In addition to the extensive first-person coverage of the tsunami disaster on blogs, there have been several amateur recordings of the tsunami from camcorders. Unfortunately, the network websites aren’t making them easy to find and view. The videos are usually only available as poor-quality, streaming video like RealPlayer, and buried in popup windows and poor navigation.

Ben pointed me to downloadable versions of three clips. I’m hosting them here. (Unfortunately, I don’t have much information about the source of these videos.)

• phuket.wmv (11MB) – shot from inside a restaurant, waves engulf older couple clinging to railing before flooding entire room
• patong_beach.wmv (10MB) – rooftop view of two huge waves battering buildings along shore, then flooding of city streets
• sri_lanka.wmv (7MB) – upper balcony view of hotel swimming pool area getting flooded as observers run away; woman asks “how high will it go?” before retreating
• koh_lanta_thailand.avi (11MB) – shot on beach level; watch as first wave grows and crashes, before cameraman’s frantic retreat away from shore
• penang_beach.wmv (1MB) – shot from wall above beach, three men are caught in battering waves
• sri_lanka_resort.wmv (6MB) – upper level hotel balcony; restaurant, pools, and deck flooded as people cling to trees; two men narrate what they see

If you have any more first-hand video footage, or higher-quality versions of any of these videos, please let me know and I’ll add them. Most of these videos are also available as direct downloads from Cheese and Crackers, Asian Tsunami Videos, and Wave of Destruction.

December 29, 2004: Added two more videos. There is also some new footage I haven’t converted yet: BBC footage from a second-story balcony in Aceh, Indonesia.

December 30, 2004: Wow, you people used over 400GB of bandwidth in a single day! I’m now redirecting all video requests to several mirrors, courtesy of Gordon Luk, Leonard Lin, Nathan Perkins, and Ask Bjorn Hansen. Thanks for the help, guys! (Sorry about the temporary downtime while I was sorting out the details.) If you can contribute a mirror and have loads of bandwidth, please e-mail me ASAP.

December 30, 2004: Archive.org is now hosting all the videos. All download links will now redirect to the Archive.org mirror. Thanks to everyone who mirrored the files overnight.

Also, a final note… If these videos touched you in any way, consider donating to the relief efforts.

December 31, 2004: Basically, we broke Archive.org! The largest repository of public-domain audio, video, and text in the world couldn’t handle the demand for these videos.

I’m now hosting all these videos on my BitTorrent tracker instead. Because of the small size of these videos, I was hoping to avoid requiring a BitTorrent client for downloading, but the demand is just too high.

January 4, 2004: Back to Archive.org, at Brewster Kahle’s request. He thinks they can handle the traffic now.

January 12, 2004: If you’re looking for newer videos, the definitive source is the questionably-named Wave of Destruction. The site is updated constantly, with videos available by BitTorrent or direct download from multiple mirrors.

I know this comes dangerously close to breaking my First Rule, but what’s the point of a personal website if you can’t post baby photos?

With that said, here’s Eliot’s First Christmas!

And for everyone who can’t stomach adorable baby photos, Jason Scott has the complete soundtrack to The Last Starfighter, The Musical.

Last week, Apple Computer filed a patent application covering the iTunes Producer application and backend architecture, used for managing and sending music to the iTunes Music Store. The patent includes screenshots of the application, which Apple only distributes to authorized musicians and record labels.

One screenshot includes some interesting fields, such as Parental Advisory warnings, BPM, and various sales and copyright information. There’s a button for adding Lyrics, which may indicate future support for lyric searching in iTunes Music Store.

Unfortunately, you need a special plugin to view the embedded images at the Patent Office website, so I’ve converted all the drawings to GIF and included them below.

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The U.S. Patent Office Search is consistently interesting. If you search by “Assignee Name,” you can keep track of all the pending and approved patent activity by your favorite companies. For example, here are all approved patents and pending applications for Apple Computer. Some other interesting company searches: Google’s pending and approved, TiVo’s pending and approved, and Yahoo’s pending and approved.

Not surprisingly, there are a few good blogs that focus exclusively on new patents. Patently Obvious and Patent Pending. And I just found Fresh Patents, a fantastic daily index of new patents, with RSS feeds by industry.

I’ve been having a big debate with the guys here at work about the future of movie theaters, and I’m wondering what you think. Here’s my hypothesis:

Home video never hurt the theaters because of the movie industry’s staggered distribution schedules, from box office to DVD to cable. If DVDs were available the same day of a movie’s theatrical release, it would have hurt movie theaters badly.

Now here’s how it comes into play in the future:

Like in any other form of media, the Internet screws up traditional controls over distribution. Many people, confronted with the option of downloading a copy of a movie on the week of release (lesser-quality, cheap) or going to a movie theater (high-quality, very expensive), will choose the former. Of course, this assumes that downloading movies will inevitably be as fast and as simple as downloading music. (Which, in turn, leads to better ways of playing downloaded video on your TV with portable video devices or networked media players.)

Not everyone, of course, because seeing a movie in the theater is a different experience. It’s social and it’s great quality, focusing your attention completely. But going to a movie will become a more elite experience, like the $14 tickets at the Arclight.

But enough families and normal folk (the bread and butter of neighborhood megaplexes) will stop going to affect their livelihood.

This Forbes article, written in March 2001, discusses the state of the movie theater industry. Even without taking the Internet into consideration, movie theaters aren’t doing well as it is, and three of the top five chains went out of business in 2001. (I can’t verify it, but I’d wager that the rising ticket costs and increases in in-theater advertising was designed to offset these losses.)

Meanwhile, compare these 2003 statistics for the home video market to box office sales. The gap between home video sales/rentals and the box office has increased dramatically in the last few years.

The only thing saving the movie theaters is their exclusive access to new films for the first few months of their lifecycle. If the Internet loosens that hold, movie companies will be forced to adapt, most likely by radically minimizing the gap from theater-to-video or offering an iTunes Music Store for films. Earlier this year, Robert Occhialini nicely summarized this situation.

Predictions of the movie theater’s demise have been common (and wrong) for the last century, first by the television and then by the VCR. I’d argue that both did, in fact, erode at the popularity of the movies. But they survived because of their distribution rights. Any opinions?

January 5, 2005: IMDB reports that the number of tickets sold in 2004 fell 2.5 percent from the previous year, and is down 7.5 percent since 2002. Despite this, there was a slight increase in dollar totals. I can’t think of another reason besides rising ticket prices.

The Grey Video is the brilliant Jay-Z/Beatles music video mashup of DJ Dangermouse’s “Encore” off the infamous Grey Album.

The official site is down, likely a result of popularity or legality, and I don’t know if it’s coming back. Until then, I’m going to mirror the high-quality Quicktime version.

Download: grey_video.mov (Quicktime, 22 MB)

BitTorrent: grey.torrent (thanks, Kyle!)

Also, Matt Haughey is mirroring it.

I received a cease-and-desist from the Walt Disney Corporation for hosting the Kleptones’ Night at the Hip-Hopera mashup. (Disney owns Hollywood Records, who owns the rights to Queen’s catalog.)

The irony is that I’m not even hosting the files anymore… The links on my site are all redirected to someone else’s server, and have been for weeks. At any rate, I’ll be forced to remove the direct links by November 23.

As far as I know, I was the first person to put the DJ Dangermouse’s Grey Album on the Web. Now, I see the suppression of artistic freedom again with the Kleptones album, which has always been freely-distributable and never made a dime. It’s depressing to think that our horribly broken copyright law means that nobody can legally hear this album or create others like it.

The cease-and-desist is below. The album itself can still be downloaded from the mirrors on the official Kleptones site, but I’m not sure for how long. If anyone has any ideas for creative protest, now’s the time.

Update: I’ve compiled a list of active mirrors to download the album. If you want to be added to the list, e-mail me or add a comment.

Continue reading “Disney Suppressing the Kleptones” →

This morning, Eliot was constantly flailing his arms around while lying in his playpen. It reminded me of Stan, the used-boat salesman from the Secret of Monkey Island:

Yeah, I’m a geek.

Greg Knauss doesn’t have a blog, so I occasionally publish some of his writing here, because it deserves a wider audience. Today, Greg writes:

There is a divide in this country today, miles wide and fathoms deep. It has cleaved our great nation, and has only grown — and will only continue to grow. But it’s not a left/right split, or Democrat/Republican one. It’s lunatic/non-lunatic.

Our culture has been swept along in a tide of emotionally-resonant, steadfastly anti-rational entertainment, and politics is at the head of the wave. The course of our country, the future of our people, is being determined by lizard-brain responses to images designed to trigger sub-rational responses.

Michael Moore and Ann Coulter aren’t opposed to each other, they are each other: determined propagandists, using the language and mediums best suited to strike at the emotional core of their audiences. They do not work from a common set of facts, and would ignore them even if they existed. When they speak well, they’re Henry V on St. Crispin’s Day. When they speak poorly, they’re a spittle-flecked wacko with an “End of the World is Nigh” sign. But that’s just a matter of presentation: they’re all lunatics, asking us to stop thinking and start feeling. And to start feeling what they want us to feel.

This determined emotionalism — which is another way of saying anti-rationalism — is what drives us today. You can find it distasteful, you can find it depressing, but it’s most important impact is that we have turned over the direction of the country — our future — to the part of our psyche that doesn’t want to think.

It’s not about smarts. The lunatics aren’t stupid — just the opposite. It’s about the willingness to abandon the deductive process in favor of epiphany. It’s about the abandonment of the brain in favor of the gut.

Jon Stewart has said all this, of course, and said it better. But it hit home, hard, because I recently discovered — realized — that I am not immune. I edged up against the lunatic side of the divide the past few weeks. I went — close, anyway — mad. I was angry, irrationally furious, to the point of raging at the world — appallingly, my children included — that things were going they way they were. I stared into the abyss, from the wrong side, and it scared me.

A potential reason for my brush has to do with how I spend my time: on the Internet. The Web is a festering cesspool of lunacy and emotion: Free Republic, Daily Kos, Little Green Footballs, Atrios, Instapundit, on and on and on. Facts only enter the picture when they’re favorable. Emotion rules. There is no common ground, nor a desire for any.

That’s a problem.

Left or right, Democrat or Republican, these labels don’t mean much in the face of the looming (or nearly complete) lunatic take-over. Dispassion and reason are qualities that need to be nurtured and promoted from every political viewpoint, even — or especially — in the face of spittle-flecked wackos.

The question is, where do we start?

If you want to comment, take Greg’s advice and keep it reasonable and dispassionate. Whining (or gloating) about the election will be deleted.

With my current host, I have a one terabyte bandwidth quota. That should be enough for most anyone, but apparently not for me:

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With less than two hours to go before my October monthly limit is reset, I’ve used 995 of my 1000 GB. (A disturbing 262GB of that was the Tony Hawk/Star Wars Kid video.)

I make an active effort to avoid discussing politics on my site. Like religion, political convictions are deeply-held, highly personal, and nearly impossible to persuade.

That said, I’d like to point you to Internet Veterans for Truth’s “Never Forget”, an election-related campaign that launched a few minutes ago. They’re featuring tons of documentary video highlighting the records of both George W. Bush and John Kerry.

Regardless of your political leanings, I’m impressed by this new form of political protest. This group of computer geeks (and close friends) is expressing themselves in the way they know best: by making information as freely available as possible.

They’ve collected hundreds of megabytes of video, all available for instant streaming over five ten 100Mbit lines. (For those less technical, this is an absolutely staggering amount of bandwidth.) In addition to streaming over http, all of the clips are also available from their BitTorrent server. (Including one 260MB torrent of every video.)

This reminds me of Marc Perkel, who rented a $2000 server for the month to serve high-quality downloads of Fahrenheit 9/11, but taken to the next level. (I wouldn’t be surprised to see several documentaries hosted in their entirety by the weekend.)

The copyright issues are interesting… Almost all the video is under copyright, but because it’s being moderated and used as a form of protest, it’s being turned into political speech. I doubt a free speech/fair use argument would fly in court, but more importantly, I don’t think the copyright holders will care in the days leading up to the election.

October 30, 2004: They added complete, high-quality versions of Fahrenheit 9/11 and Going Upriver, ready for streaming or download. This is an unprecedented move.