Today I received an email from Pandora.com concerning a recent decision by the Copyright Royalty Board in Washington, DC to almost triple the licensing fees for Internet radio sites like Pandora. According to the email, “the new royalty rates are irrationally high, more than four times what satellite radio pays and broadcast radio doesn’t pay these at all”(emphasis added). The email then points out how these sharp increases in fees will effectively strangle Internet radio companies because it artificially inflates the cost of doing business to levels far above what such businesses can expect to afford.
Category: Internet
A New Look and A New Tool
Well, I could only stand Mephisto’s default simpla theme for so long. Now while I fully intend to create my own look for this blog in short order, I decided that it wouldn’t hurt to provide a quick face lift especially after I managed to find a large list of custom themes available for Mephisto. I decided that riddish would do very nicely. It has a clean presentation and I like the usage of red in the theme.
When writing these posts and even more so while playing with the templates that define the look and feel of Mephisto, I much missed the syntax highlighting and editing capabilities of my favorite text editor vim. I did some digging around and found that with the installation of a suitable Firefox extension, I was able to have Firefox pop up vim to let me edit the contents of most text areas in the browser. Pretty convenient!
Hello Mephisto! It’s About Time
At some point in August last year, I found myself bitten by the blogging bug. However, being the somewhat neurotic perfectionist that I am, it has taken this long to finally get to writing a first post, and I still don’t have things the way that I like.
Despite the fact that there are a plethora of sites online that offer blogging services for anyone itching to publish their thoughts to the world, I decided that seeing as I run my own Gentoo Linux server at home, I would go through the trouble of setting up my own installation of a blogging tool. I figured that it would be a fun learning experience and that I would also enjoy the advantages of a fully customizable blog with no worries about having to rely on some corporate server to safeguard the stuff that I write. Call me silly, but I like having full control over my own data – especially if its going to be a journal like this one. Continue reading →