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Items of Note:
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Tech news:
Dell buys Alienware. Despite earlier denials, Dell has announced that it will buy Alienware, the Miami-based maker of specialty high-end gaming and media rigs. Speculation about the partnership began a few weeks ago, when the CEO of Alienware rival VoodooPC blogged that a deal was in the works, but the rumors were denied by Dell and Alienware. According to Michael Dell, Alienware will continue to be managed by its current executive team as “a standalone unit.” However, the deal is still likely to frustrate those who consider Dell a commodity manufacturer, rather than a high-end specialist — though it’s sure to please AMD fans, given that Dell has long been an Intel-only shop, and Alienware has a broad line of AMD-based products.
Apple calls French law ‘state-sponsored piracy’. A proposed French law that would force Apple Computer to make the songs it sells through its iTunes music store playable on devices that compete with its own iPod amounts to “state-sponsored piracy,” Apple said Tuesday. France’s lower house of parliament passed a law Tuesday that would require digital content providers to share details of their rights management technologies with rivals. iTunes songs are protected by Apple’s FairPlay technology and are incompatible with most non-iPod players. The bill, designed to prevent any single music-playing technology–and hence, any one media seller or device maker–from dominating the online market, now moves to France’s senate. “The French implementation of the EU Copyright Directive will result in state-sponsored piracy,” Apple said in a statement. “If this happens, legal music sales will plummet just when legitimate alternatives to piracy are winning over customers. iPod sales will likely increase as users freely load their iPods with ‘interoperable’ music which cannot be adequately protected. Free movies for iPods should not be far behind in what will rapidly become a state-sponsored culture of piracy.”
Yahoo offers VoIP through Yahoo! Messenger. Yahoo launched a new way to get a local telephone number for just $2.99 a month.
The calls have to be initiated from a PC, but can be made to traditional landline phones and cellphones. Yahoo customers can receive calls from those phones, as well. Yahoo will charge 2 cents a minute for domestic calls, on top of the monthly $2.99 fee. Per-minute charges to 180 other countries will vary. It won’t charge to receive calls. Yahoo is undercutting Skype by about $1 monthly for such PC-to-phone service.
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Test a geek: Thanks to David George, we have a new Test A Geek segment! Enjoy.
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How To: Back up your music using iTunes.
If you’re not backing up your music, it’s very important to do so in a world where music is only in a digital format. If your computer crashed, you could not get your iTunes music back. Apple will not let you re-download it for free. It is mainly because of this that backing up your songs is vital. Here’s how to do it right from iTunes.
1. Change your iTunes “Burning” preference to “Data CD or DVD”. Access the preferences under the iTunes pulldown menu.
2. Now we need to make a playlist that holds your entire library. We’ll use this playlist to burn the files to CD/DVD. If there are songs you don’t want to backup then you can make a smart playlist that excludes these items but makes it so all other songs in your library are automatically added to the playlist. You can use this method to exclude any songs that you don’t want to backup. If you want to backup everything, you can simply create a new regular playlist and drag everything from your library in to it.
3. Once you have your playlist setup, containing all the songs you want to backup, simply pop-in a blank CD or DVD and click burn. The great thing about this method is iTunes will automatically segment the burn into multiple CDs or DVDs. You don’t have to do anything special, when one disc is done, iTunes will spit it out and ask for the next one. The music will be burned onto the discs in alphabetical order, in folders labeled with band and album names. The layout of the backup discs depends on how the playlist is sorted when you burn it. Sort by artist – you get a bunch of artist folders. Sort by album – you get a bunch of album folders. Sort by song – everything is at the root level, with file names mangled to make them unique.
4. Now, you’re going to be adding more music to your library at some point, right? You only want to backup the new items and now do this in an incremental fashion. Tracking new additions to your library is a snap. Simply create a new smart playlist, with a rule to only include tracks added after the date of your backup. Only music added to your library after that date will be put into the playlist. The next time you want to make a backup, simply burn this playlist to CD/DVD, and then change the date in your rule to your new backup date.
5. The next thing you want to do is backup the xml files that iTunes creates so that if you need to rebuild your library and preserve all your star ratings and such you want to backup 2 additional files: “iTunes Library” and “iTunes Music Library.xml”. They are located in ~/Music/iTunes/. These small data files contain all the info about your library and playlists. In case of loss, you would reinstall iTunes, drag all the files from your backup discs back onto iTunes to import them, and then replace the new versions of these 2 files with your archived copies. You only need to do this step to recover your playlists. You don’t need them to simply recover your music.
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Ask A Geek:
Si says: Hi, I just tuned into your podcasts which I THINK ARE BRILLIANT!!
After listening to one just now I was wondering actually how do the “big brother” corporations monitor p2p use leading to identification of individuals infringing copyright please.
Best Wishes, Si,
Lancashire
England.
Si, thanks for your question. Pretty much what the corporations do is look for shared files on the networks that fall under their copyrights. Once they see a file, they attempt to download it. If they can get the file that means it’s shared and that person is breaking the law. At that point, they look up the IP address of that person. Once they have this, they then do a lookup on what ISP owns that IP address. Now they contact the ISP and use strong-handed tactics to force the ISP to give up the information of who had that address. Now they can sue you! Yay!
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Hack: This segment will return on a future episode of The Geekcast
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The geek’s view: This segment will return on a future episode of The Geekcast
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