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SOPA blackouts today
The brouhaha about SOPA/PIPA might be good for the internet in the long run
- More users get a taste of why it is important to not let politicians meddle with the internet.
- In the long run, we may get a system that’s better than DNS.
- We might end the practice of putting critical internet infrastructure in the US in favor of safer countries.
- GoDaddy.
I’m not saying SOPA is a good thing, but it’s certainly creating awareness around issues that most people usually shrug off as “nerd world problems”.
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Charles J. Kelly, a former Baltimore Police Department lieutenant who wrote the department’s use of force guidelines, said pepper spray is a “compliance tool” that can be used on subjects who do not resist, and is preferable to simply lifting protesters.
“When you start picking up human bodies,…
(Source: cbsnews.com)
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Maximizing battery life on the Optimus T
Yes, talking about my phone again. As was to be expected, I spent a lot of time with the phone on day one, and drained the battery in record time. Something needed to be done about that, and here’s what I’ve arrived at:
- I don’t need 3G, so I turned on the “2G only” option. I do not have a contract, because I like the $0 monthly fee of a prepaid SIM, and with T-Mobile that means I don’t get a mobile data plan. 2G is all I need, and it’s a lot less of a power-hog than 3G or 4G are.
- Turn Wi-Fi off. This sounds counter-intuitive, especially since I don’t have a data plan, but a lot of the time there’s no Wi-Fi network in range I can connect to, and even when there is, I don’t need to be permanently connected. Instead, I switch it on every few hours, which causes the phone’s various accounts to sync, then turn it off again and read the new emails/tweets/etc that came in.
- Display brightness all the way down. I’m indoors most of the time, and reading the screen is not a problem.
- Optimize for signal. T-Mobile has a terrible network, and my apartment is almost a dead zone for reception. Leaving my phone near the window instead of on the couch table means it won’t constantly be scanning for a network.
With all of this, I’ve gotten nearly 2 days out of the battery so far, though I didn’t make any calls in that time. It’s not the 5 days I used to get out of my Nokia 6300, but I think it will do.
Speaking of the lousy network coverage, T-Mobile has installed a funny app on the phone for “Wi-Fi calling”. It uses the Wi-Fi network for making calls, but still charges minutes to my prepaid contract. This seems ass-backwards at first, until you realize it’s a trick of theirs to hide how awful their 3G network really is. It’s enabled by default, and assuming you’re mostly calling from home and within reach of your wireless router, you get crisp quality phone calls, and aren’t immediately tempted to research Skype or Google Voice.
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I bought a phone!
Today is the first time I’ve bought a phone. All my prior phones were either paid for and bought by my employer or hand-me-downs. This month, the last one of these did its final gasp, and it was time for me to look for a replacement.
After unsuccessfully trying to navigate a couple of online stores and filing to find an offer that didn’t require a degree in advanced marketing buzzword and retail theory, I simply walked into the T-Mobile store, told them I wanted an affordable android phone without a plan, and walked out with an LG Optimus T. It’s not going to win awards for 3D games performance, but that’s not what I wanted it for. And it’s not burning a hole in my wallet every month. First impression is pretty good, time to install a ton of apps!
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git svn rebase fails, not using plink
I installed a new version of msysgit some days ago, and git svn rebase stopped working. Some digging showed that it wasn’ using plink to talk to putty anymore, but using openssh. This despite my having told the git installer that I would like to use plink.exe (and pageant).
What was going on? git wasn’t to blame here - it was svn that was using plink. I had also reinstalled msys, and with it a new subversion config file, it seems. The fix was to edit my C:\Users\erehling.subversion\config file like this:
[tunnels] ssh="C:/Program Files (x86)/PuTTY/plink.exe"
Next time this happens, I hope I’ll remember that I wrote this little reminder for myself :-)
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Good old games are not all that good.
GOG.com is currently offering one of my all-time favorite games, Wing Commander for purchase and download. Even though I still have the original floppies somewhere, I whipped out my credit card and figured I’d spend a fun afternoon with it. My friend Francis came over that day, and he’d never heard of it (he is 20 years old and was not quite born yet when the game was released), so I figured I’d show him what a great game it was. Except it turns out it isn’t. Because we live in the future now.
Never mind that it took a while to configure DOSBox properly, the game itself just doesn’t hold up to modern standards in so many ways:
- The aspect ratio of 4:3 (with occasional Letterbox bars in movie sequences) was stretched onto my 16:9 TV.
- The controls keyboard+mouse, but WASD wasn’t invented yet, and the mouse sensitivity is all wrong. Mice were new, and the OS didn’t have sensitivity preferences.
- The graphics are 320x200x8. The art is good within those limitations, but looks terrible to our modern eyes, especially on a 40” screen.
- Support for my game pad is so bad that I chose to play without it. In fact, having it plugged in made the mouse cursor jitter. Joysticks for PCs were pretty unusual then, and they didn’t have 16 buttons and weren’t always analog.
On the plus side, I was right about the game being crack for Francis. The story is great, even full of tropes as it is, and the pacing works, the space combat is exactly what a young nerd who has seen too much Star Wars wants it to be like. There are likeable characters that you care about, and your protagonist’s character development is fantastic. This game would still be a blockbuster if it was made today, with today’s technology. But as it is, it runs in an emulator and is stuck in the technological constraints of the very early 90s.
Compare this with the movies or music industry. If the only way to watch Charlie Chaplin’s movies today was to go to a cinema and watch it on the original celluloid, few of us would even know who he is. But the movie industry has moved with the times, and I can watch Metropolis on Blu-ray and Charlie Chaplin on Netflix. And before this, they were available on VHS and Laserdisc.
I strongly believe the Game Industry is leaving lots of money on the table by neglecting its back catalog in this way. There is an entire generation of consumers that have never played the great games of the 90s, and we’re discouraging them from that because we’re basically letting these games rot.
What it takes to keep these games attractive is not a reboot every couple of years. Those are expensive and risky, as DNF should have shown all of us. Why aren’t we just keeping the original games fresh? If new hardware comes along, or the way people consume games changes, it should be so much easier to adapt an existing game to that then to make an entirely new game. To use my Wing commander example: Support game pads. Port it to consoles. Sell it on Steam. If numbers are still good after 10 years, pay a studio to re-do all the art in higher resolution, using the originals as their guide. Don’t make me use an emulator.
There are a few games that get this. Another World had a 15th anniversary edition with new graphics and a port to Windows. Monkey Island released a Special Edition that was the talk of the press, because who doesn’t love Monkey Island? It’s gorgeous, and it got me to play through one of my favorite games one more time. And you know what? The story holds up, the humor is still funny, and it doesn’t feel like I’m playing something that came out of a time capsule.
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Latitude
My android tablet has a GPS in it, which means my friends should never have to worry where my couch is at any given moment. Seriously, couch companion is the best use case I’ve found for it, and I’m almost never temted to take it with me when I leave my home. What would I do with it?
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Death and Taxes
The Norwegian tax authority has sent me a letter to inform me that I failed to make a tax statement for 2010. No Shit, Sherlock! This could be related to the fact that I haven’t lived in Norway since 2009, something these guys are aware of, because they’re sending their snail mail to my US address. Also, we went through this at least twice last year - when they asked me to pay taxes for 2010 and 2011 in advance (forskuddsskatt) and we agreed that this was a mistake.
Do other countries have this problem? Is Germany still secretly hoping I’ll pay taxes for the past 10 years, and I don’t hear about this because they don’t know my snail mail address? I sure hope not.
Sent an email to the lady at the tax office who dealt with my problems a year ago, letting her know that it didn’t stick. I hope she’s still there, because there is no email address for complaints on this letter, and the letter took more than two weeks, so I’ll be damned if I use the postal service for this.
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legendary beauty like the moon
My short experiment in good neighborly conduct is over. For a few weeks, I was running my wireless LAN without encryption, but now AT&T has put a bandwidth cap on my connection.
It’s funny how many people will run non-SSL traffic over an unknown WLAN called AndroidAP without so much as a second thought. It’s trivial for anyone on that network to read your traffic, people! Also, watching netflix over what looks to you like a tethered phone is just a bit mean, don’t you think?
The title of this post is my new SSID :-) I figured Persian poetry was nicer than those passive aggressive “I can hear you through the wall” network names that are so en vogue, and more likely to make someone smile.
