A while ago, I looked up a book that I like on Amazon’s Kindle store, to see if I could get it for my Kindle. Sure enough, they had it, but they wouldn’t sell it to me. Instead, I was met with this message:
To my mind, there is no good reason for this. There is, however, a very bad one: Corporate greed. Because authors generally have publishing deals with different publishing houses in different regions, they lose sales. By the same logic, I should not be allowed to buy a book in the US, and bring it back with me, or order the paperback from Amazon, yet I am.
Ebooks are by no means alone in having this kind of problem. The best example I have, is regions on DVDs and Blu-Rays. The historical background is the divide between NTSC and PAL; two different systems for video tapes. NTSC tapes would be recorded and played back at 60 frames per second, while PAL tapes would be recorded and played back at 50 frames per second. The reason is simply that the electrical grid in the US transfers AC power at 60 hertz, while the grid in European countries transfers AC power at 50 hertz.
Now, while there was a good reason way back when, there is no good reason now, and this silliness needs to stop.
Blog
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How corporate greed loses copyright holders’ sales
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The Machine is us/ing us
As part of my studies, I came across this video. I’ve seen it before, and I’m sure many others have, too (right now, it has over one and a half million views on YouTube). Still, it poses some interesting questions, and looks at text in a different way.
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On theft, intellectual property and semantics
I believe strongly in the power of words. They can hurt and heal, and they are our primary mode of communication. When discussing any topic, accuracy is very important, and using accurate and appropriate words for what you mean to describe improves your arguments. By the same token, using words that do not accurately describe what you mean to describe, while possibly an effective rhetorical device, weakens your argument.
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iOS 6’s best new feature: Do Not Disturb
One feature that I have been missing on my iPhone, even though I didn’t realise it, is a way to have the iPhone be quiet when I want it to, but intelligently so. What I mean, is that I want it to be able to let calls from important people (such as my wife and parents) come through the shield, while others are kept quiet. In iOS 6, Apple have introduced the very functionality I wanted.
Called “Do Not Disturb”, the feature is located two places in the Settings-menu. The first place, is a simple on/off switch, in the main area of Settings. If you want to configure your settings, though, you need to go into “Notifications”, then “Do Not Disturb”. You can turn on and off Do Not Disturb on a daily schedule (though I’d like to be able to schedule it differently for weekday and weekend), set who to allow calls from, and whether to allow repeated calls to come through.
One important thing to note, is that even if you have Do Not Disturbed on, if you are interacting with the screen (i.e. if you have the phone unlocked), notifications will come through. -
Mac OS X: Automatically mount a network share
On Windows, when you map a network share, you can tick a box marked “Reconnect at login”, which will then cause the computer to reconnect to the share when you log back in. Not so on Mac OS, which can be a bit annoying. While the Cmd+K shortcut to connect to shares work fine, I don’t want to have to do it.
Luckily, there is a simple way to make it work, which may be familiar for Windows administrators; you add it to the login items, in much the same way that you might when creating a login script for an AD Domain user. Here’s how:
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The single most annoying feature in iOS, and how to work around it
Apple’s bidding for the smartphone market, the iPhone, ships with several preinstalled apps, none of which can be removed. As annoying as this may be, at least you can stick them all in a folder, and place the folder on the last page of apps. Out of sight, out of mind, right?
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Two options on how to work with images in FotoWeb Desktop plugin for Adobe CS
You can either check them out, or download a local copy. Here’s how:
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How to: Use synonym lists to modify search results
By modifying the thesaur.xml-file, Index Manager will return hits containing synonyms to the specified search words.
Say, for example, that you want to search for fast food, and want your search results to also find more specific kinds of fast food, such as pizza, hamburgers and french fries. Included with every installation of Index Manager is a file called Sample-THESAUR.XML, which can be modified to achieve this. To make your own synonym list, and enable them for search, follow these steps:
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FotoWare Connect supports upload to and download from FotoWeb Archive Agent
One of the many options when setting up a server in Connect, is to set it up to use FotoWeb Archive Agent. To set it up, simply create a new server, and select FotoWeb Archive Agent when selecting which protocol to use.
When setting up the server, you have options to select which archive the image should or come from. This can be used in many ways, for example to clean up an upload area at set intervals.
Keep in mind that the connection to FotoWeb does not allow deletion of files in the FotoWeb archive. Instead, Connect has some internal logic to avoid processing the same files over and over again, based on modification date.
Caveat lector: I used to work with support at FotoWare. This blog is my own space, I am not paid to write it. I write about FotoWare and FotoWare products because I believe in them. -
Don’t break the chain, part 2
Back in September, I wrote about a post at one of the blogs I follow, which extolled the virtues of just doing whatever it is you want to get better at, and keep doing. I also recommended an app called “Don’t break the chain!”, which I had been using for a while. This follow-up comes because I have actually stopped using that app, and replaced it with another…
I had been less than happy with two aspects of “Don’t break the chain!”; first, I felt the feedback it offered was not enough, and didn’t really help encourage me at all. Secondly, I felt I lacked a possibility to track more than one task. In comes Lift.do. Coupled with a website of the same name, Lift.do offers a community of users, and allows you to track as many tasks as you wish. The interface is simple and intuitive, and works very well. In addition, there are no ads.
There you have it; a simple way to keep motivated, along with a community to help. -
FotoWare Color Factory checks whether a share is offline
In Service Release 4 of Color Factory 7, FotoWare introduced a new feature, enabling it to check whether a network share is offline. When it finds that the share is offline, the channel is temporarily stopped, allowing other channels on the server to keep running.
When a share is found to be offline, this will be logged and displayed on the Operations Center status page.
For some shares on non-Windows systems, this check may appear to fail even though the share is online. From Color Factory 7.0.511 and later builds, this function may be turned off on a channel by channel basis, on the error handling tab of the channel:
Caveat lector: I used to work with support at FotoWare. This blog is my own space, I am not paid to write it. I write about FotoWare and FotoWare products because I believe in them.