iTunes Album Art

I've been using iTunes for a couple of years now. It took getting used to in the beginning. Recently, iTunes offers the ability to get the album art from the iTunes music store (you do need an account there). In the old days, I got the covers from Amazon.com, but hey, when it's automated, who am I to complain.... till now The downloaded ablum art from the iTunes store doesn't show up on the iPod... Why? Now I still have to get the album covers from Amazon (or another source), if I want the pictures to show up on my iPod. The probabe cause might be that the album art I manual download and attach to songs is actually added to the mp3, while the iTunes automated-album-art-getter is only a reference to a image on the hard drive. Well, at least I've got something to do tomorrow when it's raining.

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Internet Mail Is Coming To An End

Today, the end is near. Mail servers are failing al over the world. The dutch ISP's Planet, and Chello are having sever problems with their mail server. Chello having problems is nothing new :-) . They always seem to have a problem of some sort. It's beyond coincidence that even Planet AND Gmail are having difficulties at the same time.

XS4ALL is still working as expected (otherwise you wouldn't be reading this) :-)

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AACS 'Advantages'

The last couple of days were all about the leaked key for decrypting HD-DVD movies. This made me curious about the technology, so I headed to the AACS LA website. There's variety of white papers available, which explain the AACS concept. The same papers were used by musilix64 in making his first breakthrough on circumventing the AACS protection. But there is more to be found on their website... There's even a section which explains the Consumer Benefits of AACS.

• Support a superior viewing experience delivered by next generation media formats AACS is added to the content. The content itself will probably 'work' better without AACS.
• Enable greater flexibility to manage distribute, and play entertainment content on a wider range of devices This is a 'feature' for the publishing companies. Without the restrictive AACS protection, the content can be played on virtually every device. With AACS protection 'they' control on which device you can play the content.
• Enable groundbreaking home entertainment choices and the ability to use content on PCs and a range of CE devices AACS is added to the content. The content itself will probably 'work' better without AACS.
• Work across a variety of formats and platforms Five letters: L I N U X. AACS protected movies CANNOT be played on Linux. Only movies without the protection can be player on certain Linux players.

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ADSL Technology... wooohoooo (not)

I'm one of those lucky bastards who lives like a gazillion miles from a phone central. This means that the ADSL speed reduces dramatically on high speeds. My older ADSL subscription was an Ultra Fast subscription (20Mbps/1Mbps). Due to the distance I only got about 6Mbps (if the wind was blowing from the right direction). The cheaper version (Basic, 8Mbps/1Mbps) is slower, but I get relatively more speed (around 5Mbps). So for me, the additional <1Mbps more costed about 20 euro's a month..... Damn, it's about time that they start using different technologies to bring the Internet into peoples homes. How the hell will they be able to bring phone, Internet, and TV over the Internet? Currently, it would mean that downloads 'stop' if you pick up the phone, or that artifacts appear on the TV signal when browsing the Internet.

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Wordpress Search Engine Not Working

I installed Ultimate Tag Warrior recently, because I liked the tag clouds I saw on other blogs. Unfortunately,  the plugin seems to cripple the search capabilities on the website. If the plugin is activated, you can't find any posts with a search query. Disabling the plugin make things work again. So, I want to humbly apologize to all those people trying to find important stuff on this blog :-)

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Leopard Delayed (Officially)

Apple announced that the OSX 10.5 (aka Leopard) will be delayed till October 2007....

... We now plan to show our developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing, and ship Leopard in October.....

Aaaaargh. I was hoping to get it in June. Well, this gives me more time for saving a little extra money, and buy a new piece of Apple hardware (Mac Mini or perhaps even a Mac Pro) which will have Leopard pre-installed. Or maybe just the iPhone when it arrives in Europe at the end of the year and a separate copy of Leopard.

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TWiT Podcasts Going Off-Topic

I've been a big fan of the TWiT podcasts. Especially the Apple, Windows and security related podcasts. But lately, the content of those podcasts seem to shift to too much off-topic talk. Take the latest edition of Security Now! (Cross-Site-Scripting - Part II). The podcasts is about an hour in length, but the first half hour is nothing but talk about the Sony e-book reader, and favorite writers. What's that got to do with security?? I don't know. Same goes for MacBreak Weekly. It's more about having a good time for the authors, than about bringing some news. I don't mind that the authors are having fun creating the content. Hell, I appreciate a good laugh as much as the next guy, but keep it on topic. Too bad that only about 50% of the content has something to do with the actual title (Mac / Security). If they keep this up, they will loose a listener (not that they might care).

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Blog Spam (part deux)

The last couple of weeks my blog was under some sort of spam attack. I got about 50 to 80 spam comments a day. Thankfully, Askimet intercepted 99% of those messages. But Askimet shouldn't be getting these messages, because my captcha plugin should keep them out... well, it didn't. Yesterday, I found Wordpress Hashcash. A plugin which uses crypto to keep automated spammers away. So far it's working. UPDATE: ever since I installed WP-Hashcash it has been awfully quiet on the spamming front :-) Never mind... Thankfully Askimet is catching them all (50 per day at this moment)

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Blog Spam

I've got this blog running for a couple of months now. Even though not many comments are left behind (I don't care), the spammers definitely found my blog. I receive over 30 spam comments a day now. Thanks to the Askimet Anti-spam plugin for Wordpress, the spam entries are quarantined.

Every spam entry looks the same, and all the links the f*ckers try to leave behind won't work (I must admin that I try some of the links they are leaving behind). So I ask you; What's the point in spamming useless links? If a link won't work, you won't even try a (spammed) link in the future, because it's a waist of time. Same goes for e-mail spam. I receive lots of spam in my inbox, but what is the use in advertising viagra, if the shop is offline.I guess that there are just too many people with too much spare time on there hands. But not enough to create, or host a decent online drugstore :-)

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Major Server Downtime

Last night my server went down. There was a 'poof', and then nothing. The status LED on my motherboard was still in the green, so it could be either the motherboard, CPU or the power supply. This morning I head out to the local computer dealer to get me a new motherboard, CPU, and a power supply. Thankfully, it was just the power supply that died. This might actually be a good opportunity to upgrade my server to a Mac Mini.

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