[www.tuxx-home.at] - Website of Alexander Griesser

Why pirating music is old-school

Alexander Griesser — 2009-12-29T10:37:21+01:00

Yesterday, my wife asked me if I could get some songs of this new upcoming band boyce avenue. I first checked their website to see what they had to offer and wanted to listen to some samples of their songs. The first link there lead me to the iTunes store and all the albums where available there of course. I listened to a few of the samples and I have to admit that I love accustic guitars so I wanted to download some of the songs. I was just about to open another tab in firefox to see if I could get the mp3s for free somewhere when I saw the prices for the samplers in the iTunes store.

In the past (the good ol' times) I used Napster and stuff like that (like everyone else) to download music from the internet, but not because I did not want to pay for it, but because everything was readily available there, you got everything almost instantly and you didn't have to order a CD somewhere or drive to the local shop to get a copy of that - in this case, I'm not even sure if I could get CDs from them somewhere down here. I'm this kind of a person who wants to have things _IMMEDIATELY_ and don't want to wait a single day to get them, so downloading music off the internet is exactly my style.

Anyhow, after having purchased all their CDs on the iTunes store, I realized that the iTunes store is much cheaper than pirating the music off the internet. Imagine you're trying to get a full album of some band for free on the internet, what do you have to do? First, you need to know the name of the album, there's no real search function on most of these sites or P2P portals, you cannot really listen to the music _BEFORE_ you actually download it, most of the time, you don't get the covers, etc. So even if you are able to find the album immediately, download speed often varies and downloading a full album with about 20 tracks can take up to a few days if the album isn't popular enough. Then, when you finally have it, you need to verify that the tracks are all normalized or at least all have the same main volume, otherwise having them all in one playlist can easily hurt your ears. Out of my experiences, most of these downloaded songs don't have proper ID3 tags and I _LOVE_ ID3 tags, because they are so great to organize your music and all my CD and MP3 players support ID3 tags, so no more "Track 01", "Track 02" and shit like this. Converting ID3 tags to CD text is also especially important when you want to listen to this music in your car and don't have a MP3 player in it (yah, my BMW is a bit old school, I'm happy that I have a working CD changer now).

Anyhow, usually you end up spending quite some time fiddling around with getting an album downloaded for free and have it available in the quality I'm used to out of the iTunes store (including ID3 tags, normalizing them, having proper file names and directory structures, CD covers, etc.), so I think I'm not exaggerating when I say that you probably need to spend about 2 hours for downloading one or two albums off the internet.

Comparing my usual hourly rates against the price of all 5 albums on the iTunes store, I actually won money by purchasing them there, because buying all the 5 albums, downloading them and spreading them over wireless LAN to all my home computers and my two iPhones consumed about 10 minutes of my precious time, no hassles included, perfect quality, wife is happy (<= priceless!).

To all the students and nonworkers out there: Please disregard this blog entry, you probably won't understand the moral of it. When time is the most important thing in your life, you will start thinking differently and probably understand a bit of what I wrote here.

To everyone interested, here's the iTunes store link for boyce avenue:
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?i=273918689&id=273918669&s=143441

Want to share a desk with me?

Alexander Griesser — 2009-11-12T14:27:38+01:00

If you're looking for a job and if you don't mind sharing a desk with me, apply here:

http://www.lkh-vil.or.at/fileadmin/uploads/KABEG_Portal/LKH_Villach/Allgemeine_Infos/Jobs/Mitarbeiter_IT.pdf

My current workmate got promoted and so I'm looking for someone to fill in the gap

About online communities

Alexander Griesser — 2008-08-08T22:05:26+01:00

You know what's going on in online communities. You join them, you want to be part of something really cool, you post a lot there, you try to help/contribute/troll/whatever and then you leave again because there's something that you don't like or that doesn't get you further (in my case, it's mostly stupid people around there in these so-called communities without any kind of social skills).

Some weeks ago I was searching for the answer to a really tough driver problem on Vista (it finally turned out to be a hardware issue) and again stumbled upon http://www.experts-exchange.com (you know, that's always the first search result in Google with exactly the same question that you have and you can't see the answer without paying for it).

I was --||-- <- this far away from registering an account with them until I read the FAQ and Terms of Use there just to find out that you can get full premium access for free (ok, for zero money but not for doing nothing).

Sign up as expert, answer some questions, get good grades on your answers and once you earned 10,000 points (about 5 perfectly answered questions), you're part of the community (To keep your status, earn 3,000 points each month with a one month grace period).

OK, I signed up and started answering posts (to be able to finally see the answer to the question I was looking for). 3 days later, when I felt the need for a glass of water and my blatter was so full that I was hardly able to get to the toilet in time, I earned a few ten-thousand points already and was climbing up the top 10 ranks in all my favourite zones. I forgot about my original question and was heading for the free T-shirt you get when you earn your first certificate (50,000 points in a single zone).
About two weeks later, the T-shirt was on the way and another two weeks later I held it in my hands.

EE is not really a community if you're just answering or asking questions and don't talk to the others, but if you do, you'll find real experts in all major tech zones and you'll definetly find answers to most of your tech-related questions, so I can really only recommend this platform. The next really good thing is that you try to answer questions as fast as possible because someone else could "steal" _YOUR_ points and so you can really test your knowledge or fast-solving skills. The few weeks I'm now part of this community I learned loads of stuff I didn't know before just by trying to help other people (of course, I've never asked a question by now, I'm much too proud to ask for help...).

But that's not all, the probably greatest benefit from having joined EE by now is that I did already (and will continue to) earn quite a nice amount of €€ because people asked me to help them with other projects and wanted to pay for this help :)

Oh, and of course, here's my cert:

Selling my Mio A701

Alexander Griesser — 2008-06-10T17:26:44+01:00

I'm trying to sell my Mio A701 (I'm heading for an iPhone at the moment ). Anyone interested? If so, please drop me a mail at work@tuxx-home.at.
Update: sold

New domain, feeding Google

Alexander Griesser — 2008-04-22T15:43:53+01:00

Yesterday I registered a new domain for me. In the future, I want to draw a thicker line between personal and business content I'm providing on my server here, so everything that's linux related, as well as the support forum, the projects, etc. will stay on the "old" domain, all new business related stuff will go to agits.at.

agits.at will be available in german language only, I think, as all of my customers speak German. This domain will be my new platform to provide information about what I'm doing , what I can do for you(r company), how much I charge for these services, etc.
If you're interested, feel free to look around. At the date of this writing, there's no content yet but that'll change soon.

Links:

http://agits.at

New support forum online

Alexander Griesser — 2008-01-03T09:57:43+01:00

Since yesterday, I created a new support forum to support all my projects at one place.

This new forum also contains the contents of the former Unofficial Matrox Technical Support Forum. This change was necessary to be able to provide help to my other projects too.
There will be much more to come in the future, but for the moment, I'm quite satisfied with the new forum. BTW: I did an upgrade to phpBB 3.0 at the same time and was very astonished about how good the converter worked. The only thing that it didn't convert was the in-forum links (e.g. links to matrox.tuxx-home.at), but to be honest, it isn't supposed to do this.
Will add a mod_rewrite rule to ease the transition to the new domain soon.

Dear Matrox forum users, please update your bookmarks:
Links:

http://projects.tuxx-home.at (Overview about all my projects)
http://forum.tuxx-home.at (Support forum for all my projects)

Organizing my projects

Alexander Griesser — 2007-11-11T01:05:34+01:00

Today I created a new website which should help me (and what's more important, people out there) in getting a good overview about my current projects, latest release versions, download links, documentation, support, etc.
The weblog itself doesn't seem to be suitable anymore for this and therefore I'm trying to combine these two websites now. Announcements will still be made on the weblog (due to the RSS feed feature) but will mostly point to the new website probably.
I also had to rearrange some files (e.g. driver downloads, etc.) to fit into the new concept, so all previously created links are still valid, but future links will only point to the new website.

Please have a look at http://projects.tuxx-home.at and tell me what you think ;)

Links:

http://projects.tuxx-home.at

Spam, spam, spam...

Alexander Griesser — 2007-08-19T22:23:41+01:00

Due to the increasing number of spam and "Mail delivery notices" I received in the last few weeks, I had to make the final step to stop this large amount of UCE in my inbox.
The UCEs itself aren't hurting me, Thunderbird is protecting my inbox, _BUT_ you can't prevent spammers from using one of your valid e-mail addresses for their evil purposes. The downside of this is, that you get tons of "Mail delivery failed", etc. messages to your inbox you can't block out with your spamfilter because sometimes you're interested in such messages.

Therefore I made the final step to remove all unnecessary e-mail addresses from my mailserver and left a few of them online (which I of course, won't post here in cleartext). To be sure, send me mail to one of the two addresses on the right side of this blog in the imprint section. I'll definetly try to remove all other prefixes in the next few weeks once I changed all mentions and occurences of them.

Thanks for your understanding.

If you can read this, your DNS works as expected

Alexander Griesser — 2007-05-11T12:17:13+01:00

Hi folks!

I'm currently migrating all that is related to tuxx-home.at to my new server hosted at hetzner.de.
During this migration, you might experience inconsistencies or something like that and to make sure that no data gets lost, I deactivated the Unofficial Matrox Tech support forum and will bring it back online once the migration has fully take place.

Please try again later in case of troubles.

After the migration is finished, I'll write some facts about the new server.

Welcome, Raffaela!

Alexander Griesser — 2007-04-11T11:33:04+01:00

Today my daughter Raffaela was born. Currently, I'm a little bit busy so there are just a few facts and one single photo available :)

Born at: 11. April 2007, 08:22
Weight: 2970g
Height: 48cm