William Henney's Journal

Russian MP3 sites

Wed, 11 May 2005 09:35:08 CDT --- (Web)

I am in a quandary whether to download Patti Smith's Horses for 89 cents from mp3search.ru. Is this legal and/or ethical?

Technical legality is not such an issue for me since it is probably not even legal for me to rip music from my own CDs for use on my MP3 player (at least this is true in the UK - not sure about Mexico). Downloading from the Russians is probably not legal even if they have a legitimate license to sell the songs in Russia (which is in dispute). This is because online purchases from a foreign website probably count as commercial rather than private imports (same as if I ordered a CD by mail-order), so I would need to pay import duty and more importantly would need a license for the import of copyright material.

What about ethics? I would happily pay a higher price for the music from a more legitimate source. However, I cannot use any of the big download sites (itunes, napster, rhapsody, etc) because:

1. They are not available from Mexico. I could always go through a US-based proxy I suppose, but that would be a pain (and also of dubious legality).
2. They are not available in linux. Again, there is a sort of workaround in Jon Johannsen's PyTunes but again of dubious legality (using it would certainly be in breach of ITunes' Terms & Conditions). More importantly, you need to use a Windows machine to initially register with ITunes anyhow, which would be a pain.

Edith drinks from a bottle

Tue, 10 May 2005 21:41:26 CDT --- (Edith)

Edith drank from a bottle for the first time today! Jane had expressed the milk in the morning and I fed her at lunch time. The conditions were not ideal since she was very hungry and angry but with a bit of perseverance and a lot of screaming she finally got the right idea. This is all in preparation for next Tuesday when Jane goes to Tiripetio for the day and I am left holding the baby. We have now got 2 bottles of 3 oz each stockpiled in the freezer in case of emergencies.

Aha, found the trick!

Tue, 10 May 2005 21:35:39 CDT --- (Emacs)

Solved the problem with journal-create-entry overwriting my previous entry. All is fine so long as you publish the previous entry first with emacs-wiki-publish (C-c C-p). I really should report this to the mailing list since it causes data-loss if you don't get it right.

Which blogging package to use?

Tue, 10 May 2005 12:55:32 CDT --- (Emacs)

I'm still not sure if I will end up using this (journal.el) or emacs-wiki-blog.el

Comparison

emacs-wiki-blog.el

Good

Does RSS feeds - looks cool in the examples by the author -

Bad

Haven't tried it yet.

journal.el

Good

It works - good integration with emacs-wiki - you can have multiple entries per day - they get named automatically - each entry can be in multiple categories - ...

Bad

Has fatal bug - does not do RSS feeds yet - the generated web pages are a bit confusing - the same entries crop up in many places - ...

The bug: This seems to be due to the fact that journal-entries-alist is empty. This should contain a reference to all the current entry pages (e.g., "1" in my case)