Uncompatible Systems

Mon, 20 Nov 2006

Cranksgiving 2006

I crashed. I keep listening to In the drugs by Low. Yea Vicodin.

posted at: 20:18 | path: /cycling | permanent link to this entry

Mon, 13 Nov 2006

I Just Cut A New Record With My Band

Plans are to tour with The Beatles sometime in 2007

posted at: 00:17 | path: /music | permanent link to this entry

Tue, 07 Nov 2006

Good Coverage Of Banksy

This gal Michelle Saturn on Flickr got some good photos of the Banksy exhibit in LA.

posted at: 10:11 | path: /art | permanent link to this entry

Tue, 31 Oct 2006

Brad Will, A Close Friend of Mine Was Murdered By The Mexican Government

The day before Brad boarded a plane from New York to Mexico we sat in a room together preparing his laptop computer for travel. He was enthuiastic about covering this struggle of a people in a desperate situation, which he said needed coverage because "the millitary police are camped outside of town."

Brad was one of the first friends I met when I moved to New York in the spring of 2001. I discovered the Indymedia center on 29th street and showed up for a meeting. Brad was there whenever I was. He showed me around Indymedia and around the city. He was part of exactly what I was looking for. A community outside of society that created their own. Squatters, infoshops, bikes, zines, newspapers, radio stations, documentaries, bands, artists. He lived his commitment every moment I was with him. I didn't understand it at first but the more I lived with him, the more it became real. Shortly after the introduction to his world, I knew I couldn't settle for anything less.

He gave me the courage to stand in the front lines of my first street protest. He gave me the courage to get on a bike and ride through city streets celebrating nothing more than the fact that we can do it. He showed me the gardens built from nothing on the Lower East Side.

I'll miss you forever. You were too young. The last time I saw you I could tell you had grown into a person truly original and your life was just beginning.

Here's the back story, which I'd rather not get into cause it's hard enough writing this.

posted at: 11:47 | path: /war | permanent link to this entry

Sun, 29 Oct 2006

12th Annual Halloween Alleycat

OMG. I raced through manhattan and brooklyn in the famous halloween alleycat. Didn't do so bad, though the results will probably be late. They didn't even do prizes at the after party. The race was amazing. I kept up with the second pack off the start and despite some getting lost, dropping others and minor bonking we finished. Heidi won first gal and Ken took 1st place overall.

posted at: 10:23 | path: /cycling | permanent link to this entry

Thu, 28 Sep 2006

Personal Kyoto Protocol Goal Meter

Enter your ConEd account number and this graph will tell you how you measure up to others in your area. After 12 months of data it'll tell you how close you came to what you would be required to consume with the Kyoto Protocol. Yea! Use less power! Kill yr idols!

P.S. Here's mine. No idea what kind of parties I was having in the apartment in May.

posted at: 19:58 | path: /green | permanent link to this entry

Wed, 27 Sep 2006

Keeping Multiple iTunes Libraries

So now that iTunes almost does everything I would like, I'm using it. Dark Side? Maybe but as long as I can keep using ogg/vorbis I'm happy. Here's the current challenge. How can I keep multiple iTunes libraries for different locations? The goal is to take my laptop with me and never have a busted link in iTunes since the bulk of my 50 gig music collection is on a file server at home.

I don't have a solution yet but I do know that there is only one file responsible for keeping the whole index in order. By default it lives in ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music Library.xml. Since it's XML, it would be possible to do some text parsing and make slight changes to the library and have multiple databases. Changing locations would be as simple as moving a file and replacing it with another. Of course the Mac wankers would want some fancy GUI with a plastic button that was labled "change library". Maybe some day but for now I'll keep you posted on the shell script I hack together.

posted at: 13:02 | path: /software | permanent link to this entry

Sat, 23 Sep 2006

Not Since Aphex Twin's Windowlicker

Has there been a video as funny in it's objectification of ass and titties. Dougal Wilson has taken Benny Benassi's "classic foam party club anthem", not my words, and set it to slippery bitches with power tools! Did I just say slippery bitches? Holy shit. That's the only way I can describe his music video.

posted at: 19:21 | path: /music | permanent link to this entry

Wed, 20 Sep 2006

Heart Breaking Prose

A gal I went to college with wrote an anti-suicide letter on her blog. It made me cry. E, your feelings are not in vain.

posted at: 17:41 | path: /antioch | permanent link to this entry

Boot Time As New Benchmark for Desktops

Since I have "switched" to OS X until Ubuntu patches their kernel for some of my laptop's hardware, I have noticed one thing above all in the performance arena. OS X's boot time is un-fucking-believable. This is compared to Ubuntu 6's boot time on the same laptop.

Booting has been a big topic of discussion lately. It seems that the "overall desktop experience" now depends on it. OS X must be doing some kind of on-demand init thing because the system gets from the bootloader to a login screen in literally 5 seconds.

My second favorite OS X boot feature is unattended suspend to RAM. I have to remove the battery often since the serial number is under it. I rarely turn the laptop off so I'm pulling it's last bit of power when I do this. Somehow someway, OS X knows to take that last bit of power, throw the contents of RAM onto the disk and power down. The laptop needs a cold boot but when it gets to the OS X loader, it will notice this little collection of RAM on the disk and throw it back into RAM. The results are the screen and programs are exactly where I left off.

Pimping OS X sucks. Unfortunatley, these kinds of power management issues are a constant problem with the Linux kernel on some kinds of hardware.

posted at: 17:18 | path: /debian | permanent link to this entry

Mon, 18 Sep 2006

Evil Podcast Updated

Add it or press that update button.

Added the rest of the Made Out of Babies record, a Rilo Kiley song and a Talking Heads song.

Mind you, this isn't an example of my musical taste, just an example of music I like that happens to be available online exclusively through Apple. I'm not posting anything I buy through emusic, allofmp3, share with friends or download from a band's web site.

posted at: 13:55 | path: /evil | permanent link to this entry

Sat, 16 Sep 2006

Dude, it's like wearing a raincoat in the shower

This post is totally stupid but I can't resist. I searched google for a keyword on an old blog of mine and found a really funny result. It's amazing how sex can be so boring if treated right.

posted at: 05:03 | path: /sex | permanent link to this entry

Fri, 15 Sep 2006

iTunes Music Store Booty!

As a reaction to the DRM on my iTunes Music Store purchases, I will provide a podcast of all the music I buy from iTunes until Apple or the artists tell me to stop. The idea is simple, I buy music, remove the DRM, you download that music for free. The fun part is subscribing to this podcast in iTunes But take note, the files I have cleaned are in the non-standard ogg/vorbis format. If you use iTunes, you will have to first install the xiph.org vorbis plugin for iTunes. After that everything should work as normal.

Have fun!

posted at: 16:42 | path: /evil | permanent link to this entry

Tue, 12 Sep 2006

Using Apple Products To Remove Apple's DRM

I'm a vocal opponent of any kind of DRM. But yesterday I discovered a wonderful band named Made Out Of Babies. I emailed them about buying their music online because I couldn't find it anywhere except through the iTunes Music Store. Sure enough, Neurot Recordings has an exclusive with Apple. So...I signed up for an account and paid them 99 cents to download the first track off their album.

Before I start with the details. I would like you to download this track for free from my web site. It is in the unrestricted ogg/vorbis format, despite the original format being Apple's "protected mpeg-4". And now...the irony.

I used Apple products to remove the restrictions from Apple's restricted format. Step by step:

1. Open iMovie HD and create a new project
2. Select the Media window and the Audio tab within that window
3. Find your restricted song in the Library section of the top pane
4. Drag the song to the bottom of the timeline
5. Select the Photos tab within the Media window
6. Drag a photo to the top of the timeline
7. On the timeline, slide the playhead to the end of the audio waveform and note the length of the song
8. Deselect "Ken Burns Effect" in the photo settings and make the length of the photo the length of the song
9. Click on the Share menu and select "Share".
10. Pull down the tab next to "Compress movie for" and select "Expert Settings"
11. Click Share
12. Pull down the tab next to "Export" and select "Sound to Wave"
13. Click Options
14. Pull down the tab next to "Rate" and select "44.100"
15. Click OK and click Save

You will now have a DRM free version of the song you purchased from the iTunes Music Store. It will be in the uncompressed WAV format, which you can compress using other non-restricted formats like mp3 or ogg/vorbis.

Granted, this is not a practical implementation for cleaning large amounts of ITMS purchases. Personally I would recommend not buying music through this retailer. Remember though, if you happened to buy some music in that format and would like to share it with a friend, or use it with portable players other than the iPod, this is one solution. The other (admittedly more simple) way is to burn the files to a CD-RW and rip that to another format.

posted at: 18:30 | path: /hacking | permanent link to this entry

Thu, 07 Sep 2006

Fun Things I did

Enough of the stupid burning man notes! Despite what you may think I really enjoyed myself. Each link under the picture is a video of the most fun things.

Flaming Lotus Girrrl's serpent	Riding on the back of Vector
Jesus kicking ass while being crucified	Plastic chimes with bling
Dust devils coming from the burning man

posted at: 22:49 | path: /burningman | permanent link to this entry

More Burning Man Notes

The link in my last post was some criticism of the event. To elaborate, Black Rock City is a city, but it's only one because people pay an entrance fee upwards of $200 and truck the city over the Sierra Nevada mountains in a motor vehical. It's an experiment in community that depends on the state.

But once in the city, there are lots of thing you would expect. A post office, toilets, roads with street signs and lanterns, a visitors center, a store to buy ice and even a cafe. This is the adventure. Just walking around the city as one would in any other more perminant place. It's not a rock concert or art gallery or theater or rave or bar, it's all of these things.

Procuring a bike is easy. There's a community bike rack. There is also a person in Gerlach, the closest town that will reclaim bikes and sell them for very cheap the next year. The playa is terrible for bikes. If you bring a good one, expect to have to remove the front chain rings, rear cassette, derailleur, cranks and indexed shifters. If not there will be a fine corosive dust rubbing on the metal.

So what's it look like out there? I took two panoramas.

posted at: 22:08 | path: /burningman | permanent link to this entry

Treehugger Sums Up My Feelings About Conservation At Burning Man

The devil's in the details. I noticed each point made in the article. The lack of solar and bulk of diesel generators was astounding. Fortunately, the LLC that runs the event is very transpearant about their finances.

posted at: 14:47 | path: /burningman | permanent link to this entry

Tue, 05 Sep 2006

It's Hot In The Desert

It was impossible to sleep past 10AM. The sun is directly pointed at my tent and there are no clouds to absorb the heat. There is zero moisture in the air. Yea! Leaving the tent makes it feel cooler but there's no shade, so walking around becomes extremely uncomfortable after a few minutes. Opening my eyes for more than a few seconds at a time was very painful due to the intense sun reflecting off the white playa. Take that eyelids! Goggles or polarized sunglasses are the only way to see for a prolonged time.

If you've ever met someone who's really into burning man, they will constantly rail on and on about The Playa. WTF is the playa, I wondered. Well, obviously it's a beach, but this version of "the playa" looks like white sand without a drop of water in sight. Turns out it's a real word for a type of alkali dust on a dry lake bed. The Playa is relentless. It will dry you and cover you in a white film at the slightest touch. I dropped my camera about 2 feet onto it and it took compressed air and a thin metal pick to get the lens to work again. If you touch water to playa, it becomes a dark yellow mud and drys almost instantly in the daytime.

I immediately began to think about survival in conditions like this. I wasn't officially camping with death guild, so I brought all my own supplies. Each drop of water need be accounted for, each ration and calorie is critical if you want to do more than sit in borrowed shade and piss off your neighbors. Pants, boots and even long sleeves can be very good if they are breathable. You'll get sweaty but whatever. The hippies with no clothes on must all go home hurting with sun burns on their ass, ankles and eyelids. A hat and goggles are required for any activity that involves looking around.

posted at: 17:36 | path: /burningman | permanent link to this entry

Burning Man. The Event, Logistics and Orientation.

There were many moments of specialness but whatever, this isn't trying to be another stupid "oh, burning man was so great, you'll never understand" story. I'll try and illustrate what made it special for me in a series of smaller posts in place of one big one.

From San Francisco the drive took about 6 hours. It's a straight shot over the Sierra Nevada mountains to Reno, then it's a spooky trek for another hour and a half through dusty desert roads with cattle crossing signs.

Arriving at night is very disorienting. The entrance is just a dusty road with some wooden lamp posts. The only sign telling you where to go is a spray painted piece of plywood. Nothing professional looking. The camp ground is a big circle with roads along the vertexes. The radial lines follow clock positions (12:00, 3:00, 6:00, 9:00) and the diameter lines are words (fear, anxious, hope, eager). The center of the circle is the man and his platform. The ring closest to the center is called the esplanade and is where I camped.

Since it was 1AM when we parked, there wasn't much activity and it was very dark. I walked out onto the esplanade and shot a 360 degree video to get my bearings.

I was astounded at the amount of electricity people bring with them. This is the middle of the desert with no public utilities or telephone service. There is some solar but the bulk of the power is from diesel tanks and generators. The smart people run their generators during the day to charge batteries to use at night.

I drank a few beers at the camp bar and went to bed, not really knowing what will happen in the morning.

posted at: 16:00 | path: /burningman | permanent link to this entry

Mon, 04 Sep 2006

I Went To Burning Man

Among other things, I rode on a car named Vector, fought in thunderdome and split my head open, and saw some amazing art (I'll be posting photos shortly, when I get the camera back).

So...burning man is not just for hippies and ravers. It was actually started by some really cool people who are into the desert and building impossible things with engines and pedals.

There's also lots of fire.

posted at: 21:21 | path: /art | permanent link to this entry

Thu, 17 Aug 2006

Yummy! Hummers in a happy meal!

Over at Ronald McHummer you can make your own McDonald's sign! Sweeeettt. Fucking with the clown has been dangerous in the past, what with their expert lawyers and prestine corporate image and all. Fuck that. I made a sign.

posted at: 16:37 | path: /goofy | permanent link to this entry

Thu, 10 Aug 2006

My First Alley Cat Race

Was called Coney Island or Bust. It was amazing. What you might notice is that I'm not listed in the top 15. Well, that's to be expected. It was my first and I had no idea what I was up against. In the end, I finished somewhere reasonable (like the top 20 maybe) and left with some pulled calf muscles and brusies from crashing into a fence coming off the Manhattan Bridge.

Since I'm new at this, I'll try and explain what a new york alleycat is like. It's fucking insane. Everyone has to run to their bikes from the start point, jump on and just go. As fast as they can. There were four check points. If a rider finished and didn't make the checkpoints, they were disqualified. Most of the checkpoints were in manhattan, which made the ride extra crazy because the sprint had to go through busy city streets, including Times Square.

That's pretty much all I can say. Most people finished the 18 mile course in about an hour, which means their avarage speed was 18 miles an hour. pretty good for fixed gears and two wheels.

posted at: 02:22 | path: /cycling | permanent link to this entry

Fri, 04 Aug 2006

Siggraph 2006 Was Awesome

It was my first and I'm sold. I made a list of links and took some pictures

posted at: 00:43 | path: /media | permanent link to this entry

Mon, 24 Jul 2006

The Empty Vessel Project

It may not be up for much longer due to creative differences, but I'm rather proud of a new web design that went live last week. It's for The Empty Vessel Project. Acording to the web site it is "an action, art, and sustainability experiment. We salvaged EV, a WWII rescue boat, to create a space for re-imagining the post-industrial urban environment. We are a non-profit, volunteer-run organization and encourage participation on all levels."

It should be an interesting few weeks of comparing and contrasting the new version to my version. I'll keep a permanant link to my code.

posted at: 18:25 | path: /brooklyn | permanent link to this entry

Libpam 0.79-3 in Sid

So it's official. I can run Debian on the desktop again! The one thing holding me back was libpam in sarge. Then I upgraded to Etch but it still couldn't give realtime priority to a user. So I installed Ubuntu Dapper and it did. JACK applications would run smoothly. But despite it's fabulosity in popular culture, I don't really like the superficiallity of Ubuntu. Debian with chrome rims, basically.

When the Macbook gets shipped back I'm dual booting Sid and OS X. Yeah!

posted at: 17:24 | path: /debian | permanent link to this entry

Sun, 23 Jul 2006

Citizen Engineer - Consumer Electronics Hacking and Open Source Hardware

Lady Ada is a fellow at Eyebeam. Phillip Torrone is the editor of Make magazine. They both find, make and document hacking consumer electronics devices. Phillip began the session with some covers from popular mechanics magazine in the 1950s. One featured a drawing was a family test flying ther new personal helicopter they built themself! And to make it even more ridiculous it was being towed by a car! His point was this is the kind of idealism of construction, progress and mechanical tinkering was commonplace in the post war era. Then something happened and all Americans forgot that they could make their own grown up toys.

That's all changing now with the convergence of software and hardware on digital consumer devices. The session was mostly a gallery of cool stuff people have made on the web and some of the legal and political issues surrounding intellectual property of inventions.

Here's the link list

• The Retropod
• The x0xb0x
• Sketchup. Software for 3D rapid prototyping
• But little electronics kits at Sparkfun
• Public howtos on many neat things at Instructables

posted at: 15:08 | path: /hopenumbersix | permanent link to this entry

Sat, 22 Jul 2006

Wireless Security Flaws

This workshop was absolutely shocking. It focused on backbone level Internet routing protocols and IP hardware management protocols being broadcast over 802.11 frequencies in urban areas. Absolutely insane. It reminded me of an eariler workshop where someone spoke of a client who had a 802.11 signal bridging his co-lo'd servers subnet over a river to his main office, including VoIP traffic! Raven, Eric and Brandon described how they have decoded packet captures with OSPF, BGP and other kinds of IGP traffic. This stuff can effect thousands of users if it's working incorrectly. Putting it over radio waves is just stupid, so why are people doing it?

They offered no answer for this question, just confirmation that time and time again new packet captures are sent to their public email address containing this traffic. I can't stress how stupid this is. If something happens to the network broadcasting this traffic, whole chunks of the Internet can dissapear!

The next part was about IP level device management protocols found on the air. Namely SNMP and sometimes even telnet. IP devices include switches, firewalls and routers. Many of these devices have no crypto or require a service contract and firmware update to add crypto. Cisco is notorious for this.

So how does one obtain packet captures? With open source software of course! Ethereal can capture any kind of ethernet traffic, while Kismet can capture any kind of 802.11 traffic over your radio. Both save captured packets to a file on disk which you can decode later.

posted at: 23:55 | path: /hopenumbersix | permanent link to this entry

Lockpicking

Locking picking is an ancient tradition. The concept is that a lock is a metal passage that has a bunch of bars running parallel to the passage. The bars are different sizes so when you insert a key, it presses the bars out of the way and the lock opens. This is obvious. What isn't obvious is that it's extremely simple to bypass or simply fake a key with some cleverness.

I was only interested in this workshop because I have a bicycle lock with a lot of history behind it. The current revision has changed the entire system to a non-tubular design sometimes used in safes. This lock requires much time and special skills to pick and would probably not be worth it for most potential theievs.

The basic idea of lockpicking is not too different than any other kind of security. You need a specialized tool for every job. But once you have those tools any lock is worthless to whatever it's supposed to be securing. There is a large web community discussing all aspects of lock picking.

The most interesting part of the demonstration was how a $35 fortified master combination lock was bypassed with a small metal stick.

posted at: 18:34 | path: /hopenumbersix | permanent link to this entry

Fri, 21 Jul 2006

The Future of Wireless Pen Testing

Around 2001 802.11 became very widespread in consumer devices. Laptops and little access points, wireless "gaming adaptors" (aka a wireless media bridge) and even PDA phones. The problem is that all the security features in the written and accepted spec are broken.

Renderman mentioned a flaw in 802.11i which is sometimes called WPA2 by Cisco, which is where I first heard about it. It has a nice feature where if an associated device sends a packet with the wrong Michael MIC checksum in too short of a time, the radio shuts down for 60 seconds and kicks all the other devices. This is supposed to be a security feature. In those 60 seconds you can power up your own AP with the same SSID and grab all their data to a network you own.

Dragorn mentioned that 802.11w is supposed to address packet authentication better.

Probably the most interesting part was a discussion of driver level exploits that can give the exploited code access to the hardware's memory, bypassing any kind of operating system controls. It can also go straight to the memory where the operating system's kernel lives and break that. Cool!

I asked the question of how to properly secure a 802.11 network since both WPA and WEP are broken by design. Dragorn's response is to open the radios and secure everything on layer 3 with a VPN.

posted at: 20:21 | path: /hopenumbersix | permanent link to this entry

Friday Night Keynote. RMS Is Crazy

Richard M Stallman is the founder of the GNU movement since publishing the GNU Manifesto in 1985. He is speaking right now at HOPE. He gave some shouts to Defective By Design and talked about how the GPL version 3 will try and prevent further manipulation of GNU code by adding clauses defining freedoms related to DRM. The GNU project's legal arm is the Free Software Foundation, which is a group of lawyers who work to ensure software freedom stays that way. ed. I am a member of the FSF, so I'm definitely biased

He seems very touchy and came off as distracted during the first part of the speech. Then he attempted a joke where he wore a halo and crowned himself a saint of the GNU church of Emacs. He then uttered the quip that vi vi vi is the editor of the beast, which was damn funny. So yeah. He's crazy...

...but totally cool because he redeemed himself during the Q/A session. Almost every person had an antagonistic question concerning his idealism and he aptly challenged each one. The cool part about RMS is that he's 100% consistant. Free Software makes us free thus is good for humanity; proprietary software removes freedom thus is bad for humanity. Can't beat that really.

posted at: 17:37 | path: /hopenumbersix | permanent link to this entry

Magnetic Stripe Technology and the New York City MetroCard

Joseph Battaglia is pretty damn cool. He heard about card bending and got curious. Why the hell are people getting free fares by some weird urban lore of intentionally breaking discarded metrocards? He figured it out and explained it and basically the entire proprietary metro card magnetic stripe format from 2004. Of course this format has been changed due to the large mainstream media attention the security flaw got.

I'll try and be concise cause this one is really deep. Cubic is the name of the company that made the magnetic stripe algorithm for the MTA. It's different than other cards, for example a starbucks gift card in that it has a non-standard sequence of binary data encoded on to the magnet. Fortunately, to be compatible with the global market for these little swipey card things it conforms to a number of ISO standards. Namely ISO 7810, ISO 7811, and ISO 7813. Yea! reference points.

Mr Battaglia use these and more (including the patents Cubic filed with USPO) to implement a card read/write chart which he published.

posted at: 13:00 | path: /hopenumbersix | permanent link to this entry

How to Steal Someone's Implanted RFID - And Why You'd Want To

Annalee Newitz put an RFID implant in her arm to prove a point. Then she talked to us about how simple, cheap and insecure it was. This procedure is commonly used in a very ethical manner for tagging pets and livestock. A company called VeriChip makes human implantable tags containing personal data. They sell them off as good for the emergency room when you might not be able to communicate nor have any identifying paper on your person. Whatever. The shit they implanted in Ms. Newitz's arm is a simple pet tag. A totally unencrypted RFID transponder running at 13.56mhz. Anyone who can listen on that frequency can record the signal in it's entirety. Then if they have the antenna to transmit the same signal, can clone that tag. Stupid. Maybe good for inventory...maybe only good for these kind of demos.

Newitz paid $400 for her implant, but did not recommend this method. Her co-presenter, Jonathan Westhues said that any skilled body piercer can implant it for about $20. The parts can cost another $20. So you'd only be out $40 if you wanted to get your very own implant.

Newitz also had a good quip referencing her Democracy Now! appearance. When Liz Mcintyre asked "What if Hitler had RFID?". Newitz's response was that genocidal dictators did just fine killing millions before digital technology. Blaming RFID on mass murder is barking up the wrong tree.

posted at: 12:00 | path: /hopenumbersix | permanent link to this entry

Tue, 18 Jul 2006

Weekly Band Fixation

There is something about a group of sad, earnest and pissed off people making music together that gets me extremely excited. Add to that a singer with an charmingly bitter voice using the word "fucking" in what I can gather the most honest way possible. Yeah. A Better Son/Daughter is an uplifting song about faking it till you're making it despite the horrible feelings you have inside.

posted at: 15:21 | path: /music | permanent link to this entry

Bike Racers Shave Their Legs

One last update because I forgot to mention it before. I didn't pay attention at first until I saw two guys feeling each other's legs and commenting on how smooth they were at the prospect park race. I know that swimmers shave their legs to lessen the surface tension of water but c'mon, surface tension of air is dramatically lower than that of water. Then I found the answers I was looking for. I must say there were some good looking guys and gals out there tonight. I probably looked pretty silly at the finish line with no shirt and excessive body hair. I guess I'm not up on the tradition.

posted at: 02:22 | path: /cycling | permanent link to this entry

My First Prospect Park Summer Slam Race

...almost killed me. No, no! In a good way! Seriously. Tonight was an individual scratch race of three laps. There was a visible police presense so we took one neutral pace lap to test the waters then three more around for real. I was so freaked out by the speed and closeness of each rider. It's intensely exciting to be in a pack of over 30 people going 25 miles per hour by pedaling. All I could hear is back cogs and tires.

Right from the first sprint I got freaked out when two rider's pedals hit, made a spark and shockingly no one went down. I was right behind them and I didn't have the nerve to try and sprint past. The front of tha pack was gone by the time I went down the top of the first hill.

My gearing is way to low. I couldn't even keep pace on the big downhill. I ended up finding three other riders at the same level as me and we all drafted each other for the next two laps. They kicked my ass on the final uphill. I absolutely cannot do the uphill to save my life. Hardest physical challenge ever. Seriously. But hey, I finished! And not dead last.

posted at: 01:33 | path: /cycling | permanent link to this entry

Mon, 17 Jul 2006

Rilo Kiley is impossible to download anywhere but P2P or iTunes

In the search for a downloadable version of the Rilo Kiley album The Execution of All Things I have come to the conclusion that it is impossible to download without participating in iTunes or sharing with an anonymous "friend". Emusic, Yahoo music and Saddle Creek's own store do not offer mp3 or vorbis versions of the record. I wonder if this is an exclusive agreement between Apple and Saddle Creek? WIth the commercial success of Bright Eyes I wouldn't doubt it.

posted at: 18:16 | path: /music | permanent link to this entry

Thu, 13 Jul 2006

Ubuntu has an old nmap

OS fingerprinting is one of the cooler parts of nmap. Unfortunately, it appears that these fingerprints change as vendors release OS updates. Today, nmap identified a Macbook Pro running 10.4.7 as running 10.3. Another good reason to build network security packages from source.

posted at: 14:18 | path: /debian | permanent link to this entry

Tue, 04 Jul 2006

I broke my Macbook

Better said, my Macbook broke. I took it apart, put it back together and it wouldn't turn on any longer. Since I paid Apple an excessive amount to replace broken hardware, I just sent it back, and I was welcome. I hear Apple has a sophisticated power management unit. Whatever. I won't tempt fate. Word to the wise. Don't follow these instructions.

posted at: 14:38 | path: /computer_hardware | permanent link to this entry

Wed, 28 Jun 2006

An adventure in futuristic graffiti.

Last week we made throwies and put them on a bridge.

posted at: 12:06 | path: /movies | permanent link to this entry

Wed, 21 Jun 2006

Cisco VLAN's. A whole new world.

I haven't posted in a while. So I'm posting a link to the Cisco Catalyst 3500 XL VLAN reference. Why you ask? Because it's a good thing to know. In case you have an "enterprise level" switch on your hands and you feel like carving it up into a bunch of smaller switches for different networks. It's like 2, no 3, no 4 switches in one!

In other news, I recently had to talk with a "activation manager" who got really weird when I told him my router was an intel compatible computer running OpenBSD. He didn't know what I was talking about and hid behind his Cisco certification. Man, people need more unix in their life.

posted at: 00:05 | path: /proprietary | permanent link to this entry

Sat, 17 Jun 2006

I have been using mac os x for the last week

...and after two years of not using it I can honestly say it has not improved for multimedia at all. The reasons I switched to GNU/Linux for audio production have only been reinforced by the way open source audio applications and code libraries are implemented on OS X. This is not the fault of open source developers. It is only proof that OS X is not a serious platform for audio development.

Grip is a open source program that runs on GNU/Linux. It does an excellent job of ripping audio CDs and encoding them to ogg/vorbis or mp3. The only program I can find for free on OS X is called Ogg Drop, which is nice but hasn't changed in four years. Yea proprietary development.

ogg/vorbis playback is equally bad with strange third party codecs and unsupported obsolete applications bearing the responsibility of playing back open source encoded media.

Compare this to a default Debian GNU/Linux system and you'll find OS X is virtually non-functional unless you pay individual developers for their niche applications which you are not allowed to learn from or improve by editing their source code.

My overall experience with OS X is that it hasn't evolved at all since I stoped using it. Despite Apple's commitment to open source software under the GUI, their dedication to open source desktop applications is unsuprisingly absent. In it's place are the low class shareware hackers, who spend their time reverse engineering OS X to make it "value added". The whole while with the wool over their eyes so they can't see the thriving alternative right in front of them. Shareware hackers! Move on! There are alternatives that work better and have more users. Your niche is closing in.

posted at: 01:06 | path: /linux | permanent link to this entry

Sun, 11 Jun 2006

I got a macbook amature, not a macbook pro but it's fat nonetheless

Apple has entered my life again in the form of a laptop computer. This is my second Apple laptop in 6 years, my previous being a Pismo Powerbook that got stolen right around the time when I stopped using OS X and moved to Debian GNU/Linux. In all honesty, I have not used a proprietary operating system in those three years for any of my personal work and I made many decisions in my professional life to do the same. It worked out extrodinarily well.

Then Apple caught my attention with their moderately priced 6 pound widescreen laptop with a camera and motion sensor built in. Sweet! It also contains a Intel Duo CPU. Double sweet! But the thought of using OS X was painful. A real deal breaker. Then I discovered Parallels, a virtualization application similar to VMware but designed for the OS X desktop user. It supports a pirate's booty of other operating systems, including my favorite Debian GNU/Linux. Triple sweet!

Needless to say the first thing I did when I opened the box and turned on the Macbook was...watch that stupid animation they put on new laptops. Yeah, that was annoying...but after that I downloaded and installed the Parallels RC2 application and installed Ubuntu Linux. While not Debian, it's familliar and has all the same packages aside from Gnome and the kernel. And I've been using that since.

But now I get to the point of this writing. I noticed that the 60 gig hard disk inside the laptop was already quite full after doing nothing more than switching on the laptop for the first time. What could be consuming all this disk space, I asked myself. A virus? Spyware? Some Apple store employee's mp3 collection? None of these assumptions were correct. MacOS X 10.4.6 was consuming 15 gigs of my disk space. This is just absoultely insane. What the hell does an operating system need 15 gigs of disk space for? Here's my findings, which are far from exhaustive:

1. 2.1 gigs of language data. Not fonts, but text strings for menu and system messages translated into languages other than English. That's actually pretty cool but why does Apple not provide a removal tool for those who need only one language?
2. 1.95 gigs of music loops for the Garage Band application. This one freaked me out. What the hell does an unsuspecting user need this for? How difficult would it be to manufacture a DVD including the samples and put it in the box?
3. 1.37 gigs of printer drivers. I'll admit printing on desktop computers sucks ass. I'll admit it's very confusing and hard to configure a new printer. But is it 1.37 gigs confusing? I say no. That DVD I mentioned still isn't filled to capacity yet. Perhaps these can go on there too?

I haven't wasted anymore time hunting for more crap to delete but my system is now down to a mere 10.3 gigs. about 1 gig of this is consumed by some SDKs from the Xcode installer (which I actually want because I installed them myself, on the included CD-ROM I might add) but really, roughly 9 gigs of disk space consumed for an operating system with ONE other third party application installed? Barf. And if you actually read this far and found my loophole, I already subtracted the size of the GNU/Linux virtual machine from all of these calculations. So there.

posted at: 19:39 | path: /computer_hardware | permanent link to this entry

Mon, 05 Jun 2006

Windows XP Professional Does Not Support RAID-1

Brain explody!

OMG, OMG, OMG, WTF. Okay. Get a grip Lee. It's only software. It's only the most popular operating system in the universe. There must be a way. And of course there is.

Here's the summary of what this guide explains. There are three system files on a Windows XP Professional system that limit the functionailty of the Disk Manager Snap-in. They limit this functionality by containing a text string of "WINNT" or "SERVERNT". The implication here is that a "home" user would never need a "server" feature like disk mirroring (RAID-1). By changing this string using a binary editor, this feature of Windows becomes "unlocked". That's right, this feature is not determined by the programs included in Windows, it is determined by a very short string of text embedded in those programs. They are completely capable of doing this feature as shipped but Microsoft has decided that it is not in your best interest to do this.

Please refer to the brain explody graphic above.

posted at: 00:44 | path: /hacking | permanent link to this entry

Sun, 04 Jun 2006

CrimethInc Shareholder Report

The Anarchist front group criticizes itself and continues the message that the logo is just a means to an end. This is an exceptional quote

Among other things, CrimethInc. has been an experiment in structure. In adapting the decentralized, radically participatory approach of Food Not Bombs and the Earth Liberation Front to the project of propaganda outreach, we have attempted to put whatever notoriety we win for ourselves at the disposal of all. The objections of traditionalists that this approach could not provide enough control over who acts as CrimethInc. have not been borne out by reality: neither fascists nor communists nor liberals have attempted to hijack the CrimethInc. bullet mid-trajectory

I encourage you to read the whole thing. CrimethInc is the most amaingly consistant collective when it comes to writing with a tone of hope and discouragement at the same time. Moralistic without the morals.

posted at: 11:16 | path: /power | permanent link to this entry

Wed, 24 May 2006

I Made a Playlist Today

And you can have it! It's for a friend that works at a bar called Sweet Ups and The Royal Oak, which is prety cool so you should go there. If you go there soon you'll even get to hear good music...probably.

posted at: 18:27 | path: /music/playlists | permanent link to this entry

Mon, 22 May 2006

2006 Montauk Century on a Fixed Gear

At this time yesterday I was about 20 miles into my first 100 mile bike ride on the newly named Ivan, aka a NYC Bikes City Fixed model from 2005. I was really nervous about doing this but at mile twenty I felt fine. It wasn't until about mile 45 when my tendons began hurting in an unnatural way. Then, not suprisingly everything got real simple and automatic after the mid way mark. 50 miles in and I felt like I was gliding at a smooth pace between 19 and 20 miles per hour on the Westhampton shore.

The Hamptons are beautiful with their extravagant estates hidden behind manicured shrubs. If the land had a vinyard on it the whole package would look like some bottle of Cotes du Rhone or Bordeaux. The Hamptons that are not extravagant are still very cool. Beach houses with minimal archetecture and the ocean only a sand dune away. The Ponquogue bridge is unbelievable with it's east and west view of crystal clear blue water as far as the eye can see.

Some notable comments I got from strangers:

"Is that a fixed gear?! You are crazy!"
"How do you go down hills? How do you stop?"
"No helmet? Leave the century NOW!" (yes, I forgot my helmet and didn't realize until I was at the start line. This is bad, I know and I felt terrible but couldn't quit without starting. I did not leave the ride at this random man's request)
Getting passed by a man on a Bianchi track bike. "A kindred sprit." Apply Doppler effect.
Passing an older man on a custom fixed gear. "It only takes one!"
Standing in the beer line after finishing, over heard. "...and then there's the guys on the single speeds. Woah, can you imagine? No gears! And I even saw some of these guys wearing pants! Now that's style and substance."

The ride ended with a few miles of...hills! Fuck. Strangely enough they broke up the monatony of the final stretch and gave me a chance to pedal at different speeds. I ended up passing many people up the hills and had to go full speed down to conserve energy. It worked very well. At the end of the hills I nearly pulled my right calf and slowed down. The final 200 feet had a ridiculous amount of headwind. It was like someone was sadisticly saving the worst for last. I got over that, pulled into the finish line and realized I pulled my left hamstrain. After some stretching, eating and beer drinking everything got better. This morning I felt fine considering.

The NYC Bikes City Fixed is an aluminum frame with a carbon fibre track fork. The wheels are deep-v 700s and the handle bars are also aluminum but slightly angled up for more comfortable distance riding and easy pothole skipping. The gear ratio is 46x16.

And if you are still reading this far because you are waiting for an explaination of what makes riding a fixed gear 100 miles so "crazy" here it is. A fixed gear is a variation on the classic track bicycle. The only components on the drive train are a single chain ring on the front and back and a thicker than normal chain. The back ring is reverse threaded and stuck in place with a lockring. This means the bike cannot coast. Riding 100 miles means pedaling 100 miles. Classic track bikes are almost always steel, have a wheel base so narrow the back tire is only milimeters away from the seatpost and there are no break mounts, therefore the only way to stop is to apply back pressure on the chain. The handle bars are extremely steep. My bike has none of these characteristics. Wider wheel base, a front break, an optional rear break mount and less steep handlebars.

posted at: 12:55 | path: /cycling | permanent link to this entry

Fri, 19 May 2006

I Was In A Bowling League

And last night there was an "awards banquet". Media people are funny because when they decide to do something, they do it with all the gusto of a top story. And in the end, it was a top story. My bowling style was captured on film. This should describe accurately the comitment of Team Gawker

posted at: 14:12 | path: /goofy | permanent link to this entry

Tue, 16 May 2006

Sell It To Me Or I'll Bittorrent It Dot Com

A recent bit of hilarity at the workplace, kept discreet for our reader's sake (note that "reader's" is the singular possesive, not the plural). We need a video to record from cable television. Since the business pays for cable, we go to the trusty cable box and change the channel to the station and attempt to purchase the pay-per-view content. Weird, there's no option to buy it, only an option to call the phone number printed on the screen. Okay, called the number. Looks like business accounts are not allowed to purchase pay-per-view content.

...

Did I hear that correctly?

...

Wow. Ummm, I guess I have nothing more to say...time to head over to the PC and bittorrent it. Hey, we tried to pay you but you said no.

posted at: 01:13 | path: /power | permanent link to this entry

Mon, 15 May 2006

I'm All Meta

Last.fm is neat! Your music player sends their database the metadata from the tags of a file you're playing and it can be published on another web page. They do all sorts of data mining to see how many other users are doing the same things you are. Popularity contest! Music! Yea!

posted at: 18:49 | path: /w2.0 | permanent link to this entry

Thu, 11 May 2006

Fuck You iTunes. And Your Whole Company Too.

I'm using iTunes because my workplace got one of those Apple Airtunes thingies that let you "wirelessly connect" to speakers from your iTunes library. I might mention that this adventure began with installing VMware on the GNU/Linux host OS and installing Windows XP as a guest OS. Then installing the sound drivers and iTunes in that. Fuck you iTunes #1, you don't support my operating system.

So I start importing my big ass folder of music only to realize that 80% of it isn't getting added. I then remember that iTunes is the last big player to intentionally not support ogg/vorbis by default. Fuck you iTunes #2.

I find the official xiph.org vorbis Quicktime component. Cool! They took over the dying project from five years ago. I install the component and lo and behold, the rest of my music library is added. But wait! There's no metadata. Huh? I'm very particular about marking up music files and I know I have metadata on all of these. I confirm this and say fuck you iTunes #3, you make volunteers program to a crappy API that only half functions on your product.

Whatever, I can handle re-adding some metadata. Artist and album will do fine cause all the filenames are the track title. I do that and listen to some music in my franken-os-itunes-ified virtual machine. I'm using headphones from my computer's sound card. Now's the chance! I "connect to remote speakers" and start playing some mp3 files over the speakers. THen I start playing some of the ogg/vorbis files. Guess what? They don't play with airtunes, only on the local system's sound card. Fuck you iTunes #4, your product's components don't work with your other products.

Then I notice the cool sharing feature. I share my music, hell yeah! Then I connect to a co-workers shared playlist and try and play a file. Oh shit! It asks me for a password because "that file is only allowed to be shared with 5 others". 5 others? Who though up that number. Fuck you iTunes #5, you're just being stupid this time.

I later discover that a xiph.org employee was approached by the company who makes the software on the ipod and told they will never support vorbis. Guess what? That company wasn't Apple. Fuck you iTunes #6 your compatible products software isn't even made by the company that makes you.

All this so I can play music over the office speakers. Seriously. Ughhh!

posted at: 20:39 | path: /power | permanent link to this entry

Mon, 08 May 2006

The 5 Boro Bike Tour

Is a totally awesome event, though not as much of a party as Critical Mass. I did the 42 miles on the fixed gear and got away with only a small pulled muscle. The highlights were riding on the BQE through Red Hook and over the Verrazano bridge into Staten Island. FDR on the upper east side was fun too. I met the two guys who run Old Skool Track, a web site dedicated to the people with steel track frames and no front breaks. They were very nice to me despite my decidedly non-old skool alumimum/carbon frame, front break and deep-v rims.

Next stop, illegal underground races through the city!

posted at: 12:15 | path: /cycling | permanent link to this entry

Sat, 06 May 2006

Gnome Live! Desktop Session Recorder

It's named Istanbul and it can record the mouse movements of a Gnome session to either a raw YUV video or Ogg Theora compressed. I did a test recording of me starting Jack and getting a test tone out of PD. I don't think it records sound at the moment and the developer seems to have taken a break for from CVS commits for the last 10 months.

One remarkable bug is that the application itself segfaults when hovering the mouse over any Gnome Pannel applet that has a tool tip. One remarkable feature is it can stream to an Icecast2 server for live screencasting! Neato. -lee

posted at: 13:48 | path: /movies | permanent link to this entry

Fri, 05 May 2006

Got a Kensington USB Bluetooth adaptor

The phone can do bluetooth too. Check this shit!

Browsing 00:11:24:65:9D:1B ...
Service Name: Bluetooth-PDA-Sync
Service RecHandle: 0x10004
Service Class ID List:
"Serial Port" (0x1101)
Protocol Descriptor List:
"L2CAP" (0x0100)
"RFCOMM" (0x0003)
Channel: 3
Language Base Attr List:
code_ISO639: 0x656e
encoding: 0x6a
base_offset: 0x100
Profile Descriptor List:
"Serial Port" (0x1101)
Version: 0x0100


posted at: 14:42 | path: /pda | permanent link to this entry

Wed, 03 May 2006

Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool - January 2006

I'm installing Windows XP in a VM Ware virtual machine for web development and application testing. I'm installing the updates and it asks me about an update with the above title. Knowing full well I have no malicious software on the computer, I uncheck the option to download that tool. It asks me if I really know what I'm doing and even offers to stop bugging me in the future. I choose both of these options. Five minutes later the little warning bubble pops up again and tells me there are new updates. Guess which ones they are? Yup, same one I just told Windows to shut up about. I go through the don't-bug-me-stop-trying process again...and guess what happens? I'll bet you can guess. Same warning a third time.

Fuck you Windows.

posted at: 18:34 | path: /goofy | permanent link to this entry

Tue, 25 Apr 2006

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

For all of you readers that have a UNIX type operating system on the public Intenet with a real IP address, do this for a laugh. Install the ngrep package and run: ngrep -q -t -d <your ethernet device> -W byline . not port 22

Then watch and wait. If you're lucky you should see lots of traffic on udp port 137 and 138. These are Microsoft NetBEUI ports. Some of which are advertisements for various companies that sell "registry cleaning" software. Hi-larious!

posted at: 11:32 | path: /hacking | permanent link to this entry

Tue, 18 Apr 2006

RIP Coretta Scott King

Coretta Scott King has died, long after her husband, Martin Luther King Jr. was assasinated by James Earl Ray.

I attended the same college she did, though I attended it 48 years later. She wrote a particularly glowing yet naive article of the college her first year.

If you are still here after reading that...and you should definitely read it...I must comment on the relevance of the essay to the education I got from Antioch between 1996 and 2000. Private, progressive, co-educational and co-operative. That pretty much sums it up. I wouldn't be where I am today if it weren't for Antioch College. It taught me how to take a risk no matter the odds and stick with it. It proved to me that "almost any young person in any high school can work out a vocational training for himself during vacations from school, if he sets himself to it."

But I would like to write about my years on co-op differently. The co-op program was not a vacation. I still describe my undergraduate education to others as a year-round curriculum. That "vocational training" was not done during vacations, it was done during my studies at Antioch, which are four years of my life I will never forget.

posted at: 01:06 | path: /antioch | permanent link to this entry

Getting Real by 37 Signals

A book recommended to me by a friend. The advertising has the bravado of a dot com wanker but hey, I use basecamp and everyone I tell about it loves it too. Maybe there's something to this book?

posted at: 00:20 | path: /power | permanent link to this entry

Mon, 17 Apr 2006

Macbook Pro Booting Linux Live CDs

I booted a macbook pro with three different live CDs today. None worked. Here the list and the fatal problem.

1. Knoppix 3.6, linux26 boot parameter. Display goes black after loading initrd
2. Debian Sarge installation CD-R, linux26 boot parameter. Installer loads but cannot find any installation target. In other words, there is no hard disk driver in the initrd
3. Linux-BBC, 2.4 kernel. Keyboard driver errors eventually eat up all IRQ time and init gives up

So while frusturating, all these CDs were a bit out of date. I'm going to give it another round after burning some more updated ones.

posted at: 14:21 | path: /linux | permanent link to this entry

Ipod Hammer

I modified the mp32ogg script to do ogg->mp3 and renamed it "ipod hammer" since I changed it quite a lot. This is useful, for example if you have a large collection of riped music in ogg/vorbis format and would like to share it with someone who only has an ipod. It's lossy, so sound quality is effected. It is obviously a band-aid until Apple gets their head out of their ass and listens to their customers who use a real open source codec.

Download it.

posted at: 13:46 | path: /hacking | permanent link to this entry

Linux Audio Users SIP Conference Room

I made a conference room for SIP telephones on my Asterisk server. You can connect to it at this URI <sip:lau@ash.97montrose.org>. Need to talk? Invite your friends!

posted at: 13:46 | path: /linux | permanent link to this entry

Thu, 06 Apr 2006

The Gumstix kit I pieced together arrived today. It...is...totally...awesome.

The platform is an Intel Xscale CPU at 400Mhz with 64 megs of RAM and 4 megs flash storage. The size of this platform is literally the size of a stick of old school chewing gum. Not that new school dentyne ice or even the old school bubalicious, but the regular wrigley style. It weighs about the same too.

The platform comes with a fully functional Linux kernel with a lot of userland programs on the 4 megs of flash. It leavs only 400K to spare. busybox and dropbear are there for big binaries, some other stuff stands on it's own. The kernel is based on the 2.6.11 source and has modules for only the chipsets on the Gumstix expansion boards. A notable module is the prism2_cs driver for compact flash wifi cards.

The I/O expansion boards I got combine to give the tiny platform an ethernet network port, compact flash, USB 2.0, serial terminal and audio playback/recording. Connecting the serial cabled to a desktop and powering on the device worked and presented a login prompt for a bash shell. After about an hour of messing with the software, I could load all the drivers for all the I/O, download an mp3 file and play it back over headphones. A little while later I got ambitious and piped an mp3 stream via wget to madplay and it played back internet radio.

The built in software also has sshd and a web server (boa), both advertised via zeroconf (aka Rendevous, aka Bonjour) for auto discovery. And to make it even crazier, the company maintains patches for lots of other applications and instructions on how to build a new root filesystem and reflash the device. Any open source software that can compile for the ARM archetecture can run on this thing.

It is totally awesome. I recommend everyone with about $260 to spare go get one right now. Considering everything it does it's cheaper than most PDAs and portable music devices.

posted at: 11:00 | path: /embedded | permanent link to this entry

Tue, 04 Apr 2006

This Bike Is A Pipe Bomb

I have a sticker on my bike which is the name of a small punk band from Florida I discovered in college. Their name is This Bike Is A Pipe Bomb. Good stuff. I ride my bike everywhere and no authority figure has ever confronted me about the blatantly obvious fact that my bike is not literally a pipe bomb. This fact gives me a small amount of faith in the NYPD, Port Authority, MTA Police, and United States National Guard.

If you have not lived in New York, the agencies I just mentioned have at one point or another assumed the responsibility of guarding the city's trains, buses, bridges and tunnels from terrorist bombings. I have rode public transport in said trains, busses, bridges and tunnels with my bike and it's accompanying sticker. This did not seem to alarm any of these agents.

Unfortunately, other states are not so fortunate. There appears to be an epidemic at Ohio University of people labeling their pipe bombs built inside of bike frames with red stickers describing the contents as indeed containing a pipe bomb. That is the only explaination for what happened last Friday.

posted at: 19:58 | path: /power | permanent link to this entry

Windows XP Professional Corporate

I get tired of having these pieces of paper lying around that other people give me. I don't run Windows! I don't know what they are used for! I'm writing this number here so I don't have to keep this piece of paper around. I don't know what it does or where it came from so don't use it for anything. XP8BF-F8HPF-PY6BX-K24PJ-TWT6M

posted at: 11:10 | path: /goofy | permanent link to this entry

Mon, 03 Apr 2006

Today is brought to you by the word...

...martinet. Get your word of the day, each day!

posted at: 12:00 | path: /pop | permanent link to this entry

Fri, 31 Mar 2006

The Happy Hacker Heyboard

I remember a friend of mine mentioning something about ergonimics and how these huge keyboards with number pads totally break up the flow of mouse/keyboard transitions. I started really feeling that when I acknowledged the fact that I spend over 8 hours a day with a keyboard. I splurged and bought a PFU Systems Happy Hacker Keyboard. It is waaaayyyy overpriced but here's why it totally rules.

1. I look forward to typing on it. The keys are coated with this rough and smooth substance that feels totally cool.
2. The keys are super soft to the touch but still emit a satisfying clack when pressed. Like a cross between the 30 pound IBM things from the 80s and a laptop keyboard. Each key is perfectly even.
3. The whole keyboard is less then 12" long. It fits in my messenger bag so I can take it anywhere I go. It has a USB 2.0 mini cable to regular USB so it'll work on every single computer worth touching.
4. It has DIP switches on the back to flip the functionality of certian keys. It also can work in "macintosh" mode where it gives you "vol up" "vol down" "mute" and "eject" keys.
5. You can optionally buy a model with blank key tops. This is too l33t for me so I opted for the "charcoal grey" model, which is so dark you can't really see the letters on the keys anyway. I'm still trying to figure out the advantage of blank key tops for anything but typing dvorak.

So yeah, go out there and drop $260 on this shit if you spend more than 4 hours working with a UNIX shell each day.

posted at: 20:51 | path: /hacking | permanent link to this entry

Sun, 26 Mar 2006

I was wrong. The Etch kernel is awesome.

Sike! But my previous post about the broken prism2_cs driver was wrong, the Linksys WCF12 I own works "out of the box", it just needs manual configuration via weird iwconfig options. Namely, changing the mode from Master to Managed.

posted at: 17:58 | path: /debian | permanent link to this entry

Thu, 16 Mar 2006

The Palm Treo. Round two.

Today was the first time I left the house for a work day wjthout the laptop. It was fine, sans an IM connection. In fact, I'm typing this on the train ride home from an ssh session! But here's my gripes with the over hyped PalmOS and it's applications included.

The PalmOS has no unified file browser. Each application appears to have invented their own. This makes an interesting situation when downloading a PDF file to the CF card, opening the Adobe Acrobat for PalmOS program only to see a blank selection menu and no option to open the PDF I just downloaded. The same thing with the included RealPlayer program. I can't listen to WFMU with their low bandwidth mp3 stream because RealPlayer won't let me copy and paste a URI into the open menu. Suck.

posted at: 19:01 | path: /pda | permanent link to this entry

Tue, 14 Mar 2006

My Least Favorite Part of GNU/Linux is...

Linux.

Yes, that's right. Linux is the worst part of Linux. Every time I get some hot new device or upgrade the OS I have to recompile the kernel, recompile a kernel module, or just live with the device not working. The stuff in user space is great. Hell, I even know how to use XFree86 pretty well now and soon, x.org with all of it's fancy drop shadows. But he monolithic Linux kernel continues to be an endless game of trial and error.

I am well aware of the "change to distribution X because it 'just works'" response, but I think that's lame and it defeats the purpose of a good distribution. That is to provide some consistancy to the user and give them a support channel.

The funny ending to this story is that I have to say that my favorite alternative to Linux, ATM, is...dum, dum, dum; Windows. But only the NT kernel and the lovley glut of drivers for every single piece of crappy or extraordinary hardware out there. Userland in Windows sucks booty. If only GNU Hurd got off the ground, maybe we wouldn't all have to spend hours recompiling kernels.

posted at: 20:23 | path: /software | permanent link to this entry

Jack...the project that will never agree on anything

My recent foray into an upgraded jackd configuration with a USB sound card shows that the project still cannot figure out a way to interface with the kernel developers to get realtime priority support into the vanilla sources. Jackd always...always ends at compiling kernel level stuff, which takes hours of trial, error and bug reporting. Everyone has their own special way of getting it to "just work" and none ever do. Fuck! Get realtime-lsm into the kernel source!

posted at: 12:19 | path: /debian | permanent link to this entry

Darkice and Lame on Etch

More time to kill while I'm waiting for some info on the m-a bug. Installing the lame libs from Marillat's apt repo, the darkice source from sid and rebuilding for etch with mp3 support went fine after editing out --without-lame from debian/rules. That's nice. Next stop are the seemingly broken prism2_cs drivers in 2.6.15. I think I'll rebuild the kernel...yet...again...on this laptop. This is begining to be almost as fun as running Windows.

posted at: 00:30 | path: /debian | permanent link to this entry

Mon, 13 Mar 2006

Etch and kernels and audio == poop

I upgraded the laptop to Debian testing, aka etch. Big things like x.org and udev went fine. The USB sound card works by default with ALSA. Yea. But jackd stands true as the complicated, difficult "professional" package and will not configure. I've hit the Debian BTS once again, despite some LAU email list users describing the upgrade as "easy" and giving me the advice to "stop waiting to upgrade to etch."

For the record, the 2.6.15-1-686 kernel does not work with module-assistant 0.10.2 in etch. I cannot rebuild the realtime-lsm-source module because m-a complains the kernel headers are unconfigured. So I install the kernel source and run menuconfig. Same complaint. Bug, Bug!

posted at: 23:49 | path: /debian | permanent link to this entry

Thu, 09 Mar 2006

Lots of technology crap

Installing Zimbra on CentOS 4.2 requires a very strange modification to /etc/sysconfig/i18n. It appears to now be able to use UTF-8 encoding. CentOS 4.2 also installed with SELinux by default. Turn that shit off, you don't need it you paranoid weirdo!

The Linux IP Virtual Server is good, but overkill for something as simple as incoming load balancing. iptables or better yet, OpenBSD's Packet Filter is much better.

VMWare is giving away the beta of their net Server product. Installing proprietary software on Linux is not cool. But I'm doing it anyway. Fuck. It installs without errors on Debian stable. The kernel headers and compiler tools are required to build the tainted modules.

The Palm Treo is badass. Web browser, IMAP(S) client, camera, notepad, telephone...hell SSH client! Still haven't figured out how to sync calendar, tasks and contacts to Zimbra.

posted at: 14:15 | path: /wrap | permanent link to this entry

Tue, 07 Mar 2006

Weekend wrap up...a day late.

The Edvard Munch exhibit at MoMA is excellent. Strangely enough, they don't allow any cellular phones to be visible in the gallery. I discovered this as I tried to type some text notes about the pieces on my new Palm Treo. The usher told me it wasn't allowed and I showed him my text. He wouldn't budge. Strange, considering most of the works in the exhibit were over 100 years old. It reminded me of a piece by Cory Doctorow in Make 05 where he argues that photography of master works of art should be part of our world heritage and not put under this strange kind of copyright control. There is a discussion of the article online but you'll have to subscribe to the magazine to read it.

On the ride to MoMA, I decided to take 1st ave uptown instead of the Queensboro or east side bike path. It was exceptionally fast. It reminded me of an article I read by John Forester.

And then on to Union Pool to relax. If you haven't been there, it's great in the winter because there's a fire pit in the back yard.

posted at: 00:17 | path: /wrap | permanent link to this entry

Sat, 04 Mar 2006

Weird Hacker Patches Proprietary Code and Tells All

This is totally bizarre. This guy reverse engineered some CPU detection code in the Skype binary executable and used a Windows API "feature" to bypass the CPU check. The end result is some feature that the Skype corporation only intends for Intel CPUs can run on AMD CPUs too. This is a blatant violation of the Skype EULA and this guy will most likely get a cease and desist from Ebay (who owns Skype). But if you can catch it, read his expertly written blow by blow of assembler instructions and how to modify them. Oh yeah, and like, download the patched binary if you use Skype.

posted at: 22:58 | path: /hacking | permanent link to this entry

The Palm Treo. Functional or the Emperor's New Clothes?

I got a Palm Treo 650 from work. I wouldn't have bought it myself but the possibility of having internet connectivity and an ssh client in a hand held device was quite appealing. This is obviously an extremely niche application for something so heavily hyped as a producitiviy lifestyle device. Here's a moment to moment account of getting it to function both with and without a desktop system.

Voice and Data Service. This is pretty straight forward. Verizon makes a deal with Palm for a bazillion dollars and ships branded phones provisioned to connect with Verizon's proprietary wireless network. This includes voice and data. The strange thing about the Treo is the PalmOS functionality and the voice/data functionality are split. By holding down the power button for three seconds, the phone part turns off but the PalmOS keeps running. This is strange but whatever, it's probably related to the bazillions of dollars.

PalmOS Applications. By default, the phone appears to have a lot of neat toys built into it. Not toys that are fun but toys are will make your life simple and streamlined. This is mot true. Here is the laundry list

• Camcorder
• Calendar
• Camera
• Contacts
• Palm HotSync
• Mail
• Media file browser
• Text note pad
• MMS composer
• RealPlayer
• SMS composer
• Tasks
• Web browser
• Verizon Wireless Sync
• World Clock

So...this phone can take pictures and videos. These two things are the same application but appear twice in the main menu. It can keep contacts with a neat photo feature. It can sync to Palm Desktop software and perhaps other applications that support this protocol. It should read email but the Mail application is useless since it involves some mail store on the service provider's side for actual message delivery. In other words, it's not an IMAP client. The note pad doesn't do handwriting recognition, which seemed like a staple of the PalmOS since the mid 90s. Real Player...heh, cool. MMS is a format that I have no idea how many phones actually support. SMS is on every other piece of crap cell phone you can get for free for signing a contract. Task pad and Calendar are cool if they can sync to iCalendar compliant applications. The web browser is some thing with a funny name I don't recognize. Verizon Wireless Sync doesn't make any sense. It should be an over the air sync gateway or something but I'm not sure.

posted at: 19:30 | path: /pda | permanent link to this entry

It's fucking cold. For real.

This is my new link section, where I don't write that much but only talk about the things I did and link to them.

If you haven't heard, it's fucking cold in New York right now. When you bike everywhere you really feel it but in a different way then the chumps walking on the street or taking the subway, you feel it in, like, a pain way. All of you bikers in the city, get this Pearl Izumi face mask.

After using the face mask to great lengths, I arrived at Hotel QT for a birthday party. It was stupid but fucking hell, there's a pool in the bar!

Prior to that I ate dinner at Zen Palate. If you go upstairs, it's just like the part in Kill Bill where all the Yakuza guys get chopped up by The Bride. Oh yeah, and the food is vegan and awesome!

And finally, go to see Harry and the Potters perform. You won't be disapointed.

posted at: 03:40 | path: /wrap | permanent link to this entry

Sun, 26 Feb 2006

The Verdad Issue of Vice

I was so excited to pick up this month's issue of Vice magazine. It was called The Verdad Issue and there were so many interesting articles in it. One was about a kidney transplant from Cape Town transacted solely over the telephone and email. Then there was the affordable locator device that is small enough to fit on your fingertip and can be located from a free web service. Cool! Sike! It's all lies. Funny right? Verdad, truth but...like...the opposite! Fuck you very much Vice. I love your magazine.

posted at: 16:14 | path: /pop | permanent link to this entry

Thu, 23 Feb 2006

Rapid Prototyping Sound With Pure Data

I'm doing another project with a multimedia artist. He asked me to do something simple but repetitive for a recording of sound. I realized that using Audacity would take an exceptionally large amount of time and gave a shot at making a realtime version in PD. It went well. I've been using PD more and more for rapid prototyping of sound ideas. I find the flow of something in realtime much better than the abrupt stop and start of a non-linear editor like Audacity.

posted at: 00:35 | path: /art | permanent link to this entry

Wed, 22 Feb 2006

The fixed gear skip stop

I have been riding a fixed gear bicycle for transportation around Brooklyn and Manhattan since the summer of 2005. I have a front break but I was constantly in awe of the people I saw riding over the bridge on a full-fledged track bike: thick chain, track hub, lockring and that's it. Then there was the first time I saw someone do a skip stop coming down the steep part of the Williamsburg bridge detour. Shit was amazing! I asked him how he does it and he was nice enough to show me.

That was two weeks ago and last night, I finally did it. It was an amazing feeling. I felt like I had more control over the bike. A feeling of weightlessness came over me when I picked up speed after the stop. Sheldon Brown describes it in words better than I can.

posted at: 16:26 | path: /cycling | permanent link to this entry

New web site launch

I just put some finishing touches on a web site for a very cool project that just had it's six month aniversary party. If you live in Brooklyn, check it out the next time there's an event. With luck you'll find out about it by subscribing to the event feed on upcoming.org.

posted at: 01:17 | path: /brooklyn | permanent link to this entry

Mon, 20 Feb 2006

Installing and Configuring Zimbra On Debian Sarge with an OpenBSD firewall

Installation was very simple. The Debian packages from the 3.0 release, although labled "alpha (recommended for lab use)" installed without error after reading the quick start guide. Here's the quick list for modifications made to my system to get messages passing back and forth correctly. My network layout is a single static IP and a private rfc1918 subnet. Routing is done on OpenBSD the the server is on the internal subnet.

1. Disable exim4 in all run levels. I prefer the sysv-rc-conf package. Do not uninstall it or APT will yell at you without end. Just turn it off.
2. Add your hostname and internal IP to /etc/hosts or local DNS if you run it.
3. Add your hostname and external IP to DNS on the internet and add an MX record for it.
4. Install a shitload of RAM. Zimbra is HUGE! HUGE I'm telling you! Like Microsoft huge...maybe. I put a gig in the server.
5. Forward ports you need from the outside in. I just did 80 and 25 to get started. 995 and 993 will probably be next for POP and IMAP over SSL.
6. Do this netcat proxy trick on the OpenBSD box so zimbra can connect to the external IP from the internal subnet. It uses both port 25 and 7025 for SMTP. Very important to do both ports or mail will not be delivered.

posted at: 01:38 | path: /software | permanent link to this entry

Sat, 18 Feb 2006

My Favorite picks from Project 168

Attack of The Knives

Blue Vitriol

Dissolved

posted at: 20:33 | path: /music | permanent link to this entry

Critical Mass. City looks like a fool standing before a judge.

The state has decided that the NYPD are a bunch of fools with too much power. All the laws the city has been arresting critical mass riders under have been called out by justice Michael D. Stallman in NY state supreme court.

posted at: 17:23 | path: /power | permanent link to this entry

Audacity 1.3 for MacOS X

The new beta version of Audacity for MacOS X is a very big improvement in all the areas that were left out of the 1.2 release. The most important changes are in track management and label tracks. The complete list of changes is well written. Any long time Audcaity user should browse over it and see what's new.

Oh, yeah, Audcaity is like, free n'shit.

posted at: 16:11 | path: /software | permanent link to this entry

Thu, 16 Feb 2006

Serverbeach loses cool points

I have been with serverbeach for almost six months now. I like it a lot and thought it was too good to be true to get so much for so little. Since getting all obssesed with bitlbee, I uncovered a stupid implementation of a policy at Serverbeach: they block the third unique IP that makes an incoming IRC request on port 6667 and 6668. I don't know how high the range goes up to but I set bitlbee to listen on port 16668 and the filtering is gone.

posted at: 14:44 | path: /privacy | permanent link to this entry

Tue, 14 Feb 2006

Zimbra Debian Sarge Port

It looks like the YES Linux maintainer has ported Zimbra to Debian and documented the process on Zimbra's forums. I'll be following this and compare notes.

posted at: 17:08 | path: /debian | permanent link to this entry

Mon, 13 Feb 2006

Zimbra Dependencies for Debian

It seems that the Debian package dependencies for Zimbra are pretty thin. This implies that one can only install the zimbra-core package and use evreything else that's in the stable release. This makes Zimbra much less likely to take over your system.

posted at: 02:09 | path: /debian | permanent link to this entry

The Zimbra Collaboration Suite

WTF!? An open source MS Exchange server! This is impossible.

Well, not really. Many of us have been doing it for quite some time through various open source packages like apache, postfix, cyrus-imapd, openldap, yada, yada, yada. But that's hard. The topic of many a Linux Journal articles. So I find out about this thing called Zimbra from LUG Radio and download the Debian packages. These are my first impressions.

WTF!?!

In case you didn't hear that...

WTF!?!

It's cool. Really cool. But also really wack at the same time. This is the list of all the files Zimbra installs but be warned, just the list of files weighs in at 1.3 megs!

posted at: 01:35 | path: /debian | permanent link to this entry

It's snowing! A lot!

It snowed today. A whole lot. I took pictures and ate brunch at Balthazar. I felt pretty fabulous, really.

posted at: 01:19 | path: /brooklyn | permanent link to this entry

Sat, 11 Feb 2006

One client to rule them all

I like IRC. I like AIM too, although not as much as IRC. Google Talk, that's cool too. I hear some people even use other Jabber servers along with ICQ, MSN and Yahoo to send little pieces of text back and forth over the internet. Gaim was cool for a while but what happens when you're in the data center and you don't care about a GUI? Where are your AIM buddies now?

The answer is they are on bitlbee, which is an IRC -> everything else gatweay. You open an IRC client connect to your bitlbee server, which can be on your desktop or your own server somewhere on the internet, read the interactive instructions and log into your accounts on all the IM networks you like. You can now send messages to your IM buddies with a IRC client! So how do you get this for the fine, fine Debian GNU/Linux system?

...

apt-get install bitlbee
Ha!

But there's a catch...the version in sarge doesn't support Google Talk because of some tricks Google used with the jabber protocol. Fortunately, version 1.0 is in sid and someone was nice enough to backport it! Just follow the instructions for installing a backport and you should be right at home. Then register on your bitlbee server and type help account add jabber

posted at: 22:29 | path: /debian | permanent link to this entry

A fast, indexable asset management system

T and I got into a conversation about indexing and controling assets for creative applications, in particular graphic arts applications on Windows. She was curious how the dewey decimal system works for books and thought it might be a viable indexing system for various incompatible application files on a NTFS filesystem. I mentioned that Debian handles indexing and searchning for it's own software packages very well through compatible utilities and various index files. She said she wanted a system that was abstracted from a specific filesystem or even operating system. I assumed this to mean something based solely on filenames.

My first instinct was that this is ridiculous but then reconsidered when the dewey decimal came up. That's an indexing system that's infinitly scaleable and has been tested through time. But I don't know enough about it's effectiveness for anything other then published books.

posted at: 16:57 | path: /debian | permanent link to this entry

Fri, 27 Jan 2006

AIM culture and interruptions

I have a failrly large buddy list now, both from Google chat and AIM. Most people use AIM because it's...owned by AOL? I don't really know. but anyway, I do too and I use it for a lot of work related discussion. I've noticed a particular type of person who appears to have some kind of "online notification" or "buddy pounce" feature to their AIM client because every single time I leave "away" status or come online, within moments I get a "hey" or a "yo". I like talking to these people but I find it extremely odd that I come to expect a feeling of hesitation when I open my IM client, thinking to myself, "do I really want to pay attention to this person right this moment, because I will have to."

posted at: 11:29 | path: /pop | permanent link to this entry

Packaging Asterisk for Debian

Building sarge backports from sid for asterisk was easy:
echo "deb http://ash.97montrose.org/packages/ binary/" >> /etc/apt/sources.list

However, finding MySQL support was not. I'll be building a backport of asterisk-addons 1.2.1 for sarge soon. I've built a .deb for asterisk-addons-1.2.1. It's in the repo. It appears no one else has done this very publicly. Maybe I'll get in trouble with the man?

posted at: 01:54 | path: /voip | permanent link to this entry

Thu, 26 Jan 2006

Using the Kodak EasyShare C360 with Debian

I got this camera for christmas. It's a Kodak EasyShare C360. At first glance I was estatic because it has very good specs, is small and has a real zoom lens. Then I opened the box and saw all the Windows driver installation instructions. I got freaked out because I was used to a digital camera being nothing more than a USB mass storage device. After a few hours of reading I discovered Kodak invented the PTP protocol, which this camera speaks and the gphoto2 library can read data from any device that speaks PTP. Though it was strange that my camera wasn't listed in the gphoto2 supported devices. Being scared of the unknown, I installed the gtkam application from sarge and ran it. It detected the camera and showed me thumbnails! cool. Then it gave a PTP I/O error and segfaulted. Not cool. I felt defeated. Nothing online mentioned this camera working with Debian and no constructuve advice from other distros either.

Then it hit me...gphoto2 is a command line application. Let's skip the GUI. A little man page reading and I came up with these two commands:

gphoto2 --auto-detect
gphoto2 -P

and all my photos on the camera were downloaded to the current directory! No probs, I got photos! Stay tuned for the new photo enhanced version of Uncompatible Systems.

posted at: 22:56 | path: /debian | permanent link to this entry

CARP installation, first notes.

CARP is failing over correctly on the two Soekris NET4801 boxes running OpenBSD 3.8-stable. Unplugging a cable that belongs to each virtual IP does not stop pings from responding. I'm going to install pfsync next.

posted at: 15:09 | path: /openbsd | permanent link to this entry

Wed, 25 Jan 2006

The Perry Bible Fellowship

If you are feeling down, check out this comic called The Perry Bible Fellowship and it'll lift you up!

posted at: 09:46 | path: /art | permanent link to this entry

Fri, 20 Jan 2006

My Duck Family Tree

Ever wonder about the lineage of Donald Duck? Not, like, the history of the animators who drew him and his family. Like, his family for real? Now you know, and that's like, power n'shit.

posted at: 17:37 | path: /goofy | permanent link to this entry

Thu, 19 Jan 2006

Bling or Blong?

I gave my musical buddy 31d1, some of my bling. He is eternally grateful. In the process of our IM conversation, I accidently called it blong, thus coining a term for fake, cubic zirconia bling.

posted at: 13:04 | path: /goofy | permanent link to this entry

Hipster Radio. Unfortunate Title, Good Music.

It's amazing how some things fall under the radar. Joe at hipster.org is one of them. He appears to be religiously broadcasting his collection of mp3s, 24/7 without fail. Sweet.

posted at: 12:56 | path: /radio | permanent link to this entry

How Much Do I Pay For My Addiction to Free Software?

I go on and on about the virtues of Free Software and GNU/Linux to my friends. They think I'm silly or geeky or brilliant or boring for it. Very few think I'm brilliant, very...few. It doesn't help to be friends with audio geeks and writers, who have a seemingly natural inclination to the glowing white Apple. So now that I have been using Debian GNU/Linux for about a year straight without working on a commercial OS (Windows XP) at home for anything more than playing games I pick up at Best Buy, I thought I'd figure out how much I really am paying for my OS of choice when I factor everything together. Then I will compare it to how much my friends are paying with their hardware and warzed software they didn't pay for. I love my friends, I really do...

First comes hardware I own:

• Primary Workstation
• Case + power supply: $0. Found in the trash
• Motherboard: $40. Tiger Direct
• AMD Athlon CPU: $40. Tiger Direct
• 512 MB DDR RAM: $0. Found in trash
• 2 x 80 GB hard disks: $80. Bought one, found other in trash
• ATI Radeon 9500 Pro video card: $40. Bought used from a friend
• 17" CRT @ 1280x1024 resolution: $0. Found in trash
• Digital Audio Workstation
• Complete AMD Athlon system with 1 GB RAM + 80 GB hard disk: $550. Bought from corner PC shop
• M-Audio Delta 1010-LT multi-channel sound card: $300. Bought from Sam Ash retail
• 19" CRT @1280x1024 resolution: $100. Bought used from a friend
• ATI Radeon 9000: $40. Bought retail in close out sale
• Development Workstation
• Compaq Pentium 4 PC with 512 MB RAM + 80 GB hard disk: $0. Found in trash.
• 15" CRT @ 1024x768: $0. Found in trash
• Firewall/Router/VPN
• Compaq Pentium II PC: $0. Found in trash
• 2 network interfaces: $0. Found in trash
• Wireless network interface. $0. Gift from friend upgrading
• Periperals
• HP LaserJet 6L: $0. Gift from friend upgrading
• Epson 1200U flatbed color scanner: $0. Gift from friend upgrading
• SMC 8 port 10/100 switch: $0. Trade
• 12 port 10baseT hub: $0. Gift from friend upgrading
• Various lengths of cat-5 cable: $50. Mostly home made or gifts

The total is: $1250.

I should note that I live in New York City and carry a screwdriver around with me at all times. This is only a small amount of working hardware I find in the trash. I have been collecting CRT monitors for a while. No one wants them anymore. They are the most popular trash item I find. And now software.

• Operating system and applications for all workstations: $0. Debian GNU/Linux
• Operating system for firewall/router/VPN: $0. m0n0wall
• Subscription to Cedega to run Windows games in Linux: $60/year
• Associate membership to the Free Software Foundation: $150/year

The total is $210/year

The applications in Debian give me 99% of what I need to do anything I can think of. The remaining 1% comes from backports or custom builds of source code not in Debian. m0n0wall is an excellent firewall/router/VPN/traffic shaper/wireless AP/etc/etc. I do like playing games, Weaning myself off the Microsoft addiction to be up to date on the latest games is going well with Cedega. Although the Free Software Foundation is not necessarily a software development group, they do good things to protect my rights to use my software, so I like to support them with donations. And finally, Internet connectivity services.

• Speakeasy OneLink DSL. $1320/year
• AMD Athlon server on 10mbit Internet connection running Debian: $1320/year
• 718 area code phone number through VoicePulse Connect: $110/year
• Outgoing VoIP->PSTN minutes: $0.024/minute

The total is roughly $2750/year considering my limited usage on outgoing VoIP minutes

So service is the most expensive investment I have made both for work and for recreation. Most, if not all of these services are also using Free Software to power their equipment that gives me service.

I won't take the laundry list approach for the comparison. I'll just ramble on some more. If you actually read the list above you can tell that I have a much higher computer addiction than your average yahoo/gmail web browsing folk. I even have more than your average dedicated blogger or Apple congregation member. But let's take an example scenario from what I consider an average professional's computer rig. As I mentioned before, I do work with audio geeks so I'm including some media production stuff here.

The first necessity is the Apple laptop. Everyone knows iBooks are for kids, so you have to get a G4 PowerBook. That lands anywhere between $2200 and $3000 for one computer. A laptop usually isn't perfect. It's nice to have a desktop at home, especially if you are doing audio production. There are some very cheap PC desktops out there but they all have Windows XP Home installed and are quite under powered to make running that OS pleasant, especially with lots of big commercial applications. So you have to go with a more pricey model, which will run you anywhere from $1500 - $3000.

For doing media production, Digidesign Pro Tools is the market leader but it is very high priced and the low end models come with a crippled version of the software. Let's say you'll start at around $450 for the whole package on the low end and go up to about $2000 for the high end. And that's just for the audio interface and crippled software.

Those that "do Mac" get to drop much more cash on the desktop. A G5 starts at $1999 but that's in ridiculous shape to perform well with OS X. Consider between $2500 and $5000.

For firewall/routing, there is the venerable Linksys WRT54G, which is hella cheap and pretty damn cool. But it doesn't do VPN. If you need that, the cheapest product is the SonicWall SOHO with a limited user licence. That starts at around $300.

And finally the issue of commercial software. No one I know pays for any of their software, at all, ever...even if the copyright holders demand it by law. Unfortunately, the process of obtaining that software can be longer and more frusturating than figuring out a free alternative. It also produces a strange version mentality where people are afraid to upgrade because they will loose their cracks and have to find new ones. I recently ran into someone who was still running MacOS 9.2 because all her cracked Pro Tools plugins wouldn't run on OS X. That's dedication!

But this fight is getting boring but part of me did it just to get it on paper. I actually didn't know if I was dropping too much cash on hardware or getting played on the Free Software addiction. But now I feel like I made a good decision. It may be hard to get the photos off the digital camera among other hardware quirks, but in the end I'm spending less time worrying about my computer and more time using it.

Peace out!

posted at: 02:29 | path: /debian | permanent link to this entry

Wed, 18 Jan 2006

Fascism in America, Part I

This page from wikipedia got me interested in researching the history of Fascism in America. It appears that there was a popular movement for a Fascist coup d'etas on the federal government after The Great Depression. Military force was required to defend against it.

posted at: 13:08 | path: /power | permanent link to this entry

Tue, 17 Jan 2006

Cash Moves Everything Around Me, C.R.E.A.M, It's The Money...

I made my own bling in the Gimp. Luke Gattuso taught me. The tutorial is written for Adobe Photoshop but if you're clever like me you can use the Gimp from Debian GNU/Linux.

posted at: 20:11 | path: /goofy | permanent link to this entry

Sat, 14 Jan 2006

Steve Jobs Still Believes In What He Does

And he's grand-fucking-eloquent about it. He gave a comencement speech at Stanford about following your dream and not finishing college.

posted at: 02:11 | path: /power | permanent link to this entry

Your news is nothing, bitch!

Setphen Colbert ist die bomb. He actually got an AP news wire item about his fictional news show's fictionaly non-fictional content. Fiction in non-fiction!? WTF!

posted at: 02:01 | path: /media | permanent link to this entry

Thu, 12 Jan 2006

MIT Media Lab I/O Brush

Pick up a photographic image or a real object and paint with it on a special touch screen. It's the I/O Brush!. Check the movie at the bottom.

posted at: 15:00 | path: /art | permanent link to this entry

Wed, 11 Jan 2006

X.org 6.9 from backports.org

I got this ATI Radeon 9500 Pro and I thought I'd be all phatty gamer now. Instead, I'm going through the common process of digging up alternative X configurations to that in Debian. Reading through the changelog for x.org 6.9/7.0 one would think that DRI support would work on cards with the r300 chipset, as there are plenty of mentions about tha