Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

Misc¶

421 words

Just a few notes to finish the week:

As shown to me by Dan, a report on a tool to download DRM-free stuff from iTMS. Aside from all the legal nonsense, I was surprised to learn that iTMS actually distributes proper and DRM-free audio across the web and it’s only the local computer that mutilates the files. While this leads to ironic exploits like the one reported on, it also answers the question how iTMS can be so fast. I’ve always been amazed how iTMS could distribute songs that quickly if it had to encrypt everything before sending it across the internet. And the answer seems to be that it simply doesn’t. I think that’s a cool solution to the technical problem as Apple probably figured that people will figure out how to remove the DRM anyway and that the main thing about their distribution will be that are illegal rather than impossible to copy.
Another nice thing is that the tool apparently lets you re-download songs the files of which you may have lost. That’s a feature that iTunes should include anyway.
With the vast amount of comment spam we’re seeing these days, I’m always surprised how much money there must be in things like rape, incest, animal incest even, or golden showers. Perhaps I should’ve kept all the topics of such posts to compile a list… some of today’s finds were quite amusing as well – you could try to make a story of those…
Tonight we ordered some pizza once again. It’s quite funny as they’ve started to know us at the place. We have pizzas on Sunday nights fairly regularly and the pizza guys now sometimes even guess my name before I tell them. When I phoned tonight and started saying the address, the guy started laughing and said ‘right, it’s for Porst then…’. He said that there wasn’t any order last week, so I ended up chatting to the pizza guy about my holiday which was quite fun. I quite like this kind of customer relationship. Not one that says ‘your last visit to a cash machine was 42 days ago’ but rather one that says ‘huh, you weren’t here, we already missed you’. But that’s probably something you’ll only get with really small shops.
As written about by Dan Wood recently, quite a few more and less interesting mixups of music by Go Home Productions. Quite in the spirit of that Iggy Pop / Beastie Boys mix I started being obsessed about last year.