CISPA Is Back! Contact your representatives. Voting is this week.

 

34 Civil Liberties Organizations Oppose CISPA After Amendments

More information at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, take action now!

 

 

New Twitter Fail Whale

I just tried Twitter and it was down. It seems to be back up now but I did catch a new Fail Whale I've never seen before.

Update

I recently (11:15am ET) got a new error message before getting the over capacity screen.

 

 

Turbulence in the Music Clouds, Google and Amazon Both Far from Perfect

This week I tried both Google Music Manager and Amazon Music Importer again. Google was unusable and Amazon needed some work to get it functioning. Even when working properly, Amazon Music Importer will not work with the Chrome web browser.

Google Music Manager would not work properly. I would try to bring up the application from the task bar and it would close itself before I could click on anything! I uninstalled and re-installed it with no improvement so I just removed it from my PC.

I had better luck with Amazon Music Importer. I uninstalled it, updated Adobe Air, re-installed Music Importer and then it worked with Microsoft Internet Explorer 9.

Amazon claims some problem with Flash and the Chrome web browser so you cannot use it to upload music. However you can play music with Chrome, so I guess from time to time I will just use IE 9 to upload my music.

Finally Amazon's music matching service seemed to work well, it will even match ogg vorbis and flac music files. It matches them with high bit-rate mp3s though. I prefer Amazon's look and it seems to match graphics better to albums than Google does. Neither is great but Amazon is the better of the two fairly bad cloud services.

 

 

My how things have changed at Apple

Steve Jobs once said something like Good artists borrow, great artists steal. But now that Apple has stuff worth stealing, stealing is wrong.

ESPN 3 & Xfinity Problem

Technology is wonderful - when it works. Cord-cutters take note.

I have watched sports online with ESPN for several years now. First they called it ESPN 360 and now it is ESPN 3 and you can watch at WatchESPN.com (oh what a clever URL). Briefly if your TV service provider (that is if you pay for TV) participates (that is pays ESPN) then you can watch ESPN's online services. Comcast/Xfinity started a few years ago.

So anyway last night I went to watch a Canadian Football League game (don't judge me!) and I got the message above. Of course there is no way to message anyone at ESPN and Comcast/Xfinity 'help' via Twitter is not much use either. I found things were working sometime in the second half.

I'm liking my new external hard drive

A few weeks ago I bought a Western Digital Passport external hard disk drive and so far I really like it. It's 500GB which is larger than the HDD in my PC. Also it's USB 2.0 and 3.0 so when I build or buy a new computer in a few years I can get the benefit of USB 3.0 speed.

The WD Passport comes with what looks like back-up software on it but I just plug it in and manually send files and folders to it. In the future I may look into the back-up software or, more likely, try Windows back-up application.

Anyway $50.00 and no complaints from me.