Why I Stopped Buying Lots of Music
I used to buy a lot of music. Now I don't.
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They started copy-protecting CDs, so that I can't listen to them at work or, sometimes, even in my car. I'm not interested in CDs that I can't listen to at work or convert to MP3s/Oggs.
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I don't have a TV anymore. There used to be some decent music programmes (e.g.: the White Room on C4) exposing new bands, etc. Hence, one less source of news about new bands.
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Internet radio - why bother buying music, when you can listen to it free over ADSL?
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Knowledge Magazine - their cover CDs are so good that I no longer feel the need to buy d'n'b much anymore.
Why I Still Buy Music
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Listening posts in Virgin, HMV, etc. - "try before you buy". (Other people's MP3s/Oggs also allow this, although I've done this very little for a few years.)
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Fopp, a chain of shops - CDs (and other stuff) at a reasonable price.
It's still risky, though, because of copy-protection. Oh, how I wish that would die or be replaced with something a little less restrictive for the buyer.
subscripto
I've been hacking a bit more on the GUI for my mail subscription manager, subscripto. It's going quite well. It's nice to be back in the free-software-hacking saddle after so long.
The Perl Gtk2 bindings mostly seem OK, although I'm having to use both the Gtk+ 2.0 and perl-Gtk2 docs to work out what's going on. The perl-Gtk2 docs leave a lot of stuff out, which is fair enough - no point duplicating information.
Hopefully I'll have something useful soon. A couple of my e-mail addresses died recently, so it'll be interesting if I can get subscripto to the point where I can resubscribe with my current address.
Music
"Thunder" by Dom & Roland