Culture

Twenty-five Twittericans To Talk To Through Twitter

2009, February 17 - 10:57pm — afreytes

Twitter is a tool to... OK, I'll stop it now...

Twitter, at it's heart, is a micro blogging tool. However, in my opinion it isn't as much a tool to talk about yourself, as it is a tool to read about others.

Because when twitter really, REALLY becomes interesting is when you get a community whom you can identify and whom also identifies with you.

This, however, posits an interesting conundrum. Who should I read on twitter then? For me it's mostly other Puerto Ricans who are on twitter who are also engaging in witty banter, idle chitchat, or helpful advice.

Here's a list of twenty-five twittericans you won't be wrong to follow:

@anamrosado
@ancient_buho
@attenea
@dianadhevi
@edythemighty
@gabopagan
@jmonterrey
@Joenid
@joeprog
@jorgebauer
@katsushiro
@lherrero
@lucymfel
@miguelrios
@mutantreptile
@petevalle
@punkylady
@rafamejia
@rafitorres
@ramcosca
@rmediavilla
@theblogmachine
@zensolo
@zerito
@zerock

So which one of those is me? Well, I'm not on that list. But don't worry I'm not that difficult to find! See you on twitter!

Stuff

2008, January 28 - 11:38pm — afreytes

Stuff. Where does it come from? Where does it go?

But the most important question is... Why?

Culture

Pálida Mota Azul

2007, June 5 - 9:38am — afreytes

Again, on the subject of DRM

2005, September 11 - 8:59pm — afreytes

For the sake of the freedom you should have when your are using your computer. Please, take thirty minutes of your life to follow the links in this post.

In the last post I talked about DRM. Digital Restrictions Management I called it. In the post I mentioned Lawrence Lessig, who for some time has been talking about the real danger that DRM poses to our rights. The first link below will take you to a flash presentation of Lessig's Free Culture speech. If you value your right to create culture , then you owe it to yourself to hear what he says.

I you had previously heard Lessig's speech I've got a new one for you. The second link below will take you to a speech transcript given to Microsoft by one Cory Doctorow about the folly that is DRM. He argues more politely and correctly than I could; why DRM is bad for everyone. Go read it, now!

The information soldier is pro-culture...

Links

Filed in: DRM LawrenceLessig CoryDoctorow Speeches FreeCulture Microsoft

Culture
DRM

Fair Use? On Windows?

2005, September 10 - 2:53am — afreytes

I wanted to write a post about Square Enix's upcoming movie Final Fantasy VII Advent Children. But ran afoul off some obstacles in Microsoft Windows DRM.

I wanted to see the trailer for Advent Children, which is a movie based on Square Enix's video game RPG classic, and fan favorite, Final Fantasy VII. I didn't know how the post was gonna come out but, one thing was certain. I wanted to include a screenshot of the trailer within the post; which I believe is fair use (not to mention free promotion for a straight to video film). I also wanted to talk about the mule, and how I use it to download these sort of things, big files, because dial-up tends to be shaky in my area.

Anyway, I was using my wife's new laptop, a capable Dell Inspiron 700m. I opened up the file and up comes Media Player to show me the trailer. I take a screenshot using Alt+PrintScreen as usual and then I paste it onto a new document in Paint. So far, so good. Caveat Emptor, however, the Dell has Windows XP on it as the operating system and when I saved the file... The image of the movie just... vanished. I thought I had done something wrong... So, I did the process again and this time double checked the filename before saving. Same result.

I opened up the My Pictures directory, which is where I saved the files. Of course the files where there, as expected. And when I selected them Windows showed them to me. Or rather it showed what was left of the image, namely, the borders of the Media Player application. Again, I thought something wasn't right . I have the DivX Player too and I did the whole process using that, again. The film's still shot vanished every time.

Stupid. Stupid me. Stupid Microsoft. Stupid Windows.

This is the consequence of Microsoft implementation of DRM in Windows XP. You see, the movie industry, the music industry and Microsoft created this scheme, this DRM. Which they say means Digital Rights Management, but would be more aptly named Digital Restrictions Management.

DRM means to protect content from unlawful use. But, it stems from the conclusion however, that you are a thief. That what everyone does is steal music and movies from the Internet. And, fair use? Fine, thank you... But it's not for YOU.

Lawrence Lessig's doomsaying hit pretty close to home... Oh yeah, you want to know how I got the image in this post at last? Well... Knoppix.

I booted the laptop with Knoppix, in less than three minutes I was watching the trailer again. This time using the Xine application included in Knoppix. Xine by the way has an icon straight in its control panel which takes a screen shot of the scene of the video being shown and saves it to your home folder. Just one step.

Well actually I did take another step which was to use the GiMP (also included with Knoppix) to convert the image into a nice, compressed and resized JPEG file.

The information soldier is an information-sharer...

Links