emudir

Cory Doctorow: “Context” and “Content”

simon — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 22:31:24 +0000

Cory Doctorow is a sci-fi author and commentator, who is usually to be found in his capacity as co-editor at boingboing. His most recent essay collection, Context covers a diverse set of topics, trying to reconcile the “freemium” nature of the Internet (something we’re strongly in favour of here at emudir) and the need for creators to benefit from their hard work (we all have to eat, right?) What’s more, it is itself a “freemium” product, being a Context, is a Creative Commons licensed free download, as well as purchasable as a physical book.

This give-away model has also inspired Jan Rubak to do a similarly CC licensed audiobook reading of the book, just as he did with Doctorow’s previous book, Content. With not only the author’s permission, but also his thanks. Which is nice.

If you enjoy the book, you can either buy it directly, or donate a copy of either Context or Content to a school or library (which we would highly recommended, by the way).

Context
Homepage: http://craphound.com/context/
Download the book: http://craphound.com/context/download/
Download the audio book: http://www.archive.org/details/CoryDoctorow-Context

Content
Homepage: http://craphound.com/content/
Download the book: http://craphound.com/content/download/
Download the audio book: http://www.archive.org/details/CoryDoctorow-Content_268

The Weeknd

simon — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 07:00:12 +0000

We’ve featured a good few albums on this blog before, and they tend to fall into two distinct categories. Either they are from established artists – such as Nine Inch Nails, or Coldplay – as a “thank you” to the fans.

But just as often – as here – the people giving their music away do so as a trailer to their live shows, and the highly regarded indie rockers TheWeeknd do exactly that. In fact, the strategy is so successful, they’re commanding huge fees for sell-out concerts all over the USA. (Forgive me if indie rock isn’t exactly right – it’s difficult to judge genres for people like me who use Deicide as chill-out music…)

And you can find out for yourself exactly why – both their albums Thursday and House Of Balloons are available from their website. (You’ll need JavaScript enabled to experience it properly, and a zip application to extract the files, by the way).

Home page: http://the-weeknd.com/

Mystified – Waste As Fuel

simon — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 19:00:48 +0000

The hyper-active Mystified (real name Thomas Park) seems to release an album a month, and most of them are uploaded for free to The Internet Archive. This one is just over half an hour, and it’s an ever-shifting soundscape.

The title is apposite, as the atmospheric industrial rumblings that begin the piece remind me of the waste disposal escape scene in Toy Story 3. But it’s not all pounding industrial noises, and in half an hour this piece goes on a journey. It’s difficult to describe – you really need to hear it for yourself – but for me, this was the first piece of Mystified’s music that I heard, and I’ve become somewhat of a fan. I’ll feature some more of his work later, there’s plenty to delight but for now this is a great introduction, and if you’re a fan of Brian Eno or Tangerine Dream, or you just like things that are a little diffrent from the normal, then you’ll enjoy this one a lot.

Download page: http://www.archive.org/details/442-net-005

vim

simon — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 19:56:53 +0000

For those of us who started our computing careers with Unix, or a Unix variant, or who were introduced to the system at university, some time in the 1980s, you will have been introduced to the joys (or evils?) of the editor vi. While idiosyncratic, there’s no doubt that vi is, like its predecessor TECO and the like, an extremely powerful text editor. However, it’s a “love-or-hate” program, with idiosyncratic key combinations that must be learned before you can do any real work.

Vim – “VI iMproved” – clones vi very nicely, and responds in the same way any vi afficionado would expect. It also adds a nice Windows GUI to it, with lots of mouse support. And sure, it’s not the easiest editor in the world (just changing the default font requires editing a hidden file), but even so it’s a powerful text editor that’s actually a lot easier to learn than you might think.

One of the really nice things about vim though, especially in its Windows incarnation, is its ability to handle big files. Really big files. You know – the sort of stuff that you open with Notepad and then immediately let out an anguished cry of “why” as, yet again, your system grinds to a halt. Vim’s a little bit more clever than that. Not only does it handle large files rather more gracefully than Notepad, it also remembers where you got to last time.

Better yet, it does syntax highlighting on a plethora of file formats (over 200 according to the vim site – I don’t have the patience to count them). It automatically indents. It folds text away. It does split editing. It comes with full help files. It runs on a heap of systems – binaries are available for Windows, Dos, MacOS, Amiga, OS/2, Android, QNX, RiscOS – oh, check the tags, you know where we list this stuff by now.

And it’s free, of course.

Well, actually, it’s not (even though it is). It is, if you want it to be, donation ware. If you like vim enough that you use it, you’re invited to donate – to orphanages in Uganda, a cause close to the author’s heart. So, for the first time on emudir, we’re encouraging you go pay for something. Bet you never thought you’d see us do THAT, did you?

Download page: http://www.vim.org/download.php

Left Right Left Right Left

simon — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 20:59:36 +0000

Did you see Coldplay at Glastonbury? If you didn’t, it’s perhaps amazing you managed to avoid it, given it sems to have been shown live on the BBC and then again and again for days. Which means you probably did it on purpose, so if I were you, I’d move on to the next post.

Still here? Good…

This mix album is kind of a little thankyou from Coldplay to their fans. While some of the most recognisable tunes aren’t there, if (like me) you only know the obvious ones (like Clocks, Yellow and Fix You – although two of these are on the album), then this is an excellent place to start. All the songs were new to me, and it’s a worthwhile addition to your music player. And of course – like everything on Emudir – it’s free. Enjoy!

Download page: http://www.coldplay.com/lrlrl/lr.html

WirelessKeyView

simon — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 19:20:34 +0000

Here’s a clever little piece of software, and it really works well at what it does.

Have you ever got a wireless router for your Internet connection? Most Internet Service Providers give them out these days, but you can still buy slightly-better-than-average ones from electronics shops. And most laptops include wireless these days, so almost everyone uses it.

But one of the first things they recommend you do is to give your wireless network a secure passcode. Which is fine – unless you make it so secure you forget. So what happens when a friend comes to visit from out of town and wants to use your Internet conection on their laptop – and you’ve forgotten your network key?

Well, you can log into the router and change the passcode. Ah – but can you remember the secure password you gave the admin account? Same as the network key, was it? So, if only you knew the network key, you could change it – except you can’t remember it… catch 22…

Enter Wireless KeyView. This little tool delves into your PC’s configuration and grabs the network key and shows it to you. And voila – you’re back in business.

A quick word of warning, though. This little program doesn’t contain any spyware or trojans or anything (we checked, believe me), although a lot of antivirus (including the PC Tools in Google Pack) thinks it does. So you’ll get a warning message which you need to ignore. I didn’t – I automatically went “block”, even though I’d already checked it out. Silly me… I had to reboot my PC to actually use it! (As usual, we declaim all responsibility – use at your own risk.)

Homepage: http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/wireless_key.html

Just to let you know…

simon — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 00:42:51 +0000

We’re re-jiggling our bytes over at the server end (ooh, I love it when my bytes go all jiggly)… Anyhows, we may be slightly offline a bit in the next few days, but don’t worry… we will soon be back – and we’ve got a ton more free stuff to tell you about – so stay tuned

Poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

simon — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 06:00:54 +0000

Now here’s a lovely thing. If you know of one piece of romantic poetry, it’s probably number 52 from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese. You don’t? Really? Are you sure? Well, it goes like this:

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with a passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, — I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! — and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

And if you didn’t, well, you probably know the reference from either Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, or perhaps from Be My Valentine, Charlie Brown.

Anyhow, there’s a very beautiful 1904 volume available at the Internet Archive. You can have it as a PDF of full colour scans, black and white, text, or in DjVu, Kindle or Daisy format.

Download page: http://www.archive.org/details/poemsbyelizabeth00brow

Firefox 4

simon — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 06:00:11 +0000

We’ve been using Firefox here at Emudir Towers for years, ever since the dim and distant days of version 1.0. But the latest version – released just a few days ago – adds some useful and exciting features.

Fans of Google Chrome will no doubt find the new tab bar familiar; Firefox veterans may find it takes a little getting used to, but the additional screen space is welcome.

Memory usage has always been fairly light with Firefox; it’s currently using 440MB, with 10 tabs open, but that includes Google Reader having read about 600+ items. Closing the reader tab doesn’t now just dump a load of memory before Firefox responds again (although if you’re short on memory and the PC is swapping like fury that’s probably not going to help much), but it does bring the memory usage down by 20MB.

Firefox sync is now built in, providing a means to synchronise the bookmarks and passwords on your desktop PC and Android or iPhone. Perhaps more importantly, Firefox supports the “do not track” option, which ethical websites will honour by providing enhanced privacy options.

With Firefox 4, Google Chrome 10 and Internet Explorer 9 all coming out within days, the browser market has rebooted itself. Whichever is your browser of choice, they are all vastly improved, and perhaps none more so than Firefox.

Download page: http://www.getfirefox.com/

Paint.Net

simon — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 23:00:46 +0000

Forgive us for going on about graphics programs, having featured both GIMP and Serif Photo Plus in the not-so-distant past, it’s probably not time for another one yet. So… here’s a graphic editor.

While you groan away, here’s some things to like about Paint.Net. Despite being Windows only (and requiring .Net 3.5), it supports layers, contains an automatic updater (which, in a moment of what can only be described as clear thinking, good design and sheer sanity, can be made to install the update once you’ve finished using the program), and a plethora of effects.

While it may not (yet) be as sophisticated as PaintShop, or GIMP, it is rapidly gaining ground on both. Professional designers may require the more sophisticated features of more established programs, but there is little missing that the casual user needs, and with an interface designed with the graphically challenged in mind (a category in which I firmly place myself) it’s quite easy to use. One interesting (and potentially invaluable) feature is the disk-based undo. Essentially, that means that the undo levels are infinite (or, at least, limited by the size of your hard drive). Which has made my life easy when scanning photos – click back on the history and suddenly, you’re back. No worrying about the undo stack being cleared because you’ve run out of memory, meaning you have to rescan all ten photographs again!

And unlike the other two we featured recently, this one is a lightweight – in download size, I mean – weighing in at only 3.5MB. Being .Net based, the same installer covers 32 and 64 bit versions, as well as 9 languages, including Russian, Chinese and Portuguese!

A final point, for coders like me, is that it handles DirectDraw surfaces. Now all I need is the graphics, an idea, a crash course in DirectX programming and a small heap of motivation and I can write a game now!

Homepage: http://www.getpaint.net/