SCOTTKELLER.org

I’ve been a big fan of Tumblr since its early days, but what the heck is going on over there?  It seems like half the time lately that their in-house templates are always broken.  I’ve been using Tumblr to post my tumblelog at http://t.scottkeller.org/ for a while now, and have been enjoying some of the great features, especially Facebook and Twitter integrations.

But after fighting with broken templates for a while, and realizing that all of my data is not really in my own hands, I am pulling back to the good ol’ Wordpress site for a while.  Besides, this site was getting rather dusty.

Tumblr, I love your features, but not sure I have the patience to be an early adapter any more.  It’s going to be hard to keep up with the demand for bandwidth without monetizing what you’re doing over there.  It was fun while it lasted.

Worship Leader Magazine has an interesting article regarding the changes to FCC laws and band allocations that will take place on February 17th when the analog TV channels go dark, and the digital-broadcast TV era is ushered in. Since HD TV broadcasts are allocated on different bands than their analog predecessors, there is a bunch of new space in the radio spectrum that is being vacated and sold off to other entities for use.

Unfortunately, the FCC decided that Verizon could buy up a bunch of space adjacent to and in the middle of the frequency spectrum used by some manufacturers for wireless microphones.

Worship Leader Magazine Reports:

We are facing a challenge presented to all churches, sporting venues, theaters and broadcasters: How do we handle the reduced bandwidth made available by the transition to DTV effective February 17, 2009? And the associated sell-off of the 700MHz band by the federal government for $19B to Verizon and the consequential development of hyper WiFi /Bluetooth devices, called TVBD in current development by Google and Microsoft?

Currently, the wireless mics you have operating between 698MHz and 806MHz will be “illegal” next month since that band no longer belongs to the public but to Verizon. You are trespassing. However, it is unlikely they will take churches to court over the issue. They will simply transmit and interrupt your services forcing you to move. How and when they will begin transmission is unknown.

Read more of the article here.

It seems like most users won’t have trouble, especially not right away. But if your wireless microphones start acting up over the next few years, think back to this article. The development of Wifi technologies is going to ramp up in a major way in the next five years, and the spectrum is going to get more and more crowded.

Shure.com has a white-page on the topic. They write:

Wireless microphones may continue to operate on all of these frequencies, just as they do now. However, wireless microphones that operate on frequencies above 698 MHz should not be used after February 19, 2009.

That’s not encouraging at all! I’m not even sure what frequencies our church is using, but hopefully everything will continue to work fine.

It happened to Microsoft and Yahoo. Could it happen to Apple?

The limitations of antipiracy software were dramatically illustrated last week when Yahoo Music announced the company would stop issuing authorization keys for the software that prevents its songs from being copied.

Microsoft’s now defunct MSN Music service made a similar announcement last spring. Some CNET News readers have asked whether the same thing could happen at iTunes. The answer to that question is yes, it most certainly could.

If Apple ever stopped issuing keys for its FairPlay digital rights management then, just like at Yahoo and MSN, iTunes users would be prevented from moving their music to different machines or devices. That would affect most of the 5 billion songs the company has sold. (Following much public criticism, Microsoft said it would continue issuing keys for another three years and Yahoo is offering refunds.)

To be sure, the likelihood of Apple shutting off DRM keys anytime in the foreseeable future seems remote at best. Apple is the Internet’s largest music retailer and may be the largest music retailer overall. The company is riding a wave of excitement over the new iPhone 3G, which besides being a phone and Internet-enabled device, is an excellent music player. Apple appears to be on track to dominate retail music sales for a long time to come.

Still, things do change. Who can say what will happen at Apple in 5 or 10 years? That’s a long time from now. But the truth is, DRM’s threat to iTunes users’ music libraries is real. – Greg Sandoval, CNET

See, when you buy DRM-protected music from iTunes, you are not actually buying music, you are buying the DRM-key that unlocks data file that plays music. If iTunes were to go out of business, or change their policies, your music will stop playing in iTunes.

CD’s and un-protected MP3’s on the other hand, cannot be disabled by some chance of fate, or by the fate of defunct music services like MSN Music and Yahoo Music that go belly-up.

Sandoval’s article goes on to say:

What the Yahoo and MSN situations show is that DRM-wrapped music is never truly controlled by anyone other than whoever holds the encryption key. Whether it’s FairPlay or Windows Media DRM or some other format, consumers are at their mercy when it comes to unlocking their music.

Of course, iTunes fanboys will tell you to back up your music by burning CD’s of DRM-laden tracks, but to me this is backwards. Buy the real CD, and rip it to MP3. Then play it in iTunes or on your iPod. Either that, or buy unprotected MP3’s from Amazon.com.