The Register reports that the Blu-Ray format has been compromised by the same guy that cracked HD-DVD’s copy protection.

This isn’t a huge surprise, since both formats use the same underlying copy protection system. Still, it’s good to see. Sony can’t be trusted with media formats — their instinct is to lock consumers into them for the greater glory of Sony. I was worried that the downside to the HD-DVD crack would be greater enthusiasm for Blu-Ray. Now that both have been cracked, it’s a fair fight once again.

It’s slightly ridiculous, but I have to confess that I’ve only recently discovered Hype Machine. I’ve been aware of its existence for a while, but my previous attempts to use it always met with failure. The flash player didn’t work right on my old laptop, and the HM iTunes link never has and still doesn’t work properly for me. With those functions unavailable, I didn’t see a compelling-enough reason to use the site.

But, spurred by references to it in an Unfogged thread, I gave it another shot, got the flash player to work, and found out that it’s unbelievably great. There’s one major downside, though: I seem to run into buffering problems with the player on a pretty regular basis. This is an infuriating way to listen to music, and particularly bad when I try to use the app through the Wii web browser (the console is hooked up to my stereo, after all — in theory, this could make for a great at-home radio station).

The HM flash player uses the open-source XSPF Music Player, so I’m optimistic that I’ll be able to crack it open and implement some more stringent buffering. Unfortunately, my initial explorations revealed that the site uses some irritating redirects and is going to require me to do stupid things like fake my HTTP referer and user agent string. I realize that’s gibberish to many of you, but trust me when I say that it’s totally lame.

So it may be a little while before I really get my hands dirty with this project. In the meantime, I can’t resist posting these two tracks, both of which I’m a little obsessed with (the latter despite not really liking CYHSY):

Modest Mouse – Dashboard

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah – Mama, Won’t You Keep Those Castles In The Air & Burning?

I wouldn’t normally beat a dead horse like this, but this is not only a subhead, but from the same issue as the last quote I bitched about (the issue’s been lying around the office, and I’ve been slowly flipping through it). The prominence of this apparent typo is giving me pause, making me wonder if either a) I’m badly confused about the proper use of the verb “got”; or b) this reflects some new and wholly intentional editorial policy at Time. Anyway: huh.

I got mentioned in a Newsweek piece about the Wii, thanks to a connection of Sommer‘s (she’s quoted in the article). Yay media conspiracy!

UPDATE: I got some quotes in the author’s associated blog entry.

UPDATE: Here’s the context behind the graffiti in the shot, for anyone reading who isn’t aware of Shaw businesses’ ongoing clashes with Shiloh Baptist Church.

I really don’t think I did, but I was out drinking that night, so I suppose I should just go ahead and ask. Michael, Matt, Ezra, Sam, Sarah and everyone else who was out on Friday: did we get drunk at Townhouse and then go grocery shopping in Michigan? Normally I wouldn’t ask, but Bank of America sent me an email on Saturday morning wondering about these charges:

I’ve gone ahead and ordered a new card, but man oh man will I ever feel sheepish if I find a cancelled and beer-stained Kroger receipt lying around the apartment a week from now.

More seriously, this has been surprisingly easy to deal with — I had the whole thing wrapped up and a temporary ATM card in hand within about an hour of getting the initial alert email. It’s a real credit to Bank of America, I think, and even more noteworthy when you consider how essentially evil an organization they are.

The obvious question to ask is how the crook got my number at all. I haven’t been patronizing internet retailers particularly much in the last week or two, but I did make a few suspect purchases:

• A while ago I ordered something from SparkFun Electronics. But those guys are great, and I’ve ordered from them once before. I don’t think it could be them.
• I bought a new cellphone battery from a somewhat shady Ebay retailed not too long ago. But I made the payment through PayPal (or Yahoo stores; I forget which), so I kind of doubt it was them.
• The final and most troubling possibility is the Wii: I bought Super Mario 64 about an hour before leaving the house on Friday night, and did so by using the Wii’s integrated store. But surely Nintendo processes payments securely, right? Right?

My childlike faith in the internet makes it hard for me to believe that it’s any of these candidates. I haven’t gone through my back statements to check for earlier fraud, so it could have happened before these three candidates — I just don’t know. There’s also a non-electronic possibility: it could’ve been stolen when I opened a tab at DC9 on Thursday night, too. I did end up with a suspiciously low bar tab.

Anyway, it’s all very mysterious, but for now the danger seems to have passed.

Today started off on an exciting note, with police sirens screeching and officers screaming at a couple of gentlemen about 150 feet from my bedroom window. “Get down and put your hands up!” seemed to be the core message, but the officers tried out a number of different variations (consistent delivery, though). My real camera’s battery had run down, so this is the best picture I could manage; you’ll have to take my word for the fact that it was kind of awesome (or at least loud).

I almost forgot: be sure to check out the new Ted Leo track over at YANP. Shake The Sheets was a little disappointing to me, but this track takes me right back to 2004. It reminds me of watching Ted carom around the stage at Fort Reno, contained only by the venue’s curfew, the peacefulness of the summer night and whatever little constraint his curly guitar cord afforded.

Why yes, I do enjoy being a small-minded jerk:

I mostly just like this because it makes me feel better about the many times when a typo of mine has made it onto DCist. Also, it provided a handy excuse to put Photoshop CS3 through the paces (Review: it works! But it doesn’t use the right style of brush cursor when you’re zoomed in.).

Well, that was kind of a waste of time. But it was fun, and I suppose I learned a few new things.

I decided, for no particular reason, to try turning a video clip into an ascii art version of itself. In theory, this can be easily accomplished via a number of different open source projects:

• Handbrake rips the video from the DVD
• ffmpeg pulls the video frames out, one-by-one, and turns them into JPEGs
• jp2a turns each frame into an HTML, ASCIIfied version of itself
• Something turns the resulting HTML back into a graphic file. I would have liked to use khtml2png, but I couldn’t get it to work. I tried a few other things, but none of them worked, either. I ended up using webkit2png. But it was still a pain in the ass to get working, and it only works on OS X. Bah!
• Used the convert tool from the ImageMagick package to crop and convert the file back to a JPEG.
• ffmpeg puts everything back together

All of the above occurs in different phases on my mac and a linux machine, and various parts are held together by some Perl.

I chose the opening scene of The Big Lebowski for my test, but it ended up being a bad choice: I thought that the closeups of all the bowling paraphenalia would be easy to recognize, but something with a lot of human faces might’ve been a better idea. Also, ffmpeg seems to fail at putting audio back onto Flash video — I’m not sure what that’s all about, since I was able to add the audio back when trying it with different formats. If anybody’s got any idea what’s going on, let me know.

At any rate, here are the fruits of my labor. It’s somewhat neat, but probably not something I’ll waste a lot more time on. The effect would probably look a lot better on fullscreen, uncompressed video — but that’s not really my arena. For what it’s worth, the effect works best during the scenes in the middle of the clip.

Oh! The embedded flash video player I’m using is from here, and seems to be fairly slick. Also: if you can’t see the video, it’s because I’m hosting it through the coral CDN. If your firewall at work doesn’t let port 8090 through, you’re SOL. Don’t worry: like I said, it’s not exactly life-changing.

I think I’d probably get much better results with a cartoon, especially if I did some preprocessing to crank up the video’s saturation and brightness before feeding it to jp2a. But until I’ve got a clean linux system (or a genuine need) I don’t think I’ll bother — the khtml2png solution is the right way to do screencaps. webkit2png not only requires me to pull all the files onto a mac, it makes the system’s dock undulate in an oddly sensual manner as the related icon pops in and out of it for every file that’s processed. It’s disturbing.