I've come to use Tumblr to post things most of the time now.
All of my tumblr'ing is mixed in to my main feed. If you care enough to bother, please subscribe to that feed. Or you can just view my tumblr blog at http://gschueler.tumblr.com.
If you're new to RSS feeds and feed reading, I would suggest you check out this video: RSS in Plain English.
And you can begin by signing up for a Google.com account at the Google Reader page.
I'm interested in the capabilities of the iPhone as a form of eBook reading device. I'd love to be able to have an easy way to read the thousands of public domain books available from places like Project Gutenberg.
Here is a brief look at how the iPhone works as an eReader for three different formats: website, online book, and pdf.
I created a perl script a while back that would take a .txt from the Gutenberg project, parse it into chapters, and generate a set of Markdown formatted files (1 per chapter) with embedded links, as well as a Table of Contents page. Using my old Markdown cgi script to view this in a web browser made it somewhat easier to read the text, but I think if I adapted this especially for the iPhone it might turn out great.
Things I'd like my eReader to do:
A couple sites have drifted past my web browser recently that I thought were amusing. They have brought the age-old past-time of braggadocio into the web 2.0 world of social-networking.
If you don't get 99.9% of your news from the web and don't read a lot of tech news sites, you might not be aware of an interesting story involving copyright, hollywood, and tech-news sites that has become something of an internet-wide revolt.
Around February 10th, 2007, a hacker on the web forum doom9.com posted that he had discovered the "Processing Key" used to encrypt HD-DVD video discs. This key is used by all current HD-DVD discs to encrypt the content, and with it, a nimble hacker could decrypt the content of a HD-DVD and be able to extract the video from the disc, much like the DeCSS code released for decrypting DVD discs. This key is a 32-digit number when listed in base-16 (or "hex"), equivalent to 16 bytes of data.
To movie pirates online this is a boon because it means they could now easily pirate the higher-quality HD-DVD movies for transfer across the internet. To users of the Linux operating system, (much like in the case of DeCSS and DVD discs) this key can be used to let them watch movies they have purchased legally on their Linux computers, which do not have any officially licensed software to allow them to do so. To the MPAA this is a violation of the DMCA, which prohibits people from telling someone how to bypass a security mechanism designed to protect a copyrighted work.
This is exactly why the DMCA was pushed into law by the RIAA/MPAA, to protect their copyright and also to prevent people from breaking their encryption schemes. Unfortunately for them, apparently it only takes 16 bytes of data to do so.
(Note: I'm not certain about the exact wording of the DMCA, but I thought that it made it illegal to post any method of circumventing a protection mechanism. This 16 byte key is not a "method" in any sense: it certainly doesn't give me or anyone else the ability to decrypt HD-DVDs without further software. However, I Am Not A Rabid MPAA Lawyer, so don't take my word for it.)
It has apparently taken the MPAA and its copyright lawyers until just recently to start sending out takedown notices under the DMCA to websites that publish the key. Under the DMCA, if you are sent a request to remove something that a copyright-holder says violates the DMCA, you have to do so immediately, even if that content doesn't actually violate it.
The DMCA has been widely decried as limiting the free-speech rights of people. When DeCSS was released, allowing people to decrypt a DVD disc, the MPAA attempted to block its spread by issuing the same kind of DMCA takedown notices. However, spreading the DeCSS code was like telling someone how to make a lockpick set: it in itself did not violate copyright laws. Seeing this as an attempt to censor online communication, people took to very creative ways to publish the code, such as on t-shirts, in poetry form, in song, and as very long prime numbers, to point out the ridiculousness of the law.
The latest round of the MPAA's takedown notices under the DMCA are now even more offensive to people. The "offending" information in question is such a small amount of data, and users of slashdot.org, digg.com and other places have posted the 32-digits en-masse as a way of protest. They have also posted it in forms other than 32 hex digits which is the most common way to exchange it among computer programmers: as decimal numbers, in binary ones-and-zeros, "encoded" in simple encoding schemes, in english-words ("..., eight, eight, oh, cee"), etc, etc, ad naseum.
Many people, it seems, are posting it as a "Fuck you" to the MPAA, and others are getting angered that sites like digg.com are removing stories and comments that include the content. In reaction, many Digg users are posting the key as much as possible, and many say they are leaving the site forever.
Jay Adelson, the CEO of Digg.com recently posted that:
Whether you agree or disagree with the policies of the intellectual property holders and consortiums, in order for Digg to survive, it must abide by the law.Digg.com users see this as flying in the face of Digg-founder Kevin Rose's former hacker ethos. (See The Broken.)
- Jay Adelson, Digg the Blog
For what it's worth, this is utter crap, but it shows a severe weakness in copyright law. Anything that can be represented with data, anything at all, can be encoded/encrpyted on anything else, given an arbitrary coding mechanism. For instance, let us create "sabre86's stanard coding scheme": add 1 to any number. After encoding we have 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C1. Look, it's a different number! I guess it isn't a circumvention. Or is it?Later, user Mr_Icon wrote:
Everything digital is as a number (hence the name "digital").The information that the MPAA wishes to protect is now out there on the Internet, and virtually ineradicable. Not to mention that some people are reporting that the MPAA is including the key itself in the DMCA takedown notice, inadvertently publishing the information they wish to keep secure.
Circumvention software? A long number. PDFs with classified military information? Long numbers. Child porn? Long numbers. Having those illegal numbers on your hard drive will get you convicted.
But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.
If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.
- Kevin Rose, Digg.com
Here are some videos of Hang gliders taking off of Sandia Peak in New Mexico that I took this weekend.
After getting the shipping label, I shipped my Wii out on monday..and got a new one back today. They apparently just copied over my account and save files to a new Wii and sent that to me. I have to re-download the system updates and any VC games, but so far it seems good. The new Wii is noticably quieter than my old one: the old one had a weird somewhat loud "click" that would happen whenever it was reset to the Wii menu.
Yes, my Wii has a problem. It is the infamous flickering white and gray pixels problem. I talked to the support line, and they are going to repair it after I send it back to them.
Oh well. It's a bit disappointing that it has this problem so soon after it was released, but they were really good at the customer service, offering to send a brand new one right away if I didn't mind losing any virtual console games that I had downloaded. I have spent $20 on Wii points, so I decided to just have them repair my existing console and keep the few games I downloaded already.
When the problem first happened I was playing Link To the Past and there started being what looked like white and gray pixels stuck in the textures as they moved around. It later started happening in other Channels like the News and Weather, and finally I tried out a Wii game and saw the same thing, so I called Nintendo.
Jumping on the bandwagon here with my own Tumbleblog: Greg's Tumbleblog. When I think of a better name I will re-title it. Here is the RSS feed for it.
I like the idea of the Tumbleblog: "A website created in typical blog fashion, but with postings of a random and chaotic nature." Or, read Kottke for a longer take on it.
It makes sense as a way to share links, quotes, pics or other random things without the need to "compose" an entire blog post. I've added the feed for my tumbleblog to the sidebar, so you should be able to see the last 5 entries. I will hopefully update it much more frequently than this here blog itself.
Twitter: "What You And Your Friends Are Doing"
This seems like a cool website for sharing what you are doing with your friends and getting notified of what they are up to.
You can update your status online, over IM, or via a text message, and you can also receive updates about your friends through the same methods.
It's free, so go and sign up and add me as a friend.
Well, I've been duped. I thought a HDTV was a wonderful device that would show higher resolution TV shows, movies, and video games in the comfort of my own home, but I was wrong. It is a device that delivers high definition commercials straight into my brain via the optic nerves. Boy can those commercials be beautiful. I think a particular green-bottled beer has the most luscious ad I've ever seen.
We only saw the last half of the Superbowl yesterday, and none of the Superbowl ads were that great, as I understand is the prevailing common expectation. I hate ads. But as brief entertaining interludes in the football game, I guess they're not so bad, as long as they fulfill their unwritten requirement to be funny.
However, here's something to think about advertisers: The funniest ad I saw was pretty good, but I don't even remember what the product was. I think it was a can of nuts. But really, if the ad made me want to eat assorted nuts at all, which at times I want to do anyway, it didn't do much to influence which particular brand or kind of nuts I would purchase. Nuts is nuts, I say, and if I'm going to pay forth $1.59 for a bunch of nuts, I'm most likely to choose the largest package of such nuts that are available for that price. I really don't care what brand they are. You guys might want to go into a business selling a distinctive product where a memorable ad might actually influence customers to pick your product over a rival's. Nuts. And nuts are cheap. I'm sure you pay millions for your 30-seconds of high definition exposure to my eyeballs, but I have got to hope there is a smarter way of spending that money. Maybe try sending me free samples of nuts. If they are good, I will probably tell some people I see on the street that they might like to purchase your nuts. And I will phrase it thusly: "Hey you guys, you see these nuts, why don't you buy some?" Simple, concise, and it gets the point across. But I would highly recommend going into some other business.
Secondly, here's the thing: Car ads. What the hell. I know what a goddamn car driving around looks like. I also know what more than one car driving around looks like. Do we need another commercial like that? Are the cars being driven by monkeys, or clowns, or aliens, or maybe even a funny-looking guy with a funky hat? No? Then don't show me the goddamn car commercial, because I am sick to death of cars driving around on my HDTV. If I want to see cars driving around up close I'll go lie in the street. Nuts. I can't believe they would spend millions of bucks to sell me a package of mixed nuts.
I don't have much to say about the recent hair-pulling-parade in Boston, except that: Fucking people are retarded.
The guys who were arrested for making the lite-brite signs of Ignignokt basically had the best press conference I've ever heard: AlterNet: Blogs: Video: Update: Cartoon Marketing Ignites Bomb Scare [VIDEO]. All they talked about was hairstyles from the 70s.
Here's an idea for the Wii that I wish that Nintendo had done, and hope that someday they may still do: allow NES and other 8- to 16-bit virtual console games bought on your Wii to be transfered to the Nintendo DS. This seems like a no-brainer to me! What better than having the original Zelda/Mario/other NES games on your portable DS system to cart around when you leave the house? When you come back you should be able to somehow "synch" your saved games back to your Wii console and resume playing on your TV. It would be great. Please, Nintendo, hear me!
So far I've downloaded Super Mario Bros and the original Legend of Zelda from the Wii Virtual Console, and it has been well worth the $10 total.
It's one thing to play those games on an emulator where you can easily cheat using save states and you can easily look up things on the web about how to beat some part of Zelda, but it's different when you treat them as they were played originally, and using a genuine controller and a TV.
I'm biding my remaining 1000 Wii points until something really attractive comes along. I've been considering getting Mario 64, another great game that of course I already paid for once on N64, but which I've never really been able to emulate satisfactorily. I hope they get Goldeneye as well. As tempting as it is I may bypass the original Metroid. That game I've played via emulation enough times that I really don't need to play it again. Super Metroid however...
If you are skitterish about the price (as I was at first), think of it like this: you can get ten NES games for the price of one new Wii game. Games as good (and classic) as Zelda, and Mario, are well worth it. If they can bulk out the lineup I'd be happy to drop $50 on good Virtual Console games.
Ok, fine here's the list of old games I really want to get on the virtual console: Super Metroid, Goldeneye, Mario 64, Zelda: A Link To The Past, Zelda: Majora's Mask, Gain Ground (SEGA), Zillion (SEGA), and probably others.
Menomena's new album "Friend and Foe" is available, and you can go to their site and stream the whole thing.
I woke up this morning with the song "First Day On a New Planet" by Yatsura going through my head. Here is that song.
George R. R. Martin's *A Song of Ice and Fire* Series is going to be made into a show for HBO.
Yes! That would be awesome, especially since one guy who did Rome is going to be involved. I hope it turns out well. Unfortunately, they had this quote: "Martin has nearly finished the fifth installment, but won't complete the seven-book cycle until 2011." I'm going to be well into my 30s when I finish the series. Damn!
HDTV or not...
I want to buy an HDTV, and the prices have gotten pretty reasonable at Costco. You can get a 32-inch for around $600-700 if you don't mind the no-name brand, and the Sharp Aquos can be found for a good price as well.
I was kind of hoping that the Apple TV appliance would do a lot more (e.g. PVR features), and that it would be one more reason to go with HDTV, but unfortunately I don't see it as being very useful for me. I don't want to buy either movies or TV shows through iTunes since I can get higher resolution TV episodes off of bittorrent, and I pay for Netflix to get movies. The Apple TV doesn't even play DVDs or let you rip them.
What I want is something in a set-top form factor to replace the old MythTV box that I used to have. And that it doesn't cost much money. I suppose my titanium powerbook hooked up with VGA or DVI will have to do. I need to figure out a remote-control for it.
Tricia gave me a wall-mounted fish bubble for christmas, so I finally got a fish for it.
Here's a picture of him with a nice super-mario wallpaper I made for him.
