nuxx.net
Making, baking, and (un-)breaking things in Southeast Michigan.

Category moved from livejournal

IP Enforcement and eBay

Well, it looks like reporting an eBay listing which infringes on one’s copyright is a little more difficult than I thought:

If you have a good faith belief that a listing on eBay infringes your copyright, trademark, or other intellectual property rights, all you need to do is download our Notice of Claimed Infringement (NOCI) form, fill it out, and fax it to eBay.

From: Reporting Intellectual Property Infringements (VeRO)

I’ve got the form all filled out. I’ll fax it off tomorrow morning if I don’t hear back from the seller.

electronicsfinancesmoved from livejournal

E 74

E 74 on my brand new Xbox 360

I just spent about 45 minutes cabling up my brand new Xbox 360. What happens at first power-on? E 74.

I powered it down and then back up and it’s now at the intial setup screens, but still…

Fucking Microsoft.

acquired thingsgamesmoved from livejournal

IP Enforcement

I’ve never found myself in the position of having to enforce my own IP this way, but I guess that now I do. See, earlier today I came across this post on Matrixsynth about someone selling a SID 6581-based synth on eBay (this auction) . Looking more closely at it, it has one of my MIDIbox SID-NUXX Mainboard PCBs in it.

The licensing for this board is Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5, so it can’t be resold. (This was mostly because I used a non-profit version of some software for it and thusly have a responsibility to ensure that it isn’t used for for-profit work.)

I’ve messaged the seller with this:

Hey there... This is Steve, the guy who designed the MIDIbox SID-NUXX board used in there. I'm not sure if we've talked before about your implementation of the board, but I wanted to tell you that the license of that board specifically forbids commercial sale of the design. This is licensed this way because of the non-profit license used for the software with which I designed the PCB.

I'd like to sort this out without disputing the auction via eBay, so please contact me directly at c0nsumer@nuxx.net. Thank you.

-Steve

I’ve also emailed the person who runs Matrixsynth to see if they know the identity of the seller. I also made this post on the MIDIbox forums.

There are a few people who I sent MIDIbox SID-NUXX PCBs to for free. I’m wondering if this is one of those guys… If so, it’s kinda dickish of him to sell off something he was given. If he is someone who had a run of PCBs made himself, he’s most definitely violating the license under which I released the boards.

(None of this above even touches on the reselling of the software contained on there, which TK, the guy who writes all the MIDIbox stuff, generally forbids.)

electronicsfinancesmoved from livejournal

OS X 10.4.10 FTP Client

Well, it seems I’ve broken OS X 10.4.10’s FTP client:

ftp> get ThePowerOfNightmaresDVD.iso
local: ThePowerOfNightmaresDVD.iso remote: ThePowerOfNightmaresDVD.iso
227 Entering Passive Mode (208,70,29,143,149,3)
150-Accepted data connection
150 4283032.0 kbytes to download
100% |*************************************| 2078 MB 142.81 KB/s --:-- ETA

That was unintentional.

computersmoved from livejournal

360 and SG

I figure that I can find the spare $390 (total) for an Xbox 360 and a copy of Space Giraffe, but somehow I didn’t notice that 360 doesn’t have built in wireless networking. Arraugh. Everything else near my TV (Wii, TiVo) has a wireless connection, but the 360 doesn’t without spending an extra $100. Bah.

I’ll have to check to see if I still have the network line run over there (I don’t think I do), and if I can free up a port on the switch (I don’t think I can).

acquired thingsgamesmoved from livejournal

Gaming Credit

So, Google is ending their download to own / download to rent program. They had originally chosen to refund everyone’s monies via credit to Google Checkout, Google’s online shopping card/payment system. That didn’t make very many people happy, so Google then went ahead and refund the whole purchases to the credit cards they were used with, and let people keep the Google checkout credits. Basically, a company doing something kinda nifty. That’s not the interesting story here, though.

Here is the interesting story. Basically, a bunch of FatWallet folks were using Google Video in order to make extremely small (pennies, basically) monthly charges in order to keep credit cards with 0% balance transfers going. (These cards required a very minimal monthly use to keep the 0% on transfers, typically $50 worth of charges or two separate charges.)

Well, since Google has refunded these monies and the people made only those single Google-based purchases during some months, they are now getting nailed with huge back finance charges. One person in the thread even mentions having a $62K balance he suddenly has to pay on.

Talk about trying to game the system and getting bit. Wow.

($62K in credit card debt?!? That’s another wow.)

UPDATE: It looks like some of these people are actually pulling out massive cash advances on one card, transferring the balance to this one, then gaming it so they can make interest in a high-yield savings account on the cash advance while paying less than that in interest in the credit card balance. Sounds like this could be a good game, but it sounds a bit risky to me.

UPDATE2: Er… Maybe not. I think most of these folks are just using the balance transfers to pay off other balances. Quotes of triple mortgages, $30K in credit card debt, etc.

financesfound thingsmoved from livejournal

Joint Stereo

I think the reason why I like lossless audio (such as Apple’s Lossless) more than AAC is the better channel separation. I’d say this is due to the lack of joint stereo encoding of some type or another…

Hmm. Clearly I need to learn more about this.

moved from livejournalmusic

Millett Hybrid Max, MIDIbox SID-NUXX, M-Audio MIDIspot 2×2

/me grins hugely.

Yes, I’m a dork.

(Now, if I could only get SIDPLAY to feed the SID data to MIDI properly / at the right speed, or ASID XP to not glitch when alt-tabbing between other windows.)

electronicsmoved from livejournalmusic