Und sie dreht sich doch: Wer sich keine “ME” Version von InDesign kaufen will und nur ein paar Absätze layouten muss, kann sich hier informieren, wie das denn gehen soll: Ein Beitrag in deutsch und auch was in englisch zum Thema. Und noch ein gratis Tipp: UTF8 is your friend.
last.fm no longer free
At first, I am no avid last.fm user (or any other webservices in general). I was listening to last.fm radio only very rarely. The big, chunky music library I have at home has some very personal advantages over last.fm. But let’s get to the topic, shall we: even if I agree totally with everyone who thinks that last.fm’s decision was the wrong one, there are some things you have to consider (aka. the big picture).
The business case “offering content of which only 5% is (partially) free on a large scale and worldwide” will *never ever ever* work. Either it is able to generate enough revenue on ads or is a non-profit org and (maybe) get public funds/donors – or subscription fees from the users. Apparently, last.fm ads only seem to generate enough money in the 3 countries which do not need to pay the fee. It’s a two-sided sword.. Piss off the users by haveing them pay or piss off the investors by generating no (not enough) revenue. Thin line, thin line.. of course, it’s a little awkward if you advertise for 5 years as the “free, all free, wooha!”-service and suddenly switch to subscription fees. I think they knew that this will piss off many many users.
I’d say that the big problem here on this little world is not last.fm but the oversized, large media imperia around the globe. I mean, in the end, where do you think the money you pay goes to? A small amount ends up at last.fm (streaming media is very expensive: endless traffic, huge storage needs, etc) but the *big* chunk ends up in the pockets of sony bmg, warner, or for that matter, the company which lately bought last.fm: CBS.. But this is how it works.
Now, this does not excuse the decision to make CC/free music part of the whole deal for which you have to pay. The very sad thing from my point of view is, that they didn’t even consider offering a free channel completely dedicated to CC/free music. There’s plenty of it. Who knows, maybe this is going to happen. If not, I’m sure some other service will jump into the gap left behind by last.fm.
And, well, their PR sucks.
My conclusion: it’s sad to see another great free internet service turn into a subscribers-only place. Lots of users will simply not pay, because they don’t need it this much, thus making the platform less interesting for everyone, the users AND the (net)labels publishing their music. I will think about removing my content. But I’m not sure yet.
* * *
PS. Something that makes me feel a little sad not about last.fm, but about the world in general is: Why is no one willing to pay for a good service, anyhow? Everybody just wants to get everything for free. You don’t need to be a genius to realise that on the long run, this really doesn’t work and never, ever, ever will! What do you think how many times I felt pissed off when a (potential) client made big round eyes when I told him how much my service costs? It’s definately not a lot of money that I bill for my work, but it’s what I’m worth. If I am worth it to them, they shall pay me, if not, their loss. This also applies to everything else. You wanna play WoW for 20$ a month? Is it worth it? Pay for it and have fun (now before you leave a flame in my comments: offering free content and charge for it is actually greedyness and robbery, as demonstrated by last.fm).
WTF is Twine?
For all you people “getting old”: Twine is a way to collect, share and connect information, featuring some fancy web 3.0 technology. In a way, it’s like digg + delicious + semantic web functionality. I’m not gonna go deeper for now, if you’re interested, go have a look: What is Twine?
vote!
Take yourself 30 seconds and go vote for “Aasemoon’z Twine” here. Your generosity shall be rewarded with a huge “Thank you”. :)
Proofs: Epson Stylus Photo R2880
Now this took me about 2 days to figure. Most Epson printers don’t support any sort of PostScript printing. You will notice that once you try to print a page from Illustrator or InDesign: The printer-icon shows up in the dock, just to disappear 10 seconds later. Meanwhile, the printer makes a little rumba – but no printing whatsoever happens. The image printing quality is absolutely stunning and it would be a waste to not use this printer for proofing purpose. But this made me a little disappointed.
No PostScript support! Well, “no problem”, you think, “you just have to export a PDF and use Acrobat to print”. Well my friend, not so easy. Apparently, Acrobat also sends PostScript Data to the printer, which produces the same very unproductive results.
There are basically 3 Options, which allow you to print PostScript data to this printer (and every other Epson Stylus, for that matter):
1. Use a RIP software
Well, if you can afford it, you might wanna check out the various companies which offer professional level RIP software for OSX which also feature accurate color proofing and so on for a variety of large format printers. There is “KTI Harlequin RIP,” “PowerRIP X ” by iProof and a number of others. But jeez, I’m not gonna spend my money on this. There has to be another (free) way.
2. Use GIMP-Print/Gutenprint
Based on CUPS, Gutenprint allows you to do the same like the pro RIPs. But don’t expect color accuracy. It’s more of a workaround than a real professional solution. If your printer is supported, you might give it a try. The R2880 isn’t yet on the list of compatible printers. I used the driver for the R2400 to give it a try but the colors where way too light. But if you wanna give it a try: Gutenprint / GIMP Print CUPS based printing on OSX. While this might be a very good solution if you run a color laser in a workgroup or at home, it doesn’t work for me.
3. Preview.app
This one made me chuckle, honestly. OSX comes with “something like a RIP”, built-in! You can print your EPS, PS and PDF data with accurate colors on your Epson printer using the original Epson drivers. All you have to do is open the file in preview.app and print. Voila. I haven’t tried it yet with large PostScript 3 files with complicated layers and transparencies, but so far, I was quite blown away by the simplicity. Could have saved me 8 hours of browsing the web.. But at least now I know the product palette of many major RIP software companies out there. And – by reading the comments on macupdate for example – how much those companies suck in respect of support et al.
Of course, if you need to print 20 proofs a day, you should have a look at high-end proofing workflow solutions and pro-level RIP software. But if you’re just a small freelancer, you should better spend your money on another backup harddrive, rather than buying RIP soft which costs a fortune (..with each update).
So, I hope this helps someone. ;)
PS. Keep this in mind: When I say “accurate colors” I don’t say “I measured every dot with a densitometer”. I compared a few printouts with offset printed originals from a couple of my projects with neutral lighting and the difference was actually not noticeable. Also, it heavily depends on what kind of paper you use for proofing. Coated, uncoated.. it needs some fumbling. But if you try out a couple of papers and settings, you find yourself a pretty low-cost, but accurate proofing solutiong for the home office.
MacBook Pro: DVD Write Error
I tried to burn a DVD recently on my mac and encountered an error during writing, right at the start (while writing the lead-in). At first, I thought my drive’s dead, since before that, even reading regular CDs was very slow. I googled a little and came across all sorts of explanations, from “you have to reinstall OSX” to “reset PROM”. Knowing that these can’t be possibly the cause for the write error, I went to buy myself a laser-lens cleaning disc. Inserted it, played the “cleaning track” twice and tried to burn the DVD again. And look at this: Works like a charm again! So, the problem was actually dust on the lens, I guess. And that’s also explainable: The macbook’s drive is a slot-in drive, which means, there’s always a little slot open in the notebook’s case where air is able to stream in. Since the macbook pro has a tendency to get hot pretty fast when running processor intensive tasks, the case fans transport a lot of air out of the cooling slots at the back of the machine. Now, the air has to get in somwhere – and with air, there comes dust. Voila.
No need to reinstall your osx.. Actually, you might only make the problem worse because you might encounter DVD *read* errors while installing, and that would be.. pure irony. :-)
Posted in hardware, mac Tagged apple, dust, dvd drive, lens cleaning, mac, macbook, read error Leave a comment
OpenOffice 3 – out now!
Fürs Protokoll: OpenOffice 3 wurde kürzlich veröffentlicht. Unter anderem mal endlich neue, schönere Icons. :-) Endlich kann ich die Beta 3, NeoOffice und OO2.4 kicken. Spart gleich mal 1GB. Juhu! :-)
Download wie immer unter openoffice.org.
Wallpaper: Fullmoon
Here’s a wallpaper for your wide screen. Took this shoot on a foggy night, while trying to take photos for a HDR image composition (which turned out quite crappy, but it was my first try ;) ). I was quite happy about the result so I decided to post the image as a desktop background.
You can download it here: Desktop Wallpaper (1680x1050px PNG)
(ed: sorry, dead link. works now.)
Posted in design, photography Tagged dark, desktop, fullmoon, moon, night, photography, wallpaper Leave a comment
You better learn to swim..
What’s the point in saying “I’m feeling good” if you know, that you are actually far from feeling “real” good? That, as soon as you stop taking those light meds, you can start all over again? We’re so damn good at lying to ourselfes, to the point where we actually *believe*. This includes lies from “I’m the best” to “I’m not worth a penny”. Bad luck, if you end up lying the wrong lies to yourself, one could say. Putting the process in reverse on the other hand.. well. The first thing you will realise: How things should be and how things actually are, from a rational point of view. And from that point on (if you *really* got it), you feel a sting in your brain’s frontal lobe, everytime you realise that what you’re thinking is actually “lying to yourself”. The abyss you try to avoid like cats avoid water. Basic instinct. Because you know that it will take you one hell of a struggle to get out again. It’s fascinating how simple and how complex this whole issue is, simultaneously. Or maybe I’m just a little bipolar on top of everything. But if it’s just that.. keep it coming. ;)
Umgezogen
So, mal Zeit, dass ich das auch hier noch vermerke: Ich bin umgezogen, von Solothurn nach … *tadaa* .. Solothurn! :) Meine neue Adresse: Alte Bernstrasse 41, 4500 Solothurn.
Posted in my five cents 1 Comment
Catch Me If You Can!
Alrght, there we go: Catch Me If You Can! by vantage (MP4, 80MB, .H264, final release, ranked 3rd at BUENZLI 17). “Right-click/Save As..” and use VLC Player for playback or watch it in the browser if you got Quicktime installed. There’s also a HD version (720p), but the size is too big and no one likes downloading 200MB for one and a half minutes of fun. Just watch it fullscreen and imagine the corners to be sharp. =) I will upload a Flashversion as soon as I figure out how to embed it or have the time to create a youtube account.
Credits
Tentacle rendering and valuable input: Daniel Bachmann aka Triztan
Compositing, timing, design, animation, music, etc.: Oliver aka. genox
BUENZLI 17
Buenzli is soon over, the pricegiving is being prepared as I write this. The last days have been very busy and I managed to enter 2 entries to the competitions, one piece of music and a wild demo (animation movie). Triztan and myself worked for the better part of a week on making a little more than a minute of animation. Altho I’m satisfied with the result (taking into account I used After Effects for the first time a little more than 3 weeks ago and never did any sort of compositing before..), it could have been longer. But I think it’s a good start, especially because now we have a rather stable workflow, tested and running. Let’s see what happens next. Talked to cosmic/nuance and we (triztan and myself) might pull off something together, new group, or so, dunno yet. We’ll see.
Fotos von Kolja
Koljas Flickr stream hat heute ein Update bekommen. Film Nummer 6 hat’s mittlerweile auch bis in die Schweiz und zu mir geschafft. Er ist zur Zeit wohl irgendwo in Georgien, genaueres weiss ich leider nicht. Soviel ich weiss, geht es ihm jedoch gut.
PDFs für PRS505
Ein paar Tips zur Konvertierung von PDFs:
- Bei allen Dokumenten lohnt sich der Versuch, das komplette Dokument in eine RTF Datei zu konvertieren. Leider funktioniert das nicht immer gleichermassen gut und man muss gegebenenfalls anschliessend von Hand ein bisschen formatieren. Der Vorteil von RTF Dokumenten ist, dass man Metadaten erfassen kann, gleichzeitig aber immernoch ein offenes Format hat und der Reader die Formatierung und Seitenaufteilung übernimmt.
- Die Seitengrösse kann via Pagecropping in Acrobat verändert werden. Extrem praktisch, wenn der Text auf dem Reader zu klein ist, jedoch ein 4cm breiter Rand angezeigt wird.
- Bücher mit vielen Grafiken und Bildern liest man am besten nicht mit dem Reader..
- Dokumente, welche pro Seite einen ganzen Bogen enthalten (also 2 gegenüberliegende Seiten) kann man mit etwas Mühe splitten. Dies ist ein relativ langer Prozess und am einfachsten geht das mit Acrobat Pro und Bridge. Im Prinzip wendet man Pagecropping an um zuerst die linke Seite des Dokuments zu extrahieren, jede Seite einzeln speichert, die Dateien mit Bridge umbenennt (doc-A-01.pdf für die erste linke Seite und doc-B-01.pdf für die erste rechte Seite) und anschliessend wieder zu einem Dokument in Acrobat zusammenfügt. Anschliessend muss man das Dokument als PostScript file exportieren und nochmals zu einem PDF distillen mit Adobe Distiller. Der letzte Schritt ist notwendig, da Pagecropping in Acrobat verlustlos geschieht – geschnittene Bereiche werden nicht aus dem Dokument entfernt sondern nur ausgeblendet. Man würde ansonsten ein Dokument in der doppelten Grösse des Originaldokuments erhalten, was vorallem bei Scans nicht gerade optimal ist.
- Grundsätzlich empfehle ich jedoch eine Konvertierung in ein RTF Dokument, sofern dies möglich ist. Leider hatte ich auch schon PDF Dateien, deren Export nicht viel mehr als 400 leere RTF Seiten erzeugt hat.
Falls man gerade keinen Acrobat Pro zur Hand hat, geht zur Not auch Adobe’s Online Konvertierung.
Transition imminent
Welcome to the new WordPress-powered blog on genox.ch. As you may have noticed, there’s not much fancy layoutism around yet, but this is going to change over time. The switch from Serendipity to WordPress was something I planned to do since WP 2.8 got released. S9y is far from being actively developped anymore (I don’t blame anyone, it’s totally understandable that a project depending on 1 main developer is significantly going to struggle over time because ressources are very limited).
As for the potential looks of the new blog – it’s gonna be different. Dark times are over.