Just a nutty question this morning: if you could easily/cheaply stream anything to your tv, what would it be?

A little while ago, someone on Slashdot pointed me at the Sale of Goods Act in relation to purchased electronics. The act, for those unfamiliar with it, requires that goods be 'suitable for the purpose for which sold.' This is a fairly broad term, but it basically means that they must be able to do anything that the seller claims that they can do. Under this law, you have 6 years from the date of purchase to file a lawsuit if the item does not match the claims.

This was relevant to me because my MacBook Pro is now out of warranty and the battery is dying. Looking in the System Profiler, its full charge capacity was showing up as 1476mAh after 56 charges. When new, it was 5500mAh. These numbers don't mean anything by themselves, but Apple claims that their batteries retain 80% of their full charge capacity after 300 charge cycles. Claiming this means that a battery that does not retain 4400mAh after 300 charge cycles is not suitable for the purpose for which sold, and they are legally required to refund or replace it (irrespective of the time that has elapsed, although I can only sue them if they don't within 6 years of the time of sale).

I called their support line and was put through to an Indian woman, who explained that the warranty had expired. I quoted the relevant parts of law to her, and (after being kept on hold for a bit), was transferred to someone senior. He very quickly agreed to send out a replacement battery.

Interestingly, he did not ask that the original battery be sent out, nor that I provide a credit card number where I would be billed if the battery turned out not to be defective. I've had two batteries replaced in warranty, and this was standard procedure then, so apparently I get better service out of warranty. I don't have a great deal of use for a battery that only lasts about 35 minutes on a full charge, but I'll probably keep it as a spare.

As always, it pays to know the law. It's a shame that Apple, which claims to be a customer-focussed company, doesn't educate its support team about this though. Possibly the Indian call centre deals with people from everywhere English speaking, while the Irish one only deals with people in the UK and Ireland, so the people there are more familiar with British law, but if I had not quoted the relevant act then I would have been charged £99 for a battery, on top of the £1.50 it cost to call their support line for half an hour.

I want a linky to an unredacted copy. Anyone have it?

You need to go to a strip club to get over the trauma. And while you're there, just remember that the hand that brings you your drink is the same hand that jacks you off in the back room - the efficient, invisible hand of Ayn Rand!

Why am I unable to mod things???? I click the mod but nothing happens. Brilliant.

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/05/30/fanfic-contest

"For the benefit of the Lupus Alliance of America, John Scalzi, Wil Wheaton and Subterranean Press are running a fan fiction contest, in which contestants write a 400 to 2,000 word story describing the picture above. Any form of fan fiction is acceptable except slash. The winner of the contest will be paid for their story (10 cents a word), win a prize pack of books from Subterranean Press, and will have their story published in a special electronic chapbook featuring stories about the painting, written by Scalzi, Wheaton, Catherynne Valente and Patrick Rothfuss, to be published later this year, with profits to benefit the Lupus Foundation of America. E-mail the stories with the text in the e-mail to fanfic@scalzi.com by 11:59pm Eastern, June 30, 2010. One entry per person."

One must see the image at the link above, as it cannot be sufficiently described with words.

I posted this story but I have no idea if it will ever get accepted. Maybe they already posted this story, but I am too lazy to go check.

Right now I'm standing on my Manhattan balcony, jerking off onto the people below. They'll probably think it's a constipated pigeon.

Culling through my books/DVD/PS2 collection and seeing how much I can get for trade-in at Amazon. Anyone here done this before?

Apparently I have several DVDs that are worth way more than I thought they would be btw! :-)

I'm not complaining. Now I know where there's an entire state, full of people who are too scared to go to the police because they're illegal aliens.

I think I'll RAPE someone on my next vacation. Arizona is fucking good for the soul.

If you're not brown, come on down!

when I'm gone...

Some time around 2005, Slashdot ran an article about a new hosting company, MacMiniColo that was taking advantage of the new machines that Apple had just released to offer cheap hosting. I got in contact with them, and a little while later, I had a Mac Mini, sitting in a rack somewhere, running OpenBSD and acting as my dedicated server. A 1.42GHz G4 CPU, 512MB of RAM, and an 80GB disk was (and still is) more than adequate for my needs. The biggest load on it is eJabberd, and even that only used under 1% of the CPU.

I had really great service from these people. The hard drive failed a little under a year after I bought the Mini, and Apple refused to honour the warranty because they couldn't find the records of the sale (then, a few weeks later, they could, but by then it was out of the warranty period). MacMiniColo replaced the disk for me at their own expense.

After five years with them, however, I had a little look around and noticed that VPS hosting has gone down in price a lot. I've written a book on Xen, so I thought I might try a Xen-based VPS now that FreeBSD has Xen support.

GigaTux only claims to offer Linux, but I dropped them an email and they were happy to install FreeBSD for me. I still haven't tried the Xen-enabled kernel yet; they installed the stock x86-64 kernel in an HVM domain for me and performance has been fantastic.

I'm sharing a server with 64 other guests and in spite of that performance tends to be better than my ageing Mac Mini. I was getting 1000IOPS while untaring the ports tree, which is far more than the Mini's old 2.5" laptop drive could handle, and is amazing considering that it's going via the slow, QEMU-derived, emulated device, rather than the fast PV driver. I've been installing software from ports, so everything is compiled on the machine, and even that has been fast.

And my Mini? They found someone else who wants it, and offered me about a third of what I paid for it originally - not bad depreciation after five years of constant use. Shipping it back to the UK would have cost almost as much as buying one on eBay, so I sold it on. Hopefully someone else will get some good use out of it.

As an aside, I've been really impressed by how well OpenBSD works on Mac/PowerPC hardware. If you've got an old Mac Mini lying around, chuck OpenBSD on it and you've got a reasonable low-volume server. The newer ones, of course, are x86 hardware, so will run just about anything.

So for our next assignment in my pipeline class we got tasked with playing around with Houdini, which it turns out is pretty spiffy. Hopefully I will have some new cool thing to post soon :-)

One huge upside of Houdini is it is a perfectly capable 3D animation (with effects) tool that has a free learning version and a cheap ($99) Apprentice version.

Oh and it runs on Linux/Windows/Mac, which is also a huge plus:

http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=589&Itemid=221

Since I have been eating healthy peanut butter (i.e. only contains peanuts) I've had issues with oil sitting on top of the peanut butter upon first opening the jar. Turning the jar over prior to opening and stirring (with great difficulty) helps somewhat, but inevitably the first several uses have too much peanut oil while the peanut butter sitting on the bottom is too hard. The solution? Two jars of peanut butter! Once I reach the hard rocky bottom layer, I simply open the second jar and pour any excess peanut oil into the first jar and poof, problem solved.