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Photos and the Changing Online Landscape
I’ve been on flickr nearly since it first started. It’s been a great community to learn about photography and hook up with others who are really into photography as well. I have 10 700 photos on flickr so I’ve looked on various flickr developments with fear because of how invested I am in the site.…
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Why Southerners are so polite
A couple days ago I heard the latest episode of the You Are Not So Smart podcast. In it we learn about how where you grow up has a profound affect on the way you think and act. On of the coolest conclusions they mention is that the reason that the American Deep South is…
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How I Got A Smartphone (Or How I left Verizon and learned to love Ting)
Around three or so years ago I was ready to get a new cell phone. My phone was no longer maintaining a charge and a new battery was more than the nearly free phone I could get by renewing my contract. Smart phones had been around for a few years, but I didn’t want a…
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Latino Vote or Mexican Vote?
I’m always late on my podcasts. I have a lot of stuff I want to listen to and not much time for listening. This week I was catching up on the final week of Talk of the Nation episodes as well as some This American Life episodes from a month or more ago. They kept…
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Review: Sansa Clip Zip
I’ve been using MP3 players since they first existed. I can’t remember the name of the device, but I got it with my Audible subscription. Then, I used my PDA for a while – remember those? Then I used an iPod Shuffle, but it didn’t work well with my Linux computer. The database kept getting…
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Zach Braff’s Kickstarter
A little over a month ago I came across an article on Boing Boing about the movie Zach Braff was trying to get funded via Kickstarter. It was interesting time as I had just contributed to two Kickstarter projects for the first time – I Fight Dragons’ Project Atma and the Code Monkey comic by…
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I Fight Dragon’s Project Atma Interview
My first ever Kickstarter! I just backed Project Atma – @IFightDragons Creates An Epic New Album on @Kickstarter http://t.co/Bo5XglkChl — Eric (@djotaku) May 5, 2013 Back on 4 May I backed a Kickstarter project for the first time ever – I Fight Dragon’s Project Atma. Anyone who’s been following my last.fm posts knows that I really…
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Music Discovery and Acquisition
In light of the semi-recent news that most kids nowadays use Youtube to discover music and that leading to Youtube views being counted for music charts, I thought I’d talk about how I discover and/or acquire new music. For the record, the wife also uses Youtube to find new songs. It’s one of the first…
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A New Copyright Exception Should Be Considered
In the past week I’ve listened to the most recent episodes of The Commandline Podcast and The Giant Bombcast. The former was a discussion of those who willingly violate copyright law as a comparison to those who violated the Volstead Act and 18th Amendment to the US constitution both of which made it illegal to…
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First Playthough of Mass Effect Part 1
I recently bought Mass Effect in a Steam sale that knocked the price of Bioware’s RPG to $5. Thanks yet again to the guys at the Giant Bombcast (seriously, this is the second or third I’ve bought because of them and fourth or fifth from podcast recommendations), I’d wanted to play the game, but…
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How Video Games Grew Up When I Wasn’t Looking
There was a time when I loved video games. I subscribed to EGM and EGM2. I trolled the nascent World Wide Web looking for video game news. I read IGN religiously. The most powerful systems out there were the Nintendo 64 and the Playstation. Then I discovered girls and dropped the subscriptions. Most of the…
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Examining Nuclear Motivations
Usually for my blog posts, I write them in isolation and try to guess how my regular readers might respond. However, for this topic, I spoke with Dan about it as I wrote it. As someone who’s visited Hiroshima, Dan has a pretty unique perspective on the topic compared to most Americans. I…
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Terry Gilliam’s Brazil
I recently saw Terry Gilliam’s Brazil after hearing discussion of the main character being a hacker as part of a recurring segment on The Command Line where the podcaster compares characters from literature and movies to hackers (in the original sense of the word). Watching this 1985 movie in 2011 was a very interesting experience.…
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KDE 4 Look Part 3: A Week of KDE 4.5
So I’ve used KDE for about a work week. During that time I’ve pretty much gone to using the KDE versions of all my programs except Konqueror. I’m not sure if the Fedora 14 version of Konqueror is the one with Webkit, but last time I used Konqueror with KHTML it was mucking up a…
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Getting my new Sandisk Sansa Fuze to work with gPodder
So, a while back I caved and got an iPod shuffle. While it worked well at first, over the last year it has been a constant pain in my butt. All I want to do is use gPodder to get my podcasts and listen to them on the way to work and at the gym.…