BunkBlog

It turns out that the unenumerated rights that we have inherent to us as human beings don’t really exist.  If you don’t keep your car in a garage and you don’t live in a gated community, the Ninth Circuit has determined that you have no reasonable expectation that the police will stay off your property to put a covert GPS tracking device on your car.  Sure, it’s your driveway and they’re trespassing if they walk on it, but since the mailman walks on your driveway to deliver mail, it’s okay for the government to walk on your driveway to spy on your vehicular movements.

Amazingly, if you park in a garage or live behind a wall in a gated community, the court thinks you’ve still got some rights.  Is this going to be a selling point for new community developers?  “Live here, the Fourth Amendment still applies.”

One more way that Google is showing its plans for the new Google Chrome OS machines – Google Voice inside Google Mail. Pin that tab and you’ve got a persistent connection to telephones, various instant messengers, and email. This comes out the same day that CrunchGear tells us that Google is working with Acer on the upcoming Chrome OS laptop with an old-school Atom CPU, 8 GB of flash RAM, a webcam and not much else.

Should be interesting, at least.

I can relate to this SO much.

For those five science fiction geeks who haven’t seen it yet, may I present the only viral video I’ve heard of devoted to a Golden Age author: Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury. Embedded video after the break, since it is obviously Not Safe For Work (As an aside, this is likely the only time I’ll get to use the category tags of “Literary, Music, Video, and Geek” all on the same post).

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Wil Wheaton continues to prove that there are decent human beings that started out as child actors. An 8-year-old girl sent in her Wilpower fan club application back in the 80s, and the “6 to 8 weeks” ended up being much longer. She never got that fan club package, and the fan club folded many years ago. She’s now a professional writer and blogger, and when Wil Wheaton heard about her lack of Wilpower memorabilia, he fixed it. He found a set of fan club swag, and sent her a really funny letter. You should read it.

Wow, what a stunningly misleading headline and astounding display of a lack of understanding of internet architecture displayed in this Wired article.  This conflation of the client with the protocol is a very bizarre thing to see in a supposed techie magazine.

Wired claims that the web is dead, because the growth of “apps” (hate that term, it just means “programs” but with one fewer syllables) is showing that people would prefer purpose-built individual small clients to access data, rather than relying on somewhat clunky and standards-averse browser-based web applications. That hardly means the web is dead.  What pool of data do the Wired writers think these apps are accessing?  The Facebook client for the iPhone is connecting to the Facebook web site, using the open APIs that Facebook has made available for just that purpose.

Anderson and Wolff make a distinction that doesn’t seem to make sense, from a computer geek standpoint. It’s not as if the same information is not available via web browser as via the purpose-built mini-programs.  One example they use is the Netflix streaming service on an iPad.  I can get the same or better functionality from any web browser, so how is the web dead?  Another example is RSS feeds.  What protocol do Anderson and Wolff suppose RSS feeds are served through?  Hmmm, looks like HTTP which is serving up these RSS feeds of HTML information to a purpose-built or general-purpose browser equally.

Of course, since Wired predicted that “push” technology was going to kill the browser in 1997, maybe we should assume their prognostication abilities are not all they could be.

I do appreciate that they clarify that the web is not the totality of the internet, something I had the hardest time explaining to people in years past.  Since those days, though, the web has become almost the entirety of the internet traffic, minus email and P2P.  For those who aren’t running bittorrent clients, the distinction between “internet” and “web” is one without meaning today. As for the rise of the apps, I think they may be a stopgap for some things. For example, the app was necessary to get YouTube videos because Apple hates Flash.  If you had an iPhone and wanted to watch YouTube videos, using the Safari browser would make you sad. Now that YouTube is moving toward HTML5 standards-based video, there’s no benefit to the app over accessing the site via a normal browser.  The same has been happening with many other video sites – the conversion from proprietary applications to a rich standards-based web may render this predictive column as quaint as the one which said we’d all be running PointCast by 2000.

Another great stop-motion video, with the bonus feature of the paintings coming off the walls as well.  No digital effects, just thousands of photos and a lot of creativity.

Direct Youtube link

I think what the Oregon Tea Party has learned is “don’t steal slogans from vindictive anonymous geeks” but I may be mistaken.  I’ve seen precious little evidence that most Tea Party folks are capable of learning.

After two evenings of boot disks, operating system CDs, external drives, SATA drives balanced precariously atop an open case, and a couple of hard ciders, it appears the great computer meltdown of 2010 has been repaired.

Sadly, after all the effort, I still don’t know what was wrong. The computer stopped booting without an error, so I tried to fix it with a variety of different tools.  Some of them may have introduced other errors, or exacerbated the original error, and somehow it all ended up booting again around 6pm today.

Things which I tried which did not help: fixmbr, fixboot, copy partitions to a spare SATA drive I have lying around (waiting for that new build I’ve been planning for nearly a year now), copying NTLDR, hiding and unhiding partitions, making partitions active and boot, and pulling out hair.

Things which I think led to the fix: editing the boot.ini file via a Linux boot disk to point to partition(2) instead of partition(1), ensuring the recovery partition does not get assigned a drive letter in XP. And possibly the cider.

And this is why I have several USB drives about, as well as why I experiment with live distros on USB keys so I’m not completely flummoxed when everything goes pear shaped.  I still don’t trust this machine, though.  Flaky like croissant dough.

It’s never good when your computer shows a flashing cursor for twenty minutes after you turn it on.  It would have flashed longer, but I turned the machine off.

Now booting off a live Linux USB stick, running diagnostics on the machine. There appears to be nothing wrong with it. SMART shows no errors.  NTFSChk shows no errors. I can mount and browse the drive perfectly well in Linux. Now I’m running a freshly-updated CLAMAV scan against the 200+ gigs on the main drive, but I begin to think this won’t reveal anything either.

Naturally, I can’t afford a new computer currently. Heck, I’ve got parts for a new build in my dining room that have 6 months of dust on them already.  *sigh*

I recently noticed that it had been a while since I’d received a new issue of Geek Monthly magazine. Turns out, they went under six months ago.  Huh.  I guess I won’t be getting a refund of my remaining subscription fees. That prompted me to look at some of my other less-established magazine subs, and the only one that was missing was Seed.  Seed magazine was started four years ago as something of a spiritual successor to the 80s gem OMNI.  OMNI was a fabulous combination of science and science fiction, which in later years added far too much pseudoscience and then decided to jump into the “online only” realm before anyone was ready to read magazines online. They are sometimes missed. But this is about Seed.

Seed was pretty decent, actually. They had a lot of good writers working for them, and they seemed to understand the online world fairly well. They created a site which they used as something of cross-pollination project between print and blogging, the much-visited ScienceBlogs. A while back, they lost a few of their high-profile bloggers to Discover Magazine’s active blog portal. It appears that they shuttered the magazine last fall, with the promise that they weren’t going to quit publishing a magazine, they were just reducing the frequency and won’t you just wait until spring 2010 and you’ll get a new issue.  Um…yeah. Still waiting, and there doesn’t seem to be any official word (or at least not findable on their site) about where Seed Magazine went.

Last month, the ScienceBlogs folks noticed a new blog in their midst, one written by PepsiCo. There was much weeping and gnashing of teeth, ending with Pepsi’s blog being dropped. This week, there is a bit more of a kerfuffle. It’s a bit vague around the edges, but it seems the need to make money has become more important to Seed Media than any respect they may have had for being a science media focal point. I’m not clear on why this all came to a head today, rather than during the Pepsi Challenge, but a new batch of bloggers have jumped from ScienceBlogs and it’s not looking good for the site as a whole.  Interestingly, the biggest SciBlogger, the one who accounts for over half of their total traffic, has decided to go on strike/haitus rather than quit, but maybe Seed Media can bring ScienceBlogs back from this brink that their own inept management has brought them to. At a minimum, they need to realize that without content, their advertising department is completely worthless.

Meanwhile, where can I get a refund for the remaining issues on my subscription?  Hello?  *knock knock*

Apparently I have nothing to say lately, so here’s another cool video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwKtihWY_Qs

This is an absolutely hilarious video lampooning iPhone cult members.

In celebration of the return of Futurama, let’s take a gander at the most obsessive Lego version of New New York ever.  The detail work is amazing, and I can just imagine building something even 1% as impressive just to watch The Boy rampage through it with Halo figures…

Last week, Barnes & Noble revealed a wifi-only version of their nook ebook reader for “only” $150, and dropped their high-end model to $200.  Naturally, Amazon retaliated this week by dropping their Kindle2 to $190. Update: Now Borders has kicked in a $20 gift card for people buying their Kobo Reader.

Is this the beginning of the price war that finally makes dedicated ebook readers affordable?  I know, the manufacturers currently think “under $200” is affordable, but let’s be honest – it’s a niche. When I can buy a paperback book for 8 bucks, or buy the same book as an ebook for 8 bucks, which one am I going to get? For most of us, the answer is obvious. It would be nice to carry around dozens or hundreds of books in a convenient reader for those times when I find myself looking at the dated magazines of a waiting room, but I’m not dropping $200 for what is essentially the interface to a lending library. Those books on the Kindle and nook aren’t really mine. I can’t sell them, give them away, loan them to people (with very limited caveats dealing with an ecosystem of other ereaders which doesn’t exist), etc. Not to mention, if I’m at the beach with a paperback and something catastrophic happens, I’m out 8 bucks, not 200.

What price do ebook readers need to reach before you’d buy one?

This is a nifty feature of the Microsoft Bing mapping tool:

Here are a couple families that I can only assume will host every sleepover for a couple of years.
A man built his son an AT-AT loft bed with escape hatch in the play area above.

Another man decided to go completely insane and built a three-bed bunk with an even more-detailed model of an AT-AT.

One of my great pet peeves of the attempt by media folks to be “with it” and give out URLs on TV.

For anyone who ever played a video game in the 80s or 90s, this video is made of awesome with a side of geek sauce.