Steven R Kutcher - Bug Art - Gallery

PVR's let you sample some wierd shit you wouldnt normally waste your time on. In this case I'm still not sure what I've got.

I use BeyondTV, a splendid PC based PVR (think Tivo in your PC). Every once in a while I get frustrated with my apathy to TV and decide there must be something worthwhile if only I was paying attention to what's on. I am a recovering History Channel burnout. At 500+ channels and a personal avoidance of most pop culture and all network TV it's tough to wade through the archaic TV Guide style listings of all that crap...but BeyondTV (like most PVRs) at least offers some decent searching and surfing options via the fast scrolling and ad free in-program listing guide. The web interface is handy too for scheduling remote recordings or taking a minute out of the day at the mill to do a quick search for something random to grab that might be worth a peek.

Yesterday I perused the guide for documentaries and made 2 quick selections. Random and Riveting on something called the Current TV network. And some George Stephanopoulos talk show I vaguely remember as passable for news.


I've only had it on in the background while while working but, Random & Riveting seems to be a collection of viewer contributed video pod casts with G4-esque hosts...(possibly backed by Google? Odd stuff. Some of it felt after school safe, but one random and local gem poped up.

A piece, hopefully self produced, on Steven R Kutcher's Bug Art

I think the Cat painting thing was sold out as the sham that it obviously was, but this is indisputable genius at work! He even has the PETA rebuttal planned!

Sadly, Current TV decided this is availble "only on TV". So much for convergence, eh?

I want my MP3 and Apple has me by the balls

This DRM debacle is still annoying. I've resisted replacing my long defunct Creative Zen (circa 2000!) with a modern mp3 player for too long. It's an itch i havent scratched mostly due to a stubborn sense of principle and other questionable motives...but the itch persists and I'm in agony!

It should be an easy choice, right? Market and mind share leader is clearly the iPod. The upcoming iPhone (aka. jesus phone )is riding the shockwave of the market making and beloved iPod. So why not?

At a gut and possibly anti-social level, maybe I'm just plain freaked out by the popularity of the iPod. The consumerization of technology in the last ~10-15 years has really dumbed things down and we're not getting nearly what we could in just about any product area where there is such dominance. Add to this the hegemony and heritage of Apple's tight grip on their proprietary stuff and it adds up to a bad smell I'd rather avoid.

I call it practical, some say paranoid, but a feature I cant believe Apple hasnt bothered with yet is a simple FM tuner. It bugs me that all that comes out is what I put in. As my pal Tess says, it should be called a mePod...a cocoon you close around yourself and nothing comes in, except what you select. Sure, I like to hear my stuff...but if this is my personal media device and it's all I've got, how will I catch breaking news of the impending apocalypse? Radio, particularly public radio, connects me to so much local and contemporary stuff that my audio world would seem a hollow echoing space without it.

So, that brings me to the Zune, or some of Creative's new offerings? I'm close.

The bad news is, I've limped along with iTunes on my laptop long enough that I've succumbed to the impulse to grab a song here or an album there to the tune of some 300 songs. Currently there is no way to play these on anything without an Apple logo. The only way to move them is to burn them to an audio CD and rip them back in....oh, and somehow recreating all of the tag info. Bastards!

Hobbled as it is by Roku's inability to strike a deal with Apple to license DRM playback from a shared iTunes source, I still love my SoundBridge.

It'll play my Napster/Limewire era library and the stuff I've ripped but it only plays a fraction of the pod casts and none of the AAC protected files in my iTunes library.

Not being able to play my music/audio on devices not made by Apple annoys the hell out of me.

I thought there was some hope in the new iTunes Plus offering for DRM free music, but after upgrading to iTunes 7.20.35 and checking to see what it would cost to convert my library to DRM free I was horrified to note that only 5 songs were eligible for the $0.30 per song upgrade. Pitiful.

A few minutes hunting around in the FAQs to find out what the story was...Apple only says it's "because they have not been provided in iTunes Plus format from the music label." Lip service, if you ask me. I can see the mock sincerity in Jobs' shrugging shoulders as he approved this line.

My prediction is that Apple will sit on their DRM fortress until the iPhone takes off, and then likely announce an iPhone only streaming service or compression scheme...leaving the spoils of the static player to others to pick clean.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to find a virtual CDR driver to be able to pragmatically rip back what Apple forces me to burn while I scrape the tag info from whatever export nonsense iTunes might provide.