If you have some time on your hands, you might want to waste it creating different faces with Monoface, a seamless, slick Mr. Potato Head meets Get a Mac interface that allows you to create over 759,000 different human faces on the fly. None of them look like me, yet.

Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs, has received almost more publicity from his public letter yesterday about digital rights management (DRM) than his iPhone escapade in January. My assumption, per my earlier post on Microsoft’s hellish DRM on Vista, is that this is both a smart PR move against Microsoft and a legal and ethical push from a “consumer-centric” company for open music formats.
I’m a proponent of open systems and open sources and, although I don’t believe in taking intellectual property that an artist, writer, or engineer does not want to be taken, DRM systems always struck me as plain dumb. The big music companies spend a lot of time huffing and puffing about stolen music but they produce music CDs which essentially allow the distribution of that same music. Jobs gets it right:

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That’s right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player.
In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves. The music companies sell the vast majority of their music DRM-free, and show no signs of changing this behavior, since the overwhelming majority of their revenues depend on selling CDs which must play in CD players that support no DRM system.
So if the music companies are selling over 90 percent of their music DRM-free, what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system? There appear to be none. If anything, the technical expertise and overhead required to create, operate and update a DRM system has limited the number of participants selling DRM protected music. If such requirements were removed, the music industry might experience an influx of new companies willing to invest in innovative new stores and players. This can only be seen as a positive by the music companies.

I’ve never seen this argument publicly made; perhaps it took a genius like Jobs like to do it.
I’ll let the Mac-heads and the laywers sort everything out while I relish in the visuals of Apple’s visual history on Flickr.

There are a number of excellent launching tools on OS X that allow you to access information, applicaitons, and documents without having to use their mouse. Over the past three years, I’ve tested out the big three: Objective Development’s LaunchBar, Peter Maurer’s Butler, and Blacktree’s Quicksilver.
All three are superbly helpful. Essentially, you “invoke” the application by typing a combination of keys like Command and Space (all applications allow you to customize your key combination) and then type in a few letters; the software then tries to quickly figure out what you’re looking for, be it another application, an address, or an image. For example, if I type in “DAR,” I immediately come up with “http://www.daringfireball.net” – a blog I like to read; hitting Return brings up the website immediately. If I type in “WNYC” and then hit Return, iTunes launches my fave talk station. That’s it.
While I like Butler because it’s “free” (actually donationware) and very powerful and I semi-like Quicksilver because it looks pretty, I really like LaunchBar (which costs $19.95). The application works very, very quickly and its matches are accurate. I recently switched to using my Address Book application to manage all of my contacts and LaunchBar beautifully brings up information from Address Book easily – phone numbers, email addresses, etc.
Lately, I’ve been using LaunchBar to take quick notes on something or other without having to leave the keyboard. For instance, if I want to make a note “clean out car” while I’m working on something else, I don’t have to leave Photoshop. I just call up LaunchBar, type in “TODO” and a .txt file caled “todo.txt” is noted. I then hit the Tab key, type “APP” to call up the Append Text script (built into LaunchBar) and when I type “clean out car,” that text gets entered in my todo.txt file. It sounds like a lot of work. Why don’t I just open the file todo.txt and then add information to it? Because it would twice as long and I’d have to open the file, type in the information, close the window, save the file and then regroup.
Of course, I didn’t invent the Append Text method. Merlin Mann noted how to append text using Quicksilver about a year ago. If you want to try it with LaunchBar, make sure that you can first find the .txt file that you want to open. You’ll need to open the Configuration panel, select the group that you’re indexing (for instance “Documents”) and make sure that “Access items via sub-search only” is not checked. This will allow LaunchBar to find your text document. Much thanks to Objective Development for helping me figure it all out.

I know this is the second post about technology in two days. I know.
A friend of mine, RJ, noted to me a fascinating set of articles that could begin with this one Windows DRM is the ‘longest suicide note in history’ at The Register. In a nutshell, Microsoft, in its limited wisdom about young computer users, has decided to build into Vista, its new operating sytem, the most complex and doom-laden digital rights management (DRM) ever devised. The way it was described to me was such that every potential piece of hardware throughout the connectivity chain (USB connections, RAM, everything) has the possibility of being involved with ensuring that digital rights are adhered to by the big movie/music studios.
My quick prediction is that, if true, this spells the end of Microsoft as we know it. Within six months, the company will see a forfeiture of its market share by as much as 10% to one company, Apple Computer. Microsoft will then have to back its DRM out of Vista and produce a more visionary and gentler DRM for its customer base. It’s incredible to me that companies with as many market researchers as Microsoft would choose to deploy a draconian DRM system that goes against the prevailing, lighter-touch sensibilitiy around digital rights that people have come to expect, and demand.

A very happy and healthy and peaceful 2007 to all my readers. I was away for the past few weeks on the East Coast (Philadelphia, New Jersey, and New York) and it was a great and illuminating trip. I’m back and I promise to be posting more.
A few tidbits while I warm up for further posts:
For some time now, xPad has been one of my very favorite note-taking and note-keeping apps. Its attention to detail, its ability to keep and find text data easily, and its overall usability surpasses almost anything else out there. There are better writing tools but none for the price.
Over the past year, I’ve noticed that the site and the product itself have had numerous problems of various sorts and the details were revealed today. It’s a sad but revealing story about application development, business ethics, Mac personalities and the power of independent developers and software sales sites, which have received a lot of attention recently on blogs and larger sites. The end result is that the developer of xPad is giving away this great product.

I just saw a 15-minute special on Frontline that blew me away. An organization, based in San Francisco, called Kiva (site is currently overloaded), had the absolutely brilliant idea of allowing individual Americans to provide micro-credit loans to individuals in developing countries who have expanding businesses.
One man who was interviewed on the program said he could, in a small way, be much like the Gates or Rockefeller Founations. If his lendees paid the money back, which they typically do, he could then reinvest the money in another business. With grantees able to reach computers in their communities, “progress reports” are more like personal correspondence as account managers on the ground handle the day-to-day administration.
I saw the effects of Grameen Bank style lending when I was in South Africa ten years ago when i worked at the Rockefeller Foundation. (Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi that founded the Grameen Bank in 1983 just won the Nobel Peace Prize.) The country was just about 4/5 of the way through its Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings and blacks had finally, finally won some freedoms after apartheid; mostly, those freedoms were political – rarely economic. We visited a slum in Johannesburg that was filled with people, all working away at whatever they could – selling sodas, fixing tires, building houses. One business was raising chickens to provide eggs to the town and there was a largish building housing thousands of chicks; the building was paid for, in part, by micro-credit. I saw, with my own eyes, the power of micro-lending: people gained financial leverage, social clout, self-confidence, better cash flow, and technical skills to manage their funds (all of which, interestingly, I could myself use).
I wish I had invented Kiva. Congratulations, Kiva.

There’s a ton of information out there about installing Windows on an Intel-based Mac using Parallels Desktop for Mac. Essentially, one loads Parallels on one’s computer, follows the instructions via PDF et voila, Windows on your Mac while you’re running OS X.
There’s very little information out there (actually, none) about what one should do if one has invested previously in Microsoft’s now-unsupported Virtual PC for Mac. A few years ago, I bought Virtual PC so that I could be sure that the sites I was creating looked and worked well on 90% of computers (e.g. Windows). It was a necessary investment.
It turns out that Microsoft, in its semi-finite vision, bundled the Virtual PC application with Windows XP Professional. There’s no way to unbundle them; they live together on a few, unusable, CDs in my office cabinet. I found an old Windows XP install disk to try to load with Parallels and it worked. Except, when I re-booted XP and was asked for my Product Key, the key from my old (legitimate) Virtual PC disk was useless or, at least, not recognized by the new XP just loaded. Microsoft gave me a way to purchase a new key, for USD 200.00, but I already own a valid copy of Windows XP and I don’t want to pay an additional $200.00 for XP. I’m going to call my friends at Microsoft and I’ll see what they can do for me.
Postscript (10/31/06): It turns out that you cannot upgrade from Virtual PC for Mac to a plain old, vanilla version of Windows XP Pro. I spent 45 minutes on the phone with three different Microsoft tech/sales folks, and, alas, that’s the story. For those of you with Virtual PC for Mac and who are now going to use Parallels with Windows XP, you’ll have to buy a new version of XP, straight out. While I understand Microsoft wanting to make money on a newer operating system, the company really should have an upgrade path for semi-dedicated Mac users who are committed to ensuring that Windows, well, works.

For some reason, I really like the new Apple ad called Better Results. (Don’t analyze it or me too much.)
Speaking of which—that is confessions and results—I sometimes will have days where I’ll be in front of the computer somewhere between 8 and 20 hours a day. It’s not so much a problem with 8 because that’s what one is supposed to do as a worker guy (or schlong, as my friend MR used to say). But when I’ve worked something like 12, 14, or 16 hours (the latter is rare), using the Command + Copy, Command + Paste, Command + Undo and Command + Redo keyboard shortcuts, my body starts to adhere to the protocols of the desktop mind-finger dance.
For instance, I’ll walk away from the computer, move a pumpkin and a gourd around in front of the house and then realize I don’t like the results of the new arrangement. So I’ll try to mentally hit Command + Undo and nothing happens. The pumpkin and gourd stay in the same spot that they were previously.

For the past five years or so, there seems to have been (in my mind) a real dearth of good photography out there. Most of it was either very derivative of documentary photographers or it simply mocked photography in the 1990s. Boring.
Lately, it seems that there are quite a few artist photographers out there doing some beautiful and complicated work. Here’s a little list:
Trey Ratcliff’s Stuck in Customs, a photo blog filled with his heavily color manipulated images. I love his more “realistic” images, like the one of conservative writer Andrew Sullivan and this one of a gorgeous Eva.
Weird (but not too much) portraits by Noah Sheldon. They feel heavily de-masculinized as well, castrated to their core and gorgeous.
I may have noted her before, but I love the work of Rachel Papo and her website Serial No. 3817131. These are some of the most haunting, mezmerizing photos of Jewish women I’ve ever seen.
Old pal Jake Dobkin has been working away on some amazing photos of street art on his Streetsy. Jake’s got 50 fine pages of photography, each one richer than the next. His photography has been a real collaboration between himself and those who decorate the street. It’s asychronous aesthetic collectivism built on top of new technologies. Thanks, Jake.

The past few weeks have been slow. I have this laptop and when I’m sitting around with it, sending emails, looking at websites, figuring things out, it was slow. Pictures would crawl in. Banner ads would creep in. Text would flow in. Background images would slip in. And emails, large and small, would traipse out. I’m using an Apple Airport Extreme connection with a G4 laptop. After a little bit of searching, I finally found a series of fixes that seem to have helped tremendously, much thanks to MacFixIt. I hope this helps the wayward airport slow connection speed traveler.