After a while, I am making a post unrelated to books or hiking. Today, it is the transition from CEST back to CET in EU and, with it, the extremely annoying and no-good necessity to adjust my watches.
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Gardening intermezzo
A small break from my writing-related posts. Instead, here comes one more nature-related. To say it up front, I always liked home-grown apples. What I like even more is home-made apple juice. 100% natural, 100% fresh, sometimes with a side of a wasp sting. Well, my grandfather has a garden around his house with several apple trees, even if some of them were cut down in past due to frail health.
Trying to cheat the weather
I guess everyone has some degree of experience with Murphy’s laws. I am no stranger to it, especially when hiking. There were days when the forecast was almost perfect, I forgot (or intentionally did not take) something for worse weather and it came to bite me in the arse. Or when I prepared for bad weather, only to have it end up well. Several times, I tried to (ab)use Murphy’s laws in my favor, with varying success.
The weather before the last hike was typical for mid-summer, or least that it was a few years ago. 30°C and afternoon quick storms were not something one would expect for late May or early July. Yet, in the light of the recent days, the chances for it happening during my hike were far too high.
Blog plans
It’s slowly getting closer to a year since I started posting here. So far, I have no clear pattern in what and when I post. I doubt I will ever get to a stage where I have a strong pattern, but I don’t strive for that. What I was thinking about is giving it some kind of loose pattern that would work as a general idea, not a rule.
So, what could it look like?
Music, ads, missteps and piracy
Yesterday, I was reading an article that YouTube intends to increase ad frequency for users that use it primarily for listening to music. The supposed explanation is simple: they create internet traffic that’s mostly unused as the video transferred is not being looked at, those having the music on background usually doing something else either on other browser tab or completely out of the browser.
The points is to direct those users to specialized (and potentially paid) music services, yet here comes another great misstep: they are not available in all countries, or are severely limited in some. Trying to push users to a service only to show them “not available in your country” only makes the step more fickle and will only make people look for ways to bypass it. Some might use adblockers, some might try to use VPN or something for bypassing country limitations and some might go back to pirating music.
It’s a few months ago when I was thinking about piracy when it comes to e-books, where, fortunately, the issue was limited by the immense choice and lower cost of self-published books. Yet, it was probably the music industry – way sooner than gaming and movies – who was hit by this the hardest. The music industry made several massive missteps on the way, which in fact supported piracy in its inception, so I would say.
I would start in late 90s or early 2000s. Back then, I still used portable CD player, which could play mp3s and read DVDs so I could stuff a bunch of CDs into single mp3 DVD. Not as efficient as mp3 players, but decent solution. Eventually, the player was lost when we were burgled and I eventually bought my first mp3 player. As it could show the name of track, album, artist and such, it meant I had to get these information to the music track itself.
In those early days, CDs sometimes had some kind of protection to prevent ripping mp3 files. To prevent them being copied illegally, but it had the side-effect of preventing legal owners to put them to their portable players. Or create a copy for their car player, because no one would risk damaging an original in their car. What was worse, the track information was not there, and it took several years before that changed. Combined with the slow conversion, downloading pirated mp3 ‘CD’ was eventually much faster than ripping the original and filling in all the data as all the pirated sources had that filled in, including cover image. Absurd as it might look, the approach of music publishers made even owners of legitimately bought CDs download mp3s for convenience.
Music industry had several more mistakes which were aimed at pirates but hit pretty much everyone else. A small local band got into a trouble for not announcing a “public music production” (or how exactly the law names it) and threatened with large bill for breaching copyright laws. For playing THEIR OWN MUSIC, to maybe two hundred people.
I eventually bought an iPod touch back in 1/2009 (maybe it was 2010) which I still have and still use. I know that these days, online streaming services are there, but even these have some limitations. Not so much about their libraries, but about the fact that they are online. They can work well at home or in office, but the main upside of mp3 players is that they work anywhere. Train, bus, plane, high in the mountains… you’re not limited by the need to be online. Something I know well myself. I was writing at the end of summer about my holidays where even phone signal was weak at the hotel and pretty much non-existent in the hills, now think about internet connection.
Try to use Spotify here…
Not to mention that in my country, mobile internet is still extremely expensive with quality that goes to hell once you move out of a city. For me, as someone who listens to music while hiking, mp3 player is irreplaceable.
So, long story short, companies supposed to help the authors get their deserved money are doing very poor job and often going against what they try to stand for. That is being said by me who goes to concerts and buys band’s shirts to support them. Said by me who goes to cinema to watch movies while some people pirate them on day two and later sees the DVD cost double the cinema ticket, for movie I already saw and with no doubt that the anti-piracy effort inflated the price significantly. By which, I am posting this image from 2010 that is probably still very much true.
Too true…
The “best” part? Software that allows to cut all these unskippable parts took a few seconds to find and was so foolproof that anyone who would want to skip all of these could do that by creating a pirate copy of his own, legally-bought DVD. Talk about shooting yourself in the leg, huh? Closing thought: all the trailers on a DVD with movie are outdated and irrelevant in a few months and make them even more annoying.
BONUS: I remember a case where one such anti-piracy company was sued for breaching copyright laws by using an image for their campaign without the author’s permission…
That’s one random mesh of thoughts over, next time I guess I’ll be writing about something more usual for me.
Creator’s FAIL update…
Okay, so after some time, which was much less than I expected, windows offered me (okay, not offered, it started downloading the moment I did “check for updates”) the Creator’s fall update (or what’s the exact wording).
Now before I go on about how that went (though the title gives it away), I need to mention that I was waiting much longer for the spring update, which made sense. My PC is getting close to its 6th birthday (bought after Christmas 2011) with a help of friend as mix-and-match of components to give me stronger where I would need it and save where I would not (student’s budget…). It included said friend’s used HDD (for him, 1TB+ was necessary while for me the old 750GB was at least two times more than enough). Said HDD was the first to be replaced, over time followed by power source and graphic card, so now it’s a mix of components of varying age, up to 6 years.
For that very reason, I expected it’ll take months before the Fall update is offered to me, but it came quite fast. I let it do its thing and as my father was home, I just went to Uni as usual, hoping that when I come back home, it’ll be finished.
Well, it was. But even the very basic functions were failing massively. First, it somehow splintered the account settings, adding a Schrödinger’s copy of my default account that was not visible in settings, but was active, with all my settings now on default for this ‘new’ account. So, I started to put things back in normal, and in time, Start button (including through the Windows key) stopped reacting. Eventually, even folder browsing was starting to behave weirdly, and so I decided to use the restore to roll back the update.
NOPE!
The Schrödinger’s account thing completely blocked that. It asked me to remove the newly created account, sending me to settings – where it could not be seen.
Long story short, three hours later I decided that there’s only one solution: Format the whole C: drive and make clean W10 install, only getting to the spring update and then blocking the Fall (from now on to be called Fail) update. I am now sitting here, installing some essential programs and drivers while waiting for W10-1703 update to download (Not sure which big pack it was, but I know that FAIL is 1709 and I believe the working one before is 1706).
Oh, one thing: before I started the reinstall later today, I went to the hills, my favorite ultimate solution. It cleared my mind, which is nice.
With that, I end this post and go back to installing stuff.
November daydreaming
Oh, it’s this time of year again. The wet and dry November, not cold enough for snow, but cold enough to make rain feel more unpleasant than ever. Luckily there was not that much of it. But these darker days tend to take my mind away from the reality.
For the past days, before Blizzcon, they were occupied by speculations about what will be announced, for me especially about World of Warcraft next expansion. Now, a week later, the speculations are dying down, limited to thinking about some more vague statements and what could be true (while there’s still the possibility that it’ll change anyway before beta).
So, my mind moved back where it usually is: my own world. Since the decision I made some three weeks ago to completely change my approach to the beginning of the story, I finally wrote another chapter, and quite a short one. My visible progress is now close to zero, something I don’t expect to improve much in the coming weeks. I am in the stage where more progress is done thinking about how to solve the troubles and plotholes that appeared. I guess I might look even weirder than usually, with the gloomy weather, my wild facial hair and absent-minded neutral face.
I guess that contributes to the fact that I might get to revisit some darker stuff in the coming days, starting with re-read of ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ which I plan for the next week. I think with the theme the book has, it’ll be quite nice match for the darker November weather and the brooding mood that comes with it.
