Sony is doing some crazy things with DRM. There’s a good write-up at Sysinternals. I don’t know if this specific “rootkit” DRM is on the new My Morning Jacket CD, but I know a lot of people are peeved that there’s *any* DRM on it — including MMJ’s record company. This guy has a good write-up on it. And more info at East Bay Express.
I bought the CD myself from Best Buy without noticing the DRM stuff on the back. I’d be really ticked off about this if I didn’t have a Mac. I ripped the CD to iTunes, no problems, and now I can happily listen to it on my iPod. Apparently, Sony isn’t worried about Mac users; either there aren’t enough of us, or they figure the DRM would be too difficult to do on Mac OS X.
Author: Andrew Huey
Stinking Bishop
Yes, there really is a cheese called Stinking Bishop. And, of course, after the Wallace & Gromit movie, I (and probably many other W&G fans) would love to try it, even if it does “smell of old socks”, as the description states.
iHome
I picked up an iHome from Costco today. If all goes well, I should wake up to the sounds of John Coltrane tomorrow.
Samurai Champloo
Beatbox Bandits is the Mushroom Samba of Samurai Champloo. Great stuff.
Fountains of Wayne Hotline
“Fountains of Wayne Hotline” by Robbie Fulks is a great, funny, song. It’s available on iTunes now, and there’s a live version on eMusic.
CounterSpy problems
My desktop PC has been behaving for the last few days, without CounterSpy on it, so I decided to reinstall CounterSpy and see if the problems came back. Boy howdy, they sure did! I think I’m going to have to do without CounterSpy, until maybe the next major release. Something about 1.5 really doesn’t agree with my computer.
DigitalLife
The best thing at DigitalLife was the giant Robosapien. There’s a good pic at Engadget.
PC Annoyances
A few days ago, I did a full spyware scan on my desktop PC with CounterSpy. It identifed a few registry entries as spyware and suggested quarantining them. I was pretty sure it was wrong about that, but I let it quarantine them anyway. I think that was a mistake. The machine has been acting a bit weird ever since, and it pretty much fell apart today. To make a long story (relatively) short, I went back to a system restore point before the CounterSpy changes, uninstalled CounterSpy, and reinstalled StarDock’s ObjectDock, which had gone quite wonky. I hope I’m back to normal now. The moral of this story is: Never trust CounterSpy.
New Palm stuff
MacFixIt – iBook problem
MacFixIt – Sudden loss of AirPort connectivity for iBook G4 mid-2005 series: I hope this doesn’t happen to my iBook!