Dave's Tech Blog
A Third Eye on Technology

Preamble:   The techniques described in this guide are intended for educational purposes and should not be used to bypass copyright restrictions or download copyrighted material without consent from the respective owners/licensees.  In the below example I use a track by Nine Inch Nails for this demonstration for two reasons:

1.  I already own this album (in fact I own every Nine Inch Nails album; I’m what you would call a “loyal fan“).
2.  The album was published under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license.  This means I could give you a copy of the song because I purchased it.  Look out for musicians who publish their works under licenses like this.

So let’s get to using this Youtube Downloader thingy!

First, download the software from Download.com by clicking here.

Run/Open the file once you have downloaded it to install the software.  Once installed, you’ll have a new shortcut in your Start Menu.  This is what the program looks like when it’s running:

Leave this window up and go visit Youtube.  Find a video you like and then copy the URL from the address bar at the top…..

…into the first box in Youtube Downloader, like this:

Now click Download.

Once the video is downloaded you can convert it to an MP3 by changing the selector at the top from “Download a video…” to “Convert or play a video…”, like this:

Now all you have to do is click the Browse button to search for the file you just downloaded, and change the “Convert Video to:” box to read MP3, like this:

Now click Convert.  It will ask you about quality settings (and of course it’s best to just leave it on “Best Quality” and click okay).  That’s pretty much it.  A conversion process will happen, taking perhaps 30 seconds,  and you’ll be given an MP3 file that you can play on pretty much any portable audio player out there.  It’s up to you if you want to delete the original video file.

A word about piracy/file-sharing

Piracy/file-sharing can be a very polarizing topic to talk about, especially when the conversation occurs between professional musicians who make their living off writing music.  On one side of the fence you’ve got your Lars Ulrich and Gene Simmons who see piracy of their music as a direct threat to music sales and thus their paycheck.  On the other side of the fence you have bands like Radiohead and musicians like Trent Reznor who see the sharing of their music as a marketing platform that can increase band exposure, increase their fan base, and subsequently increase their physical merchandise and ticket sales.  Both sides are entitled to their opinions but I lean towards the latter group when thinking about this stuff.

Along the lines of music piracy is software piracy.  There is a software developer who goes by the name Notch who created a computer game called Minecraft by himself that has earned him nearly one million dollars in under a year, and it was still in the Alpha stage when it hit that impressive number.  He has a very keen insight into piracy and I would like to suggest you check out his blog post about the topic if you have the time.  It mostly boils down to distinguishing (or debating) the difference between the loss of potential revenue versus actual revenue lost, determining a fair way to measure the differences.

In marketing there is a strategy known as “loss-leader” and pirated music could be thought of as a loss-leader for a musician who has additional products to offer, like vinyl, or limited “deluxe edition” packages, not to mention concert tickets and who knows what else (one of my favorite musicians offers up everything from autographed cover art by Strom Thorgenson to 5 hour long studio workshops with the band and their very own equipment).  Then there’s new, up-and-coming musicians who don’t yet have anything better to hope for than a chance to be listened to and are willing to let people preview their entire collection in the hopes of turning them into a loyal fan who will go buy all their albums and other merchandise someday down the road.

Shameless plug: Check out my Kompoz profile to listen/download/pirate my music.

Regular readers of my blog may remember a website that I and my associate John put together for the band Prymal Rhythm.  Well there’s a little back-story about how the responsibility of building that website came to fall in my lap.  You see I happen to be related to three of the five members of the band.  One of them is my cousin and two others are his uncles.  That being the case I volunteered a great deal of time building that site up from scratch into the polished looking site it is today and I did so with joy because, hey, we’re family.

In a gesture of sorts to thank me for all the hard work I did for free, the three members asked the organizers (my aunt and uncle) if it would be cool for me to attend this years family reunion/vacation, which has traditionally been limited to immediate members of their family.  So about a month or two ago I was contacted by my uncle and was invited to join the family on their family vacation.  Being invited to join this group was sort of like being inducted into a secret society of epic coolness I can only begin to describe.

These yearly vacations take place at a small cabin that my aunt’s father originally purchased in the 1970s in Shell Knob, Missouri on Table Rock Lake.  Since that time the entire family (or as many as are able to make the time) have dedicated one trip out of every year to reunite at this cabin and proceed to have a rejuvenating amount of fun together.

Now before I get into the fun part of the trip, I should mention something that I have a high amount of respect for; a certain rule of sorts the family has had at all times.  And that is: Keep the technology to a bare minimum. There is no air conditioning at this small cabin, only a lot of fans for every window.  There is no TV and no hand-held video gaming.  Text messaging or using your phone while in the presence of others is frowned upon and more or less anything else that could suck you out of the familial bonding going on around you.  Being an addict of the Internet with websites like Digg and Reddit, you might have thought I’d lose my mind being isolated from these things, but it was quite the opposite.  There were far more interesting stuff to do that the thought of wasting time in front of a computer by myself never crossed my mind.

Swimming in the lake on an inflatable bed with a cold beer in your hand was just a way to break the ice on the first day and try to stay cool when it’s over 90 degrees outside.  I got a some compliments out of using my sandals as ores to row my air raft of sorts.  At one point I was so relaxed by the beauty of the forested area surrounding me that I actually backstroked an eighth of a mile away from the shore before I ran into the shore on the opposite side of the cove from our mini-beach.  I felt like I was literally inside a giant bowl filled with water, rimmed with trees and the horizon had a slightly curved fish-eye camera lens effect to it.  I was AWAY and at peace.  So peaceful that I was unaware of the horrible sunburn I was about to receive (but it was worth it).

Above:  Me and my cousin Johnny

So what kind of activities did we have?  Most of these are actually traditions that everyone did every year and in some cases plan ahead for.  There was a whole shelf filled with board games; RISK being one that was hyped quite a bit on the first day but so much other stuff occurred that the RISK geeks of the tribe never got around to it.  Other games included Catch Phrase, Charades, a card game called Mafia, and the list of games could go on and on (I’m still kicking myself for forgetting to bring Apples to Apples with me).  On one night there is a talent show, where everyone is encouraged to go up “on stage” and perform some sort of act.  Now that I know about this I’ve got to get started on thinking up some sort of performance.  There were three Djembe drums there at the time… perhaps I’ll go buy one of my own and next time I go do some sort of ten minute jam with other volunteers.

One of the other benefits of the location we were at was the fact that there was far less light pollution in the sky at night, making the stars a lot easier to see.  It was mesmerizing to look up at them and notice how seldom you get to take in that kind of scenery back at home in the city.  I took the opportunity to change the topic of conversation to outer space, mentioning a lecture I saw on TED.com where the speaker called the exploration and study of space “the archaeology of the future” because, like traditional archaeology that digs stuff out of the ground and the deeper that stuff is the older it usually is, so too in space the older something is the further away from us it is (because of how long it takes light to travel across the universe).  Though my uncle being retired from the Navy told me about what it’s like to see the sky at night from the middle of the ocean where there is zero light at all.  The view is 10 times that much more clear.

One of the most involved activities I participated in was a 2 mile hike through some woods to a secluded cave that few know about.

The story goes that my aunts brothers were wondering around about 35 years ago (probably while high on peyote or something, though I never bothered to ask just what the hell they were doing wandering around a forest in the early 1970s) and just found it by accident (or perhaps you might say “serendipitously discovered“).

This cave is about 100 yards long, 30 yards deep/tall and 2 to 10 yards wide depending on where you were standing.  Getting to this cave was a very refreshing thing because you go from a hot and humid day hiking uphill sweating your ass off to a cool 60 degrees in a pitch black darkness.  It added another dollop of awesomeness and unique flare to the entire collective event.

Above:  A very happy family

On the last day we had a speed boat and everybody took turns heading out in groups of 10 to go test their luck at water skiing, wake boarding and slalom skiing.  I’d been skiing on snow in the mountains many times but never on water.  I wiped out on the first three tries but on the fourth try I managed to stay up for about 15 seconds before wiping out again.  Had I not sustained a horrible sunburn on day one, I would have gone back out with the last group for a few more chances, but I didn’t want to press my luck with the risk for skin cancer.

The food was spectacular!  Each night different people were involved/responsible for putting dinner together.  On two nights out of the three we actually got to eat some elk that someone had hunted themselves with a .30-06, served in cuts as well as Kielbasa sausage, not to mention the pork ribs, BBQ chicken and a plethora of veggies.  Nothing quite as satisfying as eating delicious food after a long day of fun.

It was one of the most memorable vacation experiences I think I’ve ever had.  There is so much to respect and admire about the entire thing.  I commented to my uncle about his father-in-law purchasing the cabin, “What an investment it has become!”  So I think I’ve found a somewhat new goal in my life.  Before I die, I’m going to buy a small cabin of sorts to start hosting my own family reunion from on a regular basis as a long term investment in our future.  But before that, I’ll probably buy a boat and lend it to the cabin I’m now a proud member of.

Yesterday while I was browsing Ubuntu Forums I came across a thread posted by someone named EssexJames.  He recounts a recent experience with showing his 10 year old son Ubuntu:

I enjoyed setting up Ubuntu 8.10 with my 10 year old son. We learned about Ubuntu together and I was pleased that he was really engaged and interested in the whole process of installation and the philosophy of Ubuntu.

We looked at the various packages that can be installed – to see if there was anything that looked really interesting. We got some graphics and video applications. All excellent.

Then we hit a snag. “Daddy, what’s Brainf**k?” he said. (This is the name of one of the packages).

Can I ask the community that develops Ubuntu and those that compile distributions, to please bear in mind that computers are family devices.

This forum’s terms and conditions state “…you warrant that you will not post any messages that are obscene, vulgar…”. It’s a great shame that the development community don’t apply similar rules.

He continues in a follow up post:

If the objective of Ubuntu and other Linux distributions is to provide an operating system which people can use to replace Microsoft software, then it will need to tidy up the use of profanities in the code and application names. Families with children will see these things, decide it’s not for them, pay the devil and go to Microsoft instead.

I’ll happily f and blind with the best of them, but don’t expect profanities to appear on-screen when installing operating system software.

I wanted my son to become enthused by Linux and to learn about it himself. I install filters for web browsing for him – but I didn’t think I’d need one for an operating system and its components.

There have been several good replies to these two posts that I wanted share with you.  Indeed, it would be rather awkward for any parent who is showing their child a free OS and then discover within the package manager (which organizes over 26,000 different individual programs/dependencies and actually requires you to type in an administrator password before it can even be looked at) an uttering of profanity.  Here’s what some members of the Ubuntu community had to say in response to this:

From “steveneddy”:

I suggest that you explain it to him politely and professionally and if it bothers you, don’t mention it to him again.

All children are going to learn these words eventually.

This is a good time to wear the Daddy hat and sit down with the little tyke and have a man to man talk.

I also raised my two daughters, now 20 and 23, and have my two grandchildren here living with me.

We just have to decide that when that day arrives, and it will, that we are man enough to explain things like this to them in an adult manner so that they understand why it is that way and why some of us choose not to use those types of words around our children.

Don’t think worse of the whole community just because of the lapse in judgment of one developer.

From “starcannon”:

It is best to preview any material that you wish to expose your children to. It would be wrong to drop software simply because someone does not like the name. I would say that if freedom of speech and all of its implications are not something your prepared to deal with, perhaps some other OS is appropriate for your situation; I think Ubuntu is the greatest thing since sliced bread. I have 2 daughters, one is 11 and the other is 12, I do not see that they have been damaged at all by the occasional exposure to a slang word in the package manager, they hear much worse on the school bus; and then there is popular media such as television, movies, and music, all 3 of which have much more offensive words and ideas than a satirically named and obscure [programming] language.

There is plenty of xxx software for MS Windows, arguably much more than for any other OS, the difference is that when one searches for software for windows they may use the google search engine, when one searches for software for Ubuntu they use the Synaptic search engine; ironic isn’t it that if one runs across the “F” word on google while looking for windows software, that is acceptable; if however, one runs across it on the Synaptic search engine it is not acceptable. Ultimately I don’t care what a package is named, I care what the package does, indeed I never even knew about BF until you posted about it, /shrug, and again, it is your responsibility as a parent to do the parenting, not Microsoft’s, not Canonical’s, not Linux’s, not GNU’s, not Apple’s. Accept responsibility or don’t either way I certainly hope that package availability is never based on psuedo puritan ideals that have not even come close to actually existing in over 125 years.

“Grant A”, complimenting starcannon adds:

You are 100% correct. People say they are getting their kids ready for the real world, and THIS is the result. V-Chips, and their kin have made parents very lazy and thus devaluing the social standards the U.S. once held. Life has cuss words, believe it or not your children WILL hear these words. It is up to YOU to teach your child what it means. And no matter what you do, you can train him, you can stick a shock collar on him (please don’t) he WILL still say cuss words, or think them. I know a preacher who is a profane cusser. I am very offended that you want to step upon my rights to FREE speech as declared in over 200 countries, I do not tolerate fascism.

I am aware that this post may have sounded derogatory, but it wasn’t. Sometimes the blunt truth is the best truth. I’m not going to sugar coat everything I say on the Internet. I tried to keep this as civil as possible and avoided all the flaming I wanted to do. Please teach your children yourself, who else will? The Internet is not your baby sitter. If you don’t want your kid to see cuss words, you might as well have left him illiterate.

I agree with all of what was said in the above responses.  It ultimately falls on the parent to do the parenting of their child.  Grant A’s mentioning of the V-Chip, I think, is a good example of how some parents try to use technology to avoid awkward conversations with their child about things like sex, violence, drugs and “adult” language.  That being said, it should be emphasized that the Internet itself is a far more profane place than a simple package manager ever could be. Slightly off topic, I think to call any computer which is attached to the Internet a “family device” is a contradiction, no matter what operating system you choose to use.

EssexJames has marked his thread as “Solved” since posting it yesterday, but he’s not posted any kind of followup to indicate exactly what the replies have solved for him.  So I sent him a private message asking him what he’s decided and he says, although little can be quickly done to enable a profanity filter in Synaptic (and possibly won’t be implemented quickly because of resistance/misunderstandings), he and his son will continue to use Ubuntu.  He added that he will also start keeping a closer eye on him and his computer activities.  Good job, dad!