rwmtest

Back in May 2008 I offered my thoughts on three services that offered Cory Doctorow's Little Brother as an audio book. Audible didn't work at all, Zipidee worked but was less than ideal, and eMusic was the best of the three. As part of the 50'th anniversary celebrations of Doctor Who I have decided to go where I've never been before, and check out some of the Doctor Who audio-books. AudioGO offers Doctor Who, Torchwood and Sarah Jane Adventures that are based on TV Soundtracks, readings of novelizations, as well as original stories. Big Finish offers many original science fiction audio dramas for Doctor Who , Stargate and Sherlock Holmes. It goes without saying that like eMusic both offer unencrypted (AKA: DRM-free) audio in vendor-neutral audio formats, which in this case included MP3. I discussed my unwillingness to access or pay for DRM-infected audio-books in the 2008 article. I suspect given these services have a focus on science fiction that they recognize...

Since some time close to the founding in 2000 I have been a member of Fair Vote Canada, including having a $10/month automatic donation. Today I have contacted FVC to cancel the donation and let my membership lapse. When I first joined the group was in favour of electoral modernization, was non-partisan and appeared agnostic to any specific voting system alternative to the very broken First Past the Post system. It appears over the years it has moved from being non-partisan to being multi-partisan, and is now focused on voting systems that favour political parties. When they speak of being proportional they mean party proportional, fixated not on the potential of a representative having the most voter support but only on votes which are targeted at parties rather than representatives. While I heard ramblings over the years about what I consider a change, the policy direction became obvious in the language of a motion for FVC members to have a referendum on limited support of Alter...

I was invited by eMail to join CBC's InCanada Panel , which included a series of questions. They asked about radio and television networks and my viewing/listening/reading habits. I didn't know what to say as they didn't define the terms as clearly as I think they need to in order to get the information they need. For instance, when asked about television I gave an estimate of video I watch on a television screen. Later questions spoke about viewing on set-top boxes, but included that as Internet which suggested the estimates I gave were wrong. A few months ago we dropped Cable TV, with most of my viewing already being via DVD's, Netflix, or other online content. I purchased an ATSC tuner and aerial for a television we have upstairs, and other than the watching I did when I set it up I haven't watched it. That tuner sits there for that case when we might want to be watching something on a "live" broadcast (some emergency or event like we saw in Sept 1...

Yesterday I was called about a story a CBC Television journalist was doing on car-free living in Ottawa. This was a follow-up story sparked by Ottawa city Councillor Katherine Hobbs giving up her car after going car-free for a few months. While my wife drives, so there is a car in the household, I do not drive it or have a drivers license. I consider myself as (or possibly more) car-free as those who don't have a car in the household, but who have memberships in car sharing services like Vrtucar . There will always be exceptions to the general rule for a car-free person, but we are all people who as a general rule don't drive. When I was a teen in the 80's, it was a matter of laziness. I couldn't afford a car, and didn't have the motivation others did to get their drivers licenses anyway. I had a 365 (as they were called in Ontario in those days) learners permit a few times, but never bothered doing the driving test. In the 1990's I met up with some more po...

I'm re-posting this here as http://www.flora.ca/status/350 may not be available over the weekend. --- The FLORA.ca services may be down all weekend, possibly starting some time Friday June 8 and continuing to some time on Monday June 11. Background: The FLORA.ca servers (flora.org, digital-copyright.ca, etc) are hosted on a service I have been receiving from NCF.ca , who up until recently was reselling TekSavvy.com services. The NCF decided to transition to Bell. Since I wish to minimize the services I receive from the incumbent phone/cable companies (see other articles on this blog), I am now trying to switch back to TekSavvy. I wasn't given enough advanced notice of the timing, so I made an IP address transition on Tuesday May 29'th. Some services were likely down for people as DNS propagated across the network. Some people, ironically NCF.ca email users, have noticed that email messages from the mailing lists have not been able to be received as there is a ro...

Very frustrated with Internet services today. My DSL service with NCF.ca that was previously a reselling of TekSavvy transitioned to Bell on Tuesday.  I didn't have time to transition direct to TekSavvy, only being told the transition date at the end of the work day last Friday (April 25'th). Reverse DNS is still not working with Bell, which means email from my servers are likely being rejected as untrustworthy. I have quite a few mailing lists hosted on these servers... I figured my transition back to TekSavvy was a good time to upgrade service, so I tried to sign up for the DSL25 service which has a 7M uplink.  Seems that this is not available in my location, so I'm signing up with a DSL12 which has a 1M uplink. A 1M uplink is mildly better than the 800K of the current service. TekSavvy this afternoon contacted me to let me know I had to cancel my current service before TekSavvy could enable the new service.   Funny that there was no permission required to switch to Bel...

The subject of my post comes from a May 20, 2010 post of the same title where I discussed my progress with moving away from legacy phone/cable companies. Last weekend I returned my rented Rogers Digital Cable tuner, and cancelled my cable service. The stations are still there until the end of the next billing period next month, but the decision is finally made and paperwork done. Since 2010 I decided to experiment with something between Rogers Digital cable and what I would ideally have considered. I obviously don't like technology that is "sold" to me that I don't really own (IE: that I as the owner aren't given all the keys to), but I made a compromise between that ideal and the many wrongs of Rogers and Rogers Digital Cable. In May 2011 I ordered a Boxee Box (made by D-Link) , which was the most open of the Netflix compatible devices at the time. Since we have an older TV I ordered an HDMI to Composite /S-Video Converter so I could use regular audio/S-Vi...