When the used computer place sold me a refurbished Dell Latitude D810 notebook PC, they included a 65W power supply.  This is apparently not the correct one: it gives me a BIOS warning that this underpowered model would not give optimal performance.

Also, unless I throttle the 2.13GHz CPU speed back to 1.33GHz or lower, the laptop will most of the time overheat, triggering an auto shutdown.

Could these be related?  (Can you tell I’m not a double-E?)

1985:  Stephen King publishes the short story “Ballad of the Flexible Bullet”.  It describes a writer’s descent into paranoid madness.  When he moves into a new home, he doesn’t have a phone installed; he has discovered that phones run not on electricity but on radium.  There is a bit of radium in every handset, and the radiation is responsible for the increased cancer rate, not smoking or car exhaust.

2006: In the midst of brain cancer scares, Stephen King publishes the novel “Cell”.  It describes a pulse sent over all cell phones, turning all those talking on the phones at that moment into homicidal zombies who bite out the throats of everyone they meet.  In the introduction, he explains that he refuses to have a cell phone.

Um.  Yeah.

[title]

Has anyone read Dom Segolla’s 140 Characters: A Style Guide for the Short Form? 

From the back cover, apparently:

What Strunk and White’s Elements of Style did for traditional media, 140 Characters does for the social media revolution happening today.

This is a bold claim indeed. 

Alternate post title: “Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue parceque je n’ai pas eu le loisir de ce tweet faire plus courte.”  But, with the hashtags, that would make the Twitter crosspost too long to RT [insert. irony. here.]

Apple has decided — I think the official reason is “because they’re dicks” — to keep people from pulling mp3s off of their iPods onto their computers.  It’s supported by the Linux program gtkpod, but while gtkpod is rather awesome at putting stuff onto iPods, it does less-than-useful things such as “violently crashing suddenly” when trying to pull stuff off of one.

So, here’s how I do it.  It works with my OS (Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope), my iPod (120GB iPod Classic), FAT32 formatting, and … other specific-to-me stuff (?) … and I’m not really interested in supporting this.  If this doesn’t work for you and you know how to do it and want to help, feel free to post, but I can’t/won’t respond if you need more help.  Sorry.

Although I have not tried it, I am roughly 111% certain this will fail with Apple DRMmed music, which is fine because my iPod is never going near an installation of iTunes.  I don’t know if it will work with newer iTunes downloads, which I’ve read/heard are DRM-free, but I’m not going to try it.  iTunes is seriously evil software, and I’m pretty sure that the only reason NAV does not remove it as malware when doing a virus scan is that doing so would be too difficult.

First, install EasyTag.  In Ubuntu, that’s as easy as

sudo apt-get install easytag

Now, get the MP3s, which are helter-skelter peppered through useless directories, onto your computer.  Mount it as as a USB block device, which should happen automatically when you plug it in.  It will likely end up somewhere like /media/IPOD, but it’s easiest to use a graphical file browser (just go to “Places” on the Ubuntu launch bar) as it will show up, conveniently, as a clearly-marked mounted device.

The files are in iPod_Control/Music (yes, I expected that to be harder), but in a completely useless hierarchy.  Copy the files over — I’d just copy the whole Music folder over — onto somewhere local to your PC.  I use a directory called ~/MusicStage, but, you know, whatever.

The files will transfer in some amount of time.  Then open EasyTag and navigate to whatever you are calling your staging folder.  The program will go through and read the tags on all the mp3s in the directory.  You will note that, internally, all the tags on the mp3s are preserved, which is cool, because this would be an obvious way in which Apple could have been bigger dicks.

Hit Control-A to select all the files.  There’s an icon — I have absolutely no idea what it’s supposed to be, but by default it’s immediately to the left of the broom icon — hit it.  This opens the “Tag and File Name scan” window.  Set the scanner to “Rename Files and Directories”.  You can go wild at this point, sorting your albums as you see fit, but I do a fairly basic [DIR]/Artist/Album/NN Track format, where NN is the track number.  To do that, put the following into “Rename File and Directory”, of course changing the beginning part to wherever your home folder is:

/home/joshua/Music/%a/%b/%n %t

Hit the same wtf-is-that-supposed-to-be icon on this dialog.  Then hit the familiar commit-to-disk icon (it looks like a green arrow pointing downwards at a hard drive) and then — well, that’s it.  Now your music is back on your PC.

I saved this as a file last week, when I was trying to get my wireless working.  In the end I got it working, but the reveal is more poignant if I start with just this.

Nerds are going to like this for content; I hope others (whom I know in meatspace) will learn a little bit about me, about how my mind works, and a suggestion (along with the Aspergers) of why I’m surprised when other people’s minds don’t work in the same way.

The setup, as Twitter readers will have seen so far, is that my Internet connection stopped working some days ago.  Tonight I arrived home, could not find my phone, and was very frustrated at not having had the ability to check my email in days.  So I wanted to fix it.  I thought today that an automatic Ubuntu update must have broken it.  That’s the intro.

A note about the Dramatis Personæ: the unitalicized speaker is my conscious train of thought.  The italicized speaker is a voice I’ve worked very hard to train, a voice that before now I haven’t needed a name for.  I considered “Meta”, and “Metashua”, and “Metash”, but I’m settling on “Dæmon”, for a (very) funny computer in-joke, and something not funny for a reason I discovered while thinking through this tonight.

OK, wireless.  Wireless stopped working.  An auto-update broke it.  Damn.  What do you do when an update breaks networking?  You can’t exactly go online to fix it.  But that’s OK, I have a “live” Micro SD card, and a keychain USB Micro SD card reader dongle thing.  Good.  That hasn’t been working.  Bad.  Maybe I can get it to work.

OK, backpack.  Got it.  Plug it in.  Hmm.  What’s supposed to happen?  “Nothing”, right?  I always disable all auto-load and auto-mounts on my system.  OK, Places→Computer.  “SD Card”.  Good.  Mount that.

OK, that doesn’t work.  Of course that doesn’t work.  It didn’t work before.  That’s why I took it off my keychain and put it in my backpack.  It didn’t work because of a bent pin, right?

[I take off the cover and remove the Micro SD card]

OK.  Yes, definitely a bent pin.  But my hand is shaking.  To get my hand to stop shaking, I’m going to have to drink a bunch of wine.  Why can’t they come up with something for essential tremor that’s less incapacitating than alcohol?  I just need a sympathetic nervous system depressant.  Benzos.  I have Ativan.  Can I spare some Ativan?  No, I’m super-low, and won’t be able to get more until Tuesday.  Scratch that.  We can move back to the bent pin.  I’ll try wiggling.

[I wiggle]

OK, good sign.  It’s coming in and out of view.  So something is sketchy in the adaptor, because the Micro SD card didn’t move.  Oh, wait.  Did it?  OK, wiggle and press in the Micro SD card.

There it is.  OK, mount.  Nope.  No mount.  It must be the bent pin.  I need to unbend the pin.  Except, I can’t unbend the pin.  Hand tremor.  Thanks, Grandad!  Thanks, Dad!  Fuck.  OK.

Why don’t I have a PCCARD card reader?  I have a slot for it in the desktop.  There’s a dummy piece of plastic there right now.  Right?

[I check]

OK, right.  Yeah.  OK.  I just need to read this card.

Stop.  You’re boxed.  What are you trying to do?

I’m trying to boot off a live USB device.

No.  You’re trying to reinstall a driver.

I’m trying to reinstall a driver.  OK.  What else?  Church computer?  No.  I’m not supposed to use those any longer, and, besides, I don’t have a USB drive, and I don’t have a blank CD-R.

CD-R.  That’s good.  I have a CD-R somewhere.  Older version, but it worked when you installed it.  But, crap, is updraging going to wreck my system?  Well, maybe.  But you’ll figure that out before you get to that point.

[I look for the CD-R]

Gah!  Fuck!  Why can’t I keep my desk cleaner?  It was right there!  On top of the printer.

Then maybe it’s next to the printer.

Good.  OK.  Dig dig dig.  There it is.  Thanks, Sebastian [cat]!

[I take it back to the workstation.]

OK, inserwaitaminute.  What’s that?  Oh, that’s a dent in the disc.  Aargh!  I don’t have another one.  Thanks, Sebastian [cat]!.

Actually, that’s probably not Sebastian [cat]’s fault.  It’s right next to your sink.  You probably knocked something heavy and pointy over and didn’t notice.  God, I don’t see anything heavy and sharp.  Could a cat’s claw do that?

Not.  Helping.

Yeah, OK.  Well, Ubuntu live CDs can be burned onto a credit-card CD.  And this dent is at the outside.  Maybe it can load.  What’s the worst that could happen?  It wouldn’t load, right?  Or.  Hmm.  It could shatter.  If it’s enough off-balance, it can shatter.  Fine.

Or it could shatter and destroy the laser.

Yeah, it could shatter and destroy the laser.  But that’s unlikely.

Or it could shatter and jam your CD drive shut

Oh, yeah.  And my fallback for the evening is that David Mamet movie.

Fuck it.  I don’t care.

[I load the CD in X.]

“This disc has packages.  Do you want to open the package manager?”  Oh, good sign.  Now I need to boot off of it.

[Restarts the computer.  On boot-up, I get a BIOS warning that I'm using a 65W power adapter, which will yield suboptimal performance.]

Fuck.  God.  [racism redacted due to cowardice]

This.  Is.  Racist.  Knock it off!  And, besides, you’ve established that your power is wonky.  The A/C adapters blowing could be your fault.

But the fact that it’s 65W is sure not my fault!

Stop.  This isn’t helping.

Yeah.  OK, I’m at the CD menu.  “Install Ubuntu”.

[I scroll down and hit Return]

Please.  Please please.  Oh.  Hmm.  “Installation disk error.  Reboot.”  OK.

[I reboot.]

Try again.  I can run it as a live CD.  The live CD part should probably be written close to the interior.  Wait, how sure am I of this?  Not remotely.  Anyway, it’s back again.  “Try Ubuntu without installing it.”  Good, I can probably download a replacement driver.  “Installation disk error.  Reboot.”

But the boot part should be close the interior!  Wait, how sure am I?  Well, unsure enough to eject the disc and check it.

[I eject.]

Oh.  Yeah.  Congealed food on the interior.  Can’t really blame that on Sebastian [cat].  Clean that off.  OK, clean the whole surface off.  Insert.  Reboot.

[I insert and reboot.]

OK.  Run as live CD.  Good.  This is good.  This is longer than it went before.  Oh, there’s a roadsign.  OK, cool!  “Installation disk error.  Reboot.”  Damn.

You’re boxed.  Step back.  What are you trying to do?

I’m trying to roll back a driver.

No.  You’re trying to connect to the Internet.

Yeah.  I have a USB wifi modem/antenna.  Somewhere.  God my desk is so fucking dirty!  It was rightohthereitis.  Antenna.  Antenna looks good.  Power.  Damn, no power cord.

[I look some more.]

Well, maybe I have something else that can power it.  What it is?

[Examines.  "5V / 2A".]

Is that an L-type plug?  I probably have something that matches.  In that box of cables from hardware that went to heaven.

Had.

Oh yeah.  Had.  God, downsizing can suck sometimes.  Well, does anything else run on this?  All I need is an adapter.  I could open the case of the modem, splice in the power, and go for it.  Except I don’t have a soldering iron.  That’s OK.  I can hold it in place.  I don’t need it to run very long.

No, actually, I can’t.  Hand tremor.  I’d need a bunch more wine, and then I wouldn’t be able to debug the problem.  OK, nix that.  USB wifi adapter?  I had one.  Oh, gave it to my mom.  Um.  I could buy one tomorrow.  But aren’t they like $54?  They used to be, anyway.  I don’t have that kind of money, especially if it’s an upgrade problem.  I could borrow it from her.  But maybe I took it back already?  Where would it be?  HellifIknow.

You’re boxed.  What are you trying to do?

I’m trying to get my wifi adapter working.  But I don’t even have any CAT-5!

No.  You’re trying to get on the Internet.

Yeah.  Maybe that Micro SD card was a good idea.  But I don’t have a reader.  But, wait, I have devices that take SD cards and have a USB connection!  My broken camera!  I can mount the SD card as a USB device!  But I need a Micro SD – Full-size SD adapter.  Where would that be?

Hmm.  What would I do with it?  I have switched over mostly to Micro SD.  Hey, maybe it’s in a device that takes a full-size device.  What are those?  Kindle –

[checks Kindle]

No.  Oh, it could be in the camera itself!

[checks camera]

Bingo!  OK.  There it is.  Turn it on — oh, yeah.  It’s broken because it can’t turn on.  But now you have a carriage to convert Micro to full-size.  “Carriage?”  “Adapter?”  Something.  Hmm.

Not important.

Yeah.  OK, I have a card reader here somewhere.  I think it’s powered off of USB.  I think I know where it is.

[Looks.]

Oh, golden!  It’s an Iomega multi-card-plus-floppy reader.  Floppy?  What the fuck?  No, stop, go on.  No power connection.  It must draw power from the USB port.  Good.

[I put the Micro SD card in the carriage, put that in the card reader, and plug that into a USB port.  Two "USB drive"s and a "Floppy drive" show up in "Computer".]

Which USB card is it?  Well, try them both.

[I try both.]

Oh.  But maybe one needs a powered USB port.  That has to be a powered port, doesn’t it?  And they wouldn’t show up at all if the device were not powered.

How certain of you are that?

Well, not at all.  But if I were designing this computer, I’d make the ports powered.  Actually, I’d make sure to power at least one.  That wouldn’t work, though, right?  You’d have to do it in pairs.  So maybe it’s the ones on the back.

[I try]

Nope.  Fails.

How certain are you that it has to be done in pairs?

Um: not certain enough that I shouldn’t try the last port.  Oh, great!  Light came on momentarily.  Will it work?!

No.  OK.  But there’s a floppy drive.  Do I have an Ubuntu boot floppy?  No, stop it, that’s ridiculous.  Do I have any sort of boot floppy?  Hmm.  Maybe a DOS 6.22 floppy.  Or did it take more than one floppy?  Well, for sure the first one was bootable.  Otherwise it wouldn’t work.  But I need something that would get my wireless working.  That sure as hell won’t.

Stop.  You’re boxed.  What are you trying to do?

I’m trying to get on the Internet.

Good.  Do you have any other way to get on the Internet?  Even for just a bit?

Oh, Kindle!  Thank You Amazon!  W00t!  Turn.  On.  Wireless. 

Wait, what am I looking for?  Damn.  Wait.  What?  Damn.  Stop with the wine.  You need to think clearly more than you need to stop shaking. 

Stop.  You’re boxed.  Why could this have stopped working.

A driver.

Look for stuff about the driver.

I don’t know what card I have.  I don’t know how to find out what card I have.  There’s no “Device Manager”.  How did I ever get qualified under Red Hat if I don’t know this shit?  Did I forget it all?  Did I ever know it?

Stop.

Stop.  What I need is to roll back a driver.  Search→”@web roll back Ubuntu driver”.  Good.  There’s an Ubuntu suggestion for someone wanting to roll back a driver.  Maybe it’s solved.  Maybe someone told him how it’s solved.

[I read thread.  The person is asking for a rollback feature in Ubuntu; he gives an example of being sysadmin at a company, added a new module, and networking stop working.]

Good.  This is good.  Solutions?

[I read more.  Someone has written "A sysadmin loads a module and doesn't test it and brings a whole company's network down?!  That sysadmin should be fired.]

Oh, ha ha.  So funny.  Fuckwad.  Could you answer the fucking question of whether I can roll back?

[My eyes see the words "module" and "modprobe".]

Oh, of course!  A kernel module!  That’s how it’s done in Linux!  Maybe a module became unloaded.  “lsmod”.  Damn, that’s a lot.  OK, “lsmod | sort | less”.  “ieee80211″.  Sounds promising.  Load it.  Restart networking.

[I restart.]

Failure.  Hmm.  Maybe the whole kernel got upgraded.  Maybe the module from the old kernel will work.

[I fuck around for a bit.  I see a bunch of wireless modules.  Maybe I can load them all, I think.  I start tinkering.]

STOP.  You’re messing with the kernel, using out-of-date modules.  You’re going to destroy the system.

But I can’t exactly roll back the kernel!

[Stares at me internally]

Oh.  Yeah.  Sure I can.  From lilo.  OK, reboot.  65W power adapter warning.  Shit!  I have two weeks to return it, right?  I really need to do that tomorrow.  Boot menu.  Bingo!  There’s the old kernel.

[I boot, try various tricks with the kernel.  No dice.]

OK, check online again.

Here’s where I stop writing the first night.

Gods, finally!

OK, so:

ffmpeg -i [filename] -f mp4 -vcodec mpeg4 -maxrate 1000k -b 700000 -qmin 3 -qmax 5 -bufsize 4096000 -g 300 -acodec aac -ab 192000 -s 320x240 -aspect 4:3 "[dir]/[filename].mov"

Or for a whole directory of files (let’s say they’re all avis):

ls *.avi | xargs -I{} ffmpeg -i '{}' -f mp4 -vcodec mpeg4 -maxrate 1000k -b 700000 -qmin 3 -qmax 5 -bufsize 4096000 -g 300 -acodec aac -ab 192000 -s 320x240 -aspect 4:3 '{}'.mov

[Don't use those.  USE THIS.  —JHM]

That *.avi?  Change that to whatever filemask you need.  So if you have a bunch of YouTube .flvs, you can substitute ls *.flv at the beginning.  Or, just make a file of the filenames you want, and cat them into xargs: cat [file.with.video.names] | xargs....

To transfer them to your iPod, the best bet is apt-get install gtkpod-aac.

And maybe I’ll add more — in excruciating detail, so that people-just-slightly-less-experienced-than-I can make great use of it.

A story my dad told me about visit to an electronics store in the early 1990s just sprang into my head:

Electronics Store Employee:  … and some batteries [hands him a package].

My Dad:  Duracell?!

Electronics Store Employee:  Yes, they’re the best.

My Dad:  Really?!

Electronics Store Employee:  Yes.

My Dad:  But … but … the bunny!

Electronics Store Employee:  The … wait, what?

My Dad:  Are you saying the bunny lies?

Electronics Store Employee:  …

My Dad:  The bunny wouldn’t lie!

OK, yes yes yes, I’m way late to the party, but geohashing is wicked-cool.  Programmed spontaneity!  I’d put it at much cooler than geocaching and almost as cool as DCP (there are links in the post proper).

» Disability Doc

I just went to my state-appointed disability doctor today.  Different one from last time.  This doctor actually seemed to care.

The nurse had taken my blood pressure.  It was high.  Without health insurance I have been unable to afford medication out-of-pocket.  The doctor went about explaining it to me:

Doc:  Your blood pressure is very high.  It should be [switch to kindergarten teacher voice] One.  Thir.  Tee.  Oh.  Ver.  Nine.  Tee.  Or lower.

And I’m thinking, What the fuck, doc?  I was in an on-the-job accident, I didn’t have my frontal lobe removed.  Quick, I thought.  I need a shibboleth.

Joshua:  It’s the diastolic that’s especially bothering me about that.

And a light goes on behind her eyes.  Gooooood doctor, I think.  Maybe we can talk like adults now.

» A Levenshtein Edit Distance of “maybe pay attention to the computer”

I was pretty sure that I was going to spell “shibboleth” and “diastolic” correctly in that previous sentence.  And I seemed to.  So I tried appending a ‘q’ to the end of each, and Firefox recognized the modifications as errors.  I have to do this because of an apparent bug in Firefox in which the spell-checker will sometimes turn off without warning, leaving me wondering if there are false negatives.  Which leads me to a story that:

My ex-wife was/is one of the worst spellers I have ever met.  She makes my father look like the O.E.D.  When she was first telling me where her parents live, and where [Redacted.  Gawd.  The casual reader has no idea how much shit I redact -- how much shit I unilaterally redact, as far as blogs go -- about the divorce.  I believe that discretion is the better part of valor, but I can't even allude to the fact that I'm being discreet without losing valor.  So I'm going to spend one whuffie on this rather innocuous story that I'd probably tell about anyone, and one more on this very allusion to valor.  If that's enough to send you on your way, happy trails.  Nine fucking years.  Aargh.]

Anyway.  She emailed me her parents’ address, and I was going to drive down there with my mother.  My mother was looking up directions on Mapquest.  I read the address from my email, and said “The street is ‘Vangard’.  Without a ‘u’.”  Good thing for fuzzy matches.  The street is, of course, ‘Vanguard’.

So at one point in our marriage, Jenn had left a printout for work on the coffee table and my eyes caught a few words moving past it.  There was a glaring typo.  I said, as meekly as I could, “Hey, do you want me to edit this for typos?”  She said “yes”.

So I’m reading this document, and it’s just riddled with misspelled words.  So I fix them with a pen.  And, to help, I tell her, “There’s a setting you can turn on in Microsoft Word so that it underlines typos in red as you type them.”

And she says, “Oh, it’s on, the computer is just wrong a lot of the time.”

Thank whatever that she caught the typo on the tattoo artist’s essay for her second (and fucking huge) tattoo with a line from a friend’s poem surrounding it.  She didn’t let me copy-edit that.

OK, maybe that was more than one whuffie.  I don’t care.

» Macintrash

I’m typing this — once again — one one of my Mom’s MacBooks.  Firefox had slowed to a crawl.  I tried quitting it to restart it, but, no, you apparently can’t restart an application through the application menu if it’s stopped responding.  But I also couldn’t do anything else on the system; full freeze.  So I hard-power-cycled it (thank you, Steve, that the OS did not override that), the computer restarted, and: Firefox is gone from the quick-launch menu!  I thought I was missing it but, no, it just wasn’t there.  Then I realized I was being foolish: of course when an application crashes you should remove the ability to restart it quickly it in the future.  Doing otherwise would be ludicrous.

(Yes, I know I’m typing this on that very Mac.  To avoid hypocrisy — as far as can be avoided after this post — I’m turning it off as soon as I hit “Publish”.)

(And yes, I know, I’m in a terrible mood.  Sorry.)

The Amazon Kindle device uses a 3G network (they call it “WhisperNet” which is awfully precious, no?) to download books to the device “in under a minute”.  Presumably, they’re just paying Sprint or someone for the airtime, and there’s a SIM card inside the case.  Amazon offers an integrated web browser on the Kindle, and its use is free.  Free.  Browse to your heart’s content over a high-speed cellular connection, to any site you want, and Amazon will pay the OEM supplier for the airtime.

Thing is, though, it should be somewhere between “easy” and “not all that difficult” to clone the SIM card; forge a MAC address; whatever.  Maybe the traffic all goes through Amazon, and there’s a key exchange.  Somehow Amazon knows which Kindle is which, and can server-push books to any Kindle they wish, and this should give us some hints.  Whatever.  Not impossible.  So all one would need would be a dead Kindle or — here’s the thing — a working Kindle with wireless turned off (there’s a physical switch), and one could use “Whispernet” on a Linux laptop.  Yes, for free.

I hesitate to write this — although (haven’t searched) it’s probably been discussed of before — because this would be the absolute death knell of free Amazon browsing.  And it is mega convenient to check Gmail on my Kindle at a tea shop or whatever.  But there will be a resurrection real quick.  Here we have a hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars product line that ships with, presumably, free 3G (from the device) forever.  Now we have a precedent.  Amazon pays whomever (my money’s still on Sprint), but this (if Amazon have done their projections right) is lost in the clinking coins.  Mobile data networking is getting faster and faster, and cheaper and cheaper, and it may rapidly reach the point where it’s too cheap to charge for.  And, of course, telephony and SMS can all be done on the Web, and better.  Amortize it over, what?  The cost of a $70 PC-CARD?  A $5 “all you want” gift card you can buy at Starbucks?  Or have it offered as a loss leader for something else (maybe something like On^★Star which, somewhat ironically, puts a low-efficiency and imprecise actual person in the data loop)?  Fifteen years ago I was doing research in ubicomp.  All our ideas were things like “you take something the size of a credit card to one of the many kiosks in a public area and….”  Ha!

What I do know is:

1. It’s 15 years later.
2. There are people at least as smart as I working on this.
3. Lots of them.
4. And they’re working in groups.

I’ve held off getting an iPod because they hadn’t crossed into the realm where they met my needs.

They have now.

Here’s the model:

So, we’ve all done work.  Apple designed it; Amazon is selling it; I’m recognizing that I want it.  Now it’s the turn for a dedicated reader to buy one for me.  Wishlist.  kthnxbye

When the World-Wide web arrived on the scene, one wrote webpages by hand.  Summer of 1995, I read the HTML spec straight through and then coded a site I liked.  In DOS “EDIT”.  When I saw something I liked, I looked at the source, then coded it manually.

Then HTML-writing tools came.  They eventually had a suite of nice stuff, such as templates, auto-completion of tags, syntax checking, WYSIWIG editors, and built-in FTP.

Then there was Blogger.  You could use it as an online journaling platform.  You used templates (or, if you were inspired) created your own, then the site would publish onto your own server.

Then Blogger started hosting blogs.  You didn’t need your own site, but you needed some knowledge.

Then LiveJournal and all their insipid ilk, where everything except your usually-short observations were provided, and they did all the stuff with accounts and friends.  I think.

I skipped MySpace.

Then Facebook, miniblogging with tight maximum-post-size limits.  Super short mini-Christmas-letters.  People could “me too!” with a thumbs-up button, and post constrained responses.

Then Twitter, 140-characters microblogging.  Your thoughts are supposed to fit into those 30-or-whatever words, or they will not be seen by your readers.

Next, presumably, a social site at which you give a thumbs-rating of your state, and can thumbs-up or thumbs-down someone else’s thumb state.

Soon, you just decide where on the Web you are going, and if you like it and haveth not your own site, you can tell your friends, and you’re back to 1995.

Then, the Web will be provided for you as a stream, and you can simply switch streams, and we’re back to TV.

Then, all you can do is choose to turn on your computer or not, and we’re back to church.

Finally, we won’t get to decide whether we turn on our computers or not, and we’re back to school.

And all of that because losers couldn’t figure out how to write in HTML.  If the information age fizzles, it’s their fault.

One of my many get-poor-slowly website ideas is a site that would be called unreadablecaptchas.com.  Therein people would post any captcha images (challenge-response text images) that were baffling to them, even as human beings.  I’ve been collecting several of my own, but this one takes the proverbial cake:

The world’s come a long way in the ten years since The Most Narcotic Period of Anniversary.  Now we’ve got Google.  And now we have many more languages.  So, read that link for the methodology; basically, it’s playing “Chinese Whispers” (”Telephone”) with Google Translate.  Here it is, flip-flopping with English all the way, alphabetically by language (i.e., English→Afrikaans→English→Albanian→English→…)

I’ve chosen a strong pair of sentences, very recognizable (I promise), each containing what I thought was one universally immutable noun.  But that wasn’t the case.

Sweet voice and Amazing life experience!  But I mention it Clearly.  Now I know.

And here it is chained (i.e., English→Afrikaans→Albanian→Arabic→…, starting and stopping with English but skipping it in the “E”s section.)

Only on the life of a line, said the widow; The good Intention, but I understand now that loss.

What this suggests to me is that Google is not using — at least universally — some kind of internal hyper-Esperanto; if the sentences were being abstracted to a(n ultra-cool) meta-language, these two modes would yield similar results, and they are not even close.  But they’re doing something else, apparently, which seems to involve remembering the outbound translation for the inbound return.  But I’m not willing to wager anything on that hypothesis.

So the battle of wits has begun.  What was the original text?  It ends when we discover who is right, and what quote he will secretly submit to me for the next round.  Post answers below.  Also, for bonus points (the normal mcgees.org prize is a banana through the mail), I want critical interpretation of those lines — the author was cryptic, but what was he trying to say?

(I thought about “Google Torture Porn” for a title, but thought that was in rather poor taste.)

[mp3 link]

I’m pretty sure the A/C adapter on my laptop is going bye-bye, and in an effort to not have it take my laptop with it, I’ve unplugged it.  My mom lent me a Mac which is simply awesome and is making me think of giving up Ubuntu.

Oh, wait, I think I meant kinda like a plastic toy with fewer keyboard shortcuts, but, still, THANKS MOM!

Diss diss diss Mac Mac Mac.  I know, I know.  Here it is in two sentences: “Everything the designers thought you should do is trivially easy.  Everything they didn’t want you to do is completely fucking impossible.”  If it’s a choice between “makes the easy stuff easy, the hard stuff impossible, and everything uniformly pretty” and “makes the easy stuff possible, the hard stuff possible, and every UI look like a different mongrel dog”, please sign me up for the latter.  Except — most of the easy stuff is easy now in Ubuntu, and it’s getting more handsome.

Anyway — I may not respond quickly to your attempts at contact.  But I love you anyway.  Some of you.  You know who you are.

Do you know the way in which Western bloggers might have something (brilliant but) insulting about hardline Muslims, but then don’t post out fear for personal safety?  I feel the same way as a nerd blogger w.r.t. Star Wars and LotR.  So, I’m not going to say it, OK?  I’m just going to link to [Shitty] designs in Star Wars, something I’ve thought for a long time.  Please keep the carbonite away, OK?  If you do come at me, come at me with a blaster: fire your beam of light, I’ll be able to finish my snack, take a short nap, and then dodge.

Me, in May: Why URL shorteners are a bad idea

tr.im, today:

tr.im is now in the process of discontinuing service, effective immediately.

Statistics can no longer be considered reliable, or reliably available going forward.
However, all tr.im links will continue to redirect, and will do so until at least December 31, 2009.
Your tweets with tr.im URLs in them will not be affected.

We regret that it came to this, but all of our efforts to avoid it failed.
No business we approached wanted to purchase tr.im for even a minor amount.

There is no way for us to monetize URL shortening — users won’t pay for it — and we just can’t
justify further development since Twitter has all but annointed bit.ly the market winner.
There is simply no point for us to continue operating tr.im, and pay for its upkeep.

We apologize for the disruption and inconvenience this may cause you.

If you have a Skype number for incoming calls, and are registered with Google Voice, it occurred to me how you can make domestic phone calls through Skype for free.  Go to Google Voice, type in the number you want to call, tell it to ring your Skype number, and hit “Connect”.  Skype will ring.  Pick it up, and Google will dial the number you entered, and Google Voice will connect you..  Voila: a free Skype call.

This will only work if you have registered your Skype number with your Google Voice account, which is straightforward.

If this is blindingly obvious, sorry for the bandwidth.

espeak is, in the developers’ words, “a compact open source software speech synthesizer for English and other languages, for Linux and Windows.”

I cannot comment on the Windows version, but the Linux version has a command-line interface with a lot of options.  So I wrote three wrappers, called, respectively, mespeak, mespeakf, and mespeaku.

mespeak, to be used as mespeak "some text":

espeak -s 150 -p 40 -v en-rp "$1" --stdout | aplay

mespeakf, to be used as mespeak file:

espeak -s 150 -p 40 -v en-rp -f $1 --stdout | aplay

mespeaku, to read a webpage as mespeak http://www.website.com:

lynx --dump $1 | sed 's/\[[^\]*]//g'| mespeak --stdin

So sorry about the sed script.  It becomes rather write-only when one is matching against literal brackets.

I don’t think I have the willpower to have kept myself from clicking to find out what filled the ellipsis on this excerpt from a Google search result:

A hotbox, a slang noun used to refer to a woman who is eager for sexual intercourse (from … causing it to fill with smoke in order to maximize the effect.

Niall, from the back seat:  Why are you using the GPS?  You know how to get there.

Joshua:  In case there’s traffic.  And I like using the computer.

Niall:  Do you let me play computer games?

Joshua:  Yes.

Niall: All the time?!

Q: So, where is the most expensive place in the world to call with Google Voice?

A: It appears to be Tuvalu.

Q: How much does that cost?

A: US$0.55/minute.

Q: Wow.  That is really cheap for a series of atolls about 1m above sea level.

A: Yeah, I thought so too.

Q: Wow.  Again.  More expensive than Ascension Island?  Wouldn’t Google have to buy a satellite to talk to them?

A: I would have thought so.  But, in addition to radio towers and useless stamps, they have a newspaper, so you never know.

Q: A newspaper?  But there are fewer than 1,000 people there, and none of them live there permanently!

A: Yeah, I know.

Q: Wow.  I wonder how I could get a subscription.

A: I can see you are a collector.

Q: Guilty.  Maybe they would send them with otherwise-unusable Ascension Island stamps!

A: Might be expensive.

Q: Like what?

A: Like, US$0.55/word.  Or thereabouts.

Q: Oh.  Well, I still can’t believe Ascension is cheaper than Kiribati.

A: Wow, you have heard of Kiribati?

Q: Yeah.  You see, I collect stamps and specialize in remote islands.

A: Ah, yes.  We established that in the post title.  Apparently you cannot call Kiribati at all.

Q: Oh, yeah, that’s reasonable.  I’m not sure there are any phones to ring even if we called.

A: You know, many of your responses don’t qualify as ‘Q’s.

Q: They don’t?

A: There you go.  Welcome back.

Q: Gotta go.  I just got a bank mixture of Atlantic island stamps to sort.

A: Like, St. Helena and stuf?

Q: Now you are just showing off.

A: That wasn’t a question.

Q: No?

A: That was.

Q: Seriously, I’m leaving now.  Call me later?

A: How much would that cost?

Q: Not sure.  Where am I again?

How to build the Apollo guidance computer for $3000.  It cost NASA $150,000.

Actually, that’s misleading.  The $3000 pays for vintage hardware.  The computing power is rounding error in modern terms.  The people who wrote Firefox probably wouldn’t bother to hand-optimize 1Mhz out of the program’s operation.  [Fill in Microsoft joke].  Put another way, this is approximately the same amount of computing power my laptop uses to look at Internet porn on its own, while I’m drinking Sulawesi coffee in another city and it’s powered off.

If this will indeed be my phone number for life, it’s not possible to do much better than 77-333-MCGEE.

You are cordially invited to call that number, even though the chance that I will answer it, upon reflection, approaches zero very quickly.  Time-shifted voice.  Yum.

(As late as 2000 C.E., a commentator on NPR stated, with Republican-level confidence, that no telephone operator would ever “throw in” long distance “for free”.  At the time, I thought “You’re out of your mind.”  If you are one of the benighted without free long distance today, however, allow me to say “I’m sorry” and “I invite you to move to 773land (Chicago?) to call my vanity number without toll charges.”)

Joshua: “Mom, do you mind if I link my cell phone to your laptop for a sec?”

My Mom: “Why would I care?”

J: “Sorry.  Just thought I should ask first.”

MM: “No, seriously.  Why would I care?  Is it going to cost me money?  Slow down my computer?  Break something?”

J: “Oh.  No.”

MM: “Go ahead.”

(Note to self: take laptop with you everywhere.)

Google Voice.  Seriously, you had to see that coming.  Your phone data is something that Google didn’t have yet.  When Microsoft introduced IE, people had a fit (a web browser!  For free?!  Integrated with the OS?!!!  Begone, you!)

But now: Google introduced a web browser, and no one batted an eyelash, because in the grand scheme of things — the grand scheme apparently being “centralize, cross-reference, and mine all the world’s information” — a web browser is no big deal.  A voice number that records your calls?  Egads.

I’m being Chicken Little.  You know — they brand themselves “Don’t Be Evil”, which is cute-and-cuddly-and-anyway-how-bad-can-they-be?  I have friend who work for them, and they’re great guy.  But Adsense — a main revenue stream?  Fucking Nazi.

Will I use it?  Hells yeah.  But mark my timestamp: the fourth and fifth verbs in “centralize, cross-reference, and mine” are “control” and “charge for”.

The feedback I gave on Google Voice:

I need my son to be able to reach me whenever, wherever, from any phone.  To wit: I need a (semi-secret) 800/888 number routed to my GV # (I’ll pay for the minutes), the ability to accept collect calls (I’ll pay), and the ability to accept international “reverse-charge” calls (again, I’ll pay.)

Double-tasking the toll-free number to allow me to use GV through a domestic payphone, in an emergency, or (these still exist) area code-limited landline accounts, would be desirable (nearly essential.)

(K7.net has you beat on one front, until you accept faxes.)

What an awesome service.  When you have transcripts of everything I’ve ever said or written, copies of all my files, histories of everything I’ve ever read, searched for, and every website I’ve ever visited, and all my buying habits, will the next step be to clone me?  I don’t think you can instruct my Touchpad to take a DNA sample.  Yet. 

Like many people, I was wowed by the realspace titles in Fincher’s Panic Room.  I began actively watchig for them in this AskMeFi post of a few months ago, which traces them back to North by Northwest.  I’ve become relatively accustomed to them, so that I was startled when this establishing shot (or whatever they’re called) turned out to be not in realspace:

I was also startled that the software to do this automatically came out after bullet time became pervasive.  Commentary on the technique: “Something’s coming,” it seems to say. “And it ain’t gonna be fun.”  Except it was.

By the way, yes, it is extremely marvelous to be able to hit the ’s’ key and have a full-resolution movie-file/DVD screeshot written to disk.  Except, um, I’m not sure those DVDs are out yet — so I should note I got the screenshot from my good friend SWIM.

A programmer in China has reached out to me for ideas about modeling a Wordpress plugin after this, which I did manually:

mostly because I am too lazy to do it myself.

I’ll keep you posted.

This robot controlled by a “rat brain in a jar” can’t possibly be real, can it?  I haven’t found any references in non-techie sources yet.  I also have yet to explain my unexpected nausea upon reading the alleged details — and I support human stem cell research.