I just came across Streamburst via Techcrunch. Within minutes, I was happily downloading In Search of the Valley at a blistering 8-9 megabits per second, probably the closest I’ve ever gotten to topping out my 16-megabit ADSL connection. By the time I finish this blog post, a full DRM-free 1.1 gigabyte DVD-quality movie will be ready to watch, all for $7.99. That’s brilliant.

I went to ISOTV’s website, added the downloadable movie to my part, and paid using paypal. I was then presented with three download options:

I could choose to download any or all of the three formats, reminiscent of allofmp3.com. The encoding itself is DRM free, and I can choose to play the movie on whatever device I want.

What’s the catch? Streamburst prepends the movie with a 5 second clip showing who originally purchased the movie:

I’d much rather see my name on a movie than the completely pointless FBI warning on Hollywood releases. Streamburst also supposedly adds some sort of invisible, durable watermarking that is intended to be persistant through re-encodings.

I absolutely hate DRM. I hate it so much that I don’t even use some iTunes credit. I think audible.com would be an awesome service if it wasn’t for its DRM. I have 2 audible.com book credits that I’ll probably never use. It’s really that much of a pain in the ass, although admittedly it is probably worse for me being a desktop linux user. Like most people, however, I just want to be able to play my media on any device I want to use. I don’t want to be locked into a single piece of hardware or software to play back media that I’ve legally purchased.

Is this Streamburst going to stop piracy doing this? Absolutely not. I can easily clip the 5 seconds of my name and transcode the video into another format easily. However, I did just spend $8 on a movie I was interested in but not enough to purchase the DVD, and to that end I think Streamburst will be successful.

The Samsung ML-2010 is a great bargain laserjet printer. I bought it from NewEgg last year for $49 after a $50 mail-in rebate, which I quickly recieved. While it doesn’t see too much more than 5-10 pages per week, I’ve never had to replace the toner cartridge.

Using the Splix driver, it works great under Linux, specifically Gentoo AMD64 (x86_64) in my case. Here’s how you can get it to work, assuming you already have CUPS properly installed and working (most of this will apply to any distro):

Install Splix

You should now be able to print from any CUPS enabled application. If you have trouble with CUPS, try the Gentoo Printing Guide.

Make it work with GIMP

Open up or create a new image, then click File->Print. You will then see your printers listed, click on your Samsung ML-2010, then “Setup Printer”. Make sure “Postscript Level 2” is selected for “Printer Model,” then where it says “Command”, I had to remove the raw output (-oraw) option. Mine says:

lp -s -dSamsung_ML-2010_USB_1

Where “Samsung_ML-2010_USB_1” is your own CUPS device name (mine is plugged into USB_1). Click OK, then “Save Settings.”

Happy Printing.

p.s. The above instructions should work for any Samsung printer that Splix supports.

That’s my friend Tim with our final project as Clemson EE students back in 2004. We were given a computer running QNX and told to build a pendubot:

The Pendubot is a two-linked inverted pendulum actuated by a single motor. The links are connected to each other by a rotational joint, and the base of one link is connected to the motor. Control of the Pendubot is available only at the base of one of the links, thus the challenge of the project is to balance the top link by only the bottom link.

I recently found this video, and so I thought I’d share by making my first youtube.com upload.

A few months ago I was asked if I could create a small website for my high school graduating class' 10 year reunion. My immediate thought was "Wha? It's been 10 years already?!," but it turns out no, I graduated high school only 8 years ago. I've got another two years to go (Yes, the reunion is a long ways off, but look how quickly the last 8 years passed!).

But, that still leads me to feeling old, especially now that I rely on my sister, 10 years younger than me, to keep me up to date on all things hip. Then I come across chain mails like "25 Signs You're Getting Old," where during my youth I would have brushed off as a stupid forward. Now, I'm remarkably fascinated by it and think that every single item on the list is true (and funny!).

So anyway, in the midst of my mid-20s crisis I decide that I should probably work on this class reunion website that I promised our class president. From the time of domain registration to its currently (partially) complete state, it only took me about 3 hours, and the vast majority of that time was spent trying to fix the poor quality of the Wando logo I found online. Drupal 5's amazing power and flexibility really allows for rapid development of basic sites, and yet can still scale to do extremely complex sites like NowPublic and FlixYa. I didn't even have to install new code since I just used my existing codebase and created a new settings.php file. And the new default theme, Garland, is nice enough out of the box where I can just adjust the colors and call it a day.

Open source is wonderful.

A few years ago a good friend and I were walking through Munich's famed Englischer Garten when we came across some guys surfing in a fast-flowing canal. It was really amusing to see these guys surf back and forth for a minute or two before falling or conceding to the next surfer. While it was highly unusual to see people surfing downtown in a city, it was at least summer-time and quite hot. It turns out there are crazies there all year surfing.

I was in Munich over the weekend with my wife and her sister Alix, and so I told them about the surfers I saw a few years back. We were close to the area, and so I walked them over there. It was fairly cold out, 2-3 degrees Celcius, but there were 4-5 guys having a blast surfing in the canal. I snapped a few shots.

And my favorite: (Surfing and bathing forbidden!)

If you're ever in Munich, take a couple of hours to walk through the English Gardens. It's huge and quite enjoyable to walk through, and be sure to look for the surfers of Munich. The canal is near the south-west end of the park, or just ask a local to point you in the right direction.