A couple of days ago I received this telephone call, the transcript of which is as follows:

Congratulations!
You have been randomly selected to receive a Florida Bahamas holiday with all accommodations.
To hear more details press "9".

UMG Says Throwing Away Promo CDs is Illegal. Electronic Frontier Foundation

UMG seems to think that the "promotional use only" label somehow gives it "eternal ownership" over the CD. While this might make sense to a goblin living in Harry Potter's world, it's not the law under the Copyright Act. According to the first sale doctrine, once a copyright owner has parted with ownership of a CD, book, or DVD, whether by sale, gift, or other disposition, they may not control further dispositions of that particular copy (including throwing it away). It's thanks to the first sale doctrine that libraries can lend books, video rental stores can rent DVDs, and you can give a CD to a friend for their birthday. It's also the reason you can throw away any CD that you own.

For my Birthday, I received a new generation iPod, or the so-called 5.5 generation.

I have to say, as much as I am ardently opposed to DRM (and Apple's and Microsoft's support of it), this little gadget is (as Steve Jobs would say) simply amazing!

This is the first portable player I've owned that could play video, and that fact; combined with the superb build quality, incredibly intuitive interface, limited (but still very nice) PDA capabilities, cute little games (not on a par with the PSP, but still ...), and gorgeous sound quality; really makes this a device worth cherishing.

If you've reached the stage where your digital music collection is out of control; with a multitude of different file formats, bitrates and naming conventions; then wouldn't it be great if you could get some help sorting that mess out?

On the Windows platform there are a multitude of applications that can deal with the problem, such as dbPowerAMP to name one of the better ones, but under Linux the solution is not so clear.

Now, thanks to a Ruby application called sneetchalizer (yes really!) there is a powerful automated solution to audio file format conversion, which can convert between OGG Vorbis, MP3, AAC/MP4 (or M4A as Apple calls it), WMA and others, whilst preserving the metadata tags which describe the audio file contents (known as IDv3 tags on MP3 files).