RSS Screensaver Problem: OpenGL+NVIDIA+Compiz = X crash

Bad day simulation becomes real

There is a well-documented problem of using OpenGL with an NVIDIA video card in combination with Compiz. This is basically what I had been finding with the Mac Mini. I had a bad crash. Attempting to restart produced an "error: no such device. press any key to continue" but recovery worked. Also, I timed my slow motion bootup and it is 5 minutes 5 seconds from rEFIt to GRUB, then another minute or two to login and then the desktop.

Possible solutions are to turn off Compiz effects completely, turn off the screensaver, uninstall the OpenGL, stop using OpenGL (3D) screensavers, or stop using a random list of screensavers. I am changing back to Gnome screensaver, and setting the screensaver to Phosphor with an RSS news feed from Yahoo News, and hoping that will be stable and yet functional and informative.

New Install and RSS xScreensaver update

I had to re-install Edubuntu to an external hard drive as the space in the 22GB "Boot Camp" partition quickly ran out after a few podcasts and photos were added. There was some progress as I hadn't been able to get the external USB HD to boot up previously. Most things are working the same or better, but some things are worse. Booting up from rEFIt to GRUB 2 (1.97) takes several minutes. I won't reboot very much, but something is dodgy. It must be 7-10 minutes to boot up, but I haven't timed it. At least GRUB 2 works. If there is anything Linux needs, it is a reliable boot loader that doesn't bork the systems. Speaking of Linux faults, I'm not yet satisfied with the music player, Rhythmbox. It sometimes fails to sync with the iPod, fails to download podcasts and fails to play files. I haven't found a better replacement yet. Everything else in Linux works equally well, except for sound. Work on a kinder, gentler bootloader, and sound.

But because I couldn't get Linux to boot on one day, I spent an entire day in the freedom-hating AAPL operating system. You know, the one they call MacAAPLx10.6SnowLeopard or something. After 2 months, I had forgotten how to do things and found the global menu and window buttons in the upperleft extremely annoying. Let me say a few good things about the corporate profit-centered user-abuser Mac OS: it looks good and boots nicely most of the time, it generally handles sound, music, and music players well, and, best of all, Firefox 3.6 is available! The newest Firefox looks good with the Personas personalization layer enabling you to remove that tired brushed metal skin AAPL inc has made you look at for the whole millenium or the pale Firefox look.

Instead of randomly modding the OS and forgetting what I've done, I'm carefully logging what I've done in a tableside notebook. A few things inexplicably work better now. Compiz Fusion advanced effects are not freezing the xscreensaver so are turned on and make switching apps and windows mucho conveniento. In the xscreensaver, I added a few modules to the RSS news screensaver function: Fontglide, which creates a crazed robotic news feed in various fonts gliding onto the screen and arranging themselves into words, and phosphor, which looks like someone is typing the news feed into an old green phosphor-type of monitor circa 1970 (or ????). There is another xscreensaver module called XanalogTV which simulates a broken old analog TV switching channels and simulating the rollover, static, discoloration, and other nostalgic analog TV effects. It uses the picture folder you specify (as I explained before) so choose carefully your target folder. It's eerie to see the still photos as though they were TV channels where nothing is happening. It reminded me of The Ring, actually.

There is another module which is very creative and Dada-esque but not safe for work or for family. That is the webcollage module. This one randomly grabs pictures off the web and collages them onto screen with the transparency you specify.

As always, you'll have to remove (Gnome)"Screensaver" from your Startup Applications in System--Preferences and add "xscreensaver" instead.

BTW, Jamie Zawinski is responsible for xscreensaver and many of the modules.

Character Palette Panel Applet and Ringing Home

Danke schön, Señor Gagné. That answers a lot of questions for me. The Character Palette panel applet (say fast 5 times) is now living in my top panel.

On a completely unrelated note, as Monsieur Gagné has noted on his blog, you don't need to harbor any negative thoughts about the moon breaking up or our planet being eventually ringed with space junk. It turns out it's awfully pretty that way. Puts the moon to shame. The visual persuasion is below.

Civilization and its Discontents

I was addicted to Civ 1 but successfully overcame the addiction in the early days, knowing it was as dangerous as crack or meth. I think it was on Mac OS 8 or 9. Oddly, I continued to buy multiple editions of Civilization--but resisted playing the game. The software is still in the boxes, unopened, for OS platforms (10.2?, 10.3?) becoming obsolete now. None of that matters now, because on the Linux platform, there is FreeCiv. That's like giving free drugs to the recovering addict. Worse still, Freeciv.net puts it out on the internet. As great and dangerous as that is, an antidote exists. The solution is as simple as the problem. Should you ever find yourself not sleeping for days on end due to ongoing disputes with Mao Zedong, Lincoln, Caesar, and/or Catherine the Great, Civilization Anonymous, or CivAnon, offers peer support and explains the dangers. If you experience any of the symptoms, see how other addicts have clawed their way back to a partial, tentative recovery.

Ubuntu User

Ubuntu User Issue #1 is available as a free download. It's 42 MB of high-quality, useful articles covering nearly 100 pages. I've already learned some new things about OpenOffice extensions and using Freemind. The only bad point is that this issue is approaching one year old, so some details about Jaunty Jackalope may be starting to go out of date in the era of Karmic Koala and with Lucid Lynx coming. If you see a newsstand issue of this, it looks like a good buy. It might be worth subscribing.

Up the wrong tree?

BowLingual for the iPhone will have twitter support so that your dog's thoughts can be effortlessly tweeted.

Via Asiajin via Tokyo Mango

WTF'in' around with QR-codes

I've been listening to WTF with Marc Maron, as mentioned in a previous post. I've gone through most of the backlog and have to conclude that this is a better situation for Marc in that he is producing better, more timeless and higher-quality comedy-centered content now.

I tried to integrate a QR code into the (existing WTF) show graphic, so I could learn how to use the G.I.M.P. a little more, and maybe even contribute something back to Marc.

I used the Google chart API to make a URL like this or this with error correction level H (allowing 30% of the code to go missing).
My first idea was to go with Marc's face. Hmmm. It's not great but I suppose his face would be enough to remind people what the link was for.
My second attempt was the weirdo-at-the-screendoor effect, in 2 versions. Git yer gun, Pa!

(click for full size)

It doesn't really work unless you see it at full size; the grid doesn't scale.
I tried this blue 600 pixel hippie gif because I didn't like the Huck Finn quality of the existing letters WTF.
I'm not really satisfied with any of these. All of this "code" may be out of date soon as you can apparently just point your cellphone camera at buildings and things and have them recognized.

BTW, since I was working on this in the presence of a 7-year old, WTF now stands for Where's the fish?, What's that fish?, or What's that for?

This final one looks like it wouldn't work, but it scans in very quickly.

The GIMP is better than Photoshop. It's almost the same ease of use (if you start from zero), is cheaper at 0 yen vs $700, and is guilt-free for pirates. And although I personally like the gimpy-sounding name, I would propose the next version be called "The PIMP", Photographic Image Manipulation Program, or Professional Image Manipulation Program, to satisfy the people who are uncomfortable with the name. Hell, why even wait for someone else to change the name? Change the branding yourself just for your own personal use. The Windows version should go with the WIMP as the name, and perhaps The ChIMP would be appropriate for Christians or anyone who can think of a good acronymical reason for that.

The Case of the Missing Change Case: gedit vs OOo

One function that's missing from OpenOffice.org but which Microshaft Worm had is the Change Case function. I would sometimes use this to type in lower-case and later convert to Sentence case or Title Case. Although it doesn't seem to be available in OpenOffice -AFAIK, it shows up in gedit! I'm not sure if it's worth switching out of OO.o to do a tweak in gedit, but it's there. 

Note the Edit menu doesn't have this as an option as default, but open Preferences.

Select Plug-ins and then check Change Case. 

Check "Sort" too. Gotta have that.  

There's Change Case. Sentence Case is not available, but the judicious use of Title Case could function as a substitute. 

There's "Sort" -- also in the Edit menu.  

Check it out. I wonder if there aren't any similar plug-ins for OO.o. 

Free GIMP tutorial PDFs

You can have 18 free GIMP tutorial PDFs from Michael J. Hammel at Linux Format magazine. 

iPOTUS's SOTU, iSteve, Zinn, & 2010-01-27

The dear leader of our people gathered his flock together and laid down the law of and on his tablet. Meanwhile, in DC, another major operating systems developer, also the son of a runaway foreign grad student, spoke to an assembly of code writers. In Santa Monica, Howard Zinn passed away of a heart attack. He will not rest in peace, but has probably already returned, possibly right in the West L.A. area. He wouldn't waste time being dead.

Marc Maron WTFpod meta-talk

AirAmerica NYT Obit.

Speaking of AirAmerica, the NYT reports:

January 22, 2010
Air America, the Talk Radio Network, Will Go Off the Air
By BRIAN STELTER

Air America, the long-suffering progressive talk radio network, abruptly shut down on Thursday, bowing to what it called a “very difficult economic environment.”

The chairman of Air America Media, Charlie Kireker, said in a statement that the company would file under Chapter 7 bankruptcy “to carry out an orderly winding-down of the business.”

In a troubled time for advertising-driven media businesses, “our painstaking search for new investors has come close several times right up into this week but ultimately fell short of success,” Mr. Kireker said.

The closing did not come as a surprise. Air America, which began six years ago and has 100 affiliated stations, cycled through a number of owners and never found its financial footing. It first filed for bankruptcy protection in 2006 but managed to stay on the air.

“The fact of the matter was, it was always a very challenging business proposition, and it never had the right management,” said Sam Seder, who hosted programs on Air America until last year.

Although it lacked a substantial audience, the network catapulted a number of progressive media personalities into stardom, most notably Rachel Maddow, who now anchors a prime-time program on the cable news channel MSNBC.

Al Franken, now a Democratic senator from Minnesota, hosted an Air America show from 2004 to 2007, before running for office.

Several other prominent talk radio personalities who worked at Air America, including Randi Rhodes and Thom Hartmann, remain on the radio, but without the network affiliation. “It would be a shame if the world sees the failure of Air America as representing the failure of progressive talk radio,” said Michael Harrison, the editor of Talkers Magazine, a talk radio publication.

Mr. Kireker noted in his statement that advertising revenue in the radio industry had fallen for several years now. “Signs of improvement have consisted of hoping things will be less bad,” he said, adding that “our company cannot escape the laws of economics.”

Air America started to play rerun programming rather suddenly Thursday evening. The company said it would sign off completely next Monday night.

WTFpod

Marc is back, apparently podcasting out of his garage in LA? I hope he's given up any abusive relationships with AirAmerica. Just listening to my first episode of it now. I needed some good news.
Via Brilliant at Breakfast.

3D in the 1800s

There's a collection of stereoscopic images within the USGS Photographic Library, dating from the 1870's to the 1950's.
An example:

Posthumanist Mac Tonnies (さよなら)

More Human Than Human

R.I.P. GET BACK DOWN HERE!

I was visiting PostHuman Blues earlier in January and suddenly noticed that I was re-reading posts, although I hadn't been to Mac's blog for a long time. Then I noticed the dates were all October. Huh? I must be visiting older posts, I thought, and went to the top. What the heck--posts in October at the top... and so like many others, I considered various possibilities before eventually realizing the fact of Mac's death.

My condolences to all who knew him.

Damn. How can I be perhaps the last fan of Mac Tonnies to notice that he was dead? Well, I don't consider myself a Fortean, ufologist, or part of the blogosphere. I am unable to spare much time to read any blogs recently, although I guess I have read Talking Points Memo. Mostly I try to follow Google News and Yahoo news, plus some Linux news. I prioritize blogging for myself more than reading other people's blogs, or else I will never blog anything. I have 5 part-time jobs. I need to hunt for another job. There are multiple kids to look after. A language to learn. Other priorities I never get to, like sending Xmas or New Year's cards. Reading PostHumanBlues is so enjoyable and leads me to links that consume so much time and mind-space that I consider it a bit self-indulgent and not helpful in the task of caring for and putting food on my family. Excuses, excuses. I ask the forbearance and indulgence of those who find this state of isogashisa unimaginable/inexcusable.

Internet silence was the strongest evidence of his death. If I don't blog for a month, it means I'm busy. If Mac doesn't blog for a day, he must be dead.

We have access to his mind, not because his consciousness was uploaded by curious extra/crypto/terrestrial archivists, but because he documented his life "religiously" (his word) as a blogger and tweeter. Altho he labeled his posts "Tears in Rain," they were not. "Tears in rain" (a BladeRunner reference) denotes the meaninglessness of all of one's experiences and memories dissolving into the nothingness of death. Mac's posts were not tears in rain, but rather more like pearls, or perhaps grains of pollen, carrying their genetic information to the bottom of the lake or to the amber gem where the deposits can be studied by future archeologists or random web surfers. He was wise --and brave-- in that way to put his thoughts out there and not just sit in a room thinking to himself.

Mac called himself "an organic web filter" in response to a comment I made hinting that altho his link dump style posts were great, more of his original writing would be appreciated if he could spare the time from potentially profitable writing projects. We'll take what we can get, I concluded.

I think Posthuman Blues was the first site (and one of very few) to have a link to me. I'm not sure how he found me or why he linked to me. It could have been the shared "blues" element in the name, shared movie interests, (Blade Runner, other artificial intelligence themed movies), shared musical interests (The Smiths, Talking Heads, The Cure, Hooverphonic), the "metacognitive" label, the shared midwestern background, Discordianism, or some statistically improbable expression that Mac noticed. He noticed a LOT. Mac has, or had a discerning third eye and a high metacognitive index. I discovered his blog because it was linked to mine. I was surprised and pleased that he linked to me.

One time, in response to a question posted by Mac about a Blogger template (TicTac Blueberry), I set up a test blog and looked into the css to see if I could find the controls for the header (or banner) image placement. I don't know much about html/css, but it was the first or second place I looked. He was very grateful when I tipped him a solution to his problem, and he mentioned wanting to give me a copy of his book in return, altho he deleted the offer comment (after it had already come in my e-mail). It was a gracious thought that I didn't expect. I had just wanted to help him over that css bump as a tip (as in tip-jar) to thank him for all his great blogging.

I'm thinking one kind of dedication would be to create a mactonniesian feed. My concept is that everyone Mac linked to (at least in the sidebar) would be in a feed, so you could see the most recent post by each of these bloggers, in time order. I'm talking about the widget or gadget or gidget that Blogger has to put the feeds together and order them chronologically as a sidebar element. It would be the closest thing yet to automating the mactonniesian process, although still a weak imitation. The people Mac linked to circa 2009 will each change, grow, and develop in ways that parallel what Mac would have (probably) undergone. This feed of feeds could go into anyone's sidebar, but it might load so much information that maybe it deserves to be a blog in its own rite?

That makes me think of another possible tribute that I think Mac would love: a chat-bot. Try googling chat-bots, AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language), personality forge, or http://www.chatbots.org/ to find out more. Due to Mac's (continuing!) online presence, we have access to Mac's face, various facial expressions, and enough information to create a high-definition avatar. Samples of Mac's voice can also be found in many radio programs and video snippets. These can create a voice-print pattern much like a font for sound. Finally, Mac's text, vocabulary frequencies, grammatical patterns are all available to use to create a complete text database with keywords and tags. His books, essays, reviews, and interviews would be digitized as well. This is rather large. At the very least, he could reply to questions like: "What do you think of...'s book...?" using say, book reviews that he's written. Even just randomly providing some quotes might be interesting. Ideally, the output of a posthuman-Mac-chat-bot would have the same mean sentence length, vocabulary frequency, grammatical patterns, and other statistical properties of Mac's speech while conveying his ideas as well. There are chat-bots for Eliza, Abraham Lincoln, God, and chat-bots are used for corporate web-sites to deliver information given out in FAQs in earlier decades. I think there are experiments to use them for phone-sex type use and customer service. The best can pass the Turing Test, indistinguishable from a human for at least a large proportion of judges. The posthuman-Mac-chat-bot concept requires an exceptionally talented person to put together, but he would be an excellent subject for eternal digital life on the internet.

Optimysticism
I don't know what it means, but I had a strong urge to tell Mac "South Korea." Maybe something wonderful was waiting for him there. Perhaps he would have found a job teaching English or Science Fiction as Literature or something like that at university with the freedom to do what he wanted, and have a research budget to travel around the world, or perhaps he would have fallen in love, had a physical exam that diagnosed and treated his health problem, saving his life, or something else. Maybe he had already been there or something about him was reminding me of South Korea for some reason. Maybe it was just because as the most wired country in the world, with the fastest internet, he would have liked it. I didn't know how to frame the "South Korea" message, so I couldn't find a way to send it.

Emptying my mind of all thoughts I meditate on Mac until some words burst forth:

"I was killed because I knew too much."

What? That's not something I expected. That's disturbing. I don't think it came from Mac, but even if it did, it could be his joke(?). Perhaps just the product of my subconscious mind releasing a paranoid thought which is not present in my conscious mind. Or someone else? Eventually I quiet the mind again and wait for another signal.

"You are, too."

That doesn't even make sense. Is it grammatical? I am what, too? I am... killed because I know too much? I don't know anything. I suppose it could be grammatical, from a point of view outside of time. It certainly is possible to know too much, in several different ways. Knowing the time, date, and means of one's own death is not desirable for the psyche, and maybe that is why we cannot develop our faculties in that direction until we lose attachment to the world. I stop the experiment. That's what I heard, for what it's worth. Your results may vary.

Deltas from his death: Seize the day. The night. The orb. If you love it, set it free after seizing it. Put it all out there, online, back out into the One Mind. Suck the marrow from... your vegetarian diet. And from your espresso. Write. Post. I should probably exercise more and not stay up until 4 AM. Life's short. It's later than you think.

I'd expect Mac to return soon, and not waste time. Various people carry components which we could identify as "Mac", or should we say "macian," "tonniesian," or "mactonniesian," but the entire "nexus" (;-) we called Mac Tonnies will be back soon. He may have already been reborn, perhaps in South Korea, as a woman this time, for a change, or perhaps as a man again. He wouldn't wait a full year or more to be reborn, and would choose a Buddhist family over a Christian one, I imagine. This isn't death, but merely a minor setback, a restructuring of the corporeal realm in preparation for future growth. Come to think of it, I think he'll want to speak English again, but if, on the other hand, North America is fated to fall into decrepitude while China explores the solar system, maybe he'll come back in ZhongGuo. Anyway, I reckon we'll be able to read a new, remarkably Mac-like blogger by at least 2026.

Digital death, digital decay, internet immortality, LANgevity
His Blogger page, and Twitter account may live on for years, until/unless Google or Twitter decide to delete inactive accounts some day. His Flickr, if unpaid, may eventually lose all but the last 200 of the 7-800 pictures he uploaded. His older "Cydonia" web site may eventually disappear(?) if no one is paying for the domain and server. I'd like to (re)browse and perhaps save his web site before that happens. Mac had read through many hundreds of books on ufology and other inexplicata, and by reading what he has written could help avoid many dead-ends, disappointing reads, money spent on bad books, and could steer one to the better-written material. There is no one on Earth whose opinion I'd trust more right now than Mac's. He was not a fanatic but a very skeptical, sincere seeker who calmly and analytically accepted the physical reality and the reality of the experiences of many and tried to find explanations. One great thing about Mac was that pretty much any idea you'd ever had about these phenomena, he had also considered, often more deeply. In addition, he had considered hypotheses which had never occurred to most people. That quality will be missed.

The high-pitched noises I hear all too often will also remind me of Mac. He suffered from this, too. The silence is screaming.


Links I went through related to this: (sorry for omissions--it's very incomplete--and sorry for un-hyper links) You could google many of these.

PostHumanBlues
http://posthumanblues.blogspot.com/

His older website top
http://www.mactonnies.com/

things related to his earlier book and pre-blogger website
http://www.mactonnies.com/cydonia.html

an excellent sample of Mac's writing and thinking
http://www.mactonnies.com/sentience.html

Twitter
http://www.twitter.com/mactonnies

UFOs as Vanguards of a Post-Biological Intelligence
http://www.dailygrail.com/features/the-ancients-are-watching

The Pitch (Kansas City)
http://blogs.pitch.com/plog/2009/10/and_were_back_5.php

Coast to Coast
http://www.coasttocoastam.com/article/mac-tonnies-r-i-p
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=5FF1197EEC5082DB&search_query=mac+tonnies+coast+to+coast+am

UFOmystic
http://www.ufomystic.com/2009/10/23/remembering-mac/
http://www.ufomystic.com/2009/10/23/thoughts-on-mac/

A tribute with pictures
http://hemmingshousepictures.blogspot.com/2009_11_01_archive.html#4944516064707781346

George Dvorsky
http://www.sentientdevelopments.com/2009/10/remembering-mac-tonnies.html

Ballardian
http://www.ballardian.com/rip-mac-tonnies

Paratopia (some artwork)
http://paratopia.podbean.com/2009/10/28/in-memory-of-mac-tonnies/

mentioned iN an iNteresting context, iThink
http://monkeybuddha.blogspot.com/2009/11/ithink-tech-evolution-of-mind.html

http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=832

http://hermeticallyblond.blogspot.com/2009/11/ufos-are-weird-i-guess_23.html
The Alien Hypothesis / UFOs as trickster-like enigmas
Excerpts from the Sept 28, 2009, interview between Mac Tonnies and George Noory

from Cap'n Marrrrk
http://amplattner.com/ntm/2009/10/nature-of-mac-tonnies-health-problems.html
http://amplattner.com/ntm/2009/11/if-you-really-want-to-know.html

The other side of truth
http://redstarfilms.blogspot.com/2009/10/mac-tonnies-passes-away.html

Greg Taylor
http://www.dailygrail.com/news/vale-mac-tonnies

Loren Coleman
http://copycateffect.blogspot.com/2009/10/tonnies.html

a note from his publisher
http://www.anomalistbooks.com/news/2009/10/24/a-quiet-escape-from-kansas-city/

Mac on Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=mac+tonnies&x=13&y=19

After the Martian Apocylypse = $69.99 (used)
http://www.amazon.com/After-Martian-Apocalypse-Extraterrestrial-Exploration/dp/074348293X

Kindle version for $11.99
http://www.amazon.com/After-Martian-Apocalypse-Extraterrestrial-ebook/dp/B000FC1V6K/ref=sr_1_1_oe_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1263576609&sr=1-1&condition=used

Kindle for PC a free download
http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=kcp_pc_mkt_lnd?docId=1000426311

Kindle for PC de-DRM'er
http://i-u2665-cabbages.blogspot.com/2009/12/circumventing-kindle-for-pc-drm.html

Mac4Lin: AAPLification

I didn't know about Mac4Lin when I changed to Linux, but even if I had, I don't think I would have used it. It could be confusing, although it might ease the transition for some. It was publicized on Lifehacker last summer and before that on MakeTechEasier for Hardy and Intrepid. The option to change the "traffic light window control" is good to know, and could please users who want to have that in the upper left hand corner, but I've already gotten used to the upper right hand corner and now find the Mac way annoying. What was interesting to me was how good a simulation you could produce in Ubuntu, as seen in some Flickr screen shots. I also wonder why you'd want to, but it could be a challenge for someone. Rather than a near-perfect simulation, it might be more fun to make a slightly tweaked-looking anti-Mac clone. That reminds me that it could be a useful alternative for Psystar (if they have any future). It shows, anyway, how easy it is to configure Linux. I'm surprised AAPL hasn't tried to sue, but if they can find someone to sue, it might give Linux more attention and help drive AAPL into the ground. I suppose if they are not concerned about the Hackintosh, they won't care about someone simply displaying an AAPL logo in another OS.

Strike dumb this fool, we beseech thee.

Christofascist Buttcasting Nutwerx' 666 Klub host Rat Pobertson pulls some weird racist BS out of his ass. You'll have to listen carefully through his labored heavy breathing to make out what he's saying. This may be his biggest hate-speech hit since he called for the assassination of Hugo Chavez, a little fatwa from Jesusland.


An entry at Wikipedia suggests he may be referring to Dutty Boukman. There are reports that a pig may have been fatally injured in the making of the republic.

Members of the reality-based community are urged to send money to Haiti through more reputable channels.

Happy New Year! Have a blast!

Having a blast! Wish you were here!
Your tax dollars at work. The Strontium-90 in your teeth and bones are compliments of the house.
Photograph by US Navy, copyright by National Geographic. How does that work?
You have to wonder if the US Navy wasn't setting of H-bombs just to get their photos into National Geographic. "We can't compete on any 'Bridges of Madison County' but, by God, let's see them beat this! Make sure only Navy photographers are there."
That whole 20th-century missile gap competition with the Soviets has to be the biggest scam ever perpetuated in history. From America's nearly invulnerable position it would have been able to resist successfully with no military at all, just bicycles (like the Swiss national defense) and small arms, like Afghanistan. The USSR couldn't even hold down Afghanistan and we're supposed to believe they would have defeated the United States? Using more than a handful of nukes would have risked bringing on a nuclear winter. Some umbrella.
Photo re-appropriated by the people, for the people.
Maybe the photo is the same as the one here? In that case Nat'l Geog. may just slap their Copyright mark on everything even though it's clearly in the public domain.
Should have used that. Damn. Found it too late.
The people of the Marshall Islands continue to suffer from what was done to them--Castle Bravo.

3:28 study of the Sutando-to-Konbini transition

Invisible van at 1:27.

Can you ear me now?

This story at Live Science is from June, but I didn't hear about it until recently.

Hearing in discotheques

In the first study, 286 clubbers were observed while they were talking, with loud music in the background. In total, 72 percent of interactions occurred on the right side of the listener. These results are consistent with the right-ear preference found in laboratory studies and questionnaires, and they demonstrate that the side bias is spontaneously displayed outside the laboratory.

In the second study, the researchers approached 160 clubbers and mumbled an inaudible, meaningless utterance (such as "babababa") and waited for the subjects to turn their head and offer either their left of their right ear. They then asked subjects for a cigarette (in Italian the request specifically was "Hai una sigaretta?" which can be translated in English as "Do you have a cigarette?"). Overall, 58 percent offered their right ear for listening and 42 percent their left. No link was found between the number of cigarettes obtained and the ear receiving the request.

In the third study, the researchers intentionally addressed 176 clubbers in either their right or their left ear when asking for a cigarette. They obtained significantly more cigarettes when they spoke to the clubbers' right ear compared with their left.

The applications of this science remain to be discovered. Can the results be generalized beyond cigarettes, club-goers, the "discotheque" environment, smokers, and Italians? It seems that "babababa" may have a different meaning in a club environment than outside of that environment. I'd assume it means, "I'm tripping too much to be able to use language; can you help me?" When the researcher then produces a coherent request, the subject may surrender a cigarette in relief.

Free Open-Source Malware for Linux

Having mentioned screensavers, I should also mention this: Watch out for malicious code falsely labeled as screensavers at gnome-look.org. Ubuntuforums and ubuntu-user have details. The incident shows that downloading and installing software from a web site (even gnome-look.org) is a security risk with Linux as it is with Mac or Windows, although at least the code can be examined by anyone and suspicious code exposed and revealed. For security reasons, install software from the official repositories. Wallpapers should be safe.

RSS feed screensaver

There have been a few bumps in the Linux transition after 15 years of using APPL Macs. OpenOffice, Firefox, Opera, Thunderbird, and Picasa function well as replacements for m$Office, Safari, Mail, and the Mac universe i-Apps. Two functions I found I really missed were search/indexing (as provided by Spotlight built in to MacOSX) and less importantly but subjectively important, my way of getting news accidentally, the RSS news screensaver. For the indexing problem, Google Desktop finally indexed many of my 15 years of acquired files after 72 hours or so, and provides many of the old Spotlight functions I had become dependent upon to find files somewhat poorly disorganized over the years as they were re-imported from other computers and disks. I'll try to find a better indexing client that I can trust not to upload all my data to Google's server farms.

As for the screensaver, well, of course, you don't really need a screensaver. You could set it to blank out the screen or hibernate. You could say that it wastes energy. I would say that it may save time and energy because giving me the top-level news when I'm not using the computer may keep me from turning on CNN or searching through the news in a browser.

Although I didn't see any RSS screensaver function at first, it seems to have been nestling quietly among the screensaver options all along.


As you can perhaps see, in my case, using Edubuntu, I seem to have had 2 Screensaver panels under System>Preferences from the beginning. As I understand it, one of them is the Gnome screensaver, and the other is Xscreensaver (or came from somewhere else?). I'm not sure. Anyway, even if you see it there, you'll want to go into Synaptic and get Xscreensaver and its associated packages. Google around for more info if it my instructions are too vague.


The xscreensaver-data-extra I am selecting in the picture is a package which doesn't download for me since I apparently already have a copy of it(?). I should remove the dodgy one. It's not needed for this, anyway. When you configure the Screensaver panel which corresponds to Xscreensaver rather than Gnome Screensaver, it will prompt you to shut down the gnome screensaver daemon (if it's already running) and start up the Xscreensaver daemon. I'm not sure if I have made these changes permanent (after restart) or not, another detail to check on.


Find a good RSS news source. I find Yahoo Top News is best for me (as a general news source) as opposed to Google News, for example. Yahoo news provides a headline, the (AP) credit, and a one sentence summary of text before the next story. Google News has the name of the newspaper, which takes up most of the feed, followed by a few words of an incomplete sentence and other newspaper sources. No Good. Both of them change and update frequently many times an hour, unlike BBC and some others which tend to freeze the news for the day.


Click Settings in Fliptext and Starwars to configure the font size, width of the column, and a few other variables.


In Xscreensaver, you can choose Random and check the modules(?) you want to use. In the Advanced settings panel, paste your RSS feed source for text. Be sure to check Fliptext and StarWars as two of the screensaver modules which will show the news on your screen. Other fun ones are Carousel, GLCells, GLSchool, Gleidescope, Jigsaw, Noof, and Photopile. Mix in a few of those so you won't have only news scrolling by all the time. The output looks like this:


Enjoy and stay informed from the source of your choice!

Chapter T3ree is 4Free

I have this book, one of the few available in English in a physical bookstore in Japan. The Official Ubuntu Book, 4th Edition, 2009 (Jaunty). You can read the third chapter online. Of course, there is a lot of documentation and posts online, but I wanted to also have an old-fashioned paper book.

This is your cephalopod tool-using brain with a coconut shell

Research led by Julian Finn as reported at Nat'l Geographic:



The evolving tool-use of the cephalopod community puts increased pressure on the dominant bipedal tail-less fire monkey. To those concerned about homonid civilization being overwhelmed by the rise of the octopi, I recommend ordering an extra dish of tako sushi ASAP or maybe throwing one of them on the "barbee" at your earliest convenience.

BSDaemon in the APPL

I'm still learning how to GIMP.

Canon+Canonical

OpenPrinting cannot really be trusted. Some printers are listed as Paperweights--such as the 990i or i990--yet are supported by the commercial product TurboPrint, at least. Others have been listed as Perfectly, fully functional, because they are supported by TurboPrint. You cannot rely on this resource, but it's a good starting point.

I had to buy a new printer because our Pixus 990i went to a solid glowing yellow unresponsive light some days ago and never snapped out of it. I checked out some HP and Brother printers because they have very good Linux printing support. Canon support seemed spotty, but at the last minute this morning before returning to PC Depot to get a printer I was informed that the Canon Pixus MP640 did have drivers for both printing and scanning, and since it also prints CD/DVDs and is a wi-fi printer, I made a last-minute decision to get that one.

The printer wasn't cooperating in Linux at first so I decided to try it in Mac OS X. That was easy to set up and worked like a charm. Actually, the printer and scanner were recognized twice since I enabled the printer to use "Bonjour" as well as the normal wireless network link. We were connecting wirelessly on the laptops but not the ethernet-connected PCs, so I made a slight correction to the networking and now network printing and scanning is now available for Mac, Windows, and Linux PCs both wired and wireless. We had been using the age-old technique of just swapping the USB to the machine we wanted to print from, so this is a huge leap, but it seemed to take most of the day.

You can get the Japanese Linux drivers here, both deb and rpm. Linux drivers for the MP640 are here. The Debian printer drivers are here, and the Debian ScanGearMP packages are here. When you unpack these, each file contains two packages, a more generic one and a specific one for the MP640. Install all four with the package manager (a default, just double-click it). One final note: you cannot scan using XScan. The ScanGearMP works only with GIMP or on the command line, so just fire up the GIMP to start scanning, and set the MP640 as the default printer in your system preferences so you don't need to select it for every application. If you use Linux and get this printer that may save you a few minutes.

I haven't had a whole lot of experience testing printers, and I cannot vouch for the print quality of photos or DVDs and CDs. All I've printed is test prints, web pages, and OpenOffice documents. At the moment I'm just happy to have something that prints and scans painlessly from all the computers, Linux, Windows, or Mac, wherever they are. The MP640 is also a copier and has a fully multilingual menu with at least a dozen major languages. There are also some preset documents in the printer, like writing paper, sheet music paper, kanji practice paper, and so on. Just select one and print it out.

Linux Transition v4

I finally converted the mac mini to Edubuntu Linux by enabling printing, the last remaining barrier to use. Without being able to print, I would be forced to boot back into the Mac OS X every time I wanted to print. Contrary to the information on the Linux Printing database page, the Canon Pixus 990i, (AKA the i990 outside Japan) does have support.

Canon itself provides rpms --which should work on any(?) rpm-based distribution (Red Hat, Fedora, OpenSuSE, Mandriva-- and source, which I suppose can be compiled once I figure that out.
http://cweb.canon.jp/drv-upd/bj/bjlinux240.html
http://download.canon.jp/pub/driver/bj/linux/
http://support-asia.canon-asia.com/contents/ASIA/EN/0100119202.html

There is also older debian and ubuntu support that may/not work
http://mambo.kuhp.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~takushi/#canon

I downloaded turbolinux and that got printing up and running although it may only work for 30 days before putting some logo or something on my printouts. I'll find a workaround w/in 30 days, or buy a new printer, or boot back into MacOSX, or install an rpm-based distribution to keep my printer happy. I hope nothing gets so broken that I have to go back to the Apple world.

Apparently it's also possible to convert rpm to deb using "alien" but that involves command line interface (CLI)toral skills of a higher level. I don't think I would need that anyway since I have the source.

Printing was the final barrier because sound is good, and I decided that no physical shutdown or restarting is not really such a show-stopper; I am old enough to remember computers that had to be shut down in software and then shut down physically. It was about 15 years ago. Back to the future. Also, Mac and Linux usually run for months without needing to reboot, anyway. (I don't know about WinDOS--never ran it long enough to see if it was equally stable.)

This is "Linux Transition v4" because there has been the Little Sucker (Eee pc 4G), Little Puppy (Eee pc 1000HE), the iLamp (M9290J/A), and now the 2009 mac mini. I had to change the mini since I tend to work on it, use it for mail, and use it for podcasts and iPod syncing. In addition to being figuratively locked in classrooms with Windows five hours a week, if I use the Mac as my main home computer, I may not even use Linux everyday. I was probably using MacOSx 50 or 60% of the time, then Linux, then Windows. This will put Linux on top, with the obligatory Windows time at work, and Mac and Windows available at home as a secondary boot option should I ever need them. This fourth install puts me over the hump. Edubuntu, Ubuntu, Xubuntu, and the Netbook Remix and Moblin Remix are the ones I am using now. I'm done with Mandriva for a while and I not using OpenSuSE anymore or Fedora (yet). I am interested in looking into Fedora, Debian, and FreeBSD but Ubuntu is serving me best right now, I like the philosophy, and I think it may be more productive to try to use a larger rather than smaller distribution and build a bigger community, all else being equal.

That leaves only the 2003 eMac and some 1999-2000 iMacs in my 3rd floor PPCLounge running MacOS. I rarely get up there these days. The challenge of the eMac will also require me to finally master editing the xorg.conf file and get the eMac display challenge right. In addition to those, there are also 2 other Windows computers run by others in my family. They seem happy as Windows drones.

I'm very happy with the mac-mini-bootcamp-edubuntu-OS. It seems better than the MacOS, but I could be biased. The text editor gedit is certainly better than Text Edit in that gedit is tabbed. Rhythmbox sees my iPod and plays the music without complaining about it being synched to another computer or such nonsense. I don't know well yet, but if it doesn't support the iPod well, I'll try gpodder and some other tools or just get a SanDisk. Basically, freedom is better. MacOSX is like sleeping in your office because it's a really nice office; Linux is more like having your own place made of prefab parts that you built from free materials donated to a co-op. We might compare it to being out in the forest in some cabins since GNU-Linux(&BSD) is a whole ecosystem of competing and co-evolving operating systems and software, while the Windows-Mac duopoly is a shiny glass office building. Don't you dare try knocking holes in the walls or redecorating. Edubuntu with Google Gadgets and a lot of small customizations looks much better than MacOSX right away. Part of it may be because the 22 inches of screen looks better than the ten inches of screen I was looking at in the netbook experience. Possible 2.2 times better. Squared. Somehow it looks great. I had been looking at that brushed aluminum for years and years. It's a nice look, and it would have been good for 4 to 6 months. But give me a break. Try something different for Steve's sake. Mahogany. Concrete. Stone. Something. I can't stand looking at it anymore. Only one choice in everything. The Cult of Mac. It's like Steve Jobs is dad and you have to live in his house and follow all of his rules as he gets older and a little slower at staying up to date all the time. Grow up, MacAddicts! Stop sucking corporate ass'le. I will enjoy not having only the Mac hardware to choose from for my OS of choice. However, I do intend to keep one working Apple CPU and MacOSx around for odd jobs. I miss the RSS news screensaver; I've got schools of fish now and it's very AfterDark Flocks-esque.

I tried to set my Shuffle to download the latest podcast of some select daily favorites and delete the previous day's. I always do it by hand. I knew it was possible because the Nano can do it. But I found it was not possible. The Shuffle is only allowed to download a random mix, or you synch files manually. Crippleware. Steve Jobs apparently decided the Shuffle was for jogging, that it should be nearly impossible NOT to shuffle it (1 mm slider has to stop halfway to NOT shuffle) and that users should be forced to upgrade to the Nano if they wanted to automatically offload and onload their daily (or frequently updated) favorites. The Shuffle is better for me because I want to operate it by touch in my pocket, so APPL just lost another customer. When I hear "Shuffle" I imagine a crippled old man walking slowly without lifting his feet. I sometimes call it the iPot-snuffle or the iPot-sniffle. It's yet another entry in the Top 50 Things I Hate About APPL. I will have to write that list up sometime. Maybe I should go for 100?

Speaking of things I hate about APPL, how about the situation where Windows has a (near) 90% market share and is somehow NOT a monopoly? Can you imagine any other business in which a company has a 90% market share and is NOT considered a monopoly? Imagine if one company had 90% of the phone lines. How much competition would there be? What if one company had 90% of the rails, or roads, or gas stations, or cars, internet service providers, or television stations? Is there any chance it would not be considered a monopoly and not be broken up? Looking back at it, what happened is that Apple saved Microsoft. By taking Microsoft's investment and staying afloat as a token make-believe competitor, they saved Microsoft from Microsoft's worst nightmare, being an undeniable monopolist. The two of them carved up the market. Maybe Steve promised not to sell computers for much under $1000. Bill promised to delay or screw up Windows enough to help APPL get over 5% again. In the alternate timeline where Apple did go broke, Windows would have to be clearly recognized as a monopoly and might have been broken into a few competing companies, teams, and versions of Windows by now.

Apple has an SD card in their laptop computers now, much like they finally have a radio function in some iPods, after refusing to consider it for the first 5 years when it would have been cutting-edge. However, you cannot get the SD card in their one laptop for $1000. You need to pay more and get the more expensive model. Guys. Computers at the $200 and $300 level have the SD card slot. They've had it for years. You don't use that as a feature to squeeze more money out of people--unless you really think of your customers as dumb farm animals (no insult to sentient farm animals intended).

Here is a funny spoof of the iconic I'm-a-Mac ad. The producer says he wrote the script before Google bought YouTube, which is why an anthopomorphised MySpace makes an appearance (as opposed to YouTube). The Linux guy should have been based more on Linus Torvalds or Richard Stallman. Unix is like Stallman. The Google hacker guy is not really my image of Google (but what do I know). Perhaps what the Mac is experience is a kernel panic. IMHO, the video could be improved by incorporating a Spinning Beachball of Death as the end.

Linux adoption milestones and notes

I've been very busy but when I have some time I'm trying to get to where I can use Linux most of the time.

It has been a month now since Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala came out. I was refreshing the download page and wondering where it was as midnight approached. When it did appear, my download was expected to take an hour. As new Ubuntu users crowded onto the servers, the reported time gradually lengthened to over 24 hours, so I started some bittorrent downloads, which followed the opposite pattern: near infinite download time at first, but as more and more peers acquired copies the download time shrank to a handful of hours. I eventually downloaded 8 or 9 versions of Ubuntu:

• Ubuntu 9.10
• Ubuntu Netbook Remix
• Ubuntu Moblin Remix
• Kubuntu 9.10
• Kubuntu Netbook Remix
• Xubuntu 9.10
• Edubuntu 9.10
• Ubuntu 9.10 PPC
• Ubuntu 9.10 alternate installer

By the way, since that time, I have also downloaded 5 versions of Fedora

• Fedora 12 i386
• Fedora 12 PPC
• Fedora 12 XFCE
• Fedora 12 LXDE
• Fedora 12 i686 live

and

• Knoppix 6.2

--none of which I have not yet tried. I have tried all of the versions of Ubuntu except PPC and the alternate installer, which really isn't a version.

Somehow I have not downloaded the new OpenSuSE, perhaps because I went there to get the PPC version and was annoyed that they had stopped making an official PPC version (although there is a daily build).

I did some experimenting on the Little Sucker (an eee 4g). I tried installing Moblin on its SSD flash memory drive. It took 2+something GB. Good size. Liked it more at first but the GUI is a little too chunky and weird. Icons are overlapping with other icons, but it works and is snappy. I like GRUB 2, too. I tried Ubuntu Netbook Remix but didn't like the behavior and look. You can't (easily) turn off netbook-launcher, and it's actually a very inefficient use of space compared to the non-netbook-remix, requiring more clicks to do anything. I also tried Kubuntu Netbook Remix, which I'd recommend if your screen is big enough. It requires 576 pixels of vertical space, and didn't work on the 4G because I couldn't use alt-click and drag to move windows and had to use tabs and try to guess what was offscreen in the installer, which didn't work and wasn't going to lead to a good outcome anyway. I also tried Xubuntu on the Little Sucker, installing it on a USB flash memory stick. It looked good and worked well, too. I didn't want to run it off the protruding stick, though, so it was just a test. I installed the regular Karmic on the SD card and have booted that most of the time. Grub 2 lets it see the other installs on other media regardless of what media you boot from, unlike the way it would give an error and quit before. That's a huge improvement.

On my other Asus, Little Puppy (Eee 1000HE) I upgraded to Edubuntu 9.10 on a whim and a prompt, and promptly lost Skype sound. Other system sounds seems OK. I'm waiting for a system update to magically fix it, or a new version of Skype, or in the worst case I may just have to knuckle down and figure out how to fix it.

I managed to finally install a Linux distro --Edubuntu 9.10-- to the Mac Mini (Macmini3,1), and have it boot correctly from rEFIt, which chainloads GRUB2 in the BootCamp partition. It also downloaded the driver for the display, so the Acer H223HQ came into full use. It also downloaded a wireless or ethernet driver (one wasn't working initially; I forget which one). It looks great; better than the Mac OS because you can customize it to your needs. Mac is like a shiny (capsule) hotel room owned by a huge chain whereas Linux is more like having your own place to live. It can also see the Macintosh HD and all of the files on it except for the users home folders, so I have made a top-level documents folder in MacOSX to be better able to access it from Linux. There were a few problems. One is that shutdown and restart do not work properly. You need to power off with the power switch after it hangs in shutdown limbo. That may not be a big problem because with Mac and Linux I often let the computer go a month or two without rebooting. Sound wasn't working, either--until today. I haven't tried, but printing is also likely to be useless since the Canon Pixus 990i (AKA i990 outside Japan) is reported as "paperweight", the worst possible status, on the Linux Foundation's OpenPrinting database.

I may have to carry a list of "Perfectly" Linux-compatible printers and go shopping for a cheap replacement. This also explains why I can't go cold turkey into Linux immediately without putting all of my dux in a row.

Today I found the magical incantation to get sound working, and it was gratifying to experience loud and clear sound. The solution came from Victor Costan and was stated as

To get the sound working, add the following line to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base
options snd-hda-intel model=imac24

Many thanks for that!

Starting from zero, you may think that you'd search for the file, open it, modify it, and when saving it, if not authorized, you might be prompted to authenticate, right? Well, it doesn't work that way. The unstated assumption in this instruction is that you would know to open a terminal and type
sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base
save a copy of it as a backup to a safe location,
then add the line
options snd-hda-intel model=imac24
and save (overwrite) the file alsa-base to its original location in
/etc/modprobe.d/
before rebooting and enjoying sound.

Ideally, it shouldn't be necessary to do this to get sound working. It would be easy for a new user to make a mistake or just give up before getting this far. Also, if it were easier, the distinction between newbie and experienced Linux user would start to erode, like the popular OSes. Finally, the assumption that every user should or would know to authenticate on the command line as superuser and designate an application and a path to a file to be edited in order to edit alsa-base is expecting too much of new users (or old users or potential users). Linux has a long way to go.

I tried out Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop and Thunderbird for the MacOS on the Mac Mini, too. I'm pretty hooked on Apple Mail and would like to find a worthy replacement. These two are both cross-platform and available on the Mac (unlike Evolution--I think). Zimbra works well with my unused Yahoo accounts (no problem using the 2 accounts) and it works with Gmail, too, but I couldn't get Hotmail working yet. Thunderbird didn't work either although it works well in Linux for me. I probably gave up troubleshooting too soon. I already know that it's not quite as easy as Apple Mail.

Since browsing and word-processing are handled well in Linux, E-mail and podcasts are my main daily concerns. I'll try the default music manager, which I guess is still Rhythmbox, and explore a few alternatives for managing podcasts and iPod support (until I get a Sandisk). I hope F-Spot, Picasa, and/or DigiKam can replace iPhoto.

Supercomputing with Penguins

I hadn't realized that most of the world's supercomputers were running Linux (as of June 2009). When did that happen? Apparently between late 2003 and early 2004 Linux began to displace the Unix memes from their virtual niche in the supercomputing ecosphere. I don't know the history, but the shift is so fast it suggests that Linux became more efficient and was adopted en masse by supercomputer admins. Or I suppose it could be a licensing thing. Anyway, Linux was adopted because it was better for one reason or another.

Victory over all in the supercomputing field doesn't necessarily mean Linux is headed for supremacy on the desktop, but it's still a good sign. By the way, Top500.org has some interesting charts, historical graphs, and tables you can generate.

Windows 6.1: You're gonna hafta pay for that!

A few days ago I remarked to a friend how strange it was that Microsoft had come out with a new monolingual operating system in 2009, ten years into the age of multilingual operating systems. But after that I wasn't so sure if it had been 10 years --or more like 8 or so. Was I exaggerating?

Then I stumbled across a multilingual version of Windows 7 that only costs $219.99. OK, Windows IS available in a multilingual edition for a price. I suppose that's only for a single license, so if you had a few computers lying around, you'd need to multiply that by 2 or 3. Or by 20 or by 500 if you are a school. Too bad that most of the teachers in most of the world's schools barely make that much in a month--or a year.

Designed for people who want it all
Windows 7 Ultimate is the most versatile and powerful edition of Windows 7. It combines remarkable ease-of-use with the entertainment features of Home Premium and the business capabilities of Professional, including the ability to run many Windows XP productivity programs in Windows XP Mode. For added security, you can encrypt your data with BitLocker and BitLocker-To-Go. And for extra flexibility, you can work in any of 35 languages. Get it all with Windows 7 Ultimate.

$219.99 also doesn't compare very well with the $29 Snow Leopard which you can slap onto as many of your Intel Macs as you like without much bother (just keep buying Apple hardware and they won't mind). It compares even less favorably to free Linux or BSD.

So how long have most operating systems been multilingual? A quick google at Apple Mac OS X in Wikipedia shows 10.0.0 was multilingual, released on March 24, 2001. Well, excuuuse me, that was only 8+ (but almost 9) years ago.

Mac OS X version 10.0, code named “Cheetah”, is the first major release of Mac OS X, Apple’s desktop and server operating system. Mac OS X v10.0 was released on March 24, 2001 for a price of US$129.

What about Linux? Distrowatch records Debian 1.1 as a multilingual operating system at the time it was released: 1996-06-17. So in this case it was over 13 years ago. Split the difference, and we're now roughly a decade into the multilingual OS era--with the exception of laggard Windows. Other Linuxes such as (Open)SuSE 6.0 was multilingual as of 1998-12-21, Mandriva (Mandrake at the time?) on 2000-01-14, and YDL 2.0 as of 2001-05-17, just behind Apple. As far as I can tell, BSD was a bit slower to catch up, but a multilingual FreeBSD 4.9 was out on 2003-10-28. These are just a few popular and older examples I picked at random.

What's more annoying about MS is that they market it as some kind of high-end luxury premium purchase, rather than a free and natural choice to use your own language(s) with no fuss. "Hey there, big spender!" "Yo, fancy pants, you want to pay for THIS!" The caption is "Designed for people who want it all". It's bundled with encryption. Right. Of course, people who want to use another language or more than one language must be arrogant, epicurean, big spenders, AND encryption freaks. Probably spies.

If you really "want it all", the ability to compute in your own language (or two), encryption, compatibility, interoperability, and your money and self-respect, get Ubuntu, Fedora, or one of the (gnu)Linux (or BSD) operating system software distributions referenced above. As always, I'd recommend a major distribution which is free and which supports a wide variety of processors and languages, and which has a user-friendly desktop environment. These conditions are not met by the Bills and Steves of the world who did us the favor of bringing personal computing to us from their garages in the 1970s and 1980s (and who reaped the rewards in the 90s and n00ties). We're grateful for that, but it's time to graduate to Linux.

Walking through Akihabara today, I noticed how the place is changing. Although there are bigger, newer buildings and train lines, the electronics stores are being replaced by more places to eat and stores selling anime-related items, game software, and kiddie-oriented stuff. It didn't look high-tech to me at all today. I could see it as more of an old, baroque Turkish market or something taken from the pages of a 19th-century Sears catalog. Here and there were computers advertised as having English (or sometimes "Enblish") installed. One store had a wordy, crowded signboard advertising its English computers. Another annoyance was the iPods everywhere. Shopkeepers, it doesn't distinguish your store if you have the same iPods in the window that the other 500 stores have. I was looking for a SanDisk player and would have spent time and money in any store that had one, but I guess I'll just save time and buy it on Amazon without checking it out in the material world first since the time I spend walking around looking for one to handle is getting to cost more than just buying one to try out. ThanXmas is on the way, so one can always give it away in the spirit of the seasoning. As twilight fell, the harsh ugliness of the city faded and the beauty of the contemporary and future e-waste and its fetishists in the city's autumn air began to emerge as the anthropogenic lights began to shimmer. I JRed home.