Music Cloud Services?, Just what the RIAA was looking for!

Google Music, icloud, and recently announced bestbuymusiccloudcopycatwhatever, all have users scared that the RIAA could be using these service's like honeypots. Get users to upload their music then sift through them and see which were bought legally online ripped from purchased CD etc, and which were acquired by other means....  basically their letting the users list off if they have any "illegal" music

Faenza Icons on my Motorola Milestone

Ever wonder what those Amazing Faenza for Linux OS's icons would look like on your android phone?
Well, Here it is:

Simply download the rar'd file here and put the the .png files on your android phone somewhere accessible to your photo gallery software using your usb cable. Then to replace your existing icons remove them from your home screen and put them back on changing the icons and using the custom icons saved to your phone's photo gallery.

Rogers a Screwy Bunch

So I've been thinking for a while of ditching my Bell cell plan for a shiny new Rogers smartphone plan. Unfortunately I just discovered that if I want to get the good voice and data "Deal" (if thats what you call price gouging), I HAVE to sign up for 3 years, chaining myself to there exorbitant prices. If I try on their website to sign of for a 1 year contract *poof* the Voice and data plan disappears leaving only the voice plan as an option. To then get data on top of that you would have to add it to you contract separately for a higher monthly cost. Things like this make me really wonder how much time and money Rogers devotes to the fine science of putting the screws to the customer as much as possible. I can only hope that Ontario's 3 new cellphone providers really take off and setup shop in my area.   

CRTC Helps out Big Bell and Screws Canadians Again!

According to CBC news the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission has approved Bells proposal to allow billing based on bandwidth-usage.

Bells side of the story, is that high volume users like customers downloading files using bittorrent are slowing its networks and its solution is if you use more bandwidth downloading movies, games etc you'll have to pay more. This is all fine and dandy for illegal movies and the like but what about the several legal high bandwidth applications like Steam or youtube? are they trying to send us back to the days when all we used the net for was email!?

For anyone thinking "oh I only use my internet for email anyways, so my bill should be lower right?" no that wont happen  would Bell ever do anything to put itself into a position where it would be making less money? I doubt it. Rates for minimal users will be the same and for the majority they will be higher.

I guess severely screwing Canadians for the cellphones wasn't enough, now they want to do it to us again with our internet.
  

Skype 2 Go for Canadians... Sorta

Skype has Released Skype 2 Go for Canadians, yay! Now the bad news, at least for me I live in the 519/226 area code. Unfortunately I live near London and the 2 Go number they give me to call is based out of Kitchener/Waterloo area, which is still long distance for me. Which is totally pointless since I get charged long distance for a service design to negate long  distance costs.

Hopefully they add some London numbers soon, it is the 10th largest city in Canada, kinda a big market if you ask me.

Steve Jobs More Evil by the minute?

So aside from kicking in doors of stolen prototype phone buyers, and denying a future for flash on his iphone/pad/ipod cartel. Now he wants to attack opening source video! see his response to "An open letter to Steve Jobs" his response was

From: Steve Jobs
To: Hugo Roy
Subject: Re:Open letter to Steve Jobs: Thoughts on Flash
Date 30/04/2010 15:21:17

All video codecs are covered by patents. A patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other “open source” codecs now. Unfortunately, just because something is open source, it doesn’t mean or guarantee that it doesn’t infringe on others patents. An open standard is different from being royalty free or open source.

Sent from my iPad

whats next Steve? do you want to patent taking a shit?

Lubuntu wireless with my old Acer

My old Acer Aspire 5000 laptop had been doing a fine job as a dust collector under my bed for a while since the xp install was getting pretty bloated and sluggish. Therefore I decided to wipe the hard drive clean and do a fresh install of the Lubuntu 10.04 beta 1. Overall i was very impressed with the speed of boot-up and operation on the old acer, my only problem was getting the wireless to work, since it has a broadcom card and they have never been the most linux friendly cards around. I did a little research and found this site http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/b43


It guided me through well enough and I downloaded the fwcutter program which is automatically downloaded the necessary drivers and installed them and on reboot the wireless worked wonderfully :).