Monthly Archives: August 2005

Creative’s not so creative patent

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Speaking of iPod (my I am just a fountain of words today), Creative Technology have been granted a patent for the entire concept of the typical MP3 player interface. You know, being able to select an artist, then an album, then songs on the album?

First, I STRONGLY have to question the actual relevancy that they created this. ID3 tagging (the metadata they refer to) has been around since the mid-90′s, and the ability to manipulate song lists based on that data has been around for nearly just as long on PC media players. So essentially Creative is saying they invented it for portable players, because they can’t be saying they created it in general.

So my question is, how does this fall under non-obvious when it comes to a patent? If it was around for years on earlier “devices” (PC software), doesn’t it make sense that as soon as portable processing was powerful enough to handle this it would happen?

The two theories on this are a) that Creative will use this simply as PR material for their MP3 player line, or b) that they will use this to receive licensing money from Apple. If it is simply (a) they want, more power to them. If it is instead (b), I hope they lose. If not this is more evidence that the US patent system is screwed up.

Can I patent being able to select a song by year?

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And now for something serious

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http://www.digitalresurrection.com/

This site belongs to a friend of mine. I have known him now for over three years. An exceptional guy. Out of all of the people I have known to meet him, not a single person has a bad thing to say about him.

He obtained the dream most of us wish to, he owns his own business. It is a successful enough business, but it is difficult for him to overcome his past tax burden AND make ends meat for his family. So this is where the power of friends and the internet come in.

Take a look at his site. See what he has to say. If you are feeling generous, donate a couple of dollars. He is honest, and anything that is received beyond the tax debt will go towards charity. Please pass this on to anyone you feel might help also.

I don’t normally condone these internet beggings, so to speak. But this is a close friend and I guess as the saying goes “You are only critical of something until it happens to you.” So if you can give anything do. If you think it is shady, then don’t. The choice is yours, but at worst a dollar or two might not be the end of the world to help someone out, especially a friend of mine.

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Been a long time

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How does that Zeppelin song go? Been a long time, been a long time, been a long lonely lonely lonely lonely… well, it hasn’t been lonely, but definitely long.

So how have things been? Good. We had a 50th birthday party for my Uncle Lloyd. Much drunkeness (and fun) ensued. Though I honestly hope no one breaks the spanking paddle at MY 50th birthday party. Hopefully he could sit down fine the next day ;)

Upgraded my PC. I am now running an Athlon X2 4200+ with 1GB RAM and a Radeon x800XL PCI Express video card. I am also running Windows XP 64-bit Edition, which is running fine. Word of warning: before moving to Windows x64, make sure all of the drivers you need are out. Just finally got my scanner driver from Epson which is the last one I need (well, aside from a driver for my mobile phone and a VPN Client for work).

My daughter started school. This year she is in what I consider the first *REAL* grade of school: 4K. She is at Our Redeemer Lutheran School which is a nice enough school. Her teacher met with the WHOLE family. That being Heidi and I and Laura and Steve. I think she was nervous that we outnumbered her 5:1 :P . But she is a nice lady and has even followed up with me on some curriculum questions I had for future grades. I really do like the school.

Otherwise my big project recently has been archiving my CD collection. A little back story on this first though:

I was listening to the radio one day and they were talking about their iPods. Now I am just as big a tech geek as they come. I love gadgets, as Heidi and our bank account can attest to. However I have never had a use for an Ipod. I don’t do enough that I need what I call an over-glorified walkman. Well, on this radio show one of the morning guys talked about how he uses it to store his entire CD collection; hundreds of discs. He archives the discs to the iTunes and then sends them all off to the iPod. He ends up with hundreds of CDs on a device smaller than two packs of smokes, and it can be played on any device that accepts RCA audio inputs (the red and white inputs).

Now THAT sounded appealing to me. So I have spent the last few weeks moving my CDs off to the computer (for the geeks interested, I am using Exact Audio Copy to rip, and using a command line front end to Nero’s AAC encoder. I am encoding at AAC LC VBR Extreme settings which averages about 220Kbps.

For the non-geeks who are just curious about what I’v'e ripped so far, you can take a look here, along with some useless stats I put together. It should be noted that this page is generated dynamically based on my library file I export from iTunes. I update it whenever I think to send the library file to this site.

So those are the songs I have ripped. What am I going to do with them? Well, so far I can share them to Heidi’s computer as well as my hacked XBox, which can then play them on my stereo in the living room. Next week though, Apple is holding a press conference where it is expected they will announce the 5th generation of iPod. After this information is when things will truly get going. After that I plan on buying an iPod, a car stero hookup for it, and a clock radio attachment for work. All of my CDs on a little device that I can play anywhere. THAT’S what I’m talking about.

iPod Clock Radio

iPod Cup Holder

Just some possible examples.

Well, hopefully I will be back soon, and in the meantime hopefully by tomorrow I will have more pictures added to the gallery.

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