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This is huge news.

Apple will soon allow record companies more flexible pricing of songs on their iTunes music store. Songs may be priced at 69 cents, 99 cents, or $1.29. In exchange for that, however, iTunes will make every available song completely DRM-free.

This essentially heralds the death of digital music purchases with DRM. While no doubt Amazon has been a big player in that (and in turn, they have received a lot of my business), this definitively puts the nail in the coffin. Since iTunes is the leader in digital music sales, all other stores will have no choice but to follow suit to remain even remotely competitive. This is great news for music lovers/tech geeks everywhere.

There are other possible ramifications for this move. I imagine more music players will start supporting AAC files, the format that iTunes uses, now that the songs will no longer require specially configured players (iPods) to play them. Also, with DRM gone, Apple has almost no good reason to keep their firmware locked down like they have with the past couple generations of iPods, so maybe future models will be more RockBox-friendly.

Tags: digitalmusic, itunes

I gave myself an early Christmas gift this year. In some circles, though, that might be called “spending without discretion.” My laptop became mostly useless to me after it decided that it no longer wanted to recognize its own internal hard drives (even working ones), so it gave me the excuse I’ve been looking for to give it the boot and to finally buy one of these things.

So far, my experience with it has been very positive. It’s a surprisingly sturdy, fast, and easy to use machine for its size and weight. I actually bought my old notebook used a couple years back and had added more RAM to it, and this little machine actually feels faster. It comes with Windows XP Home, but currently I am dual-booting with Ubuntu Eee , which I’m primarily using. I’ll probably put up more impressions later.

Tags: notebooks

New Lenovo IdeaPad netbooks are already out available for order.

Coupon code for 15% off good until end of month: USPIDEAPAD15

(You may want to wait for the announcement of the new Dell netbooks, which should be any day now…)

Tags: notebooks

…and things are going to start happening to me now!

I spent my whole evening today setting up the Linux-based open source firewall/router IPCop with an old machine my brother gave me and some NICs I had lying around. I actually first spent about an hour rearranging my computer room. I decided it made more sense having the firewall box and my server boxes on the same side of the room as my computer, which was not true in my previous configuration.

I struggled for a while to get the firewall set up the way I wanted it, and even now it’s not 100% perfect. One of my NICs seem to be faulty, so I currently don’t have an “orange” zone for the webserver. Instead, I’m poking a hole for port 80 into my “green” zone where the server currently resides. I hope to rectify that little issue soon. I also spent about an hour and a half figuring out why I couldn’t get my wireless to work, only to discover one small but crucial step needed to let my wireless router talk with the outside world. It’s always the small stuff.

Another thing currently bothering me is that I can’t seem to get it to pick up OpenDNS as the DNS servers, even when I specify them. It still assigns the DNS servers it retrieves from my ISP’s DHCP. I’m thinking it may be a bug. It’s not a big deal, but I liked using OpenDNS as it made web browsing just a little snappier.

But all in all it looks good. I have a firewall now that acts as an awesome router with different subnets for my wired and wireless machines and just enough pinholes between them to do the things I want. Hopefully, we will no longer see a port 80 forwarding issue, so the website should be much more available now. It now also serves as my personal time-sync (ntp) server which itself syncs with the NTP Pool Project once daily.

Technobabble aside, all you really need to know is now the site should be up regularly and hopefully you should see more posts from me soon.

Tags: firewall, ipcop, Linux+GNU/BSD, router, webserver

Usually, big announcements of exciting new technologies don’t get me particularly riled up. Usually I only read about things like a new release of Windows or the iPhone with relatively passing interest.

But Microsoft announced something today that got my attention. It’s called Microsoft Surface.

It’s one of those ideas that seem simple in concept, but it really pretty amazing in execution. The videos on the page really show off the possibilities. These bad boys will probably cost several thousand dollars at first, but it will be really cool to see these around and then see them in the home when they become reasonably priced. I just hope that it will become easy for the open source community to take advantage of it as well (I can’t imagine why it wouldn’t.)