -- as long as the utility has been enabled on a machine with TPM. BitLocker users can boot from the hard drive as they usually do; that is, with their usual Vista password (transparent mode) or, for added security, with a PIN and/or a USB key (on TPM machines). Also, for machines running a BIOS that can read a USB at the pre-boot stage, one can also boot in "USB Key Mode" -- very handy in case the user's lost the password. On the TrueCrypt side, two-factor authentication is likewise an option.

Next: If BitLocker comes pre-installed, isn't installation a factor in Linux?

Installation BitLocker drive preparation has been a notorious pain under Vista, with the necessary BitLocker Drive Preparation Tool available through Ultimate Extras and for Vista Enterprise and Windows Server 2008. (BitLocker has been incorporated into Windows 7 for machines with TPM.) Installation is notoriously cranky, and woe betide the user who doesn't partition the drive correctly -- two partitions are required -- before installing the OS.

On Linux, Debian has for years included the ability to set up a fully encrypted system right from the installer, if that how you prefer to go about it. TrueCrypt, on the other hand, has a wizard allowing you to create an encrypted file container, encrypt a non-system partition or drive, or encrypt an entire system partition or drive. The volume or drive must be empty of files before installation, but one needn't flush the entire OS.

I asked Jeremy Garcia if he would characterize ease of installation as a major concern for the community. "While I've never used BitLocker, it looks quite a bit more difficult to setup than TrueCrypt," he responded. "As you note though, most distributions now offer the ability to set up an encrypted partition right from inside the installer. Ubuntu uses dm-crypt behind the scenes. I actually wrote an article about TrueCrypt for Linux Magazine a while back, and the feedback I got did not indicate many people had install issues."

Extra protection The problem with FDE is that once the disk is legitimately accessed, it isn't protected at all from attacks by someone who has access to the unlocked machine. If your laptop is swiped while it's up and running, or if a file is plucked from the machine while it's unlocked, you're out of luck. However, TrueCrypt allows one to set up a "hidden" volume within the larger encrypted volume; in case access is gained to the drive, the volume appears to be simply a collection of random data. Individual files can also be encrypted.

BitLocker also allows encryption of secondary volumes, though if you're not yet running Vista SP1 it's a command-line setup process that even Microsoft's documentation says is for advanced users only. And the volumes aren't hidden. BitLocker cannot be used to encrypt individual files.

Thumb-drive protection Both BitLocker and TrueCrypt allow you to encrypt an entire storage device, such as a USB flash drive. Drives are encrypted in BitLocker must as any other drive would be; they'll work seamlessly with the machine on which they were originally configured, but to use them on any other BitLocker-enabled machine, you'll need to "Unlock Volume" and use the recovery key to gain access again. (If the machine doesn't have BitLocker, you're out of luck.) TrueCrypt allows you to encrypt an entire thumb drive, but you won't be able to actually run TrueCrypt from that drive. Instead, you'd create a file container on the USB drive, then store TrueCrypt alongside that container, after which you should be able to operate on any machine.

"You can't run BitLocker from that drive either, can you?" asked LinuxQuestions.org's Garcia. "It's really just a matter of having TrueCrypt on each machine you use, and as you mention, you can easily store a copy on an unencrypted partition on the drive."

Protection during hibernation Hibernation is not a great idea for machines running FDE for various reasons, including the threat of "cold-boot attacks" (see below). However, BitLocker does make a point of encrypting a hibernation file if one is present. TrueCrypt does not.

Key recovery When things go wrong, unless the administration has set up the system to store the private key on a removable drive, BitLocker users will need access to the local administrator account. With the individual user's account password, the key can be recovered -- it's stored on the local system. (This can lead to problems if the would-be intruder knows the admin password, obviously.) It's trickier with TrueCrypt -- under Linux, if the password or keyfile is truly gone, your data's locked on the disk forever. On the other hand, you've gained a lovely paperweight about which you can tell pitiful stories for years to come.

The TrueCrypt FAQ notes there is no "back door" provided for administrative users who need to find a way into users' encrypted drives when they've lost the password. However, there is a way for admins to enable themselves to reset the volume password and/or pre-boot authentication password.

Support On one hand, Microsoft. On the other hand, the TrueCrypt user forums. Choose your poison.

What about that freaky hard-drive attack with the canned air? As we learned last year, the "cold boot attack" can affect any FDE scheme that doesn't authentication before booting, whether it's coming back from a power-off or from mere hibernation. Researchers were able to reconstruct the all-important encryption key by switching on a shut-down machine fast enough to grab the residual electrical changes in RAM -- a time window which as it turned out lasts rather longer if you simply chill the chps to subzero temperatures. Almost no one was spared -- BitLocker, FileVault, dmcrypt, and TrueCrypt were all vulnerable.

Any interesting outliers in the FDE space? If you're seriously comparing Windows to Linux, it's a fair bet you're not too worried about whether a particular piece of software is free as stipulated by the GNU General Public License. But if you are looking for a GNU-compliant Windows package on the level of a TrueCrypt or a BitLocker, there is, of course, TrueCrypt for Windows itself. Also check out DiskCryptor, which bills itself as "the only truly free solution." DiskCryptor criticizes TrueCrypt for placing limits on what developers may do with that program's source code, and derides other packages as "fully proprietary ones, which makes them unacceptable to use for protection of a confidential data." And if, at the other philosophical extreme, your organization prefers to utilize TPM technology, Linux FDE options supporting the chip include CheckPoint and eCryptfs.

All that having been said, what's the verdict? With respect to being able to use full disk encryption functionality in Linux the way Microsoft intends for its customers to use it in Windows, the answer to this Can Linux Do This question...is yes.

Select Wisely is a company that makes food allergy/sensitivity cards and medical emergency cards for travelers in a wide variety of languages so you don't need to worry about random shrimp or peanuts showing up in your food on a business trip to China. Reader Michael (commenter LetMeGetTheManager) ordered a set of cards, and was so delighted with their service that he just had to e-mail Consumerist.
Jim,

Thank you for sending the allergy translation cards I ordered, both the "Strongly Worded Peanuts" cards for China and Hong Kong, as well as the "List of Nuts" cards for China and Hong Kong. However, including cards that I did not order, but that would be extremely helpful for someone who is severely allergic to nuts, is a great example of a company going above and beyond what they normally do in business. With my allergy, which could easily lead to death in an instant, those emergency cards work out to be extremely helpful in the unfortunate event I need to use them.

I will let you know how these cards worked out upon returning from my trip.

Since Michael had ordered his cards as PDFs, it didn't require a lot of resources to enclose extra cards with his order, but it was still a thoughtful gesture and very useful to him!

- Hayden Panettiere Doesn’t Regret Misspelled Regrets [PopEater]
- Lindsay and Sam go out for a birthday lunch [Dlisted]
- Gwyneth’s latest GOOP email is actually decent [Lainey Gossip]
- Michael Jackson Had Cancerous Lesion Removed From His Nose [MSN Wonderwall]
- Kim Kardashian and Reggie Bush Going to South Africa [Bossip]
- 5 Best Things About the Fourth of July [College Candy]
- Matt Damon And Ben Affleck Gamble For Charit [Fafarazzi]
- “Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs” review [Pajiba]
- Ryan Phillippe Spotted After Intense Workout. Yums [I’m Not Obsessed]
- Jessica Alba went mattress shopping - and even tries them out [Celebslam]
- Rumer Willis is headed to ‘90210′ as a “punky cute lesbian who isn’t afraid to speak her mind” [In Case You Didn’t Know]
- Random celeb photos [Crazy Days and Nights]
- What Is The Most Romantic Way To Win A Lover Back? [The Frisky]
- Lenny Kravitz Rocks Out in London [PopSugar]
- Marisa Miller and her Supermodel Friends [Egotastic]
- Britney Spears gets one Frappucino closer to crazy [The Superficial]
- Cheryl Tweedy’s Cleavage Sparkles [Hollywood Tuna]

Alec Baldwin (with Marci Klein) at the UJA-Federation of New York’s Leadership awards dinner at Pier Sixty in New York City on June 6th. Images thanks to WENN.com .

Depending on how you look at it, Alec Baldwin is either really gutsy, totally insane, or able to learn from his mistakes. Or perhaps a combination of the three. After the controversy of the infamous “rude, thoughtless little pig” voicemail message he left for his then 11-year-old daughter Ireland, you’d think Alec would hesitate to bring up the incident again. Sure he did the initial requisite round of apologies and explanations, and he seemed genuine in his regret. Partly because he didn’t apologize for everything, only the things he felt he truly did wrong – and I suppose that’s better than saying you’re sorry for everything and not meaning it.

Nonetheless, that was two years ago and Baldwin has done a good job of moving on, thanks to his consistently stellar performance on “30 Rock. But he’s going to bring it all up again – because Alec has an idea or two about how you should parent your kids.

He’s no Dr. Spock - but that isn’t stopping “30 Rock” star Alec Baldwin from writing a book - about parenting!

The actor, long embroiled in nasty family turmoil involving his daughter, recently told an interviewer: “It will be ironic for some people, but I’m going to write a parenting book.

“We’re at… an awful place right now in terms of parenting. Kids have too much power and call too many of the shots, telling their parents what they will and won’t do.”

…Alec thinks modern parents have gone soft, and he blames the bad economy and other social stresses for pulling them away from their kids.

“We live in stressful times,” Alec said. “People come home, walk up the driveway, put the key in the door, and they can’t do another hard job. Parenting your children effectively is a tough job.”

Said a source close to the Emmy-winning actor: “He really believes he can help other people with their parenting problems because he’s been through the whole thing himself - the good, the bad and the ugly. And he’s a lot more learned and loving as a result.

[From The National Enquirer, print edition, July 13 2009]

The thing is, much as I think it’s ill-advised and big-headed of Alec Baldwin to think he’s in a position to offer advice to other parents, I agree with every word he’s said. I cannot believe the way I see children bossing around their parents, telling them what they will and won’t do. Not that I didn’t have my moments as a kid, but you can tell when a child is throwing a once-in-a-while random tantrum versus behaving in their everyday manner. Parents let far too much bad behavior pass without raising an eyebrow.

That’s a big part of it. Yesterday I was on the train, and this kid kept obnoxiously yelling at his mom over and over again, annoying the whole train. I wanted to glare at the kid, but quickly realized the real problem – his mom had her headphones on. Loudly. She didn’t want to be bothered with her kid (who was only trying to tell her about his afternoon at day camp) so the rest of us had to hear him screaming. So... Alec Baldwin, you may not have a leg to stand on, but I’m still going to read your book. And do my best not to call my future kids barnyard animals.

SPACE.com — “Toy Universe” Could Solve Life’s Origins

So who wants to install this thing on their computer?

It’s very cool and all, but given the fact that there’s someone “at the wheel” doesn’t it kind of call into question the notion that anything it generates is truly completely random and undirected?

Michael Jackson’s public memorial will be held Tuesday, July 7th at 10:00 a.m. at Los Angeles’ Staples Center, the sight of the superstar’s final rehearsals for his This Is It! run of London concerts. A family spokesman told the Los Angeles Times yesterday that 11,000 tickets will be passed out for the free event and a press conference hosted by concert promoter AEG today confirmed how those tickets will be distributed.

Fans interested in attending the Jackson memorial can log on to StaplesCenter.com today through 6 p.m. PT Saturday. 17,500 tickets total will be made available: 11,000 for entrance to the Staples Center and 6,500 for neighboring Nokia Theatre, which will simulcast the memorial on three screens. 8,750 registered fans will be selected at random and receive two tickets apiece; they will receive a Ticketmaster code on Sunday between 11 a.m. and 8 p.m. that will allow them to pick up tickets and wristbands on Monday at an undisclosed location. No tickets will be physically distributed at the Staples Center or Nokia Theatre.

Questions over who will foot the bill for the memorial and its associated costs — particularly police deployment — remain partially unanswered as of today. “There’s no precedent for this,” Councilwoman Jan Perry, who is stepping in as mayor for a vacationing Antonio Villaraigosa, told the L.A. Times. At the press conference today, Perry said the event had “the potential to impact public safety” and urged fans to watch the memorial on television; a pool feed will provide footage to all the major networks and a Webcast will also be available. All tickets to the event are free, and AEG’s Tim Lieweke discouraged scapling: “Those who would take advantage of this, shame on them.”

No details about the memorial service itself — who will perform or attend — have been released.

In this increasingly hostile computer environment, it is essential to have a strong password for everything. Whether it’s email, computer account or online banking, using your cat’s name as a password is a very bad idea. And if you’re afraid of not going remembering it because it’s too long and complicated, I’m going to show you how I do it.

What characterizes a strong password? First of all, its length. The longer the password, the stronger it is and the longer it takes to be cracked. Secondly, the entropy or randomness of the generation process. If the attacker can make some statistical assumptions based on the method of generation, even a alphanumerical 8 character password can be cracked within hours. The third characteristic of password generator is trust. Do you trust that the password generator does not keep logs, do you trust that it doesn’t have a backdoor? Lastly, do you have a secure communication channel between the generator and the receiver? Most of the online password generators fail one or more of these guidelines, and even software solutions have problems.

The only completely secure method to generate passwords is to use an open-source generator stored on your computer, preferably running Linux. But even one of the website generated passwords is considerably more secure than any password you can come up with.

Steve Gibson’s Perfect Passwords generator deserves the highest praise of all the solutions tested for this article. Besides the fact that Steve Gibson is a world renowned programmer, the algorithm used ensures a high level of entropy, and although there is no source code available to corroborate tech specs with the notes on the website, I personally trust it. The connection between the GRC server and your computer is secured by a SSL connection and the generator produces three strings at once: 64 random hexadecimal characters (0-9 and A-F), 63 random printable ASCII characters, 63 random alpha-numeric characters (a-z, A-Z, 0-9). The most secure of all is the ASCII string which contains numbers, letters and special characters. You can use any part, the complete string or even mix them to create an unique password. Your password will look something like:

“4q){4′{y]SWt]796Ay|9=

While such a password will work for a web-based service or email account, you aren’t expected to remember it for your Windows account, it’s simply too complicated. I personally use a 12 character hexadecimal string for my user account password, which I can remember without having to write it down, like

FBA4F22489116F11F

This too, can be cracked with Rainbow tables, but it will deter most guys without NSA-level knowledge and processing power.

If you’re asking yourself,”How I can use 12 random ASCII characters for every password I have?” Here’s my system.

• I have an IronKey, a secure USB thumb drive that itself is protected by a 12 character hexadecimal string. All the data on the drive is hardware-encrypted. It will automatically self-destruct if physically tampered or if the password is entered 10 times wrong.
• The IronKey has an integrated password manager and a hardened mobile version of Firefox 3. The passwords never pass through the computer’s keyboard or compromised applications.
• When using my own hardware, which I can vouch is secure, for performance reasons I will use an Excel document which contains a list of services and their assigned passwords, stored on Google Docs. I will never save any passwords into the Firefox password manager. The only way this system can be compromised is by first cracking the computer user account password and hoping that the cookie session is still active.

Editor’s note: IronKey is not free. It starts at $79. If you think that it’s worth the money to protect your privacy and security, then check it out.
The other services I tested were:

PCTools – which provides different options for generating passwords: length, punctuation, numbers, letters etc. as well as a SSL secured connection. They also have a freeware, offline version of the generator. It’s not open-source and the technical details are not available for inspection.

GoodPassword – offers both a random password generator with some customization options and a “Leet” generator that “Leet Passwords are easy to remember acronym passwords generated by combining the first letter of each word, randomly changing the case, and replacing alphanumeric characters with their Leet (1337) equivalents, that is characters that look and/or sound the same”.

Multicians – generates ten “pronounceable” passwords using a Java applet. It’s not open-source but the source code is available for inspection. No SSL connection.

Linux users can use this command to quickly create a strong password:

% dd if=/dev/urandom count=1 2> /dev/null | uuencode -m - | sed -ne 2p | cut -c-8v1/oVN+S

You might want to read on through How To Create Strong Passwords That You Can Remember Easily, Securely Synchronize Your Browser Passwords With LastPass or maybe How To Password Protect GRUB Entries (Linux).

Photo credit: InfoSec Blog

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too.

• Using Keepass to Secure Your Online Accounts (12)
• Protect And Track Your Laptop In Case Of Theft (14)
• Manage & Protect Passwords and Other Data with LockCrypt (9)
• KeyDb - A Portable Password Manager (14)
• Keeping Under the Radar and Securing Your PC Files (19)

['@ Play' is a monthly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.]

We've discussed the information-heavy balance of the game Nethack before. How, once the player learns enough about the nature of the game world, all of the difficulty turns out to be front-loaded, before the player has had the chance to build up experience levels and equipment.

Recently, a couple of variants have arisen in order to remedy this perceived problem. Two years ago was the release of Derek Ray's Sporkhack, and only this past month saw the release of another, UnNethack, created by Patric Mueller.

Nethack's mysterious Dev Team is presumably aware of the problem, and though it is known that they're still around, updating bugs and answering email, and thus we assume are still working on the game, it has been a very long time since the last version. It has been over five years since the release of Nethack 3.4.3, the latest version of the game.

A rising current of opinion on rec.games.roguelike.nethack is that the Dev Team has abandoned the game. Even if they haven't, a few of the more irksome characteristics have survived for multiple versions, long enough that it begins to look like the Dev Team is perfectly happy leaving them in.

Both are games that, to the many characters who die in the earliest regions of the dungeon, seem almost unchanged from the original game. While not any unfriendlier to a new player than vanilla Nethack, most of the changes in these games are aimed at the experienced hacker. Unlike uber-variant Slash'EM, neither seems to be interested in radical reinvention of the game.

The idea of a expert-foiling balance patch has actually been around for some time. One of the most popular variants of 3.1.3 was Stephen White's Nethack+, which also took it upon itself to correct some balance issues. Unicorn horns in that version, for instance, degrade with use.

So, what are the things that they balance? Quite a lot, really. Following are just two of examples. This list contains spoilers, of course, but the effect of these changes is to make the game harder for players who are already spoiled. Still, you should probably move on if you care about such things. We'll probably pick this thread up again later, after UnNethack has had some more development time.

Balance fix #1: Loosening up the "ascension kit."

This is particularly a focus of Sporkhack. In Nethack, nearly all players who aren't actively avoiding them for some reason strive to build up a certain set of equipment which make success all but certain. Nearly all ascensions not only contain some form of dragon scale mail, due to its light weight, non-hindrance to spellcasting, unequaled protection and special protection based on color, but in practice it's only three colors that are even used: gray, silver, and, coming up distant third, black. One way this is done is through the addition of a fractional resistance system. Permanent intrinsics from eating resistant monsters don't immediately go to 100% upon success, but must be reinforced through several such meals. This makes equipment-based sources, such as from the off-colors of dragon scale mail, more useful.

Related to this is the place of magic resistance in the game. After poison resistance (and in some ways surpassing it), magic resistance is the most essential intrinsic in vanilla Nethack 3.1-3.4, nullifying a wide range of dangers through the acquisition of one characteristic. Vanilla Nethack balances this by making equipment the only way to gain it, and few items grant it: basically, to get magic resistance, the player must wear a cloak of magic resistance, a suit of gray dragon scale mail, or hold one of a few quest artifacts, which must either be wished for or the matching class must be played.

Sporkhack's solution is to make magic resistance both less needed and less useful. Magic resistance is essential because of the high-level monster spells of Touch of Death and Destroy Armor, both most-often cast by opponents who are able to teleport after the player and are thus difficult to escape without fighting them, and thus taking a few spells. They may even decide to use one immediately after a teleport, giving the player no opportunity to avoid a potentially deadly attack. Magic resistance protects against both states, and so it is of great value in a game of vanilla Nethack.

No, more than that: because the player's whole game can be ended, or grievously harmed, by a single unavoidable moment, magic resistance is an essential characteristic. If you don't have it by the time teleporting liches start showing up (usually the Castle), then you are subjecting your character's life to the whims of the dice, and as we covered before, high-level roguelike play is about eliminating such risks wherever possible.

Sporthack makes Touch of Death do high physical damage and max HP drain instead of killing the player outright (think of it as an "aging" attack....). Magic resistance helps reduce this penalty but doesn't eliminate it. It also makes it so that the Destroy Armor isn't outright blocked by magic resistance.

Balance fix #2: Make the game's levels more unpredictable.

This is a focus of UnNethack primarily, which merges in more versions of many special levels. It gets its levels from other variants and patches. Both it and Sporkhack also fold in Pasi Kallinen's "flipped levels" patch, which sometimes mirrors a special level on its X or Y axis. Sporkhack also contains new code that allows more doors to be randomly placed, in order to keep long-time players on their toes.

The level additions are made possible by the fact that most of the game's important locations are not random in layout, but come from a level file, a utility file created from a source definition during the compilation process. This setup was developed in order to allow more coding-friendly hackers to modify their game dungeons, but it also allowed the Dev Team, eventually, to make multiple versions of the most important special levels, which are randomly selected for inclusion each game. This makes it relatively easy to add new levels to the game, so many variants feature them.

Both Spork and Un add in some level variants, but more in order to liven things up by presenting more options for those levels that are chosen from pre-made templates. One of the biggest sources of new levels is Pasi Kallinen, who has written a range of patches that include new versions of levels such as Sokoban, Medusa, Castle, and other levels. Some of these versions post new challenges; word is one of the new versions of the Medusa level must be travelled carefully to avoid catching sight of its star monster before engaging in combat with her.

Unnethack also brings in the "Heck2 patch," a radically reorganized scheme for what most players consider to be the most boring area of the game, Gehennom. It also has variants for the demon lord lairs, and additional lairs for previously-neglected lords. It also includes a Very Special Guest Star subbing in as Amulet guard for the High Priest of Moloch....

Basic Nethack has four primary level generation systems. Dungeon levels are those found throughout the main dugeon, Cave levels are found in the Gnomish Mines, Mazes are generated in the deep dungeon and Gehennom, and the Rogue level has a unique generation scheme. After some plays, these schemes, while suitably chaotic for new players, can become fairly familiar to an experienced hacker.

UnNethack livens the early dungeon up a bit by adding in the "town" generation scheme from Nethack Brass. Sporkhack tries to mix up Gehennom a bit by randomly changing its maze walls to other types, such as lava, a rude surprise for players used to leaning on direction keys to hurry through. Both games also do away with one of the most frustrating aspects of Nethack's ascension run, the "mysterious force" that sometimes random teleports players downward while carrying the Amulet.

Friday Five : ˈfrÄ«-(ËŒ)dÄ,-dÄ“ ˈfÄ«v : On the sixth day of every week I hit the shuffle button on my iTunes and share my five and drop a little knowledge and insight for each track. Sometimes there is a playlist involved, sometimes there isn’t. Sometimes we have guest, but most of the time it’s just me. The rest is up to you, our friends and readers! Fire up your media player of choice and share the first five random track of your shuffle in the comments.

The Five:

Editor’s Note: After a 4 day work week that felt more like 7 it’s time to unwind, but before I start my holiday weekend I’ve got a quick shuffle to share. Have a safe and great Independence Day weekend.

Harvey Danger – “Flagpole Sitta” (from Where Have All the Merrymakers Gone?, 1997)

The Gaslight Anthem – “Great Expectations” (mp3) (from The ‘59 Sound, 2008)

Van Halen – “Jamie’s Cryin’” (from Van Halen, 1978)

Prince – “Controversy” (from Controversy, 1981)

Bobby Brown – “Roni” (mp3) (from Dance! … Ya Know It, 1989)

What tunes are getting you started today?

I’m f*cking tired of hearing random people screaming out why mono is cool or not. These kind of people don’t even know what coding is about, or they just learned Java or C# at university and they’re like “oh shit, I can code!!”. STOP THAT.

Quite some stuff has been going on in Zeitgeist since UDS, including the addition of two new developers to our team: Mikkel Kamstrup and Markus Korn, who both have been doing awesome work!

As planned, we split the project into the engine (Zeitgeist) and the default graphical user interface (GNOME Activity Journal), but during this time we also dropped our old database to start with a completely new structure which is way more flexible and uses less disk space than our previous one.

Not so positively, some team members wanted to try out an ORM (Storm), which from the start one I thought was a bad idea (it’s not that I can’t see the convenience for using one in certain projects, but for Zeitgeist, an engine mainly constituted by a little set of rather complex queries, I don’t really see how it can help us). Doing this -at the same time as the switch the the new database model- ended up as a pretty demotivating experience, and while we got it working at the end the result was an engine which worked slow (even with caching) and used lots of resources, so we’ve decided to go back to plain SQL.

Right now we still have a mix (we’ll probably finish quicking out the remaining Storm parts within the next weeks), but I already changed the main information request methods to SQL, thus reducing common operations from requiring up to thousands of queries to doing only a single one, doubling the speed while reducing memory usage. I hope to get further performance improvements while converting the remaining parts (for example, inserting data currently takes way more time than I’d like).

We also cleaned up the D-Bus API (it was pretty much of a mess before, just enough for the GUI to work) and added more functionality to it. However, it may still undergo substantial changes in future versions once we start making more use of the added flexibility the new database gives us (for example, for the 0.2 release we’ll probably split up tags into “user defined tags” and “automatically assigned tags”). Unrelated to this, Markus has started working at making it possible to configure and enable/disable loggers, so there’s also some cool stuff coming from this front (but nothing visible yet).

Just some random notes… You can read more about Zeitgeist at Seif’s blog, in his recent blog post “Some Zeitgeist news“, and if you have any comment you can come find us in #gnome-zeitgeist on GIMPnet . I’m now going back to work: after all, today we’re going to release Zeitgeist 0.1 (development preview)!

Related posts:

• I’m in Google Summer of Code!
• UDS 2009

© Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals, 2009. | Permalink | License | No comments | Add to del.icio.us | Post tags: gnome, gsoc2009, Programari lliure, Ubuntu, zeitgeist

p2pnet news view P2P:- Wired Editor Chris Anderson first book, The Long Tail, “has been required reading in our office since day one and today we’re extremely excited to be working with him to bring another first to Spotify,” says, well, Spotify.

Starting today Anderson’s new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, will be, “made available,” says Spotify.

But only to UK users. Which is passing strange since Anderson is an American.

“Personally narrated by Anderson, Free considers a brave new world where the old economic certainties are being challenged by a growing flood of free goods – newspapers, DVDs, T-shirts, phones, even holiday flights,” says the story, adding:

“The audiobook supports today’s hardback launch of Free, published by Random House.”

But of course, Free isn’t free. Listed at $26.99, Amazon is flogging it for $17.81 .

Which is also passing strange because it’s all about how companies get rich by charging nothing.

It’s, “essentially an extended elaboration of Stewart Brand’s famous declaration that ‘information wants to be free’,” says a review in The New Yorker.

“This is the first audiobook we’ve ever included in our catalogue,” says Spotify. “We’re going to trial it, see what people think and who knows, maybe this is the start of something new for us.”

Follow p2pnet on Twitter.

Spotify -  Chris Anderson’s Free, the first audiobook on Spotify, July 2, 2009
The New Yorker - Priced to Sell, July 5, 2009

Although I am a professional writer and blogger, although I keep up with the latest tech trends, although I am, might I say, something of a geek, I do not iPod. I don’t even iPhone. This is not a political nor even a religious position, it is simply the Way That It Is.

When Microsoft released the Zune, I scoffed. Until one day, I sauntered past the Zune display at a local Mega-Duper-Mart and, out of the corner of my eye, caught a glimpse of a sight so hideously ugly, so repulsive in all its aspects, that I stopped dead in my tracks. The Brown Zune. Truly glorious in its ugliness, the Brown Zune features design that puts Soviet prison designers to shame – a squat, brick-like shape sheathed in a brown exterior whose ugliness is only increased by the green highlights when the light hits the device just so.

I had to have one. And that dream came true one happy Christmas morn when I opened my present from my then-girlfriend – pure Brown Zuney goodness.

To be honest, it’s not at all a bad media player. The desktop software is pretty good, if a little resource-hungry; the sound and video are great; the device’s interface is at least as good as any other media player’s interface (yes, including iPod’s) – all in all, I’m happy with my Zune.

Except for one big thing. Although a firmware update some time ago added audiobook functionality to the Zune, in its infinite wisdom Microsoft decided they wouldn’t add it to the desktop software. Instead, Zune users need to use third-party software – Audible’s for Audible audiobooks, Overdrive for everything else – to transfer audiobooks onto the Zune. I am not an Audible member, so I haven’t really used their audiobook manager, but I do use Overdrive quite a bit. Unfortunately, it’s a little weird, especially when it comes to deleting audiobooks from your Zune.

One thing neither Microsoft nor anyone else has seen fit to make easy, though, is how to get audiobooks from non-Audible and non–Overdrive sources onto your Zune. Maybe you have an audiobook on CD that you’ve checked out of your library, or one that you own. Because of licensing issues, it can be difficult and in some cases impossible to find those files online – and in any case, why should you re-purchase an audiobook you already have in your possession, just for the “privilege” of listening to it on your Zune instead of on 18 CDs?

Now, you can rip the files and install them like any other music file, but you’d better listen straight through, because you won’t be able to resume playing from wherever you left off. You can also rip the files and edit the ID3 tags, setting the genre as”Podcast”, which will put all the files onto your Zune as a podcast, allowing you to stop and resume – but in my tests of this technique, the files came out in a random order that was useless. Since many audiobooks have tracks every 2 or 3 minutes, you can end up with hundreds of files for a long book, and searching every few minutes for the next one when you’re barreling down the freeway isn’t exactly a relaxing way to enjoy a book.

Fortunately, there is a way to make the Overdrive audiobook manager work for you and, with a little work (not a lot) you can rip audiobooks to your Zune, and remove them, quite easily. Here’s how.

The Overdrive Media Console is used most often by libraries for handling DRM’ed, time-limited audiobook downloads for their clients. My library, for instance, offers audiobooks for a three-week “Checkout”, during which the title is unavailable to other patrons. It’s not the greatest thing ever, but it’s a fair-enough compromise between publishers and rights-holders who would prefer people buy books and libraries and their patrons who are committed to the free exchange of information.

When you check out an Overdrive book, you download an ODM file to your hard drive which is opened by default with the Overdrive Media Console, which will download the actual book. Once it’s on your computer, you can listen to it in Overdrive, or transfer it to a device. To install it on your Zune, connect your Zune and then close the Zune software (which will probably open when your PC detects that the Zune is present). Now, simply select the book you want to transfer (unfortunately, Overdrive Manager cannot transfer multiple titles at the same time) and hit the “Transfer” button, which will open the Overdrive Transfer Wizard. The Transfer Wizard will find the Zune, then ask you which parts you want to transfer over—usually, you’ll select “All”, hit “Next”, and wait; when the files are all transferred over, click “Finish” to return to the Overdrive Manager.

Deleting audiobooks you’ve already put on your Zune is... well, it’s weird. If you delete the book from the Overdrive Media Console window, it deletes it from your hard drive, but not from your Zune. So don’t do that. Instead, you want to select the book and, in a stunning break with intuition, click “Transfer” as if you were going to put the book on your Zune. Wait for the Zune to be detected, then deselect all of the parts of the audiobook in the Transfer Wizard. Hit “Next” and wait for the Transfer Wizard to do it’s thing – think of it as replacing the files that are on their with the no files you want. Hit “Finish” and the audiobook is gone from your Zune.

If you have your own audiobooks that you’d like to listen to on your Zune, you’re going to have to do a little prep-work, essentially fooling Overdrive into thinking you have an “official” Overdrive audiobook. You’ll use a couple of pieces of free third-party software to make this all work.

First of all, if the audiobook isn’t already converted to mp3, you need to rip the audiobook. I use CDex for this, although you can use any ripper, even the one built into Zune. To save space on your Zune, you can greatly reduce the bitrate from what you’d use for music – the spoken voice simply isn’t all that complex. 128k is more than adequate for most audiobooks – 64k will sound perfectly good, even. You can also rip in mono, cutting the file size in half. If your mp3 convertor has a setting to optimize for speech, use it – it will make sure that the least data loss occurs in the richest parts of the human voice.

This step is not strictly necessary, but when it comes time to delete files (see below) you’ll be glad you did it. Use an mp3 merging program – I like mergemp3, which is free and easy to use – to combine all of the files in your audiobook into one giant mp3 file. This is much easier to work with – some long books take up 25 or more CDs, each with 10, 20, or more tracks – that’s a lot to keep track of! Using mergemp3, you just select the folder where your files are, hit “merge”, select a file name and a place to save the file, and wait a few minutes. Make sure you save the file to its own folder – this will be important in step 3.

Now you have a great big mp3, but you don’t quite have something the Zune will recognize as an audiobook. What you need is a WAX file, which is basically the meta-information that defines the mp3 (or mp3s if you did not merge them) as an audiobook. To create this, download the Zune Overdrive Wax Creator. Before you run it, tough, go online and find a picture of your book’s cover and save it in the same folder as your ripped audiobook (make sure it’s in JPG format).

When you run the Wax Creator, it will immediately ask you to choose the folder where your audiobook’s files are stored. Find it, click next, and wait – the program will scan the folder, create a file listing all the mp3 files in the folder (which is why you want just the audiobook and the cover image in the folder), add the cover image, and open the Overdrive Transfer Wizard. Now, you can transfer the file just as you would any normal Overdrive audiobook.

What you’ll notice when you make your own audiobooks is that they don’t show up in the Overdrive Manager like “proper” Overdrive audiobooks do. And if you try to delete them the same way – by running the Transfer Wizard and opening the Wax file for your audiobook, then deselecting the files associated with it – the Transfer Wizard will give you an error.

So how do you delete your audiobooks? If you haven’t updated to version 3 of the Zune firmware, there’s a registry hack you an use to mount your Zune as a hard drive, allowing you to browse the directory structure and manually delete the files. This doesn’t work for people with up-to-date Zunes, though.

All is not lost, however – you can still fairly easily remove your audiobook files from your Zune, using Overdrive. To do so, initiate a transfer and click the “Advanced” on the screen that pops up after it’s detected your Zune. In the new screen, click the “Browse” button, which will open a new window allowing you to examine the contents of the Audiobooks folder on your Zune. Drill down to the folder containing the book you want to delete and right-click it – there’s only one option in the right-click menu, and that’s “Delete”. Select it, cancel out of the Advanced options, cancel out of the Transfer Wizard, and you’re done.

Hopefully Microsoft will add better support for audiobooks  in the next version of the Zune Desktop – ripping audiobooks and listening to them on your Zune should be at least as easy as ripping music CDs to your Zune, which the Zune desktop software does automatically (it will even set that as the default action to take when you insert a CD, if you let it). Until Microsoft comes to its senses, though, it’s nice to know that you don’t have to carry a box of 26 discs and a CD player to listen to your latest audiobook. Like me, you can fly your Ugly Brown Zune with pride!

Header photo courtesy of yngrich via Flickr

Dustin M. Wax is the project manager at Stepcase Lifehack. He is also the creator of The Writer's Technology Companion, a site devoted to the tools of the writing trade. When he's not writing, he teaches anthropology and gender studies in Las Vegas, NV. He is the author of Don't Be Stupid: A Guide to Learning, Studying, and Succeeding at College.

Follow him on Twitter: @dwax.

Share This