I am happy to see that the Lubuntu (lubuntu-12.04-desktop-powerpc.iso) live CD works even better on my old last-generation iLamp (circa 2003) than Lubuntu 11.10 does.
http://www.youtube.com/user/Birdhairjp
Welcome back after over a month of silence. It looks like he is in Fukushima.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YI718wgTIFI
ᚠμ©× TEPCO
by SCRAP
to the tune (?) of Rockaway Beach (Ramones)
Song set to SCRAP musician Nobu's pics of his abandoned hometown of Namie, including what looks like suiting up and going back in to extract belongings from his apartment.
As the military budget surpasses one trillion dollars, over $3000 per
capita, planetary exploration is scaled back (to $4.00 per capita).
Soon, we'll have to just be content watching the Chinese missions.
Obama’s budget would cut Mars program, solar system exploration
The Obama administration’s budget would hit the NASA division that sends rovers to Mars and probes to Jupiter.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/presidents-next-budget-to-cut-mars-solar-system-exploration/2012/02/08/gIQAvrm3zQ_story.html
▻ Scientists briefed on the proposed budget said that the president’s plan drops funding for planetary science at NASA from $1.5 billion this year to $1.2 billion next year, with further cuts continuing through 2017.
Accidentally caught the Reptilian party "cnn tea party" "debate". There were 8 cards on the table. All appear challenged and slow. They represent the people who are a few decades behind the rest of the country, primarily the elderly. It seems that Republican candid-8 attending the debates should have the same right (or obligation?) to carry a concealed firearm that they enjoy when they go out for a drink. Let the sniping begin-- or continue. You have to fight for your right to "party". Didn't the Gipper say that?
I'm making more use of DDG. Put it in your Firefox search bar if you use Firefox.
https://duckduckgo.com/
DuckDuckGo is a search engine based in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania that uses information from crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia) with the aim of augmenting traditional results and improving relevance. The search engine philosophy emphasizes privacy and does not record user information.Google may be a victim of its own success. Yahoo, Altavista, AskJeeves, Google, and nothing much else has come along to challenge Google other than Wolfram Alpha and Bing.
DDG is coded in Perl and JavaScript with help of YUI, served via nginx, FastCGI and memcached, running on FreeBSD and Ubuntu via daemontools. We both run our own servers and have servers on EC2. We use PostgreSQL+bucardo, CDB, Solr, BerkelyDB, S3 and flat files for data.
As web companies strive to tailor their services (including news and search results) to our personal tastes, there's a dangerous unintended consequence: We get trapped in a "filter bubble" and don't get exposed to information that could challenge or broaden our worldview. Eli Pariser….
The government of Minami-Soma has revealed a plan to decontaminate all radiation-polluted areas of the city in cooperation with a University of Tokyo laboratory, with the exception of places inside the no-entry zone.
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/T110807002708.htm
It’s true: The brain of NASA’s primary vehicle has the computational power of an IBM 5150, that ’80s icon that goes for $20 at yard sales. According to NASA and IBM, the shuttle’s General Purpose Computer (GPC)—which controls, among other things, the entire launch sequence—is an upgrade of the 500-kilobyte computer the shuttle flew with until 1991.http://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-amp-space/article/2009-02/does-space-shuttle’s-computer-real
Chinese Prisoners Allegedly Forced to Play 'World of Warcraft'
www.pcworld.com
One former prisoner says he had to farm virtual gold that the prison guards then sold in the real world for cash.
http://soc.li/KLDAhnh
Prison guards were reportedly able to sell the virtual currency for up to 6,000 yuan a day, which is about $930 -- not a bad sum. The prisoners, who naturally never saw any of the money, also had quotas to meet. According to Dali, "If I couldn't complete my work quota, they would punish me physically. They would make me stand with my hands raised in the air and after I returned to my dormitory they would beat me."
http://www.democracynow.org/appearances/dr_gabor_mat
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/2/15/dr_gabor_mat_when_the_body
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/12/24/dr_gabor_mat_on_the_stress
DR. GABOR MATÉ: You know, in other words—see, it never used to be that children grew up in a stressed nuclear family. That wasn’t the normal basis for child development. The normal basis for child development has always been the clan, the tribe, the community, the neighborhood, the extended family. Essentially, post-industrial capitalism has completely destroyed those conditions. People no longer live in communities which are still connected to one another. People don’t work where they live. They don’t shop where they live. The kids don’t go to school, necessarily, where they live. The parents are away most of the day. For the first time in history, children are not spending most of their time around the nurturing adults in their lives. And they’re spending their lives away from the nurturing adults, which is what they need for healthy brain development.
AMY GOODMAN: Canadian physician Dr. Gabor Maté, his book, _Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do about It_.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-path-to-sustainable-energy-by-2030
Supplies of wind and solar energy on accessible land dwarf the energy consumed by people around the globe.The authors’ plan calls for 3.8 million large wind turbines, 90,000 solar plants, and numerous geothermal, tidal and rooftop photovoltaic installations worldwide.The cost of generating and transmitting power would be less than the projected cost per kilowatt-hour for fossil-fuel and nuclear power. Shortages of a few specialty materials, along with lack of political will, loom as the greatest obstacles.You may remember this article. We are swimming in excessive energy. Solar and wind are widely distributed and cannot be as easily controlled and profitized as plutonium radioactive energy can.
A Path to Sustainable Energy by 2030; November 2009; Scientific American Magazine; by Mark Z. Jacobson; Mark A. Delucchi; 8 Page(s)
In December leaders from around the world will meet in Copenhagen to try to agree on cutting back greenhouse gas emissions for decades to come. The most effective step to implement that goal would be a massive shift away from fossil fuels to clean, renewable energy sources. If leaders can have confidence that such a transformation is possible, they might commit to an historic agreement. We think they can.
A year ago former vice president Al Gore threw down a gauntlet: to repower America with 100 percent carbon-free electricity within 10 years. As the two of us started to evaluate the feasibility of such a change, we took on an even larger challenge: to determine how 100 percent of the world's energy, for all purposes, could be supplied by wind, water and solar resources, by as early as 2030. Our plan is presented here.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/02/parents-revolt-radiation-levels
The new standard of 20 millisieverts a year – equivalent to the annual maximum dose for German nuclear workers – will mean those schools remain open, but parents and nuclear opponents are angry that safety concerns are being ignored.
...
"I think 20 millisieverts is safe but I don't think it's good," said Itaru Watanabe of the education ministry, drawing howls of derision from the audience of participants.
...
"How dare they tell us it is safe for our children," said Sachiko Satou of the Protect Fukushima Children from Radiation Association. "This is disgusting. They can't play outside with such risks. If the government won't remove the radioactive dirt then we'll do it ourselves and dump it outside the headquarters of Tokyo Electric."
During the inspiring Egyptian uprising to overthrow Hosni Mubarak, I thought the best solution would be to offer Hosni a seat on the last space shuttle flight. The last minute training would surely draw him away from his duties as the president of Egypt as well as appeal to his ego. As far as I know, this is what happened. We don't really know what they told him, come this way sir, the palace is on fire, we must evacuate. How is your dinner this evening, sir. Are you feeling drowsy? I doubt that he actually resigned, based on what we know of his personality, but when Suleiman announced that the president had resigned, everyone seemed to take it as fact except me.
Away from home and can't find the right characters on your keyboard? Typeit let's you type Czech, Danish, Dutch, Esperanto, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, the Intenational Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) symbols needed for English, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Symbols, Turkish, Welsh, and international currency symbols on any computer. According to the website,
Recommended IPA fonts available on various platforms:To those we can also add Charis, DejaVu Sans, Doulos SIL, Gentium, Linux Libertine, Monotype, and Tahoma, among others. IPA input methods differ by platform, but for Linux you can just copy useful characters into your Character Palette for a click-and-paste method of typing. If you have it installed and added to the panel, just right-click it to edit it.
- Windows XP: Lucida Sans Unicode
- Windows Vista: Lucida Sans Unicode, Arial, Times New Roman
- Windows 7: Calibri, Cambria, Lucida Sans Unicode, Arial, Times New Roman
- Mac OS: Lucida Grande
Manythings.org/shuffle/ has a good explanation of how to fix the iPod Shuffle. It links directly to the sourceforge page of rebuild_db. It also explains why any reasonable person --such as a language student-- might find it useful to rebuild the database. I wish I had known about this sooner.
Recently Linux visitors to my site seem to outnumber Mac visitors, sometimes by 2 to 1. Ten percent of visitors are from Japan (at the moment), so those LXers are not just me re-loading my own page. I really do think there could be a stampede to Linux in the form of Google's Chrome OS. I'd like to see Chrome pass Mac OS and get alot of attention in the process, bursting Steve's bubble. I expect that it has a fairly good chance of doing that and becoming a phenomenon similar to what they've done with Android. This might make a major dent in the Microsoft monopoly or Win-Mac duopoly.
I recently upgraded two machines to Ubuntu 10.04.1. I hadn't made the change earlier because Lucid came out in late April, several weeks into the first semester of the new school year in Japan. And since I immediately went on vacation in August, I didn't have a chance to install until late August. The exception is the Asus Eee 4G, my most expendable computer and therefore a test bed, which has had Xubuntu 10.04 on the SSD and Ubuntu 10.04 on the SD card and which performed excellently as a vacation computer, within the limitations of the 7" screen and a slow processor. That's a configuration I can recommend; I usually boot the SD Ubuntu rather than the Xubuntu option.
The two others were the Asus 1000HE and the Apple Mac Mini. I upgraded the 1000HE through the Update Manager (Preferences>Update Manager>Distribution Upgrade). That seemed to go well, but afterwards the computer had devolved into the Netbook Edition that it had begun as long ago when I first made it dual-boot. I despise the Netbook Edition since it uses space less efficiently than regular Ubuntu. However, it was a deformed and disfigured Netbook Edition, with a stub menu and nothing there. I was able to add an item to the menu and restart it. I found that the solution is to select a GNOME session at startup, not Netbook Edition, and then use Synaptic to remove all Netbook Edition packages so it can only boot as GNOME or something equally reasonable at startup. If Lucid is stable on this machine I may be able to stick with that for a few years. Some Skype test calls were a little dodgy at first; I'll have to check some real calls to see if audio is really OK.
I was a little worried about the Mac Mini since the install seems rather fragile, and after rEFIt hands the boot off to GRUB2, it all took about 5-7 minutes to re-boot. Of course, you could go months between reboots. I usually log out and log back in if something appears glitchy. Sometimes it froze during bootup and I worried that it was lost. I used an Ubuntu Studio DVD for this upgrade. It went very well, although it didn't seem to transform from Edubuntu to Ubuntu Studio as I had thought it would. Perhaps only packages relevant to Edubuntu were upgraded from the DVD as one source, the rest from the internet. Performance has improved: the Mac Mini goes to sleep and the on/off/sleep light pulses gently as it does as a Mac, Bluetooth is working perfectly now where it didn't before (or maybe I was just doing it wrong before?), and that troublesome bootup is now about 2-3 minutes, slightly long but better than some Windows machines I use in universities and perhaps just about par for the Linux-on-a-Mac course.
The UNE is a waste because you can simply set your top (and bottom) panels to auto-hide by configuring them with a right-click. This saves more space than the UNE. In addition, the UNE launcher is a huge waste of space and time. Using GNOME Main Menu, you can have a single icon in the auto-hide menubar and with a single click, drag, and release open any application. Using F11 toggles the tab I am viewing in and out of full screen view. The "Run" applet in the menu bar lets you launch an app with a few letters of its name. By comparison, the launcher of UNE requires a click (on the ever-present menubar) to bring it forward, another click to navigate to the right section, a few more clicks or scrollwheel to scroll down the list of apps (which are not the size of text but have huge space-wasting icons and the name of the app in a box!) and finally a click on the icon to launch the app which will then appear in the tiny space left available to you in UNE. Just use regular Ubuntu is my advice (or Debian or Mint or Mandriva or openSuSE...). I am not a fan of "Docks" either.
Update: Not only does sleep work, bluetooth work, and bootup go faster, "Restart" works properly now, too. In 9.10, I had shutdown but restart went to darkness requiring physically powering off. There have been a few new Linux kernel updates and thus a few restarts recently. It takes about 1 minute 15 seconds from selecting "Restart" until the EFI/rEFIt/BootCamp stuff goes away and GRUB comes into the scene, then one minute to my Login screen and about 30 seconds (?) more after that. I guess it's OK. Anyway, there is much better support for the 2009 Mac Mini in Lucid than in Karmic.
