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:
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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.
I got a robo-call to my voicemail number (+1 206.600.6354 if you want to call it for some reason) that presumably began speaking when my outgoing message picked up. I joined the call in medias res; specifically, to:
… by continuing to listen to this call, you confirm that you are [two seconds of digital silence]. It is …”
Usually I assume these calls are for me, or for a former holder of the number, or some other entity with a name. But, two seconds of silence? My voicemail may in fact have been their robot’s intended victim.
Boy, do I miss industry! (Flash, video, audio, automatic start)
I live in a suburb of Los Angeles, California, USA. Unfortunately, Garmin’s GPS receivers are designed for a parallel-universe-version of this city called Los-Angeles-With-No-Red-Lights. This is why their GPS receivers have me get off the 60 freeway in Pico Rivera when I’m going to San Gabriel, and why my journey through the surface streets of downtown-but-not-so-beautiful-no-matter-what-Leno-says Burbank this afternoon, ostensibly to avoid a traffic jam, ended up taking six minutes longer than estimated. I understand not finding optimal solutions, even to the point of my ignoring directions and taking time off the estimated arrival — TSP is, of course, NP-complete — but not weighting surface streets with delays from traffic lights (or woefully underestimating, which equates to the same thing)? Really inexcusable.
Maybe our red lights just suck here.
I suppose it was predictable. I’ve spent a month on my new laptop with a fresh Windows Vista installation. And hasta.
So, Vista. It’s not that it’s bad, per se: actually, it’s just like that. It’s bad. Unforgivably bad. I have a 64-bit processor; four gigs of RAM (I’m old enough [my first hard drive was 40 MB] that this is practically inconceivable); and every accessory imaginable. And what do I get from Redmond? Well, it takes a couple seconds for my typing to show up on screen. I have to pay Symantec absurd amounts of money to protect me from malware. I have “trial versions” of Office, that would cost roughly $100,000 to register. Non-uninstallable applications. And fucking blue screens of death. For real. BSOD. In 2009. At least WordPerfect has forgone the white-on-blue color scheme in the last 15 years.
Vista came “for free” on my computer. That means that some large amount of money was spent by Hewlett-Packard to buy me a copy of this OS OEM.
Being a Vista user is like being married to a retarded, HIV-positive prostitute — a prostitute who still charges you money for sex, after marriage, and goes on sleeping around; who never gets your jokes; and threatens you with terminal illness every time you attempt to do something fun.
Stop being so smug, Mac-heads. Being a Macintosh user is like being married to a high-class prostitute who went to finishing school, but who, every time you want to talk about something intimate or important, tells you a vivid Shahrazodian tale to distract you.
I’m going back to Ubuntu. I’m running towards it. Using Ubuntu is like having an open relationship with the well-read, clean, natural-fiber-wearing vegan neo-hippie you met at the health foods store: she’s willing to experiment with anything, not opposed to your seeing other people, and if it doesn’t work out, well, the relationship will end with a hug and her packing up the thrift store backpack that can hold all her essential possessions with space left over.
Ubuntu. That’s the link. Ubuntu is “free as in speech” and “free as in beer”. It’s written by volunteers. It’s maintained by volunteers. It is configurable down to sub-millimeter scale. It works anywhere. It does anything. And the people who maintain it — and you can be one with a small amount of effort — actually welcome advice and refuse money. Ubuntu’s main goal? To be available in every language, even if there are only 100 speakers, and to support any old hardware, even if it’s twenty-year-old crap that the Salvation Army is throwing in the trash. And to rock while doing it.
It’s one of my basic rules of computing: you can pay for shit, or you can get great stuff for free. I’ll share my other rules later. In the meantime I’m going to finish [description of illegal activity redacted] on Windows, then boot off my CD-ROM and go back to a grownup’s operating system.
I’ll see you on the other side.
You ain’t seen nuthin yet. Just try to get there from your remote.
Time Warner Cable, in Los Angeles, carries an On Demand station called FEARnet — the on-demand version of the website, wherein you can watch free horror movies, television episodes, and shorts to your heart’s content.
Deciding that I wanted to learn how to get to FEARnet intentionally, rather than by hitting random buttons, I searched out a reliable method, dear Reader. Namely:
Hit the big orange button in the middle of the remote that says “On Demand”.
You’re welcome.
It’s OK, I’ll wait. Go try it.
Type type type wait quick brown foxymophandlemama backyet?good.
Ha. Ha ha. Bet you fell for that. Ha. Loser. Of course you can’t access free, on-demand horror programs by going through the On Demand menu. What you really need to do is hit the triangular button marked “A”, which maybe-stands-for-or-it’s-just-a-fortuitous-accident “Access Menu”.
Go try.
Back? Yeah, it’s not in the list, is it? Look on the bottom of your screen. What looks like a status bar is actually a scrolling menu that you access with the horizontal buttons on your remote, rather than boringly scrolling up and down through the Actual Menu.
Remember, dear Reader, that we’re trying to access free horror movies, TV episodes, shorts, and maybe other stuff. So, scroll long enough, and you will see a button that says “Free On Demand”.
You’re welcome.
And then — um — hmm. What category does it fit into? Not “Local”. Not “Kids”. Maybe “Entertainment” or “Cutting Edge” (voting for the latter, if for nothing else than the play on words.)
OK, I’ll wait while you go through “Entertainment”. Remember to scroll vertically through all the options.
No? Well then, they are clever. It’s in “Cutting Edge”. See? Cutting Edge? Slasher flicks. Fits! There you find the free horror content.
Easy.
Ha! Psyche! Trick! Other stuff they used to say in junior high! Why in the world would free content be under the “Free On Demand” menu in the first place?! You blithering moron! What’s wrong with you?
What you actually do to watch free horror content, which includes (just reminding you) television episodes, is go to “Movies On Demand” instead of “Free On Demand”. Note to self: television episodes are movies if they’re horror television episodes.
OK, whew. Wanna take a break?
No, you can’t, can you? You have to do this quickly or you get thrown off the menus. So we’ll do this properly. We’re in “Movies On Demand” now. And now a vertical menu! Woot! Scroll up to “Free Movies”. That’s all there is to it.
I think I’ve cried UI wolf. You don’t believe me, do you? Yeah, I admit, FEARnet is not on the first screen. But we may actually be getting closer. Hint: it’s a horizontal menu again. Scroll right, it’s faster. FEARNET. Just hit “Select” to, um, select that content.
Grrumph. Frak. No no no, that’s not at all what we want. Turns out, the FEARnet content is in a vertical scroll menu in the upper-left on your screen. Scroll up and down. “Select” does things better left to horror movie screenwriters.
We’ve made it! It’s actually pretty cool. Hit “Info” for info about the shows, “Select” to play them. Start your movie (warning: High Tension is pan-and-scan and dubbed.)
OK, how far did you get before the DVR unceremoniously kicked you out of your movie? If it was more than ten minutes, you’ve beat me.
You’re kicked out because you scheduled two broadcast shows to record simultaneously, and one (or both) just kicked in. Graciously, they give you a message explaining this. They give you a pop-up menu through which you can easily cancel one of the tuned programs if you want to watch your on-demand program.
OK, don’t wait too long for the pop-up menu. It won’t actually, um, appear. You’ll just be kicked out of your movie. Fortunately it seems to pause the movie where you left it.
Now the trick is to get out of the On Demand menu. Just press “Exit”. I mean, “Stop”. I mean, “A”. Or “B”. Or “C”. Elephino. Usually I just type in a channel number and it takes me there, wherein I can do DVR-type stuff to my heart’s content. Your still-beating, tell-tale heart. Yum.
OK, I’ll wait. But not long. I have stuff to watch. Wait. Thought I did. Frak. What’s step two again?
The Moxi DVR is great. Really, really great. It took almost a decade, but a company finally came out with a UI better than that of my Series 1 TiVo.
One neat thing about the Moxi is the ability to add an external hard drive. I tried adding a 750 GB Seagate FreeAgent Pro drive to the unit. It is recognized, formatted, and ready-to-go. Problem is, after a certain amount of idle time, it will stop functioning. When you try to play a show on the EHD, you will get a prompt — twice, oddly — that says “Do you want to keep this episode?”, with “keep” and “delete” options. Also, if there is no room on the internal hard drive, the unit will fail to record episodes, and in the “Canceled/Deleted Episodes” log, the (unhelpful) reason will be given as “Failed (No Signal)”. If you go to “Setup”, then “External Hard Drive”, select “Disconnect”, then physically disconnect and re-connect the drive, it works again.
The problem is that the Seagate EHD goes to sleep, and the Moxi cannot wake it up. The fix is to connect the EHD to a Linux box via USB, and use sdparm to clear the “Standby” flag on the hard drive. See the flags on the hard drive by typing:
sdparm -a /dev/sdX
where X is the letter assigned to the device (type “tail /var/log/syslog” after plugging in the drive to see what letter it’s assigned.)
To clear the flag, type:
sdparm -c STANDBY -6 /dev/sdX
The “-c STANDBY” clears the “Standby” flag, and the “-6” does it in six-bit mode, which is apparently required.
Answer for how to keep these drives from going to sleep was found at the blog My Slice of Reality.
I’m beginning to get a sense of what it’s like to be lost around computers. I have a Canon AP 350 electric typewriter, no manual, and no idea what most of the settings do. The logos aren’t clear, the operation is not intuitive to me, and when I want to do something that I assume should be trivial, like move the paper a tiny bit up or down electronically, I haven’t the foggiest how to accomplish it.
Ah, torrential autumnal storms and Pizza Hut Quikorder. A match made in Valhalla. A $5 tip will just about assuage my guilt, I think.
These are my friends and cube mates:
They are good for cheering you up, keeping you company, or being sympathetically down while you’re down.
I’ve placed an order for an e-book reader: the first-generation Amazon Kindle. I’ve been interested in a good e-book reader for about 8 years, but what I previously thought was going to be the best, the Everybook, failed to bloom. It was many times as expensive and heavy, and used LCD screens.
I sat down some years ago and put together a checklist of what I wanted in an e-book reader. They were:
Only the first seven are guaranteed. This is only a one-page reader, however, rather than a two-page reader. The viewing area is only 6 inches diagonally. And I’m not sure whether it’s going to be hackable, but I’ll try my best. But Amazon added a whole bunch of extra functionality: MP3 player, free wireless access to buy books or download content while seeing Amazon reviews, free browsing of Wikipedia, an email address for the device. I think this all adds up to “good enough for now”.
Notice how everything is converging? My ideal reader today would support full-motion video, color, advanced music playlist management, email, telephony, touch-sensitivity; it would be a replacement for a separate book reader, phone, mp3 player, PDA, calculator, and laptop.
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