Just Don’t Bite

So we all take pictures right?
**yes you all nodded didn’t you**

Do you know your rights when you take a picture? If you’ve ever stopped shooting when told to than I’m going to guess you don’t. Well please go read your rights and use them. Also extrapolate on them. Remember that if it can be photographed than you are IN PUBLIC and should you do something stupid you cannot relay on any form of privacy to protect you. Also the same rules would apply to cops. If it can be legally photographed you can be busted for it.

At the same time when dealing with pictures remember the license that you grant them. Please read the MySpace TOS, Flickr (pretty easy), or YouTube (tell me, a google gives a high SNR). Thing is, you should look at the liscense that you use to put you pictures on the web. Pick the one that is least restrictive and host there. If you must, host them your self. Hide the copy right using CSS. Don’t let yourself get sued because you used something that you shouldn’t have. Don’t let fear keep you from using something you could have.

Time and time again I get asked about mp3s and how to deal with them. This might have something to do with having a sizable mp3 collection and the fact that I keep it very well maintained and clean. What will happen typically is someone will get a new mp3 player, and not surprisingly want to add music to it. Now I love mp3 players, I really do. I just hate how they deal with media most of the time. For me it has always made sense to organize my mp3s as follows.

\Artist\Cd\Track-Title.mp3 -or-
\Artist\Cd\Track-Artist-Title.mp3

Thats how they’ve always lived on my hard drives, it makes using just about any media application a snap. I can quickly and easily locate and load a cd. Now when it comes to things like iTunes, Windows Media Player, and the newer Winamp you get these nice library functions. This can make for a mess if your mp3s are not organized or were not ripped properly. You see these application rely on the ID3 tag to get info about the file, and (possibly) the file name to some extent. Or course when you throw things on your mp3 player, they like to use the ID3 tag.

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I’ve been asked several times in the last week how to do something that really should be common for people to do. Simply shift the music from a CD to your computer, for free, with no added trouble or mess. Of course we’re going to use some thing free. We’re going to use CDex a nice little app that I’ve used for years. Now back then… hrmm been a good while. You had to add the mp3 encoder too. You’d have to get a copy of LAME and that would be your encoder. LAME is also free, it has been since 2000 when it was compiled cleanly. Kinda nice really.

At that time there was a community driven project known as CDDB. It has sense been bought out and is now Gracenote, but does the same thing. Works great, you hit a button and the whole CD is named and ready to go. Now enough with the history lesson and time to explain how to do it and for that you click to read more.

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