On this episode of Spark:
- Harlequin‘s Malle Vallik publishes romance 2.0 (full interview)
- Amber Mac explains what the US switch to digital broadcasting in 2009 means for Canadians
- What You Need to Know About the Analog-to-Digital Television Transition in Canada
- If you have a green solution for keeping old televisions out of landfills, post it in the comments below
- Nora introduces Elena, star of Spark’s upcoming Grandma Dinner (details)
- From mesh 08, Bill Buxton on webcams, telepresence, and if location matters anymore (full interview)
- Nora mentions our LOLcat Idol competition
This episode features Creative Commons music and sound effects:
- “Aww scratch” by shagrugge
- “Wadidyusay?” by Zap Mama
- “Mellow” by Darkroom
- “Agustin Barrios: Una Limosna Por Amor De Dios” by tollimees
- “Danger” by slumberlords
- Clip from Magic in the Air (1955)
- Clip from Story of Television
- “airtone/kyawkku/”>kyawkku” and “airtone/mere-blips/”>mere blips” by airtone
- “Funk_Hustler” by Rhythm Scholar
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I do read ebooks on my hacked iPod touch. All of these are public domain or creative commons. My favourite author is Cory Doctorow. I just bought Little Brother in audiobook format DRM frew from his site: http://craphound.com . I like the fact that he makes all his books available in ebook format for free under cc. I also like http://podiobooks.com for free audiobooks in podcast format.
Good episode: Amber does a great job of connecting her PEI childhood and Hercules to the bottom line (2/17/09) of analog-to-digital television conversion; and the “unmistakable joy” of Romance 2.0 was insightful from a DRM and audience expansion POV. It’s pretty hard to imagine my mom torrenting a torrid novelette.
I am a local artist living in Calgary. I was interested in what people want to do with all of their old televisions and for the same matter older computer equipment which has experienced the same kind of upsurge in planned obsolescence.
4 words “Give Them To Artists” We can reuse them and we often use outdated technologies to make our work which still need old hardware to function and replacement parts. They are still useful to us especially some of the really old ones.
-Thanks
I used to go to this coffee shop that had an old floor-set television that had been converted into a fish tank.
I don’t think we could solve the waste problem by just making a whole bunch of fish tanks, but it was a neat reduce-reuse-recycle project.
TV is dying and forcing consumers to change formats – YET AGAIN – will kill it beyond resuscitation.
Two years ago, we bought an ‘analog’ TV. We do not plan on throwing it out when everything goes digital. We’ll still use it for DVDs and (gasp) VHS viewing.
Instead of going digital with TV, we’ll save our money and take our internet connections (which are now in every room) and plug them into projectors and portable monitors because the web will provide everything we’ll need.
That’s assuming, of course, that a few media companies don’t make everything on the web illegal!
Although I have known about the analog to digital switch in the States for a while now, I must confess I never thought about what will happen to all the old analog
TVs. For those who buy a new TV instead of using a converter box, there’s has to be green solution.
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/edmonton/story/2008/03/11/ewaste-recycling.html
Re-use old TVs: Make them into ROBOTS!
Emma W.
(age 6)
Emma is a gal after my own heart!
On the subject of e-books I think the publishing industry, Harlequin included, should learn from the music industry and stop using DRM to hold on to the old way of selling books. They should take a page (pun intended) from Wired editor Chris Anderson’s book “Free”, and start giving away basic books and selling other things. Maybe give away the basic text book and sell the multimedia version…Their future customers are all growing up with this business model in increasing industries and that’s what they expect. If they don’t get it the book industry doesn’t get them – or their cash.