The Week That Was

Sitting here and typing that it is Friday night seems strange, because it seems like Sunday was only a day or two ago. Time flies when there are things getting done and this week was a better one than I had experience in some time.

I took advantage of the warm weather to get a 2.5 mile walk in yesterday and thought I would never make it back up the hill. That bug last month really knocked the stuffing out of me. The good news is that I managed to be functional today.

While it looks like I did not do much with the blog, I updated two reviews, Gamera: Guardian of the Universe and Gamera 2: Advent of Legion with sections on the bonus features. If you ever wondered what making a big monster movie was like before CGI took over everything, there are some good glimpses of the work involved. Next up will be the concluding movie to the trilogy, but that will wait until next week.

One thing I did not get done was re-entering my contacts data on my CyPad tablet. Despite buying Titanium Backup Pro, it failed to save that data in its pre-Ice Cream Sandwich backup. Everything else worked fairly well, but I need to check the settings.

The Long Arm of Uncle Sam

This article on Wired (via Instapundit) caught my attention today. It may surprise people to see just how absolute the Fed’s power over the Internet really is. So any website ending in com, org, or net is claimed to be under United States jurisdiction. What does that mean? It means they can legally shut down any website in the world that ends with those suffixes.

Meanwhile, Anonymous are in a tizzy after one of their own rolled over to the Feds. Language warning for the article, BTW. LulzSec is pretty much done, but there are still quite a few in Anonymous who are sweating bullets at this point.

I am afraid a lot of people assume they can do whatever they want and get away with it due to government incompetence. The thing to remember is that governments are slow and ponderous, but not oblivious. Eventually they will get around to pursuing cyber criminals if they draw enough attention to themselves. With Anonymous constantly making declarations, they might as well be wearing blinking neon signs. Their time is running out.

No deep thoughts on any of this today, because it is merely interesting data for the moment.

Odds and Ends–Tech Edition

The Iview Cypad 760TPC I purchased earlier this month has been a lot of fun to monkey with. Being new to tablets and the Android OS, I have to say the stability leaves something to be desired. It appears to be app related and I did go in forewarned about the crash rates of mobile operating systems.

Battery life has been good since I disabled the telephone related drivers on it. I get better than five hours doing a mix of things including playing games, web browsing, reading, and watching videos. Performance has been fast, but with occasional slowdowns that seem to come from my monkeying with app installations too much. The temptation to play with new software is severe due to the plethora of freebies available.

One of the apps I really like is the Gospel Library one from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Not only are scriptures available, but class manuals, conference talks, and magazines. All of them can be highlighted and annotated with that synced up to your Church account online. This week I matched up all of that from my hard copy of the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price. This week I will get the Holy Bible synched up as well.

Another app I have gone nuts with is the Kindle for Android one. Yes, I now have the equivalent of a Kindle Fire in many ways. The sheer volume of public domain books they have up had me downloading like mad while watching a movie Saturday night. Being able to watch something and multitask on the Net is an unexpected bonus for me. The IMDB app makes it a handy “look up the actor” tool, too.

I purchased one book and read it, The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi. It was nice to find a straight forward translation, since the one I had dated back to the 1980’s and was aimed a business men. There are some formatting errors, but nothing egregious and it was a quick read. Reading on the Cypad is easier on the eyes than expected and the ability to look up archaic words is very handy.

After testing multiple browsers on the tablet, I have kept three on it: the included Android one, Firefox, and Opera. If a page does not render correctly in one, one of the others usually can handle it. Opera is my main one due to its much better controls and rendering. I am disappointed that embedded videos do not work well, if at all, on the browsers. Dedicated apps appear to be the only way to go since websites are detecting mobile devices and do not act normally as a result.

With a new mini HDMI to HDMI cable, I finally was able to test out the video output of the Cypad and was stunned by how well it upscales to 1080p. With only limited space to play with until I get a new microSD card, I can’t test a full length movie yet. I can see using this to teach Sunday school lessons with downloaded Church videos and one of our new flat screens.

On the PC end of things, VLC 2.0 is finally out and it looks like I will be going back to it for my video playing needs. So far it has rectified all my problems with VLC, but further tests await. Besides the improved performance and compatibility, a lot of little things have been added and tweaked. The ability to jump chapters in ripped videos means I will be able to do screen captures more efficiently for my Blu-ray reviews. Anything that speeds that up is good with me, because I resent having those huge MKV files taking up room on my hard drives.

I have been playing Star Wars: The Old Republic with a friend online and have some issues with lagging despite a 100-105 MS. It may be my old video card cannot handle some of the areas with only 512mb of memory or it may be the fact I live in the middle of nowhere. More playing should give some clues. The game is good and if you liked Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic you will love this.

Tablet or eReader Time?

It is with great reluctance that I have come to the conclusion that my Dell Axim’s days are numbered, simply because it is a very out of date platform. It cannot be upgraded to Windows Mobile 6 and the future is Android and iOS with their associated formats. Being cheap and hostile toward Apple, the iPad is not an option which limits my choices to something Android flavored.

But the big debate I am having with myself is whether to go for something with more functionality or with something that has an eInk display. I would love to be able to read in sunlight, but I also want to be able to keep contacts and appointments with me along with note taking. That would be more along the lines of getting a tablet than a reader.

While the Kindle Fire is pretty much a stripped down tablet, the lack of standard Android apps is an issue. Asus is coming out with a Tegra 3 quad core based tablet for $250 later this year and I wonder if that would be a better solution. I should mention that smaller is better and 6-7” screens are the desired size range.

I think I will bug one of my friends who got the Fire for Christmas and find out more about its capabilities. 

Panic Has Hit the File Sharing Services

So after going through my normal routine of to start the day, I decided to check on some of the tech sites to see what effect the Megaupload arrests were having on the online community. While Anonymous continues to make sporadic and ineffective attacks in retaliation, other file services are beginning to react. Filesonic has stopped allowing file sharing altogether, which means users can only upload and download their own files. Slightly less panicked, FileServe has reportedly ended their affiliate program where users were paid when they got others to join the service. As many have already commented, who needs SOPA or PIPA when the U.S. government can already reach out and have people in New Zealand arrested?

While I do not like the ease with which the international arrests were carried out at the behest of Hollywood, it was painfully obvious what these file services were created for. So I do not mourn their passing in the least. Yet I wonder what affect it will have on the legitimate file locker companies? While I am not terribly enthused about cloud based computing in general, I do use Amazon’s cloud service to back up my purchased iTunes and MP3 files. Oh and then there is Steam, which is a cloud like service that I am fond of.

I am feeling some ironic amusement though. If you went through various technology and multimedia forums in the past couple of years, the pro-pirate forces had declared bit torrenting dead and the entire future to be these file locker services. As anyone familiar with how spy and terrorist organizations operate, the easiest ones to roll up and eliminate are the highly centralized ones. That is one reason why they operate in cells. Painting big old targets on yourself is not particularly smart and that is what these companies did.

My suspicions are that we will see the file sharing sites gone or inaccessible from America in the very near future. Torrenting will increase with a move to decentralize magnet links becoming the new standard. All of this reminds me of Spy vs. Spy in Mad Magazine as Hollywood and the recording industry use the U.S. government against the pirates.

Adventures in Home Entertainment

Sometimes your cup overfloweth and I am having a hard time getting everything posted I want to post. Which is good news on having content and bad news putting it on virtual paper. Since I will not be going anywhere soon due to no wheels, it will help me keep occupied.

Most of yesterday and today were taken up by home entertainment concerns. The 40” HDTV arrived safely to everyone’s amazement, so a domino effect began. The long awaited rebuild of the media center PC had to be done in order to output to 1080P. Being a true rebuild, blood was shed in order to successfully make things work. Or at least that is my excuse for cutting open my middle finger on the right hand. All I will admit to is that hard drives can be dangerous.

So that was actually a smashing success and my old Palit Radeon 3870 is purring away in a new used case with much better ventilation along with an extra used hard drive to  make room for more HD content. Overclocking on the GPU went well. It is not generally realized, but 2d increases in speed when you do that, not just 3D games.

A new Samsung Blu-ray player and assorted cables were mated up with the Westinghouse LD 4055 40” LCD-LED HDTV successfully. None of the problems associated with that specific model have been an issue for me. Specifically, not losing aspect ratios after powering off, but I do have that set to automatic. The dreaded HDMI issues with computer video cards were avoided by getting a DVI to HDMI cable and controlling the overscan from the Catalyst Control Center.

Color control on the set is poor, with only three presets available. Cooler and disabling Dynamic on the picture helped a great deal since the picture is biased toward the red. This was a surprise as I had the impression that LED lit screens leaned toward a bluish cast. Brightness is a wee bit excessive, but not a big issue since we have a very bright living room during daylight hours. If I seem to be complaining, I am not for this has been the fastest to get adjusted TV I have ever dealt with. The default colors are very close to optimal.

One problem may be audio cable related and that is getting the SPDIF coaxial cable to output properly to my decoder. There is a periodic drop out that would be highly annoying if I actually watched broadcast TV. It may not be worth even messing with since I have not yet discovered a local signal with 5.1 audio.

The Samsung BD-5700 Blu-ray player is a gem. It setup easily and found my wifi network without any issues. Upsampling to 1080p from DVD is excellent and audio is stellar. Options to downsample DTS-HD MA to standard DTS are handy, but it unexpectedly turns out my decoder can handle the core DTS signal natively when passed through. That made me very happy, though I would like to have the full audio capabilities working. But that would require new speakers and a receiver anyway.

High definition content looked fantastic on the Westinghouse when I torture tested it with my library, physical and digital. The 1080p turned out to be far better than 720p, which surprised me. Browsing the web and playing videos online has been a real treat with all that desktop real estate. To make things easier to read, DPI has been set to 120 and large type enabled.

Best of all, after some travails I was able to get my old Yamaha region free DVD player to work with the set. While only a progressive scan player, the picture is not horrible and I can still play my foreign DVD’s on it.

Once again I have to thank me sister and brother-in-law for the HDTV. The timing is good since I have no transportation and will be house bound for the most part.

Odds, Ends and In-betweens

This has been a good week so far and it is Wednesday already so that means the majority of it has been good. It has been awhile since I could say that.

Sunday I got a ride to church and hung out with a young friend of mine and his girlfriend as we got his fancy new Onkyo home theater system to play nice with his new PC. A spare optical cable I had lying around turned out to be key in getting the signal out to the receiver. The Phillip's one he bought at Wal-Mart refused to convey a proper signal, so we decided it was probably defective.

Monday I bought an upgrade to the Cyberlink PowerDVD player that came with my Blu-ray drive since I was liking what it was capable of but wanted more features. PowerDVD 11 Ultra is a very nice upgrade and I am currently playing with its TrueTheater HD upscaling versus the capable ATI Avivo of my videocard. Depending on the video, it seams to do a better job when the content is of lower quality. More testing is needed before I can conclusively say more, but it is promising. It is now my go to video player for all formats.

Sorry, VLC – you have really fallen by the wayside of late.

That cheap optical cable I mentioned before?  Well, shockingly it turned out to work with the Razer Barracuda soundcard on my living room multimedia center PC I built with leftover parts a couple of years ago. Dolby Digital Live and DTS Interactive sound fantastic coming out of it, which breathes new life into streaming content from Hulu, YouTube, Crackle, and other places on the Web. All I can surmise is that the Barracuda pumps out more light than the Asus Xonar D1.

Tuesday my father and I had lunch with a friend from out neighboring county in Houston at the Crossroads Cafe and caught up on politics. I also encountered an amazing hashbrown omelet that was not only huge but had everything wrapped in the hashbrowns. I am still digesting it a day later.

Today we ate at the same place when we met with our State Representative, Greg Davids. It is going to be a strange election year for many reasons, but redistricting due to the census makes it weirder than usual. We do not know for sure where the districts will be until the courts rule on them. Hopefully, they will be more logical than the last court imposed ones from 2000.  Odds are that I will be in the same district as Greg, but the state senate is another question. I will hate to lose Jeremy Miller as my senator if it goes the way I suspect, but that’s life.

Now for something more sobering.  I have to agree with Glenn Reynolds last sentence. These are fast becoming perilous times when you cannot trust the election process anymore.

Over in Belgium a mass shooting took place that got next to no attention here in the States. So far it appears the shooter being a drug dealer about to go to prison again is the motivation, despite his Moroccan origins. The fact he was not a practicing Muslim indicates it wasn’t sudden jihad syndrome, but why did he have grenades and 9500 gun parts? It makes me suspect he dealt illegal weapons on the side to other drug dealers and criminals. Even the craziest of gun nuts do not have that many parts lying around.

In my opinion, Europe is slowing losing control to criminals due to their pervasive statism and gun control laws. Look how well those laws worked with a convict having possession of that kind of arsenal. There is always a way for criminals to arm themselves – always.

My prayers go out to those wounded and the loved ones of those killed.

Drone Follies

Iran has put the RQ-170 Sentinel on display for the world to see. Yes, one of America’s most secret aircraft is in their hands. Video here. From that it looks like it may have landed gear up rather than crashed. The airframe looks completely intact though. It also makes me wonder if the virus going around the Air Force base might be related to it. Could it have been hijacked?

Something of interest to me is the fact that it is painted in a yellow sand color. That would suggest daylight operations for the top secret reconnaissance drone and a great deal of belief in its stealth abilities. Also interesting is the used of a radar scattering grid on the intake like the F-117ANighthawk had. This is a very low observable aircraft. So much for stealth being a magical shield.

This is up there with the Gary Powers U-2 shoot down in the early 1960’s. Now I assume Russia and China will be bidding on access to the drone, if they haven’t already.  You would have thought there would be a self destruct device in the RQ-170. This is embarrassing.

Full video follows:

RQ-170 Sentinel on Display in Iran

Blu-ray and the Blog

I have to say I am loving my new Blu-ray drive and the quality difference in the handful of movies I have in that format. While I had some minor issues figuring out how to do screen captures, that has been resolved thanks to some codec pack changes.

As a test run, I have updated the TRON: Legacy review from earlier this year with HD screen caps at 720P resolution. I went for an optimum compromise in quality and size by choosing that resolution, which is 1280 x 720 pixels for those wondering.  The review itself was cleaned up, added to, revised, and shrunken by removing the bonus screen caps.

Now I have a bunch of leftovers to make wallpapers from while I fantasize about getting a bigger monitor!

At some point in the near future I will be reviewing a few more Blu-ray’s I have including Captain America, the Gammera trilogy, and 2001. I’m really looking forward to the last because I have read that it is an exceptionally good transfer.

Oh and I had a bit of luck on Saturday. A trip with a neighbor to a local grocery turned up a used Blu-ray copy of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader for ten bucks. While the original case had been looted of the DVD and digital copy discs, it appears the original had never been played. Not a smudge, not a spec, and nary a scratch on it. It played with no issues and that my friends is what I call a steal.

It is also one of the few things to go right lately. Nothing like finding out the rear brakes on the car need parts that are very hard to find and very expensive. My father will have sunk almost one grand into this attempt to do it on the cheap. Meanwhile, winter weather has set in and we only have the front brakes working reliably and one of the rears sort of.

At least the jump to Blu-ray is as impressive as I had hoped. It is as big a leap as from VHS to DVD.

A Small Step into the HD World

An early Christmas gift from my father arrived yesterday in the form of a Samsung Blu-ray drive for my PC. Since it came with PowerDVD 9, I was able to try out some HD movies on the system for the first time. TRON: Legacy is an exceptional visual experience, so I fired it up in the drive.

What a fantastic looking film it is in HD! While my monitor only goes up to 1680 x 1050 and is exactly between 720p and 1080p, it looked great. Just one problem. No way to do screen captures from PowerDVD and DRM prevents my usual utilities from working correctly. All I get is a black rectangle where the picture is.

Well, being the industrious and stubborn sort I looked for a way around this. While I eventually found one that didn’t cost money (for the moment), it is not the best solution because it involves backing the movie up as an MKV file. Some detail is lost on TRON: Legacy to my eye, but it seemed to do fine with Gammera: Attack of the Legion.

Click on the following for HD sized (1280 pixels wide):

The Disney logo looks sharp here.

Not as satisfied here, but scaling issues may be at work. Oh for a a 1080p monitor!

The film looks grainy, but is miles better than I expected. HD is fun for examining the model buildings that are always destroyed in these films.

It is very silly that screen captures are not allowed. Do the studios really think we will sit and takes stills of every frame to recreate the movies?

I probably will upgrade the PowerDVD software but I am still looking for a better way to do screen captures. AnyDVD is what a lot of people use, but the price of 80 Euros is exorbitant! MakeMKV did an odd job with TRON and there are waves of block distortions going through every scene. Perhaps the DRM is the culprit.

So my first step into the HD world has been taken and I am liking it, despite the screen capturing issues.

Numerical Uncertainty

Or how you never know what is really going on around the Web.

For my personal amusement, I have had Google Analytics running on this blog site for some time now with only a brief lapse of a couple of days when I changed over to the newer template. Thanks to things like NoScript and other blockers of content, I can never be sure how accurate the visitor stats are, but it does give me a rough idea of who, what, and where.

Being a tiny fish in a vast blogosphere, From the Sidelines’ stats are nothing to brag about. Still, it is interesting to me what gets looked at since I do not flog the blog in dreams of gaining wealth and fame. This blog has been up for over five years now, something that surprised me when I went back through my posts a little while back.

One thing that fascinates me is how Google Analytics and Blogger’s stats do not quite line up. Let us take a look at the top posts past month, October 16 to November 15, for comparison. Blogger is first, then Google Analytics:

Bleach Season 1: The Substitute, Episodes 1-2
Jul 26, 2011   
149 106 Pageviews

CITIZEN KANE (1941)
Jun 22, 2011   
132 102 Pageviews

Howl’s Moving Castle
Nov 25, 2009
106 80 Pageviews

Gojira (Godzilla 1954)
Nov 25, 2009
80 26 Pageviews

Godzilla: Tokyo SOS (2003)
Dec 18, 2009, 2 comments
61 30 Pageviews

Battle of Britain (1969)
Jul 22, 2011
56 85 Pageviews

Bleach Season 1: The Substitute, Ep. 2-3
Jul 28, 2011
43 44 Pageviews

Smallville: Absolute Justice Review Part 1
Sep 13, 2010
40 39 Pageviews

Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidora (2001)
Dec 9, 2009
39 36 Pageviews

Only Yesterday (1991)
Dec 3, 2009, 2 comments
34 29 Pageviews

So there are some very large discrepancies between the statistics gathered. One pattern I think I am detecting is the blocking of Google scripts by people concerned about their privacy. All of this makes me wonder how in the world the advertising rates can be calculated for websites.

Note: Blogger doesn’t list the home page for some reason. Google Analytics does and says it was visited 87 times for third place by its stats. It also has a whopping average time of 5:18 spent on it. Yes, that is five minutes and eighteen seconds. In 2009, the average time spent on a web page was 56 seconds. Something is very screwy with that number, methinks!

Now for some fun if probably inaccurate stats for the past year (12 months) from Google Analytics:

2,304 Visits

1,816 Absolute Unique Visitors

3,927 Pageviews

1.70 Pages/Visit

67.45% Bounce Rate

00:01:05 Avg. Time on Site

77.82% % New Visits

Browsers used to visit:

1. Firefox 1,120 48.61%

2. Chrome 511 22.18%

3. Internet Explorer 389 16.88%

4. Safari 205 8.90%

5. Opera 41 1.78%

6. Android Browser 11 0.48%

7. Mozilla Compatible Agent 11 0.48%

8. Playstation 3 5 0.22%

9. IE with Chrome Frame 3 0.13%

10. Opera Mini 3 0.13%

Firefox is still on top after all these years, but Chrome is gaining. Internet Explorer is fading fast.

Visitors came from 78 countries and territories:

I looked at that and I suspect that is a fair representation of Internet penetration across the globe.

What does it all mean? Well, not a lot but one thing that I have confirmed is that pop culture dominates the Net. Also, most of my hits come from people doing image searches, something I rarely do these days. That intrigues me.

I am pleased to report that the Citizen Kane review is one of the most hit pages on the blog. Battle of Britain is slowly climbing up and thanks to the Philippine aviation buffs at timawa.net Thirteen Days got a lot of attention. Bleach becoming hit so often is quite a surprise, since I would have thought reviews of it are done to death and images from it are abundant on the Net.

The biggest surprise is how popular the Smallville: Absolute Justice review has been. There are a lot more Justice Society of America fans out there than I ever suspected. It is nice to see those 1940’s comic book characters still getting some love seventy years after being created.

Computer Insecurity

It was true in past decades that you could rely on brand names to guarantee quality, but it was always touch and go in the personal computer world. It has gotten far worse and one product I used to use and highly recommend has gone very bad. Lavasoft’s AdAware used to be a front line weapon against malware. Now it is owned by people who made their money scamming people online. The most galling fact about this purchase is that they used to falsely sell AdAware!

It looks like Malwarebytes and Spybot: Search & Destroy are the go to programs now. I’m waiting for the release of the gold version of Spybot 2.0.  These days I do not rely on such programs as much, mainly due to using OpenDNS to filter addresses and Firefox with AdBlock Plus and NoScript to further keep bad links out. While I don’t surf “bad” sites, there has been a growing trend of hacking big websites and ads. So nobody is safe right out of the box.

Thanks to my precautions, I do not get much malware found on my system, if ever. It has been years since I saw anything other than the odd suspicious cookie.

Still, it is sad to see what happened to AdAware. If you do not stay up to date on what is going on, the possibility of being at the mercy of con artists, thieves, and other evil doers increases greatly.

Odd and Ends

After having to come up with new titles to posts all the time, I decided to reuse this particular title for my more trivial posts. Recycling is good, or so they say.

Raccoons are nasty, vicious, and unsanitary critters despite the washing food thing they do. We have been afflicted with a rarity around here, a stealthy raccoon. Multiple times I have entered the bathroom to see its tail in the cat door as it silently escapes after raiding the cat food in the kitchen. Hopefully, the new smaller cat door will keep it out. It is also elusive once outside and hunting it down has been a futile quest.

What does the English custom of tea have to do with computer history? More than one would think as this article on LEO, the first business computer, shows. I would have thought a bank would have built the first one, but reality is wonderfully stranger than fiction.

After becoming dissatisfied with the quality of screen captures from VLC, I have switched back to WMP12 for the time being. I probably need to do more research into setting on VLC, but so far I have been unable to get it to use the ATI videocard’s built in deinterlacing that is superior to the software options. At least the Bleach screen captures will look better from now on.

With Call of Duty: MW3 and The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim coming out in the same week I am very grateful not to be a hard core gamer. Game prices are ludicrously high at release these days and often you are paying so that the bugs will be fixed for the bargain hunters later on. Class me as one of the bargain hunters. Only Mass Effect 3 has me tempted that way and it isn’t due to March. More time to build up resistance, right?

Watched Will Penny thanks to Netflix last night. What a great movie. I think it is one of the few to really portray what it was like to be a cowboy and that ending was perfect. Anybody who thinks Chuck Heston couldn’t act needs to watch this film.

Is Episode 4 of Squid Girl season 2 the funniest of the entire show? It has to be of the second season so far. The first part focusing on learning English is hilarious, but the other two segments are top notch too.

For those who have given up on Bleach, now is the time to try it out again. The current arc is worth checking out and Episode 342 is where to begin. Even if you have read the current arc in the manga, a lot of fleshing out and expansion is being done, apparently with the creator’s involvement.

I am hoping to take advantage of the Metropolitan Opera’s live HD broadcasts to theaters in the near future. Unfortunately, I was not able to go see Siegfried from the Ring Cycle when it ran last week. Faust is the next one up that interests me, so we will see.

This archive has some stupendous photos from the heady days of high performance flight including shots of the A-12, YF-12, SR-71, XB-70, and X-15 among others. Man, the Valkyrie was a beautiful aircraft.

The Internet Becomes a Small Town

Having grown up for part of my childhood in a small town, I became aware at a young age of the fact that there are few, if any, secrets that manage to stay secret. Privacy is an illusion as gossip and snooping are a way of life. Of course the facts are secondary to a good story and are among the first casualties.

The Internet is getting to be the same way, but with a goal of selling information rather than running other people down. Or is it?

One of the first things to catch my eye this morning was a report about how the Fed is planning to scour the Net for people opining on their policies. Are they soliciting viewpoints to incorporate into their decision making? No, they are looking to find who is shaping opinion and run a counter espionage style operation to control the public’s perception of them.

The fact that they have put out a request looking for a technology vendor to implement this is disturbing. Unlike a lot of people on the political right, I have no beef with the Federal Reserve. Well, until now. For this act alone, I think they should be disbanded. It smacks of being a government unto themselves and an Orwellian one at that.

Meanwhile, Facebook has been tracking every webpage that their members browse for at least a year. Not even logging out will stop this. As an immediate counter to this I have moved to using Internet Explorer solely for Facebook and will not be using my main browser, Firefox, for it anymore.

Combine that with the new “Timeline” interface and you have the world’s biggest snoop into people’s private lives. This is worse than knowing the old lady across the street is watching your windows, folks. Some websites will automatically update your status with your browsing their page under the new system. Since I was already winding down my Facebook usage to just gaming, I plan to take it all the way to that step pronto.

With those “features” in place, privacy settings are a moot point. It is clear there is no privacy where Facebook is involved and it creeps me out greatly. It is amazing how many people want your information. As much as tailoring advertising is supposed to increase sales, this has become ridiculous!

Time to roll down the shades, close the curtains, and maybe invest in virtual black out tape.

Can Be Used for Good or Evil

The ever changing thing called modern technology can be a wonderful thing. It also can be a terrible thing for doing harm when placed in the wrong hands.

So it was interesting to see this account of an ATM skimming crew using 3D printers to make skimmers. When I found the link to this at Blue’s News, I knew I had to click on it as it hit two things I’m interested in: 3D printing technology and high tech theft. No, I don’t want to steal things, but rather like to be forewarned.

Having first read about this last year, I admit wondering where they got the plastic made for the devices. Now I know. The 3D printing tech has gotten so much more advanced over the years and I really would love to have one for fabricating model building parts.

Sadly, I am poor and unlike the users in the first article, not a crook. All I would use it for would be parts to make exotic versions of jet fighters.

Killing the Golden Goose

Having rejoined Netflix a couple of months ago, I have been enjoying hard to find films such as Ugetsu (brilliant film) as well as catching up on hits from the past five years. But I am wondering just how long they are going to be around as a company.

The first sign of problems was the change in fees shortly after I joined, with the ability to stream and have one DVD out going up considerably. I opted for the two DVD only package because most of what I want to see is not available streaming. Also, Starz contract will not be renewed and it appears other studios providing streaming content intend to follow that path.

Most people opted to keep the streaming, believing that is the future of entertainment delivery. But many threw up their hands and quit Netflix outright. Many as in millions of customers. Consequently, the stock tanked when the losses were revealed.

So when the CEO Reed Hastings announces out of the blue that it was a poorly handled change it should be a good thing. right?

Sadly, the buffoon running the show has decided to spin off the DVD operation into a different company, Qwikster. It is clear that Hastings wants the DVD side to die completely, but with the demise of the streaming service likely next year this is incredibly stupid.

I disagree with the analysis in The Atlantic Wire piece. Netflix has the Hollywood studios completely against them with some executives thinking the rental business has hurt theater box office. It has appeared to have damaged DVD sales, though I would argue that poor product has more to do with it. Which is why you don’t see new films streaming and a three month wait after DVD release on the disc side.

This is all fall out of the fanatic intellectual property rights fight which is based on greed and laziness. The sad result is less choice for consumers and no increase in sales of tickets or DVDs.

But the sheer idiocy of thinking the studios will cave on streaming video when they won’t even support their own endeavor, Hulu, is astounding. Even though DVD sales have plummeted, Red Box proves there is a market for renting them.

For rural people like me, renting movies will become nearly impossible once Netflix/Qwikster fold. With iTunes getting rid of rentals and only allowing purchases, things are going to get interesting. But this will make cable and satellite providers happy, since they have been losing people moving to Internet delivery of entertainment.

It dawns on me this is the perfect combination of events to drive up piracy. Oy.

Back Up Your Data!

There is no fun quite like that of dealing with an older PC that won’t run correctly. A myriad of possible problems present themselves before a diagnosis can be made and all of them require significant time to test. So my day is blown as I’ve been dealing with my father’s balky PC.

Thankfully, Knoppix boot DVD’s and CD’s allow one to poke into everything possible and after hours of CHKDSK follies I found the problem.

Sadly, the boot drive has developed bad sectors and Windows XP is unusable. Fortunately, the backup utility I installed on it to silently back things up has archives from a month ago before running out of space on the second drive. A month’s amount of data is lost and I need to see if the trial version of Acronis TrueImage will restore it when we get a new drive.

Of course my father hasn’t backed up any of his documents, so I’m shutting the thing down to prevent further data loss. This is why backups are a must.

I just wish I’d paid more attention to where he stood on backups. It will be questionable whether the last month’s data can be salvaged.

Life in the Fast Lane

It has been a very nice improvement going to 7.7M down on the DSL service. No longer do I have to check if my father is online and streaming something when I want to myself. Downloading walkaround pictures of aircraft doesn’t consume vast amounts of time. Best of all, I can click on news videos without worrying about buffering.

In a similar vein, high speed access is coming to many church meetinghouses too. I like the fact that you’ll log in using your LDS account and there will be extensive filtering which is a very good thing. Nice to see a wiki up on the Internet too, this page on filtering should be bookmarked by every Latter-day Saint household. From personal experience, I heavily recommend using OpenDNS to filter things at the router level.

Our meetinghouse already has high speed Internet, but protected access only. This should be a great help to Sunday school teachers, though I hope the temptation to use media too much is avoided. Nothing beats real discourse.

Across the river, the GOP in Wisconsin held the state senate, only losing two seats in the recall efforts. But those could be regained elswhere in next weeks recalls against Democrats. This is all very silly – recalls should be for serious malfeasance only.

Locally, Kapanke was toast due to his screwing up and being corrupt in transferring campaign funds to a business he owned. Doing that once is bad enough, but being caught doing it again is sheer stupidity in an age of quick news dissemination.

Just got a call from a FedEx driver, my Verizon pay as you go cellphone will be here this morning. After multiple difficulties with TracPhone, I gave up on them and have been without a mobile phone this year. One has to love being able to order a cellphone online and have it delivered to your house that has no reception. The irony is splendid.

Of course Verizon’s union workers went on strike as soon as I ordered the thing. I wonder which company I should cause trouble for next…

All Along the Watchtower

Time again to collect my thoughts for posterity since this blog was started to be a journal.

With the stock markets diving, it appears reality has finally caught up to investors. The new jobs report shows unemployment down slightly to 9.1% but is due to Americans leaving the employment game. Only 58.1% (or 63.9%, I’m running into varying figures) of the employable population are holding a job right now.

The attempt to decouple employment from economic health baffles me. It demonstrates just how out of touch the elites are. Apparently, they have no knowledge of history – if they did they’d be terrified right about now. The first warning sign is usually a populist political movements being born. If those fail to change things or are suppressed, structural failures in a society begin to be evident. That isn’t saying they weren’t already there, but that the masses begin to perceive them. Consider it noticing that the emperor is walking around stark naked.

I think we have entered that stage with “government” replacing “emperor.”

Should be an interesting day watching the stock markets again. 3% a day declines in US and Asian stock indexes have been the pattern the last few days. We’ll see if that changes.

At home, we now have much higher DSL speeds thanks to a change in modems and the new package from Ace. Speed tops out at 6.7M down, which is amazing after being used to 1M. Streaming is a new world, but tests of HD streams have been mixed. Since I don’t have many to compare, my conclusions are limited but it appears to be dependent on the technology used by the streaming services.

720P works just fine off of youTube, but an anime site I tried still stutters. Come to think of it, they don’t label as 720P, maybe they are trying to push 1080P. I should try out Hulu Plus for the free week and see how that works.

Will this skeptic of streaming movie services ever be fully converted? Time will tell.

Best thing about the increased speed is how software updates seem instantaneous now. There is also enough bandwidth to have two people browsing videos and music without stepping on each other’s virtual toes. VOIP is working better so far as well.

A Mormon Defense League? For all the talk of Latter-day Saints being so media savvy, the fact this only just launched demonstrates how questionable that assumption is. This organization is needed given the rampant bigotry and ignorance on display across the country.

I was checking the stats on the blog and noticed a lot of hits were on my Citizen Kane review. What is surprising is how many people have been looking for the No Trespassing sign still shot. Is there a meme out there I’m unaware of?

And by a lot of hits, I mean in double digits.

One of the nice things about having a small blog is seeing the strange intersections of what I post and what people are looking for. Part of it is nostalgia for when the Web was new and I’d surf to find whatever was out there. That feeling of finding the unexpected and different is no longer there for me. Maybe others aren’t as jaded and find something here to entertain or ponder. If so, I hope that feeling of discovery is aided a little by my meanderings.

Watched the new Clash of the Titans the other night. What a hollow experience that was. None of the charm or respect of the old myths in the original was present. The effects were decent and that is the only area in which it was superior. It simply isn’t a good movie.

Finally purchased and downloaded Planescape: Torment to play. It is a game I’d read about for years and had meant to get last year when it showed up at GOG.com. There are some issues of crashing, but I made sure to add the mod to allow quick saves. Sigil is one interesting place and the Planes always make for a good setting.

Hopefully, I can finish this game eventually. I haven’t gamed that much lately since writing has taken up more of my health induced down time. This is a good thing.

Purple Haze

Okay, it isn’t purple out, but it is hazy.

Blogging for me is primarily about knocking the rust out of my writing skills and developing a routine where I pound out words on the keyboard every day or something close to it. With that much typing, a good keyboard is a must to have. While it took me to the middle of this year to get going again, preparation was done starting in November when I purchased a mechanical keyboard. Multiple Microsoft ergonomic and Logitech keyboards had died on me with replacements becoming an annual event.

There is no substitute for a good mechanical key switch in my opinion. Since I learned to type (not “keyboard”) on a manual typewriter a good amount of travel and tactile feedback is something I appreciated greatly. Then there is the delightful clicky sound they make which really helps in touch typing. Back in the 1990’s all my keyboards were mechanical and I lost a rare ergonomic one that served me for ten years due to a water spill . After much research, I decided I needed something based on Cherry blue switches and fortunately for me an affordable keyboard came along.

The Rosewill RK-9000 came out in two limited batches and was based on a Filco design, if I remember correctly. I missed the first batch at Newegg but got in on the second. The construction is nice and heavy, but it manages to not take up excessive real estate. The fingers fly on it and while I won’t set any speed typing records, it has been wonderful to type on.

One bad thing about having a mechanical keyboard is it spoils you. I find that I really don’t like modern membrane switch based keyboards now and that they tire my hands.

My Rosewill was worth every penny and even has the added benefit of full anti-ghosting while using the PS2 port. That is something in gaming that can be an issue especially in first person shooters. It seems like I do better at running and gunning.

I’ll never go back to non-mechanical keyboards and regret the money I spent on the comfortable but fragile ergonomic ones.