Portuguese Authors Association Caught Faking Authors Names

While the entire world is revolting against SOPA/PIPA and other abusive anti-piracy laws, in Portugal there's a little know association called SPA that allegedly cares of authors best interests. It's an association that already receives levies on each and every virgin CD and DVD sold, no matter what it is used for: whenever you're storing your family photos on a DVD, you're paying them for it. And it still unclear how much of that money really makes it to authors themselves...

But, they think they don't receive enough, and now they're trying to pass a new "Private Copy Law" with which they hope to put a tax on every digital storage device! A few cents for every Gigabyte on every hard drive, memory card, embedded flash storage, etc. A tax that is so obscene that would invert the usual market tendencies where you get roughly the double amount of storage space for the same price every couple of year - and make presumable larger hard drives more and more expensive as they come to market. It's the Lei da Cópia Privada (PL118) and it would mean that even if used your hard drive just to store an operating system... you'd be paying for that "author's society" (and again, without really knowing which authors would get what).

This is causing a bug outcry from the portuguese society, and SPA has tried to validate their point by presenting a list of one hundred authors and artists that support this PL118 law. There's no denying that some author might thing its a good idea... even though it might look suspicious that they could get only a hundred of them among their 25k+ registered members; and even though that roughly 20% of those 100 are the association board members; the really horrendous part is that we now found that some of those nomes were put there without any consent from the authors!

António Pinho Vargas (one of my most appreciated Portuguese music composers, you should check his Tom Waits if you don't know him) has came forth and revealed that it has no idea of how his name got there, and that he was never contacted about it. More so, he said he doubts some of the other names he sees there, from friends of his, would have agreed to that as well!

I think this says it all regarding these "author protection associations"... When they have to resort to such low tactics and fake their own members names to support such ilogical laws, it's a sign that something really has to change! (And by that I don't mean taxing each and every gigabyte no matter what you intend to use it for!)

[My original portuguese post - and we made it to Boing Boing too! Thanks Cory!]

Boxee Live TV

It's no secret there's a of effort going on to change the TV as we know it - just look at how important Google considers Google TV to be, not to mention the upcoming and possibly disrupting Apple TV offering that should come out during this year. Peopler are increasingly tired of traditional TV channels and cable operators, where you pay up for hundreds of channels even though you end up watching just a handful of programs.

Boxee is well known for they popular media center software and their Boxee Box. And to prove that on-demand and stored content can live hand-in-hand with live TV, hey now have Boxee Live TV, a small USV digitial TV tuner that allows your Boxee Box to add all the interactive social elements to live TV as well.

Ubuntu Trades Menus for HUD Interface

It might sound strange to hear Ubuntu is working on making a more usable user interface for keyboard users, in a time where most people are flocking around touch devices which lack a keyboard; but indeed it is what it's doing. With version 12.04 LTS Ubuntu will offer a overlayed Head Up Display (HUD) which claims to make life easier for users tired of navigating through endless menu levels.

I don't if this will appease all those users that are highly critical of the Unity interface... But at least is seem like something different that might appeal for keyboard power users (though much of what it does can already be accomplished today using 4rd party programs).

LED Reading Lights for Books

Tablets and eBook readers may be on the rise, but there's still a lot of people out there that are unwilling to let go of their old (and new) paper books. And unlike their digital screen counterparts, when it gets dark... you can't really see whats printed on its pages.

The time of reading holding a flashlight are long gone, and today we have more comfortable ways of reading books during the night like this Philips bok reading LED light which uses light guides technology similar to the ones used on LCD screens, allowing the LEDs placed on the frame to evenly light a larger area.

Unfortunately, its price isn't that cheap (nearly 40 euros) so... here's a similar, but cheaper alternative:

This LED book reading light isn't rechargeable via USB like the Philips above, but costing under 5 euros, I guess most people won't mind that.

How to Fix Google Chrome Flash Crashes

Just the other day I was complaining that, being an intensive Google Chrome user, with two or three windows open with over twenty tabs on each, for weeks or months at a time without reboot (unless there's an update), I'm still surprised to see that most Chrome crashes are not caused by Chrome itself but due to the Flash plugin!

But now, it seems there's an explanation for it... and more importantly, a way to prevent it from happening again. It seems the problem is caused by having two different flash versions installed.
Chrome has its own internal Flash plugin, but most people are also likely to have the regular "installable" Flash plugin.

You need to check your Chrome plugin section (type "about:plugins" in the navbar) and check the Flash area.

If it states that it has "2 files", then it's likely you'll have problems and crashes.

The key is to disable either of them (click expand to see its details). I've chosen to disable the external Flash plugin - you can tell which is which by its location; the internal one will have a path containing Google\Chrome, the other most likely will be installed in another Windows folder. This way, I won't need to manually upadate Flash, or rely on yet another "Flash updater" task running on my system - Chrome will take care of that for me.

So, you just need to disable one, and restart Chrome, and to be sure, you can visit Adobe Flash's test page to really make sure everything is in working order.