Carl Hutzler’s Blog

I blogged about this a few weeks back but wanted to update everyone that IK did a press release on Monday announcing their service. The release has some nice information in it for all you independent artists trying to make a few bucks.

INDIEKAZOO: New Service Takes on Goliath in the MP3 World

2 comments

OK, maybe this is not earth shattering news by itself, but it gets a little better.

• The music is $0.10 less per song than iTunes and the albums seem to be about $1 less than iTunes.
• The music is DRM free. No more pain in the ass restrictions on what I can do with my music
• The MP3 files are encoded at 256 kbps which should translate into very high quality listening
• Files work on just about any device that can play music as it is just a regular MP3 file.

I do not buy much of anything on iTunes mostly because I can usually find the CD for the same price at BestBuy or Target and I hate the DRM crud. No, I don’t steel or provide illegal music, but the DRM stuff is just annoying and inconvenient especially on iTunes video files. With Amazon providing high quality, DRM free, MP3 (as opposed to Apples AC3) format, for LESS money, the choice is clear for me.

The only downside I can see is that Amazon only has two major labels right now - EMI and Universal among many other smaller labels.

Note: There is a small “downloader” application which Amazon recommends installing. They have a Mac and Windows version. I don’t think you need this but it does sound convenient as it will auto add the music into iTunes for you.

A bit off topic, if you are looking for one of the best pure “rock ‘n’ roll” albums out there, spend $9 on this one and you will not be disappointed. Its one of my favorite all time albums.

Ryan Adams: Gold $8.99

No comments

My thoughts on the matter posted to Dave Farber’s IP list…

---

While I don’t work at AOL anymore, I did run the anti-spam team for many
years and worked on the email platform for almost a decade. I can tell
you that from time to time we had a group complain that we were blocking
their mail without proper cause. In most cases we would provide the data
to show the organization why they were having issues. Most of the time
it was a combination of complaints about their mail (REPORT SPAM from
members) along with an abnormally high rate of bounced mail
(non-deliverable addresses). And in most cases the organization would
fix the issue once we got them signed up for a feedback loop which would
allow them to see their complaints and address the cause.

In all of my years at AOL, I can tell you that AOL never intentionally
blocked an organization for their political views. I would not have
allowed it. But we did block some of these political groups along the way… Read more

3 comments

First let me say that I am not a network engineer. I understand a lot about networks and how to string stuff together. But my experience is mostly on the end user side of things without knowledge of Cisco routers, IP Tables, Firewalls, etc. So if I get something technically wrong, you have my disclaimer :-)

That said, I have been experimenting with those small routers you buy at Circuit City for $50 or so made by Linksys, Buffalo Technologies, etc. What you do is buy one of these gizmos (make sure you get one that is compatible) and then “upgrade” the firmware in the router to an open source firmware called DD-WRT. To be fair, DD-WRT is not the only game in town. Open WRT, Tomato, and others do exist and may even be better in some ways. But I have found that DD-WRT has very good documentation and wide-spread use and support. I like to use what other people are using as they help me by figuring stuff out and publishing the “how to’s”.

Read more

4 comments

Margot Koschier and I did some interviews a couple of years back for the Spam Documentary which I blogged about a while back. The film was taped by the Canadian PBS equivalent. And as they promised, it is now going to air on a US station, CourtTV. The show is even featured on CourtTV’s home page right now.

So tune in at 11pm on Tuesday 9/18 and see your’s truly get his 15 minutes ;-)

Click here for a preview.

3 comments

From lifehacker.com…

I do computer tech support for my photography and graphic arts clients and one thing that always comes up is “what time is it in…” some location. Perhaps it is a city in Europe where one of my clients are traveling and we want to know when we can call them. Or maybe its a question about the best time to Skype with someone taking ballet instruction in Russia. Or maybe it is just a question about how many hours GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) is different from my location on the East Coast of the US as the email server shows its logs in GMT…and I can never remember whether its 4 or 5 hours different from the East Coast (DST?)

Well, Google has the answer. Just go to Google and type in “What time is it in London” or “What time is it GMT” and you will get the answer back.

No comments

I saw this on Gizmodo originally.

Adobe has been developing a way to allow people to upload and edit photographs using standard web browsers. There are some sites that already do this, but seeing Adobe do this with the Photoshop brand is earth shattering in my opinion. My guess is that they are fairly scared about the possibility of losing ground in the retail/consumer space which could eventually trickle into their primary, $600 product, Photoshop.

We have seen this type of thing a lot lately where a company takes a traditionally “desktop” application and does a really nice job of creating an entirely “web based” application…and many times for free (ad supported). Email is one of these areas with Google Mail, AOL Mail, Yahoo Mail and now Live Office and Zimbra too. These online email applications are so “desktop like” that many people are ditching desktop email and using the web instead.

Of course Google and Microsoft are likely competing the fiercest on this front as Google roles out Calendar, Word Processing and Spreadsheet apps that in some cases (calendar) are better than the desktop versions. Microsoft is not sitting around waiting for Google to take over their Office productivity suite as they are working on a counter set of apps in MSFT Live.

And office suites are not the only thing that can be better on the web. We all know that Google Maps and Earth are way better than any desktop software put out by Delorme or Garmin. That is as long as you have a connection to the web which is becoming almost ubiquitous these days with the advent of 3G cellular based broadband for $40-$60 a month.

Not sure I am going to give up the speed and flexibility of my desktop image editting tools anytime soon, but for the consumer who shoots 20 pictures of their family vacation and just wants to edit them a little and then publish them to a website or order a few prints, this new Photoshop on the web may be a killer app. Watch out iPhoto!

No comments

I was finally (terribly, thoroughly) bored with the look of my blog. It was the boring Wordpress “out of the box” style. I found some time to look at the 100’s of styles freely available and easily installable and found this one which I liked a lot.

It is called Gray Gets Green 1.0 by Fred Banuelos. His site is http://www. mexico.vg/

I took his original look and put in my own artwork and customized the font colors and paragraph widths a bit more to my liking.

I had to fix a few images that were too large for the new format, but I think it is OK now. Would be curious to know if the blog is showing up strangely for anyone….what browser, version, OS, etc if it is broke. Thanks.

1 comment

A ways back in March of 2004, I worked with a number of bright people in the Internet and email communities on an anti-spam document. We attempted to explain how some fairly simple operational and architectural changes to the way email is submitted and transferred across the global mail infrastructure could provide better tracking and identification of the senders of bad email once it had been sent. This would, in-turn, better help show who was to blame for the problems. No, it would not identify the actual spammer directly, but these recommendations would help ensure that responsibility for the issue was handled by the correct “responsible party” instead of the big ISP getting blamed for blocking the little hosting company’s mail (now you know where I was coming from :-)

Anyway, we did not have any grandiose ideas that our thinking was cutting edge, new, or would stop spam on its own. But we wanted to document a number of best practices for network and email security that we felt would greatly benefit all internet users if ISPs would implement them. To that end, we wrote a document called Email Submission Between Independent Networks.

We submitted it to the RFC community and have received many informed comments and revised it several times. Thanks to the tremendous help of David Crocker, the grandfather of Internet mail (yes, look for his name in some sort of SMTP standard or something :-) we are finally to the point where it is approved as a Best Common Practice (sort of a mini RFC).

Anyway, I am proud to have worked with these folks and to be able to contribute a little something to the great Internet we find so valuable in our everyday lives.

Thank you to:

David Crocker of Brandenburg Internetworking
Pete Resnick of Qualcomm, Inc.
Robert Sanders of Earthlink
Eric Allman of Sendmail, Inc.
Tony Finch of the University of Cambridge

And might I say, Woo (explicative deleted) Hoo!

3 comments

IndieKazoo (http://indiekazoo.com/) launched this week. No, I haven’t seen it written up on Techcrunch yet, but I am sure Michael will get around to it soon :-)

IndieKazoo is a music e-commerce site for independent artists that requires no web or e-commerce knowledge on the part of the musicians/bands. As a band, you go to the site, sign-up and in less than 10 minutes or so (well maybe uploading the mp3’s takes a little longer ;-) your music is available for sale via download or snail mail (you get to mail out the CD).

Read more

1 comment