Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

PhoneCaster.de is a nice service which offers podcasts via telephone. I received an email from them today which told me that someone had added my music podcast to their site (thanks anonymous stranger!).

This means that you can now listen to my podcast from your telephone or cell phone by dialing

(in Germany). I'm not sure if it works from outside of Germany, but you could try to call +49 931 663927 408. Please leave a comment and report whether it works or doesn't work.

There's quite a bunch of other podcasts available which you can listen to while in a train, on a bus, or while you're somewhere else without Internet access. This opens up some nice new possibilities...

The editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary have chosen 'podcast' as the word of the year.

I bet next year they'll choose 'vlog'. We'll see.

(via digg)

Note: This is actually an entry for my music podcast, but I'm cross-posting this to my blog as well, as I think it deserves a broader exposure!

Now, here is a really special song I'd like you to listen to. This is a great song (aria!) by Improbulus which is about the Creative Commons movement. The song itself is Creative Commons licensed, of course, as well as the lyrics (the "libretto" is you want).

Quoting from the original site, the song is an

Operatic ode to Creative Commons, to the tune of Puccini's O Mio Babbino Caro!

The lyrics:

This is Creative Commons:
Something that you've created
Somebody else can copy
Spreading the word about you
You see, they're free to copy
But they must give you credit
And others then can copy
Giving you credit anew
And if they make some money so must you - you profit too!
Isn't that fair, and how?
So get Creative now...

It's a wonderful promotional song for Creative Commons, and it sure has the potential to become sort of the hymn of the Creative Commons movement/culture, if you ask me.

(found via consumingexperience.blogspot.com)

Update 2005-12-06: The song was taken down for now, as the legal situation of the background music is unclear.

Song: Improbulus - Creative Commons Song (2:33 min, 2.4 MB)
License: CC-by-nc-sa 2.5
Source: archive.org

I have ITP'd the podcast / vlog client Kitty, yesterday. I had a look at various vlog clients recently and Kitty seems to be really nice.

A Debian package should be available in a few days, I already have a test-version running on my local box...

I didn't follow this disaster too closely, but here's a short (most probably incomplete) roundup of what happened so far:

1. The Sony DRM installs a rootkit,
2. people use the rootkit to make game cheats safe from the (Blizzard) Warden,
3. trojans start (ab)using the DRM rootkit,
4. Sony gets sued,
5. Sony pulls the rootkit.

Nice bedtime story so far. Now it turns out that Sony’s web-based XCP (rootkit) uninstaller seems to open huge, gaping security holes itself...

Not that I would care too much, I don't buy any Sony CDs. There's a huge pile of great Creative Commons licensed music out there (shameless plug: check my music podcast for some hand-selected goodies). No need to pay huge corporations for crappy music which comes with funny "extras"...