Everybody swears by HandBrake as the free, open source tool for ripping DVDs. But every time I’ve used it, it hasn’t been able to rip movies. The trick, it seems, is to also install DVD43, which runs in the background waiting for you to stick in a DVD, at which point it strips off the copy protection. Voilà, Beetlejuice to Amelia’s iPod.

Update: But wait, Flushed Away continues to resist, even in the face of the Handbrake/DVD43 combination. Handbrake kept freezing trying to read the disc. So in this case, I used VLC Media Player instead, following these instructions: Rip a DVD to iTunes using VLC. Worked great, but note that in the case of Flushed Away the movie was on track 34, so step 4 of those instructions required some patience.

I don’t really think this is why people pirate DVDs, but this is still a great graphic illustrating one way that the movie studios punish their paying customers. So true.

(I think people generally pirate movies because they want them for free rather than paying for them. I think people rip movies they legitimately own for a lot of reasons, this being one of them.)

This open letter from OK Go, in explaining why their new video can’t be embedded, pretty well covers the state of the music industry (incidentally, the video is great). (via waxy)

Way to mass produce key bird flu drug revealed:

The biggest hope for saving people at the start of a bird flu pandemic, before a vaccine is available, is the antiviral drug Tamiflu - but the drug is hard to make and stocks are limited. That could soon end: a Nobel prize-winning chemist has devised a straightforward method for making Tamiflu, and has not patented it.

Very cool. Of course, the big disasters are never the ones you plan for, so it won't be the bird flu, it'll be an asteroid.