Well, the FCC voted to eliminate all low power wireless activity in the recently auctioned 700Mhz band, as of Feb 17th 2009.  That means that we have some work to do, and some money to spend.  Wireless mics, in-ears and wireless com in the 700Mhz band will be illegal as of Feb 17th.  Prior to this announcement, I had heard mixed reports from trusted sources about the future legality of operating in the 700Mhz band.  Although the document referred to in this article is open to comment, and is not yet law, there is no reason to believe that it won’t become law.

FCC wants wireless mic ban at 700MHz

It has finally been discovered ;o) that it takes a little work to rip CD’s to MP3’s that sound ok. Back in the hey-day of Napster there were many files to be had, but most of them didn’t sound very good. I guess that the general public is beginning to realize that size isn’t everything…:O|

Wired News: Old Rips: May They Rest in Peace

I have written about I, Cringely before. I really like what he has to say about technology, and he’s entertaining to read as well. A few months ago I read something about his efforts to start build a show based around his musings about technology, computers, and opinion. It has finally some to fruition. NerdTV went live yesterday. What is NerdTV?

NerdTV is essentially Charlie Rose for geeks – a one-hour interview show with a single guest from the world of technology.

His first guest is Andy Hertzfeld, who was one of the original Macintosh systems programmers, and now a big proponent of Open Source Software. Upcoming guests include, PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, Apple Computer co-founder Steve Wozniak, Internet publisher Tim O’Reilly, and TCP/IP inventor Bob Kahn. As well as a host of others.

Andy also has a great web site, Folklore.org, that focuses on stories from the original Macintosh development team. It too is a great read. Andy has also just released a book of stories from Folklore called Revolution in The Valley.

Other nerdy aspects of the show include the fact that it is distributed on the internet in a multitude of formats, from mp4 video and audio formats for podcast including ogg vorbis, aac, mp3 and it’s also available as a straight up transcript.

It’s nerdy, and I found it very entertaining.

I, Cringely . NerdTV | PBS

Technorati Tags: Media, Nerd, Computers, PBS

From “For Your Entertainment”: The author, and fellow audio engineer, John Sibley, is my hero. In the midst of a cross country trip, returning to Vegas from a job in Detroit, decided to point his car to the south, and go to Houston instead, to assist the Red Cross with their efforts to help the hurricane victims.

I’m proud to know you…

You can read his account in his Blog:
For Your Entertainment: A Brief Departure From The Funny

BeOS, which many audio engineers are familiar with due to its use with LCS (Level Control Systems), is back. A few years ago, BeOS sold all it’s assets to Palm, and Be disappeared. With the exception of a few enthusiast web sites like BeBits, and a couple of opens source builds of Be, there was no supported version of the OS. LCS has changed its OS requirements, and development path, and now supports builds of CueStation on OSX, WinXP and Linux (first RedHat, now SuSe).

BeOS was ahead of its time. I still have 2 machines that I use for LCS that run BeOS. They boot very fast, and run reliably.

There is a really good history of BeOS and a review of Zeta on ArsTechinca.

ZETA 1.0 by yellowTAB

The Electronic Frontier Foundation published a paper on a proposed music licensing scheme that is very interesting. Basically it works in a manner similar to the method venues use to license music (perhaps through ASCAP or BMI). A flat fee which makes it’s way to the artists, writers and copyright holders of the material. It may, depending on contracts with record companies, partially cut record companies out of some revenue, but the creators get their due. It’s a shame that the record companies can’t seem to embrace the electronic distribution model, and truly take advantage of the massive distribution potential of the internet, including P2P.

EFF: A Better Way Forward: Voluntary Collective Licensing of Music File Sharing

I don’t know why I found this intriguing, but I did. I think I have most of these around the house somewhere.

There all here, from Atari2600 to PS3 and everything in between. If you ever wondered about the evolution of the game controller, check out Sock Master’s Video Game Controller Family Tree

Google Secret Lab, Prelude

News about Google is always interesting. It seems that Google has many secrets to keep. It is being reported that Google has a secret sub-domain http://eval.google.com

Click it and you get …nothing. The site reveals itself only if you have the proper login and if you use a network known by Google. Residues of Eval.google are found on the web, but the full content of the mystery site has never been published before.

It is supposed that Google uses this site to allow real people to keep the quality of their results high. It seems obvious that a smart company would real people for quality assurance.

Godwins Law states:

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

The link below is to the Wikipedia entry.  It reads a bit like an essay on Bistromathics.

Godwin’s Law

I’ve posted about WiMax before, and how the bandwidth that is being set aside for this technology is the same bandwidth the entertainment industry uses. While I’m not happy about the possibility of losing space for wireless mics and other devices we need to have, Intel has announced that it will start to build WiMax hardware. The tricky part is the licencing of the bandwidth from the FCC to operate the equipment.The telcos are upset because they stand to lose a lot of money, unless they get in the game.
Below is a link to I, Cringley’s column on PBS where he talks about this situation. It is an interesting read, but the thought of WiMax everywhere makes me wince for the future of wireless as we know it.

What if Wal-Mart got in the WiMax Business?