What’s Up with Paul Oppenheim

I spammed a pal the other day, who happens to have founded Boxbe, a company fighting spam in a neat way. Just like when you sign up for a new account online, someone who hasn’t mailed you before has to copy text from a garbled image. if they don’t want to do that, they can give you some money instead. Otherwise you never see the email. That’s Boxbe in a nutshell. i still haven’t seen any money from it, but my tide of spam has turned into a trickle. Here’s hoping enough people sign up to make spamming less profitable, and targeted advertising a viable option.

The things I learn from spamming people.

There is a tool that I recommend to absolutely everyone - Off-The-Record Messaging, aka OTR which works with GAIM… err, Pidgin. Mac users can’t use Pidgin, but they get the even-better Adium which uses the same code for connections, has a much friendlier interface, and has OTR built-in. In the Adium preferences there is a pref to encrypt conversation automatically. Recommended!

If you’re IMming with me and you see a message that tells you to get OTR, that’s it working to keep the rest of the internet out of our conversation! :)

Cleaning out my half-written post queue. :) You should see some of the crap I’m deleting, whew!

Wired magazine just had a redesign and trumpeted that their redesigned logo obeyed the Law of Optical Volumes. Some commenters noted that this is basic kerning. Well, yes and no. Kerning is not typically this mathematic, which is related to why the word “law” grabbed my eye. This implies there is an algorithm to do this automatically… you know, if this whole exercise isn’t just crap.

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Another article about “controlling your public appearance”. The article talks about google caches, and the new facebook privacy options for public profiles, and the general idea of the new all-seeing eye. That’s some positive education.

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Ever wonder where your favorite artist gets their funky samples? Check out Sample Wednesday.

Me
11:30
i should think about selling my car :\

MC Grifty P
11:30
yeah you should
not like you need it, really
stupid sf resident

Me
11:30
no, i basically drive it when i need to dodge street cleaning :\

MC Grifty P
11:30
heh
here
i'll tell you what to do:
(off the record.)

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Today an IEEE Spectrum article pretentiously called The Future of Music argued against the overcompression of modern music known as the “loudness war.” Aside from the fact that that sounds like a war I want to fight in, it made an argument that we aren’t making technological progress on sound quality because of loud music.

If you have been hanging out around me lately, you know I totally dig the new Justice album, †. Their whole point is loud. Face-rocking, turn-it-up-to-11, side-chain-compressor-to-the-grill loud. Same with that good ol’ SebastiAn who I have previously blogged about. So, are these guys that I love so much right now really destroying the future of music technology? How can you have many of the intense modern sounds without loud? (Does indie rock make this point moot?)

Algorithm to resize images so “important” details are kept, resulting in images that fit whatever aspect ratio you need:

(or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-SSu3tJ3ns )