thisStrangeEngine.com

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

It was all right. Mostly.

I hope everyone had a good Christmas and has had a chance to wind down enough to lose the stresses of the past year. I have been in my hometown of Nacogdoches the past few days and it has been a great release for me. It helps that I have been functioning on a low-pressure schedule. I have the whole week off and I decided to hang around as long as I felt necessary to see people. Though there are slower moments in between, which I’ve been spending gazing at much-missed piney woods scenery, all of my days and evenings so far have been spent having a great time with old friends. I’ve done pleasant family dinners, rowdy bars, college student parties, and intimate fireside chats in the country among other things.

I originally had not envisioned that I would actually stay around long enough to be here when the New Year comes, but now it seems more likely that it will happen. I think I have been feeling particularly worn down this year and, as usual, coming back and seeing everyone…even if it hasn’t been everyone…was exactly what I needed. The “usual crowd” may not be quite the same, but it all still feels very much the way I remember it to be. Maybe even better.

Tags: nacogdoches

To my surprise today, I discovered that the GoogleMaps Streetview people have apparently visited my home town of Nacogdoches. Those Google people are serious about this stuff.

Look, it’s my old house. The interesting thing to note is that they actually didn’t go any further south down the road.

And look, it’s everyone’s favorite hang out spot.

Pretty neat.

Tags: google, nacogdoches

I think I’ve always been selective about what I put on here because I wanted to be careful to not put up anything that no-one would care about. However, clearly that hasn’t worked since I usually get so worked up over certain music-related things that I feel like I have to put them up, and clearly that’s not made to appeal to you, so it seems like a silly rule to keep. So I am hereby excusing myself from any such discretion. You have been warned.