Category: tech

Talk about software, hardware, electronics, and a myriad of other sex-repellent topics.

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realize the model


With this baby, I wonder: Older babies coo and giggle when you play with them; smiling and laughing in response to attention. I wonder if Keaton’s doing the same thing inside, but her little face and vocal cords haven’t learned the motions yet. I play with her like she can: zooming my face close to hers until our noses touch with a loud “boop” sound (don’t ask me what “boop” means, I think it’s kind of onomatopoetic for the kind of soft fleshy impact sound two noses may make, in the exaggerated children’s-cartoon world of sound). Even though her little face doesn’t give away anything, I like to think, on the inside, she’s feeling those same feelings that will later get translated into smiles and giggles – when the proper neural pathways connect the emotions and expressions. So, I forgive her for not visibly reacting – at least for now.

Uh-oh my leet pirate friends, looks like the digital-pirate spotlight is beginning to shift in dangerous directions. In an article in the Boston Globe, the writer examines an “obscure data network technology” called Usenet. Hint: this is what you’ll see me refer to on sounds familiar as “absmi,” “the groups,” “binaries,” or “the newsies.” It’s an interesting article, with some relatively insightful commentary on the day-to-day of the newsies:

The Usenet has long been one of the primary sources for the illegal files found through peer-to-peer services… [it] also has long been a center for illegal file swapping. …huge numbers of illegal video and music files are traded every day on the Usenet. [It] offers the downloader an extra measure of privacy, because the Internet address of his machine is known only to the Usenet server and can’t be intercepted by investigators.

Hollywood’s attack on the Usenet companies [is like]… ”a strategic strike to cut off the supply, like a drug cartel. This is top of the food chain stuff.”

They even have some ideas about news users, and what’s said to be a rise in Usenet usage:

”A common misconception among people who use networks like these is that they’re in a group that is above the law,” said movie industry association spokeswoman Kori Bernards. Indeed, she said the popularity of the Usenet as a place to swap illegal files has grown recently, perhaps because the music and movie industries have successfully shut down several distributors of peer-to-peer software, the most popular means of file swapping.

It’s obvious the article isn’t written by a binaries guru, as there are some misconceptions – but it is somewhat worrisome that terms like NZB, Usenet, and piracy are all being used in mainstream media articles.

Until now, it’s been relatively difficult for ordinary Internet users to get at illegal Usenet files. They aren’t indexed by Google, and downloading them is often a slow, painstaking process.

Usenet trading of illegal files hasn’t become a a large-scale problem yet. One reason is that NZB downloading isn’t free. The NZB search sites charge membership fees… By contrast, peer-to-peer systems are free.

Read the entire article if you’re inclined (if boston.com won’t let you access the article, try using one of these bugmenot logins).

Slow? Painstaking? Not free? Fingers crossed everyone; let’s hope they don’t find out. You take my newsies and I may be forced to go straight… the horror, the horror. When the story hit the front page of digg.com this past weekend, the digg user comments echoed my thoughts above. Some of my favorites:

First rule of Usenet is you do not talk about Usenet.

Ok, WHO TALKED?

waves fingers
You didn’t see any USENET.
disappears into the shadows

this is not the warez network you are looking for, move along

Never heard of it. Move along, nothing to see here.

But, of all the comments, one stood out as particularly insightful to me:

this is crap. why can’t the industry understand. I have “a friend” who uses newsgroups. “He” pays a subscription fee to a nzb provider, and pays a monthly fee for access to “the usenet”. now what does this mean? it means that even people who are called pirates are WILLING to pay for a service that provides reasonable pricing and CHOICE. driven by demand and request, and not dominated by a drm technology that impedes the ability to listen or watch content on the medium of their choice. these stupid organizations need to take a lesson away from their so called “discovery” of usenet. idiots, realize the model and present a compelling alternative, and you get subscribers.

I couldn’t have said it better myself, seeing as I also have a “friend” who follows the same model. What a great comment. If someone is willing to pay ~$15/month for unlimited access to illegal binaries, wouldn’t stand to reason that they may be willing to pay the same for unlimited access to legal files? Sure, there’d need to be a huge selection, and they’d need to be DRM free – but the model is already working, just illegally. Flip that, folks, take that and do it within the boundaries of the law – and you’re a rich man. Too bad there are so many middle men and so much payola in the music business that it’s unlikely a Utopian agreement like that will ever be able to happen.

Everybody catch England’s newest hitmakers on Saturday Night Live this weekend? Coolfer has some interesting commentary about the Arctic Monkeys craze (which I’ve written about previously here and here), and how their US success is much slower-coming, if coming at all, than it is across the pond. This band is more hyped than anything I can recently remember. Every time I hear something new about them, I pull out the album again… in an attempt to hear the greatness so many extol. I plan to check it out again tomorrow, just to be sure. In related news, The Four Stages of the Arctic Monkeys:

Goodnight.

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it all starts somewhere

FetusWatch 2006 - Judgement Day
We’ve arrived. The due-date: Judgement Day, the Reckoning.

Sitting at home early Tuesday afternoon, cellphone earbud and microphone dangling from my ear as I sit, muted, on a conference call. I had a dentist appointment over lunch, and decided to work from home the remainder of the day. Not because my numb mouth was too great a discomfort, no, more because I just wanted to be home – wanted to be close to any potential action, wanted to be near Sharaun. I feel like, if I can just be home, something might happen. Anyway, prepare for an entry having almost nothing to do with the fact that today is my daughter’s predicted due-date.

Does anyone else remember Rocketbals? Oh man, I so remember Rocketbals. Back in 5th grade, my elementary school went through something of a Rocketbal craze. Not unlike the run on Yo-Yos that happens in the days after the Duncan man comes to school, someone brought a Rocketbal to school one day and next week the skies above the playgrounds were thick with the things. I’ve always thought they were the coolest toys, and so simple: a small rubber ball (slightly bigger than a golf ball) with a loop of colored surgical tubing inserted through the center and glued to the thing. You’d put your thump in the loop, pull back on the ball, and let the thing fly. They’d go hundreds of feet into the air, and, with practice, you could actually get pretty good at aiming and playing catch with them. I’m assuming they went the way of the Jart – being banned as too dangerous or something – but I’ve always rued the day mine was swallowed by a storm drain. Thinking about it the other day, I decided to long onto the dub-dub-dub and do some hunting. Turns out, that great finder of lost childhood memories: Ebay, had one available. I immediately put in a bid and am anxiously awaiting slinging one of these things around again. Seems like I’m not the only one who’s searching for one, I mean, they were dang cool… when I get one I’ll post of video of it kicking ass – so you can visualize just how dang cool.

Note: After writing the above some time ago – I discovered that the original Rocketbal company went out of business, and a new company bought the patent – reissuing my childhood favorite as a dog toy, the Go-Frrr. When I found the site linked in that last sentence, I immediately remembered seeing one of these Go-Frrrs across the street at the local pet emporium. Anyway, I ran right over and bought one. I don’t care if you call it a Rocketbal or a Go-Frrr – these things are freakin’ awesome.

Ahh.. beloved memories.
Oh man I can’t wait.

I know it seems like an odd thing to do, but I’ve decided I’m going to try and cultivate my own yeast – for no other reason than just to see if I can. For a long time, I’ve been fascinated with the idea of food-sources – meaning I’ve often wondered about our intrepid pioneer ancestors and their ancestors before them, and how exactly they managed to make the basic foodstuffs we today are so accustomed to picking up at any corner store. Bread, especially, has been an item of wonder – being the ultimate staple it is. Sounds simple, wheat for flour, some water, and a leavening agent. Oh, but that dang “leavening agent.” I’ve brewed on this all before, and had some success using the ultimate resource of the internet to satisfy my curiosity – but I’ve long wanted to actually put some of that learning into practice.

Anyway, following these excellent instructions – I’ve begun the process of getting my own “starter” going. This basically involves mixing some flour and water and letting it sit until it “catches” the wild yeast and bacterium that in the flour to begin with as well as floating around in the atmosphere. Once it’s nice and “soured,” you’ve got a natural yeasty “soup” that can be mixed with plain dough as the leavener – it’s a base material that you use to make your breadstuffs. Amazing that the process is so simple… dough left out will sour, and grow bacteria and yeast – at that point, rather than throw it away, you mix the bubbly froth into virgin dough to infect it and make it rise. Voila, you’ve got homemade yeast. You can do the same thing with water and starch, like water that potatoes or pasta have been boiled in. Making yeast is as simple as providing a nice home for the microscopic beasties that are yeast.

I’ll make sure and keep you updated on the progress of my starter, like it matters. However, the natural extension of this experiment is to take it out of my middle-class, mortgaged-to-the-hilt kitchen and make it more challenging. The end-goal here is to understand how Joe Ancienttimes made his bread, with only what he had around him. And, because it’s a fantasy of mine, the question I’m truly after boils down to: “Stranded on a desert island, could I make my own bread?” That one, and it’s cousin-question where the desert island is replaced by a post-apocalyptic barren landscape, are the real reason I want this knowledge. You’d need some kind of material suitable for transforming into flour: wheat, rice, potatoes, corn, rye, nuts, etc., some water, and some time – salt would help, but is not 100% necessary.

That’s relatively simple, right? So, I’m on an island – I find some nuts, or some cattails or some reedy thrushy things, boil some pre-salted seawater to remove any living nasties – and I’m good to go. Ferment-up some starter and get to baking on hot stones left in the fire. Soon I’d be making Island Flapjacks with coconut syrup. If you find this at all interesting, check out this Cree Indian recipe for Bannock (traditional Indian cake), made with corn, flour from cattails, and wood ashes as baking soda. Imagine the process by which people came to try putting the ashes of last night’s fire into the next day’s food. Awesome.

During this whole process, I learned that all bread was once sourdough – although it likely wasn’t called that because not all of it was actually “sour.” I was getting hung up on the term “sourdough,” which true bread aficionados take to mean any starter created using the above process – not to mean bread that tastes sour, like the San Francisco stuff. All “yeasts” of old were produced this way, and then dried and stored for later use. Modern commercial yeast are laboratory-bred for fast-action and “neutral” flavor – while bread flavor of yore was based on several different factors, including starter cultivating temperatures and mixtures, and of course the breeds of yeast and bacteria that were floating around the region from whence they came. Once you got a starter that made good bread, you held onto it – drying it and using it forever and ever to reproduce the flavor. Yeah, I’m kind of skipping over things like salt-rising bread and the non-leavened breads – but my focus today is on “making yeast.” Hey, it may be boring to you, but to me it’s totally amazing to think of old world folks arriving at these processes via trial and error. But, let’s move on anyway…

Oh my God, I seriously wrote about bread and Rocketbals. Sorry Keaton, daddy loves you.

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the rumpus room

It's where I want to be.
Birth-Eve. 24hrs and it’ll be the day the doctor predicted as our daughter would arrive. I know, due dates mean little, but it’s a psychological milestone at least. This weekend, Sharaun took the advice of a friend and went to get a pedicure, so her toes are now neat and pink – the idea being that at least they’ll be more pleasant to look at for the umpteen hours where they’ll be front and center during labor. And, on top of those pink toes, she affixed little stick-on letters, one per piggie, that spell: “YOU CAN DO IT.” Y’know, the power of positive thinking and whatnot, plus – it shows she’s got a fine sense of humor about the whole deal. I’m more ready than ever, in fact I’m downright impatient… wanting pretty badly to just be able to hold her in my hands, covered in vagina-juice or not.

Monday was a vacation day, Presidents Day here in the States, and it was a gorgeous one. The rains of the weekend-proper ended and we had a crisp clear day, colder than normal but with a nice warm sunshine to help balance it. I spent the morning working around the house, doing more nesting. Cleaning bathrooms, hanging new shelves, and putting the baby swing-thing together. For that last task, I moved the truck out of the garage to gain some working room, put some Otis Redding on the stereo, and puffed my pipe as a I pieced the thing together. I love being able to smoke my pipe while I work. The other day, I even puffed it as a mowed the lawn – people driving by must’ve thought they’d time-warped back to the 50s to see me. One day, I’ll have a real man’s “den,” with a large standing floor globe, shelves of leather-bound books to match the leather sofas, and a pipestand next to my chair, again, leather with brass brad seams. Isn’t that every man’s dream? A cloistered room with a hunting lodge vibe, warm fireplace and maybe bearskin rug? Yeah… one day…

Recently, I discovered the excellent Cheetah line of CD/DVD burning apps – which are free. Up until now, I’ve been using CDBurnerXP Pro and BurnAtOnce, both of which are good – but the Cheetah apps do a better job of integrating users’ most frequent burning and copying tasks into one nice UI. So, if the trial version of Nero that came with your new laptop is expired, check them out here, good stuff.

Goodnight.

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geezer in training

FetusWatch 2006
One week to go! That’s one measly week, or seven even measlier days. Funny how havin’ babies makes you change the way you think about things. I was watching the Simpsons at lunch yesterday, and was aware for the first time that, in the opening theme, where Maggie’s sitting in her carseat turning a fake steering wheel, she’s doing so from the front seat. For a baby Maggie’s age, it’s a cardinal sin of modern parenting to ride in a front-facing carseat – let alone one in the front seat next to mom. See, that and my constant yelling a the local “whipersnappers” to “tone down their hootenanny” show me I’m already a geezer in training.

Heard about this new “Digital Wax” program via Coolfer, and was pretty excited. It’s an auspicious effort to digitize rare, out-of-print, and perhaps previously unreleased vinyl. I’m not too interested in the initial lineup of labels, seems kinda underground punk and hip-hop based – but if they every make it around to some of the stuff that was released in the 60s and never again after that, I’d turn my head. I guess it may be doubtful though, that any major/major-owned label with potentially marketable unreleased stuff would license it for the project when they could skip the middle-man and digitize/sell the stuff themselves. Either way, the audiophilia associated with the press release is certainly boner-inducing:

The system, almost eight months in the making, offers Orchard labels a digitization platform that is unrivalled and unlikely to be exceeded in the future. A modified Simon Yorke S7 turntable fitted with a Kondo IO-j cartridge feeds the esoteric, rare, expensive and exquisite Kondo M1000 preamplifier, via a Kondo KSL SFz step-up transformer. This signal is in turn converted via an audiophile A-D 2 channel converter, and archived in DSL. All wiring is Kondo age-annealed 99.9999% pure silver wire, and all components are isolated by Vibraplane active isolation platforms.

Falling asleep, goodnight.

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the two iPod family

Happy Valentines Day, nerds.
Happy Valentines Day peoples. I hate Valentines Day… I really do. But, if I get a nice dinner with my wife and unborn child out of it, I figure I about break even.

A loooong time ago, I signed up for a website that was all the rage at the time, a website called freeipods.com. I linked the site on the blog, and also added a link to my completely old and busted, yet still highly trafficked, ? and the Mysterians page. When my free iPod didn’t materialize in a month or so, I lost interest in the whole deal – it seemed it took too long to get five people to sign up and jump through all the required hoops. Every few months or so, I’d log on to freeipods.com to see if I’d perhaps accumulated enough folks – but despite nearly fifty people registering, only four of them had completed their offers. Then, the other night – I got an e-mail at my hotmail address saying one of my referrals had completed an offer. I logged on to freeipods for the 1st time in several months and, sure enough, was greeted with the the free iPod screen. So, if all goes well, Sharaun and I will have gone from iPodless to a two iPod family in the course of a month – both free. There was some rigmarole about them needing 7-10 days to “verify” that all my referrals were real and did whatever they’re supposed to – but if that all goes off without a hitch, my 60GB video will get a new little 30GB video sister to play with. I’m so pumped.

Watching the news in between episodes of the Simpsons Monday night, the 10 day extended forecast came on – and I realized that Keaton’s due-date was on the screen. You know it’s getting close when the weatherlady is saying it’ll be cool and partly cloudy on the day your daughter is set to be born. I wonder, y’know, if she’ll actually come on the due-date. I wonder what that percentage is… babies born on their Dr.-pronounced due-dates? I never thought the last few days would be so excruciating – being able to see that little baby squirm and move under the seemingly paper-thin skin on my wife’s swollen belly, I know she’s all crunched up inside, she must be ready to get out and stretch her legs, right? I know she hears my muffled voice from behind all that blood and goo and thinks, “I can’t wait till the day I get to met this handsome lumberjack of a man, the timbre of his voice alone tells me he’ll be a good dad.”

Somehow I came across a remastered/re-released copy of a 1968 album by a British group called Love Sculpture. Now, I’d never heard of Love Sculpture, but allmusic tells me that the one and only Dave Edmunds was a member, and, man… does this record cook. I mean, outstanding driving guitar-based blues rock. Edmunds showing on this album is simply brilliant, sharp and slick and a pleasure to listen to. If you ever get a chance, pick up this disc – or stop by my house with a USB key and I’ll “loan” it to under the Fair Use clause, with explicit instructions for you to delete it to NSA standards 72 hours later. That way, you can hear some great music, and we’ll all be cool under the watchful eyes of the RIAA – the music lover’s best friend and compulsory conscience.

‘Night.

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this nest has wheels

Who needs it?
Today I was proud of myself. We’re moving floors at work, so I spent all yesterday packing boxes, and we were told not to come in today – but to work from home. Additionally, I had an optometrist appointment at 2pm and needed to drop my truck off at the stereo place before that at 1pm. To make matters worse, I had an important conference call I needed to be on between those very times. How to manage this? Here’s what I came up with: Throw the bike in the back of the truck; drive up to the stereo place and drop off the truck; ride the bike up to the Starbucks near the optometrist and take the conference call while enjoying ‘bucks’ most secret beverage; meeting’s over at 2pm, walk the 30ft to do the optometrist thing; hop back on the bike and go get the truck. Well, it seemed brilliant to me, and it worked, too.

I think I liked the plan so much because it didn’t rely on a vehicle to convey me. Bear with me for an aside here, but, I work with several folks who live in Shanghai, PRC. A good cut of these folks don’t own a vehicle. They are too expensive, not practical on the city’s congested motorways, or the prefer pubic transit. When I tell them that, between Sharaun and I, we have a vehicle for each of us – it only reaffirms their view of America as a country full of rich people. Knowing people who don’t own cars and live perfectly normal lives, I get a kick out of realizing I’m not really that reliant on the beast. Yeah, not using the car made me happy. That, and I was able to utilize the cellphone to take my meeting. I love technology, it amazes me how it’s changed the way I do some things. For instance, my cellphone has replaced the following: my alarm clock, datebook, calendar, land-line home phone, and Post-It notes.

At baby class, our instructor talks a lot about the urge to “nest” that some couples feel before the baby comes. She talks about women wanting to clean, vacuum, and generally prepare the house for their new arrival. I can understand the preparing part, at least having the necessities on hand – but I’ve yet to see Sharaun go all cleaning jihad. Me, however, I think I just had my first “nesting” freak-out. Yeah. You wanna know what nesting is? Nesting is realizing your truck is so dirty and nasty that it’s not fit to ferry your child. It’s spending four hours in the garage painstakingly cleaning the interior and carpets, wanting to remove every smudge and speck of dust.

When I was in Shanghai, one of the $2 DVDs I bought was Jim Henson’s 1982 classic, The Dark Crystal. I absolutely loved the movie when I was a kid, it was the perfect mix of magic and fantasy – things I didn’t even realize I loved yet. Then yesterday, I stumble on this news online – they are making a sequel! I know most folks won’t care, but I sure was pumped. I mean, you know what they say: the darker the crystal, the sweeter the juice… or something like that.

In blogging news, using those larger images in last week’s Gimp-a-day baby theme, I decided that I prefer them to the tiny 100px I’ve been using for years now. Maybe it’s because I recently switched to a smaller screen resolution, so the bigger images don’t fill the entry as much – but whatever the reason, I’m stickin’ with ’em. Live with it.

Until tomorrow, love ya.

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t-minus one month and counting

FetusWatch 2006, Day 1
Some may think a month out is perhaps too soon to start my regular baby coverage, not me – I’m gonna do this in true media-blitz fashion. And, keeping with that blitziness, coverage will approach a fever pitch as the denouement approaches. Plus, I figured, I made the fancy news-style banner (thanks Inkscape!), I might as well kick off the feature. I’m not saying we’ll be all single-topic now, but you can expect the baby-talk to increase.

At the request of the to-be-hitched Ben and Suzy, Sharaun and I rambled up to some sawdust-burg set deep in the old-gold Northern Californian foothills Saturday evening. The place they’ve chosen to nup’ at has some “promotional” deal where the couple-to-be can come up and stay and drink for free, and, what’s more, they’re encouraged to bring friends. Not being ones to pass up an offer of such caliber, we gladly accepted and hit the road. It was a nice night, filled, for me at least, with wine and beer and some bad-judgement cigarettes I bought from the center console of some girl’s Ford… really, she had two-inch white heels on and sold me a pack of cigarettes out of her truck. Had I not switched to water around 1am, things could’ve been much worse – it was a swirly, headachey sleep as it was. It was a great night though, haven’t done that much unbridled imbibing in a while.

And, in iPod news, I spent some time this weekend importing album artwork into my library using the iTunes Art Importer, which works really well, if slow. Every time that little picture of the album comes up with a song, I feel a smile spread across my face. This thing, this “iPod,” was invented solely for me; I’ve been waiting for it since I was 12 and didn’t even know it – how I lived this long without it, I have no idea. I’ve also been slowly wading through the library and making sure the genre tags for all the tracks are correct. I never cared about tags that much before, but with the ability to shuffle within or listen to a particular genre – it’s become more important. Want a grunge mix? Blues, maybe soul? Fire it up.

No more writing. Goodnight.