I've written before about Pine, the e-mail client I've been using for more than a decade. My love for Pine is hard to describe. I cannot think of another software application (of any type) that so perfectly lets me do exactly what I want to do, quickly and efficiently, no more, no less, never crashing, never surprising me in any way even as it has slowly evolved and sprouted new features. Pine is very easy to learn and use for geeks and non-geeks alike. No, it does not look modern. It does not need to. E-mail is a text medium.* A text-based app can handle things just fine. Pine does better than that. Pine kicks ass.

And now even moreso. Earlier tonight, the Free Software ecosystem grew a bit richer with the first public release of Alpine, the successor to Pine. Alpine looks and works just like Pine always has, and runs on Windows, Linux, and the Mac OS just like Pine did, but they've cleaned things up under the hood and rebirthed the whole thing under the Apache license, which is good news for everyone. Pine's source has long been available, but Pine was never Open Source (or Free Software) because though you were allowed to meddle with Pine's source code on your own, you were not allowed to share any modified or improved form of Pine. That restriction is gone with Alpine, so if the University of Washington chooses not to accept code contributions from the hacking public, legitimate, supercharged versions of Alpine could still emerge.

It will be interesting to see what happens with Alpine. All I know is, I like the idea that if I just learn enough C, I can make the slight changes I've been itching to make all these years and bequeath Mahna Mahpine to the world. I like that this part of my essential software stack is Free at last.

Here I present what may be the Web's first screenshot of Alpine.

* Or is it a textual medium? Is there a copyeditor out there to make the call?

One of the main reasons I am not an iPod owner: I can't stand the way iPods store their files with scrambled filenames, in a pathetic and half-hearted attempt to curb music piracy. I simply don't want to deal with the inconvenience of a device that can't speak to a computer unless that computer is running iTunes (or some Linux-based program that speak iPodese, like Rhythmbox, Amarok, Banshee, or Exaile). A hard-drive based MP3 player should just behave like a damned hard drive.

Enter YamiPod, which seems cool enough to perhaps make me an iPod owner someday. This app lives on your iPod, and runs under OS X, Windows, and Linux. It seems to let you freely copy music to and from your iPod to any computer. Can one of my iPod-using homies give this a look-see and tell me if it's as cool as I think it is?

PROBLEM: You want to play the music on your iPod (or other digital jukebox) in the car, where you have a factory head unit with an AUX that only talks to CD changers — and you live in an urban area where all FM frequencies are taken, so those stupid FM transmitter solutions simply don't work at all.

SOLUTION: The Aux2Car from Peripheral Electronics. You purchase this sucker, plus a customized harness that connects it to the head unit in your particular vehicle. As far as your car stereo is concerned, this sucker is a CD changer, but of course, it's not. It just talks to whatever device you plug into it.

The whole shebang cost me about a hundred bucks (great prices on eBay...), and it took about an hour to install. The installation procedure includes the setting of DIP switches, which I hadn't encountered for years; I felt taken back in time in a very happy way. And now, there's a plug in my car that fits right into the line out of my MP3 player (a 20GB Rockbox-ed iRiver IHP-120 — soon to be replaced by an 80GB iPod, as soon as Rockbox runs on those), or the headphone jack of my Treo 700P cell phone, which is sporting a 4GB card full of tunes these days. Digital music in the car, at long last! HUZZAH!

There's a nice little piece over at the WSJ Online (the free part of their online presence) about interactive fiction (or IF — sometimes referred to as text adventures). The 11th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition has just come to a close, and there are a clutch of new games to be played. Color me excited. Sure, modern games are great, but to a wordsmith like me, there is something special about interactive fiction. Beautiful prose that responds to the "reader's" impulses may seem quaint by today's gaming standards, but I find something restful and unique about a largely blank screen, a few magical words, and a blinking cursor. (As I have said before.)

Flying out to (and back from) Boston last June, I played For a Change and Galatea, two award-winning, free works of IF. Neither will drive you nuts with insane puzzles, and both contain some top-notch, engrossing writing. Highly recommended.

You like your iPod? You dig that part of 21st Century life is a neverending stream of new and exciting gadgets? Salon's Andrew Leonard has a fantastic piece up about why the Grokster case — argued before the Supreme Court yesterday — is so damned important. Edward Felten, a Princeton prof who's no stranger to this and related issues, notes a brief real-world example of the future that awaits us if this decision goes the wrong way. If the court fails to, uh, grok what's at stake here, you can kiss certain kinds of innovation good-bye, and you'll have the big entertainment companies to thank.

It's interesting to note that in arguments yesterday, one idea that got kicked around was that business models might be useful in determining whether a new technology is legal. If that's the way the court goes, what will it mean for new technologies offered up by geeks for free, absent any business model at all?

Many of my geek friends chastise me for my love of certain pat phrases about technology, like "the Internet changes everything" and "information wants to be free." Thing of it is, these two in particular keep proving themselves true over and over again.

Case in point: Fiona Apple's new album, Extraordinary Machine. Or perhaps I shouldn't call it "new," since work on it apparently wrapped up more than two years ago. But then Fiona's label, Sony, decided that none of her new work was radio-friendly, and thus they refused to spend money publishing and promoting the work. So Extraordinary Machine has sat collecting dust.

Some Fiona fans have been working on a grassroots effort to get Sony to release the material, but in the past week, something else has happened. All the music in question has been leaked — a lot of it going out over the airwaves of KNDD 107.7 in Seattle, apparently — and now you can grab your own complete copy of Extraordinary Machine online: Just ask your favorite Torrent search engine where to go. (Here's a link that works for now.)

Information wants to be free, and in the digital age, music is just another form of information. And yes, the Internet changes everything: It can even make the art-hostile decisions of a moneygrubbing megacorp irrelevant.

[How's the album? So far, sounds like stuff Fiona fans like me will enjoy...]

If you use a KVM switch to move between a PC running Windows and a PC running Linux, you've probably encountered Drunken Mouse Syndrome, in which, upon returning to the Linux box, you find your mouse pointer freaks out and behaves wildly, unpredictably, and angrily when you so much as breathe in the direction of your input device. For a long time I assumed that Drunken Mouse Syndrome was the fault of my KVM. Turns out, (1) that's not true, and (2) there's a fix. more...

Need to pull the Internet out of the air when you're traveling? Here are the top five domestic hotel chains offering free WiFi.

[spotted at The Morning News]

I have two long, narrow rugs adorning the hardwood floor in my hall at Chez Newton (The Global House of Chillage). Until recently, said rugs were held in place by these nifty sorta-sticky things that IKEA makes that go under rugs. The IKEA name for this sorta-sticky thing is Patrull, a strange name to be sure, even for IKEA. And I'm pretty certain that the plural of Patrull is Patrull. But I digress.

The problem with Patrull is that over time, they lose their grip and you need new ones. Not wanting to deal with the traffic and parking nightmare that is modern-day Emeryville, I decided to stay away from IKEA's brick-and-mortar store and instead head to IKEA.com to order myself a new pack o' Patrull. more...

From News.com:

A Spanish-language version of Windows XP, destined for Latin American markets, asked users to select their gender between "not specified," "male," or "bitch," because of an unfortunate error in translation.

There has been a lot of online coverage about eBay now owning 25% of Craigslist, the Web site and indispensable tool (for Bayareans, anyway) where I found my current job, my current apartment, and even a couple of dates. But in this piece in the Chron, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark says something that makes my Pine-lovin' heart sing:

I sometimes use an Apple PowerBook, but for my purposes the Linux systems are snappier. Frankly, I do most of my work in e-mail, and I use a fairly old e-mail tool called Pine (a free e-mail program administered by the University of Washington).

So now I am aware of two other people who use Pine. Neat!

[Thanks to Spike for the link.]

EFF employee/activist and science-fiction author Cory Doctorow gave a talk at Microsoft Research about why he thinks Bill & Co. should quit building digital rights management into their software. He manages to tie together cryptography, the invention of radio, e-books, Flowbees, the way AT&T used to own every phone in the country, player pianos, Apple iTunes, Ringo, the Luther Bible, DVD region encoding, and cellphone ringtones as he explains why DRM will never work and can only inhibit innovation and incredible business opportunities.

If you've rolled your eyes at me during my DVD region encoding rant (or my iPods-are-evil rant), GO READ THIS DAMMIT. It's also required reading for geeks and artists of all flavors.

(By the way, on the subject of ringtones, if you've chosen a cellphone that requires you to pay for ringtones, you're on crack. One of the greatest things about my Treo 600 pda/phone is that any old MIDI file can be a ringtone. Didja know that the Web harbors free MIDI versions of just about any tune you can think of? My phone alerts me to the end of a meditation sitting with a sparkly little rendition of "Within You, Without You." A nice little shot of George that always does me right.)

It's kinda creepy when a site you last visited on a lazy Tuesday afternoon at work more than three years ago suddenly e-mails you out of the blue.

Matthew,
                                                                                
We haven't seen you in a while...
our records show that you last signed in to Tickle,
formerly known as Emode, on February 13, 2001.

more...

When building this site, I chose Blosxom to power this blog, in part because it is Free Software. I also evaluated Movable Type, because I was told that it was Open Source. It turned out that wasn't true — despite the source code being available.

If that last sentence made you blink (and you want to know more), alphablogger Mark Pilgrim has a great post you should read.

This short blog post by tech guru Clay Shirky makes me think about where cameraphones and the Internet are taking us. Part of me laughs gleefully. Part of me dreams about writing a book about it in twenty years titled The Slow Revolution.* Part of me feels scared.

(Tell me this is not some amazing new form of distributed journalism. History books almost writing themselves.)

[*Hands off that title, bitch! Sucka's mine!]

As I've noted a few times in my column, Free Software is definitely getting friendlier. In "The Rise of Interface Elegance in Open Source Software," blogger Steven Garrity explores the trend.

[spotted at LWN.net]

As I've said before, it's one of Newton's Laws: The Internet changes everything. Including, now, laundry. This is the neatest out-of-left-field use of the net I've heard of in a while.

[thanks to MC for the link]

I got some spam this evening. It contained one ad image, hyperlinked to a web site that's apparently paying a spammer to push some traffic its way. I never saw the image, because I use an e-mail client whose interface looks like it may be older than me, and it doesn't do images. The body text of the message read as follows:

princess janus region wiseacre annulled buck carboxy methylene ahoy lackluster sanatorium psyche farthest linkage qatar desert poverty ringside monarchic anything frailty

more...

I'm writing a new column for PC World, all about Free Software (including, but not limited to, Linux). The first edition went live today.

1 iRiver iHP-120 + 1 cable = mp3 music in my living room, for the first time. A low-tech way to make it happen, but oh is it sweet.

Back in 1999, I wrote an article about the very first work of interactive fiction, Adventure, which you can still experience on modern PCs. The piece was written for a proto-webmag that vanished years ago; I resurrect the article today in honor of the 9th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition, which Slashdot took note of this morning. more...

Over on Slashdot, they're talkin' about how the makers of Gator — a truly nasty bit of behind-your-back software that sits on your system and launches pop-up ads — have forced a Web site to stop referring to their product as "spyware."

Actually, I've got no problem with that. Gator is not spyware: It does not spy on you. But it is a fucking parasite that, when teamed up with other parasites, can bring a system to its knees. The last time I was visiting my folks, I did a simple run of Ad-aware on their system, and it was hit city. Unacceptable. Unacceptable that their computing environment was letting this go on without their even knowing. more...

This is a geek-rights issue that could impact anyone who watches TV, so listen up. The Electronic Frontier Foundation provides some background:

The future of television is digital. In fact, the FCC has already said that television manufacturers will be required to include digital television (DTV) tuners in their sets after 2007. You may not have heard much about DTV yet, but Hollywood is already there, lobbying the FCC for regulations that will force "content protection" technology into every DTV device, including televisions, PVRs (including digital TiVos), and any computer that touches a DTV signal. more...

And what it is ain't exactly clear. Some sort of ruling has come down on the California DVD Case, but the Associated Press and the Electronic Frontier Foundation seem to disagree on what was actually decided.

Skimming over the actual decision I think what I am seeing is that the original preliminary injunction — requiring the defendant to remove DeCSS code from the Web — has been upheld. That's what the A.P. article zeroes in on. But there is a bunch of other language in here that seems helpful to the EFF and all the other Good Guys in this saga. So that's where the EFF's optimism must be coming from. Hmm.

The Washington Post reports the story but misses the most important part, which Lessig brings out to some degree on his blog. Listen: Open Source and Free Software crusaders are not against such things as intellectual-property rights. What the General Public License (for example) basically says is this: more...