A Quick and Geeky Round Up

Amazing, isn’t it, how retro you can get if you have a dig around, isn’t?

One thing that always tickled me with the Performa was the amount of amazingly funky alert sounds it had; Sosumi is or course, still available on Leopard, but there were others.

Wild Eep and LogJam amongst them.

Which are rather fun; especially if you’ve managed to find them, and install them on your system.

Handily, you can find them here.   It’s only a few minutes work to put them in Home Folder>Library>Sounds.

Which is when you can really get going, with altering your System Preferences.   (There’s .aiff and .wav versions included in the pack, for those of us running Windoze, or GNU/Linux or BSD variants.   And if you’re running iTunes 8.x, or later, you can use it to convert them to mp3 format, and put them on most mobile phones.)

And I’ll tell you what, LogJam don’t half make you jump, as an email alert …

•••••

But moving quickly along …

In between the various reports of rampant botnets and cyber warfare, the BBC managed to put out a report about a piece of software called RealDVD, which allows people to copy a DVD to their hard-drives; something the major Hollywood Studios say is a license for copyright theft, and the software’s makers maintain is designed to let its users back up their DVD collections.

This is going to run, isn’t?

The trouble is, of course, is that there’s alternative ways of doing this that Hollywood hasn’t apparently complained about.

For starters, it’s easy enough to find software that will copy — or ‘rip’ — a film to a computer hard-drive; Hand Brake being the open source app of choice.

There’s also plenty of ways — if needed — to re-encode and edit a given video file; vlc.app is very good at the re-encoding part, as is Squared5.   The latter’s also a very handy, if basic, video editor.

On top of that, owner’s of recent model Mac’s will have copies of the iLife suite, which includes an application called iDVD; intended for use, with another iLife app, iMovie, for making home movies, but which can create dvd’s.   I know; I’ve made home movies with the combo,  myself.   For those of us without, there’s both commercial and open source DVD authoring software available.

So I personally don’t understand why Hollywood’s complaining about this; beyond the obvious fact that this is seen as threatening their income.

Understandable, given the current recession.

But to complain now, when the basic technology’s been around for a good half decade?

It seems to be whinging about the unlocked stable door, after the horse has bolted.

Long after the the horse has bolted; that happened when Currys and Tandys sold their first VCR …