It’s not that I’m having “bloggers block”, but I’m feeling kinda meh about it lately.

I need to blog for some kinda company or something, something with an audience and more likely to have discussion I guess…or at least that’s what I’ve been subconsciously thinking lately.

Sooo…yeah, election in two days – I’m sure that’s on a lot of folks’ minds too.  Maybe I’m just waiting until that is over, maybe I’m burned out on politics and reading political blogs and news and polls and etc.

Maybe.

Hopefully on Tuesday our new smartphones (HTC Touch Pro) will be in. I know some folks out in the wild already have theirs – you’ve been able to buy them at Best Buy for about a week now but…we don’t actually pay any money for ours.  So free > 1 week early.  I’m moderatly excited, at least more so than  I have been about any piece of tech in a long time.

My HTC Mogul is decent, but it has some pretty noticeably shortcomings, especially once you’ve used one for a while – the lack of RAM is a big one.  The Touch Pro has 288, compared to my Moguls 47ish…so that should be nice.  I’m just hoping it’s enough that whenever my remote sync app kicks in in the background it doesn’t drag everything else to a screeching halt.  We’ll see.

I’m also curious how 640×480 is going to look on a screen that’s physically not much larger than my 320×240.

Carry on.

It was running Feisty I think…version 6.something.  I just recently found out you could actually update entire OS versions from inside the OS – which I think is the boss shit.  I found the instructions here.

Anyway, it worked almost perfectly.

634 pm start
825 pm: omg linux wants to reboot?
830 pm we are back up in gutsy gibbon/7.10
836 start
1006 restart #2
1010 up with 8.04/heron

Wow, you can barely install ONE version of Windows in 3.5 hours, that’s pretty freakin’ sweet.

It’s a great OS for web browsing and other basic functions, and that was my plan for it…

Unfortunately, now my wireless card won’t connect, and it’s a royal pain in the ass to troubleshoot linux.  No worries though – like I said I never use the thing!

Maybe my next project will be fixing the wireless.  Or trying to rather.

Clinton or Obama: decision tree – a pretty neat graphic

CNN has a story up on how genetic information from Africa tells us that the human race nearly died out at one point. Details in the article are really scant though, I’m surprised they let this go to press with so little.

Ars has a good article up on the state of malware & grayware. If you use a computer (which you do), it wouldn’t be a bad idea to read this.

An article at New York Magazine on how we’re wrecking our feet. Or somesuch. Quite worth reading, even if just to skim.

Wired has an article and some very cool pictures on colliding galaxies.

Here’s another very cool Wired article about the origins of the TEMPEST program.  Turns out the government has known about the vulnerability of electronic input since the 40s!

Finding life on Mars could be a very bad thing – and not in the way you think!

That DC Madam lady just turned up dead.  Suspicious?  Maayyyyyybe.  I wish I could remember that politician who died under REALLY suspicious circumstances inside the last few years.  Something to do with missing then being found drowned but he was an all-pro swimmer/rower/whatever…is this ringing any bells?  Interesting, this is the AP story that came up today, now they are saying she told someone she would kill herself before going to prison…with no documentation of said comment of course, but what they do have documented:

“I’m sure as heck not going to be going to federal prison for one day, let alone four to eight years, because I’m shy about bringing in the deputy secretary of whatever,” Palfrey told ABC last year when she released phone records that revealed some of her clients. “Not for a second. I’ll bring every last one of them in if necessary.”

Huh, sounds like she was willing to name all the names of her clients, maybe try and drag the whole house down with her.  And now she’s dead.  Gee, that’s just too bad.

Here’s Orson Scott Card ripping J.K. Rowling a new one.  Good times.

This guy may just be the worst office worker ever to not lose his job.  Wow, I wonder if they ran the semen-detector-lamp thing from CSI over his workspace.  If not, they really should.

That guy who was a whistleblower on the whole Abu Ghraib torture scandal thing is saying the movie/documentary of it is bullshit.  Surprise!

Some 20/20 show recorded people’s reactions to gay PDA - one of which included a 911 call (I didn’t watch any of the video clips, so no commentary on whatever they contain)!

The first superheavy element found in nature.

Slate had a cute article about modern poetry.

There have been a number of comments floating around lately about the pro-Clinton bias at ABC (especially with effing Stephanopoulos moderating the debate!?), here’s a brief tally & analysis/comparison of some of the recent debates which seems to support that idea.

Jack Bauer, 24 and torture.  OK, whatever I don’t watch the show so I have no idea.

And to close it off, here’s a crazy flash exploit.  Note that this is worth checking out just for the link to the vid of the super difficult Japanese Super Mario Brothers.  Oh hell, I’ll just link it myself.  The audio track is INCREDIBLY ANNOYING; I just watched it for a bit with audio off.  Yes, this was a real game.  Wow, I think if I had gotten that for my Nintendo it may have driven me away from consoles forever.  Or at least made me smash it.

Science-y stuff:

monkey ape-split pushed back
simulating out of body experiences
asteroid belt & dinosaur extinction
inorganic life? – find it strange that these things were only “modelled” and not observed
Norwegian electric car: Think.
microbes in ice – the interesting bit is on the half life of DNA and improbability of dna arriving from elsewhere
Obesity contagious? Not really anything surprising here, sloth breeds sloth.
Dyson essay on the need for heretics in science. Guess he’s some important dude. I forget.
behe vs erv – if you’re interested in the flaws in one of the lead (at least media wise, he’s always trying to get his name out there) ID guys’ arguments.

Sex-y stuff:

hebrew porn & arabs – I seriously doubt this one will surprise anyone. Just like all those KKK members are beating off to Booty Talk 79 (or whatever they are up to…really prolific “film-makers” there). But it’s still funny!
monkey sex harassment – you really should read this, it could save your life.

Social stuff:
gay marriage in medieval europe
An essay (I think, been a while) on abortion rights state/federal:
crime rates by city 1986-2006 – useful if you find yourself debating crime rarely or frequently.
lending crisis – If you’re an adult, it’s probably not a bad idea to keep up on this.
Jim Cramer meltdown as a result of lending crisis – I don’t know who this is, but watching wealthy people yell about money is always worth a laugh.
from Freakonomics blog: Everything you always wanted to know about streetgangs but were afraid to ask.
Diversity & social malaise. Or the “downside of diversity” as the spin doctAs are calling it. Of course, I don’t think the mention how this plays out over time, which is pretty darn shortsighted considering that’s kind of how this country has always been. Bunch of immigrants move in, people give them crap. By the time their kids are grown up, they’re “all-american” and hanging with the rest giving the next round of immigrants/etc. crap.
more on the salary gender gap.

other stuff:
christian perfume – You know you want it! It will keep you holy!The tjx effect – how data theft affects the rest of us. Ok, anyone really.
caffeine OD – Yeah, some moron finally did it.
CIA world factbook – useful reference
wikiscanner: 1 2 – probably a good idea to read 2 first I guess. Handy little tool someone made to help keep wikiposters “honest”. To some degree at least.
iphone cloning & cloning in China in general. Not THAT kind of cloning (but just give them time).
Media Defender leaks all over – have you been following all the RIAA/MPAA bullshit? I have. Here’s one of the latest fuckups on the part of our brilliant “copyright protection” establishment (who is fighting tooth and nail to avoid being drug into this century). I wonder if the fact that they were explicitly planning entrapment can get anyone sent to jail? Please!

Anyway, so that half works, maybe next time I’ll try adding some text from the phone as well. Supposedly whatever little app I’m using can also send photos directly to WP too…but I have limited space here so who knows if that’s worth it.

I think Z did pretty well with the shots – he cried very loudly right when it happened and lit up beet-red, but seemed calmed by us pretty quickly. He is, as always, adorable.

He’s up to 11lbs 2 ounces and 22 inches long!

Some dude lost weight playing wii sports. Hmmmmmmmmm.

Looks like State Farm might FINALLY pay out some of its Katrina claims.

Freaking awesome. Go go gadget samurai vigilantes!

In more Wii related news, some woman drank so much water in a contest to win one, she died. Seriously.

Science/tech:
Micro-robot to swim around in our bloodstream. What if it goes all berserk and turns my blood into vomit juice?

Crazy Powerpoint machine gone awfully wrong! But wait, it finds snipers.

A really neat little article about a Chinese village possibly being descended (partially) from a lost Roman legion or some junk or stuff.

Possible simple, aid for cancer. Probably won’t be funded because the big name pharma-whores can’t patent it and make fat cash on it.

A long article about the evolution of cancer, I forgot what I found particularly interesting about it.

File under “more coolness”. Lightning balls created in lab. Foo fighters anyone?

Hubble + dark matter = crazy science.

The Tesla roadster! I want one.

Trash to power. Can’t wait for the home version. Hopefully it doesn’t smell too bad.

Hack your pocket!

Mind reading brain scanner. Sure it would have some good uses…but who thinks it wouldn’t wind up all crazy mind reading cop-government, huh?

Micro turbines: http://www.tfot.info/content/view/114/58/
Lots of possibilities for these! Don’t ask me why, but the software wouldn’t let me make a link over text out of that link…

Mice cured of form of autism. This bodes well for us in the future, especially with the rising rates of Autism (classification) in the US.

Whew! Done for another month or so ;).

OK – first up: some dude evidently involved with the forming of myspace is now claiming the sale was a scam and that Tom is shit! He is claiming that myspace was worth much more than the 480 or whatever million that it was sold for, and that the shareholders were ripped off. Nice! All I can say is myspace has gotten even shittier since it was sold. And yes, it was shitty and semi-functional to start with.

Cool tech gadget for the week: making water out of nothing. Definitely very cool. Of course, I wonder if stripping all the water from the air will cause earthquakes!! …OK, I hope not. Now, if they can pair this with that guy who invented a way for cars to run off water (fuck I wish I had a link!), then we would be totally set.

I was going to link to this cool post on the City of Heroes boards about a guy creating a mastermind villian who wound up locked into hero side and played there for 15 levels or so but it looks like it got modsmacked to oblivion. On another CoX note – issue 8 went to the test server this week. The changes to Faultine look great, and hero-side newspaper missions were BADLY needed. I can’t wait, it will make the newbie levels hero side much more tolerable. Not to mention the veteran reward wings – that will be groovy.

More cool science stuff, this time random black hole news. Even if you aren’t into astronomy, the animations are pretty cool to watch ;).

We’re almost to full on brain interface computing! Of course the disabled will reap the benefits from this first (and justly so), but I can’t wait till it goes mainstream. Then I can be truly lazy and compute without damaging my wrists! Hell, I could do pull ups or something productive while computing….

This is pretty shady. All kinds of laws relating to internet behavior are being passed and considered lately, and judgement sets a scary precedent: say something negative about someone online and you could be sued for millions of dollars. What the fuck? Seriously…..what the fuck.

Alas Spam, how the mighty have fallen, and become confused with unwanted emails. I don’t have an opinion on this yet, but the situation is very interesting – what happens when your trademarked name becomes common slang, and then people start using that slang in their product names? It used to be the case that you definitely could not get away with this, so this case surprised me.

Yet another reason why Windows Vista looks like a giant load of congealed horse semen. People are going over the top lately on licensing in general – all the RIAA/MPAA bullshite is related to licensing and who owns licenses too…the whole idea of paying money for “usage” of something you don’t even own just seems asinine to me.

The graphics were for shit, but what do you expect, it was 16bit! Why was it on Sega-CD and not Genesis (or the awesomely underwhelming 32x)? Voice acting & anime video! Yeah, it wasn’t really worth it for that. But the strategy portion of the game was a lot of fun.

ANNNNNYWAY, skip to last Wednesday or so – I’m thinking, man I’d really like to play it again. And Diety knows where my SegaCD is now! Probably in a land fill somewhere. So, I did a bunch of digging and got it working on an emulator on my PC. But alas, it looks crappy on my monitor AND I don’t really have a gamepad. As a result of my digging around though I came to find that the Xbox (once hacked) can run emulators for Arcade, Nes, SNES, SMS, Genesis/32x/SegaCD & even Saturn (supposedly!) and Playstation 1!

So, I decided that in lieu of spending $50 on a used sega-cd I would used for one thing and then throw away, I would dive into the world of xbox modding. The handy (or stupid from Microsoft’s point of view maybe) thing about the xbox is that its basically a stripped down computer (even more so than previous consoles), so once you get in through a backdoor you can hack it MUCH MUCH farther than any previous console.

Skip ahead a little more. I find a local guy (on craigslist, who does SOFT mods – these are different from HARD mods, which require physically installing a chip on your console (and were the main way to hack PS1 & PS2s). Soft mods [simplified] are just like changing the OS on your computer from Windows to Linux (you can run Linux on an xbox too, but that’s not what I’m doing). So, anyway the guy softmods my xbox, and puts in an extra hard drive (music/movies/etc. will fill up that little 10gig hard drive in no time!).

I get it home and it works fine for playing my sega CD game, as well as streaming audio & video off my networked computer – AWESOME! Almost anyway – I don’t have a network upstairs. I COULD have bought the xbox wireless adapter for $100, but no, I’m a bargain hunter and I know a device that fucking simple is not worth $100 – more than a full on wireless router (more on that later). So, I hunted around and found that Best Buy is running a special on the Linksys WGA54AG wireless gaming adapter for $49.99 (regularly $79.99 online).

We just happened to be near the one in Beaverton, so I planned to swing by there (#2) and pick one up. I recalled seeing that model on trip #1 (Saturday morning to pick up the hard drive) to the Best Buy out near the airport, so I hoped this one would have some as well. I also recalled seeing what I assume is the older model, the WGA54G, which lacks the A band which does some kind of data verification for supposedly better speeds. Meh. ANYWAY again.

So, go into best buy, see the display sign for the WGA54AGs and a stack of boxes behind it, pick one up. Realize it is a WGA54G and there are no AGs in the area. I check around, none at all anywhere. OK..I guess the employees just fucked up because they look similar (although they don’t really, one has more shiny colors on the front). Figure there is nothing else here so maybe they are doing substitutions. Take it over to get it run up and it rings up at $99.99 – awesome! I guess the retail prices is higher than the online price (which lists it at $89.99), but that’s normal. I debate with the cashier for a bit, but he’s an idiot and can’t do anything to help me even if his store screwed something up. Do I want to go over his head to a manager right now? Not really.

I head back to the router/wireless area knowing that there should an access point for sale, which does the same thing but on a larger scale (multiple computers plugged into it versus just 1 for the gaming adapter). Lo and behold not a single access point. OK…so routers have built in access points I should be able to run one in access point only mode right? Right. And the tech agrees with me. So I pick up the good old Linksys WRT54G, workhorse that it is – and the rep confirms that it should run in access point mode. Not that they usually know stuff….

Get it home, fuck with it for an hour or two. Turns our it has version 6 of the hardware (which is not labeled at all on the box) and the access point features are only available by HACKING versions 1-4. Not awesome! Take that shit back and head (today) back to my new favorite Best Buy store (the one by the airport) where I’m 3/3 with getting kick ass reps to assist me. By this point they have run out of AGs, but I talk to a floor guy and he oks exchanging the router that I just bought for a G at the AG sale price. Woot.

You thought I was done didn’t you? HELL NO! It then took me an hour on the phone with a nice man with an accent placing him as probably located somewhere near India. Which would have been ok as he seemed to know what he was doing EXCEPT there was massing feedback from his phone and/or headset the entire time. AWESOME!

After an hour on the phone with him we determine that my gaming adapter does not behave at all like it is supposed to – firmware upgrades don’t take, and a variety of other fun things. But after he goes to check with a supervisor for the 4th time or so I techno-majagically getting it working. Go me. And I don’t even care if it’s not working right, I’m just glad it working. Thank milk suckling, baby gap wearing baby Jebus for our new speakerphones or I would have stabbed myself in the ear with a 19″ LCD (How you ask? Where there’s a will to be deaf there’s a way!).

End result? We can play music/movies (anime, yay!) from our downstairs PC on the upstairs tv/xbox combo. And I can FTP into the xbox and transfer files without having to bring it and a large, heavy tv down to my computer/router setup in the basement.

I bet you totally had more fun than me this weekend.