Jon Stewarts appearance on Crossfire made me lose a lot of hope I previosuly had for the future of our society. However, I also have come closer to finalizing an idea I have had on a possible way to bring real debate and enlightenment to the people. So here is my new blog entry called show of courage. Tell me what you think about it. If I can get enough interested manpower to start it up, I might consider actually executing one of my ideas for a change.
Ok, this isn't really blog material, but I'm putting it in the
Check this out. I got an iPod. The iPod has an alarm clock feature, so it can play a song at a specified time. Great replacement for bedside alarm clock if you have speakers that can plug into the iPod. But I don't have speakers that do that.
What I DO have is a normal clock/radio and an iTrip. Leave the clock/radio on tuned into the iTrip. There will be complete silence as long as the iTrip's LED is on and the iPod isn't playing a song. Then when the iPods alarm goes off you get an mp3 to wake you up in the morning. If I wanted I could syncrhonize the clocks on the iPod and the clock/radio so the alarm clock goes off in radio mode which happens to be the iPod playing a song.
The best part is that I can do this AND leave the iPod charging overnight.
Without even writing a line of code or taking out a soldering iron you can combine existing pieces of technology to do some really awesome stuff. Oh hotness.
I wrote a peice in my blog today that I'm pretty proud of. I describe my personal philosophy on blame. Considering the stuff going on in the presidential election, I figured it was pretty relevant. What it boils down to is that if people placed blame correctly the world would be a much better place.
If at least one person improves their life a small bit after reading this, then it was worth the time it took to write it.
My latest blog entry deals with my idea of starting a geek commune. Similar to the Kibbutzes in Israel we could all group up and write software in a small, happy, cooperative community for the rest of our lives. As long as we don't look like crazy culties in the process. And as long as we don't let freaky people in.
I've posted my thoughts on the DS/PSP multiple times around the net. Mostly on games.slashdot. But I decided to reiterate them in my blog so they would have a permanent easily accesible home. But in addition to that old slightly changing opinion I also included an idea we had yesterday. The killer app for the DS has been discovered, and its a doozy. Now I just have to get a DS dev kit. Too bad they cost $10,000+. Maybe one day my dream will exist.
Anyway read all about it at my blog here. While you read it notice the Gameboy being the icon of choice for this slashdot category and what that means.
Also, my blog has RSS if you want to subscribe to it here.
Ok, that's all for now. I haven't posted much due to lots and lots of work at work. We'll see how things go. I should have more free time when school starts again in two weeks.
Remember my distro rodeo? Well I settled on Gentoo. For the same reasons I'm moving from xfce4 to fvwm2. I tried every window manager in the world. In the end I realized one thing. The only window manager good enough for me is the one that can be customized in absolutely every way just like Gentoo. To read about my new ultimate desktop project check my blog. When I make a project page for it I will post it here as well. I hope I can outdo Taviso.
So I made a post in my blog about a post in a slashdot thread. And this post in the slashjournal is a post to that blog post. And its about Farenheit 9/11 and slashdot so it will probably be interesting for you.
On a side note you will notice that earlier on slashdot there was a posting about the national weather service and their SOAP web services. I'm about halfway done from implementing an application to access this web service. I'm writing it in python using SOAPpy. It's a little different from SOAP4r in ruby which I am more used to, so it will take time. I must also learn to use the python xml parser to deal with the returned SOAP envelope. My goal is to combine it with pyosd to make an xosd torsmo-like weather forecast on my desktop. If I actually work on it, it shouldn't take me long to make it go. You will see it in the blog. Oh, I'm creative commons licensing it instead of GPL or LGPL. Just a note.
I'm running around the internet posting this wherever I care to.
I GOT MECHWARRIOR 2, THE OLD DOS CD-ROM TO RUN ABSOLUTELY FLAWLESSLY UNDER GENTOO LINUX USING DOSBOX!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
For the whole story, see my blog.
This is like the greatest thing ever. I'm always happy, but this is absolutely fantastic amazing awesome stupendous. Especially considering my alone-ness and boredom as of late, this is a total turnaround. Oh yea!!!!!!
OK, so I decided I finally have a need for one of those little USB flash drives. I've started to use more encryption and I would like to keep all my encryption keys on it. Something that can go on a real life key-ring would be great, I like to keep all my keys in one place. I also want it to be relatively cheap and work with all OSes easily, mostly linux. I know there are like a zillion of these things on the market, so I really need some help in figuring out which one is the quality.
If you didn't guess I finally made an audioblog. It's kind of crappy actually. But I haven't even skimmed the surface of what is possible with this concept. I'm going to try to do a lot more with it in the future and feedback is very very good. My ultimate goal is to make something that is the equivalent of a morning radio talkshow, but for geeks. It wont be live, but it will be on the net. So it will be just like if I'm on the radio, but you have a radio Tivo. Anyway, the audio is back at my blog.
Constructive criticism desired.
I was really looking forward to making my first audioblog post this weekend, but computer "trouble" came up.
Well, of course I never have computer trouble, that's why I put it in quotes. For you computer geeks who love a good story here it goes.
So I re-wired my box today. I had some free time and I wanted to prepare for the new Serial ATA hard drive that is coming soon. Until now, I've had 3 drives like so.
Primary IDE Master - 20 GB - Contains linux
Primary SATA - 80GB - 40 GB of this partition is WinXP NTFS. The rest of the drive is the biggest FAT32 partition that you can make filled with my mp3s and other important media files.
Secondary SATA - 40GB - This drive is partitioned also with the biggest FAT32 partition you can make. It has all my video files on it and has a lot of room to spare surprisingly. It actually isn't a SATA drive, it has a converter on it.
So what I did was I removed the SATA converter and put the 40GB drive to the primary slave on the ide controller. My CD burner is all alone as the secondary master on that same controller.
Of course, because I did this windows wont boot. Why is that? Oh because this causes a change in drive letters and windows is dumb as bricks! And of course since windows doesn't have a nice bootloader like grub where I can just change the line to kernel root=/dev/hde1 or some such I can't boot it.
Oh, and Linux wont work either! But that's no fault of linux, but a fault of mine. I was messing around with my kernel recently and I must have made a booboo with the config because after about 10 minutes of operation the whole system freezes. It also may be the new version of NVIDIA drivers I emerged...
Anyway, so I have lots of live cds. I can knoppix for one day until my new drive comes. Then I can back up everything to the big drive and restore. Ooops, Knoppix 3.2 doesn't support my network card OR Serial ATA. Shite. Oh bones! Gentoo 2004.1 doesn't support my network card either! (nforce2, need forcedeth patch or kernel2.6 with forcedeth enabled). So I have to call up my friend who luckily has a knoppix 3.4 cd, yay! More proof that there is power in numbers. If I was a lone geek in a "painkeep" basement I never would have been typing this now.
So I'm glad to say that tommorow I will be backing up all my goods to a giant XFS partition on a 160 gigabyte drive. I'll also be removing that 40GB drive after I back it up so I can put it in my server. It's the only non-Seagate drive anyway so I can't have that in there
Anyway, so I went to do the audioblog and all I've got is knoppix 3.4. I guarantee that on Tuesday, Wednesday at the latest I will be capable of talking into my microphone, creating a wave file, encoding it into a very small format and then uploading it.
ph33r.
In Puzzle Pirates they have really stepped up the features quite a bit. And in the interest of making my crew more efficient and more wealthy I want to start doing basic accounting of goods and moneys we deal in. However, all the pirates in the crew will need to participate. For this, I need a cross-platform, free, collaborative spreadsheet application with a moderate amount of authentication/security.
For more details check my blog post.
Also, since its going to rain tommorow I'm going to make the audioblog I promised.
So I made another post in my blog thingy.
It's about the "Supersize Me" documentary, a bicycle I just bought and other related tidbits about exercise. I also devote a paragraph to Gentoo is for Ricers because it made me laugh a whole lot more than I have in recent memory.
You know, when I turned this
I promise you this. This weekend, after I ride my bike on Saturday (weather has never mattered before now, but I hope its nice!) I'm going to come home. Then I'm going to put on my logitech Internet Chat Headset, which I usually use for audio shitcocking in counter-strike. And I'm going to rant into a wav file. Rant rant rant about something. Then I'm going to take that wav file and encode it into an ogg file. Then I'm going to serve it up in a blog post, possibly with a
Of course here is what I predict. I piss off everybody who listens to it. They poke a zillion holes through everything I say. And you think I'm an asshole.
Que sera sera...
I wrote two new blog entries this morning. In the first I ponder the idea of having a Geekstock. That doesn't need so much more explanation.
http://protoman.rh.rit.edu/blog/2004/05/31#geekstock
The second post relates to my previous idea of writing the in-between computer book. The book that transitions people from just using their computer by remember procedures to actually understanding how they work on a lower, but not too much lower level. Well, what do you think if I wrote this book with a Wiki? People could contribute and I would have to type less. The book might be done faster, and of course a CC license would make sure everyone gets credit and nobody gets money.
No, I'm not going to make a journal entry about the connection between those two things, sorry to dissapoint you. But I did recently write two entries in my blog, one for each of those.
The first one I wrote was about the local lilac festival and how advertising has become entertainment. It's not news, but I found a really good example to illustrate how it is so much worse than before.
http://protoman.rh.rit.edu/blog/2004/05/23#lilacfest
The other post is about another summer project idea I had to write a book. I'm looking for opinions if people think its a waste of my time or not.
http://protoman.rh.rit.edu/blog/2004/05/23#compbook
I'm also looking for opinions on what people think of this. I'm not really using this journal the way I used to anymore. I'm just making meta entries to point to my new "real" blog. Now that I'm actually doing it instead of thinking about it, how goes it? Do you think its cool because it saves you the trouble of reading my blog if the summary doesn't sound interesting? Are you just clicking the link and rushing to my blog right away? Did you subscribe to my RSS and now you ignore this? Maybe you stopped reading because it isn't worth the effort? I'd really like to know. Not that I'm dying to get 1000s of people to read it, but its nice to know I'm not just creating information that nobody cares about.
8 Catfish = 1 Octo-puss
