Das schwarze Auge

While ripping the music files into iTunes from the computer CDs of the RPG of my youth, I found these nostalgic game videos on Youtube:

Die Schicksalsklinge (Intro)
Sternenschweif (Intro)
Schatten über Riva (Outro)

More information

My worst nightmare becomes true

This post is all about the new iTunes store. And no, I didn’t pick the title because it’s bad, I picked it because it’s so good. Better don’t ask me about my iTunes bill at the end of the month.

Over at vowe’s we have been moaning for quite a while about DRM and how it prevents people from buying music online. soundmedia.ch lets you download DRM free music for quite a while already, but only locally famous Swiss artists are to some extent available. With the arrival of iTunes Plus another barrier has been broken. Finally buying digital music is the way it is meant to be: easily available, properly tagged, superior sound quality, fast downloads and playing anywhere.

My experience with the iTunes Plus store had only flaw: despite my DSL connection being perfectly fine, it took me three days to download my songs because of repeated interruptions. My guess is the Apple servers were too busy as lots of customers hit the new service (John’s comments seem to confirm my assumption). After three days I had my album downloaded except for one song that mysteriously disappeared leaving only the playlist entry behind. The repeated download interruptions and my Powerbook going to sleep obviously messed things up. However, some nice iTunes staff person answered my complaint within 48 hours and enabled my account to download the missing song again. Today I downloaded the Pulse album by Pink Floyd and didn’t experience any lags anymore.

So there my worst nightmare has come true: almost every album by Pink Floyd is available without DRM - and once I’m done with those, Iron Maiden is waiting… Apple has the skill to suck money out of their customers’ pockets without having them regret it. I just wonder why it takes the rest of the industry so long to grasp a good business model.

(PS: The Wall is the only Pink Floyd album not available as a DRM free download, it still has the DRM chains. Some people at EMI don’t seem to have that much courage yet)

Dropping knowledge

Today over at vowe.net, Cem Basman dropped again a wonderful IT-related link. This one is on Identity 2.0.

Adding a Palm to Kubuntu Linux

This morning I have been able to solve one of the problems with Linux I carried with me the longest, that is over three years by now. Some distros will automatically recognize your palm (=the way it should be), but most of them don’t, so you’re left rather alone without digging deeply into USB literature.

Adding a Palm in Linux is very straight forward and not hard at all. With

tail -f /var/log/messages

active in a terminal you press the Hotsync button and look for the tty address the Palm is hooked up to. Once you know that, you enter that value (e.g. /dev/ttyUSB0 will do the trick in most cases) in the setup of your linux pilot software (I use kpilot) and off you go.

The problem starts to get nasty, however, when your Palm connects with your Linux kernel, but no tty node is being created. In this case, your tail -f will show something comparable to

May 27 08:02:17 viper kernel: [ 2206.484000] usb 1-2: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 7
May 27 08:02:17 viper kernel: [ 2206.652000] usb 1-2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
May 27 08:02:59 viper kernel: [ 2249.336000] usb 1-2: USB disconnect, address 7

To create the missing node with udev, you first need to write a rule in

/etc/udev/rules.d/

I found this out with a lot of googling and these two very hepful tutorials: UbuntuGuide, Andreas Haack’s Palm Treo 650 And Linux Howto.

Especially the second is the most extensive literature you can find on Palms, Linux, and USB. It systematically takes you through all the steps required to hook up your Palm.

BTW: I still had no node when using the tip from the UbuntuGuide, but it worked when I added in my rule the

SUBSYSTEM=="tty",

from Andreas’ howto. My final rule looks like this:

BUS="usb", SYSFS{product}="Palm Handheld*", KERNEL="ttyUSB*", SUBSYSTEM=="tty", NAME{ignore_remove}="pilot", SYMLINK="pilot", MODE="666"

Hunting Kerrigan

It will be the end of the world as we know it. Again. Time to get a Mac with an Intel processor.