Using Roxio’s Toast & CD Spin Doctor, I converted this tape to Mp3s and burned a CD from it. The sound quality was pretty decent after I filtered out the tape noise & adjusted the output level.

Watching the Salon train wreck. The Kuro5hin site takes a look at Salon living on borrowed time today:

According to Salon Media Group’s annual report and a just released auditor’s report, there is “substantial doubt” about its ability to continue as a going concern. Salon has been charging for premium content, but it wasn’t enough to offset a loss of $11.3 million or make a dent in the accumulated debt of $76.6 million.

This is a sad story on many levels, but one that really bothers me is that the eventual collapse of Salon will be see by many as proof that it is not possible to run a successful Internet media company, and more specifically that charging for premium content doesn’t work. After all, Salon has talented writers and engaging content, and it didn’t make it.

[snip]

If Salon collapses it should teach some more lessons, especially about charging for premium content. Mainly, people will pay for valued content. Some Internet sites do make money by serving a narrow niche and covering the snot out of it. But people don’t seem ready to pay a blanket fee for accessing general interest stories. Hell, I don’t pay for Salon access…I don’t have the time to read it thoroughly and make my subscription worthwhile. Now, if they charged a small fee for reading a particular article, I would do that… [Mac Net Journal]

EXACTLY! It’s time to start looking at micropayments. I wouldn’t subscribe to a particulr site such as Salon, but I’d certainly be willing to pay for reading a particular article. How about somehow tying it into PayPal? When you click on a premium article, it will give you the option to pay for that article from your paypal account.

Thanks to Dave Seidel for pointing me to rinetd. This is a neat little program that redirects all TCP requests on a specified port to another machine. I have all requests for port 5335 redirected to my G3, so I can now click on Radio links such XML coffee mugs that assume Radio is running on the local machine.

When I install it on my iBook, I’ll have to see if it lets me specify a dyndns domain instead of an actual IP address for the redirect.

I just listened to Salif Keita’s new CD, “Moffou”, which arrived a few days ago while I was at MacHack (thanks Rick).

This is a great CD, one of his best in a long time. He moved away from his overuse of horns & synthesizers to a more natural sound with lots of guitars, koras, n’gonis, and acoustic percussion. That seems to be a trend in recent African releases; Baaba Maal did the same thing in his latest album, “Missing You”.

I wonder what Youssou N’dour will do in his next album, which is supposed to be out this summer.

I’m now listening to a Senegalese import tape I got a few years ago called “Litaal” by Aby Ngana Diop. She’s an elderly woman who does some pretty wild rap music. One day I plan to convert it to a CD & MP3s.

A few years ago when I was at the Grand African Ball in NYC I mentioned that tape to Boubacar N’dour (Youssou’s brother), as we were sitting and talking while getting ready to leave. He told me she died a few years ago after performing at a show.

Should you buy a PC from the other Steve?

Let me ask you: Do you really want to buy the right PC from someone, at least according to the commercial, who’d borrow his dad’s convertible to impress a girl friend and then tell her it’s really his car?

Adelphia files for Bankruptcy. Adelphia Communications, the cable television operator, filed for bankruptcy protection in Manhattan after a month of struggling to find another solution. [New York Times: Technology]

Ha! About time! I used to have Adelphia (or as everyone called them, Adumbfia) when I lived in Boca Raton. Their service was abysmal. I finally switched from PowerStink to BellSouth FastAccess DSL.

I just wrote an introduction to PowerPlant at MacMegasite. About 50 yoots went home with free copies of CodeWarrior 8, and Metrowerks missed a big opportunity giving a PowerPlant session for them. If I had known, I would have given this as a session. I thought about giving it next year, but since everyone has CW8 now, it would be more useful to have it before next MacHack.

I feel pretty crappy right now, as I have since I got home from MacHack. I have sort of a cold with a really bad sore throat. Justin told me he also has the same thing, as do several other people who went to MacHack.

I see Nicholas Riley also doesn’t feel too well.

I’ve converted my email back to Eudora. I used Eudora Pro for many years, but after I switched to OS X I really hated the way it handles multiple windows (which is mostly X’s fault). I finally switched to Entourage X & I still think Entourage X looks a lot nicer.

However, I really dislike how Entourage stores all of the email in one huge database that can easily get corrupted. It also gets really slow when you have a lot of messages in a folder. I really needed some way to archive my email conveniently but I really disliked every email archive program I’ve tried, including several FileMaker export solutions. The last straw was when Entourage gave me a bit of a scare on the last day of MacHack. When I launched it, it said that it couldn’t read the database, and I also wasn’t able to rebuild the database. Thankfully simply rebooting cured that.

The first thing I noticed when I went back to Eudora is how much faster it is. I’m still getting used to working with it again, but the increased reliability & speed is definitely worthwhile. In all the years I’ve used Eudora, I never once lost any email and I don’t have to live in fear of a corrupted mail database. It also uses much less disk space and synchronizing Eudora mailboxes between my G4 & my iBook is a lot faster than synchronizing Entourage’s database.

I find that glowing mice make irresistable cat toys. While I was at MacHack I bought a Kensington Optical Elite mouse, which glows blue when it’s plugged in.

When I got up this morning, I found it on the floor. The same thing happened with my IntelliMouse Explorer, although Cody seems to ignore any mice that don’t light up.

What’s left of the right and what’s right on the left: EPO ratings, v2.0. We call ourselves and others “left-wing” or “right-wing” all the time. Yet these are two of the most abused terms in political speech. What do they mean, really? Are liberals left-wing, as Americans would say, or extreme right-wing as Austrians would tend to think about them?ÊWas Stalin left-wing or right-wing? How about Tony Blair? Bill Clinton? Left/right doesn’t really make sense. Here’s an attempt at an alternative way of labelling political beliefs. [note: This is a re-write of the story by the same title. Thanks for all the comments.] [kuro5hin.org]

Interesting article. Although I’m a member of the LP, I sometimes think they’re a bit too extreme. I guess I actually come closest to Classical European liberalism, EPO = 254. An extreme Libertarian is 155.

I’ve uploaded my MacHack photos here. I’ve also made two slide shows as QuickTime movies, which I plan to upload to my iDisk.

I just got home from MacHack & posted a more detailed wrap-up here.

It looks like Aaron has some tough new competition. Adam Atlas is only 12 and he amazed everyone by taking first place in the “yoot” division & second-place overall with his hack, a Cocoa application which fetches RSS newsfeeds.

I just met another Radio user, Ryan Wilcox.

I’m now sitting in the “Bash Metrowerks” session. Nicholas Riley is sitting next to me & I just subscribed to his Radio weblog.

I just posted some MacHack photos at http://www.macmegasite.com/MacHack.

I also set up a MacHack forum.

I’m at MacHack now. My flight was uneventful & on-time. I got up at 5:30 this morning because the airport shuttle was supposed to pick me up at 6:45, but they didn’t show up until 7:20. I still haven’t slept.

I just moved Radio Userland to my server machine, which I will keep running while I’m at MacHack, so I can continue to blog remotely.