Woke up this morning to many news stories that the Raspberry Pi 5 was announced (after the head of Raspberry Pi had said there wouldn’t be a Pi 5 in 2023). Interestingly, if you subscribe to the Raspberry Pi magazine, you’ll be first in line for pre-orders. After having read 5 articles summarizing all the new features ( ars technica article, very detailed hackaday article), here are my thoughts as bullet points:

• It’s awesome that you get about twice the processor speed for only $5 more than what the Raspberry Pi 4 is now selling for.
• However, at $80 for the board (with the need to buy power, case, cooling, etc) the Raspberry Pi is moving out of the realm of an impulse buy item. And, for non-tinkerers, why not buy a Chromebook?
• Somehow it has taken 11 years, but we finally have a power button built into the Raspberry Pi 5. Hurray! Supposedly, pushing it will trigger a controlled shutdown.
• Unfortunately, there is no longer an no audio out jack. I use one of my Raspberry Pis as an MPD daemon device to play music for the kids at night. In the future I would either need to get an audio hat or a set of USB speakers.

If you prefer watching a video about the new features instead of reading one of the articles above, you can watch Jeff Geerling’s video about the Raspberry Pi 5:

As you know, I’ve been using Vivaldi as my default browser for a while now. I like how they continue to innovate in the browser space while Firefox and Chrome as just standing still. (Which, to be fair to the other two, makes sense given their general purpose audiences) The latest Vivaldi update has some nice theme updates for folks that like to customize their browsers, but what I really like is their addition of Workspaces. Similar to the way that many of us use Virtual Desktops (or the Windows and Mac equivalents) to organize our open windows, Workspaces allow for organizing your tabs. Combine that with tab groups and you get the kind of 2-dimensional organization that I like with KDE Plasma and their use of both Activities and Virtual Desktops.

There’s apparently a bit of a software fail for the LEGO company. When you launch the LEGO Boost app, it won’t continue until you’ve updated the firmware. It asks you to connect so it can update it, but it never actually updates. As I learned in this reddit thread, you actually need to get a different app and use that to update the firmware. Having to use a different bit of software while making you think the software you expect to use can handle the firmware upgrade is a HUGE fail in my book. Hopefully they fix this soon, but if they don’t -at least this resource can be here for anyone searching Google for the answer.

This post continues a series on exploring new browsers:

• Are Web Browsers getting exciting again?
• Vivaldi Part 1
• Vivaldi Part 2
• Vivaldi Part 3
• Brave on Windows Part 1
• Vivaldi Part 4, Brave Part 2, Qutebrowser Part 1

Quite a bit has changed since I first started this series about 18 months ago. Back then I was sure I would only be trying Microsoft Edge on Windows and that I would be sticking with Firefox on Linux. Yet Microsoft Edge is now available for Linux, Mac, and Android. On my laptops I continue to prefer non-Firefox browsers. Things continue to be interesting in this realm.

One of the categories of software people often go to /r/selfhosted to ask about, is for software to host music. This has become even more important with the dissolution of Google Music and Amazon and others removing the ability to upload your own music to listen to. I’ve got some experience with both FunkWhale and Ampache, so I decided to create a video to compare and contrast the two.

https://youtu.be/0dBcKNoJAso

As I mentioned before, I got a Raspberry Pi Zero W to replace my Arduino MKR WIFI 1010 and ENV board in the bathroom. My Pimoroni Enviro Mini pHAT (or bonnet, as Adafruit calls them) finally arrived a few days ago, so I setup a git repository for my code. The Pimoroni git Enviro+/Enviro Mini repository has a one-line configuration, but I’d rather do things manually so I know what I’m doing and also so I can set up a proper requirements.txt in my Python venv.

As things continue to happen in the commercial IoT space like Wink switching to requiring subscription fees, I continue to feel happy that I’m creating my own Internet of Things solutions rather than relying on commercial vendors who can decide to disappear or suddenly start charging fees. The cost for me is that things go at a slower pace and, obviously, don’t have sleek packaging. I think I can live with that.

Recently I got a bunch of manga through a Humble Bundle sale. Having read “authentic” style manga before, the Kobo Clara HD seemed to be about the right size to read manga without having to do any zooming. So, naturally I uploaded the .epub for the Kobo. It was HORRIBLE. It cut off part of the image and made it impossible to read. After a bit of Googling around, I found the suggestion to use the .CBZ file, as the Kobo was capable of reading it. That worked very well. The only real bummer is that it has a margin around the page that makes it just SLIGHTLY reduced in size. It’s not a problem for the text, but some of the fine details can be a little hard to make out. Overall, it worked VERY well and I recommend it as a way to read manga in ebook form (allowing you to carry all of a modest run on your device). (But might not fit all of, say, One Piece or Dragon Ball.)

This is copied over from my Hackaday.io page.

BBQ Thermostat: Arduino MKR 1010 and Therm Shield measuring temperature during a smoke

Today I was smoking a turkey so I figured it was a good time to do a live test of my project. There was good news and bad news. I think it’s illustrated quite well by the following graph:

Grafana graph of my BBQ Thermostat while measuring the smoker temp

Three years ago I wrote a post (along with a Youtube video) about how to set up a KVM VM with Dual Monitors (or even triple monitors). Since then there’s been a bit of a change. I loaded up remote viewer and, for some reason, I couldn’t add more monitors to my Linux KVM VM. Turns out what you have to do is look at the Video (QXL) section in virt-manager. Look at how many “heads” it has listed. For example:

I’ve been hearing about Podman for a while now - at Red Hat Summit and at various local Red Hat presentations. I’ve seen the slides where the RHEL presenter (it’s always the same guy, but I’m terrible with names - after a bit of research, I think it’s Dan Walsh) asks you to pledge to call them container images, not Docker images, etc. But up until now, even though I’m a huge Red Hat fan, I’ve continued to use Docker as my container engine because I am just running a few containers for myself. I don’t even use a one-machine Docker Swarm. I use docker-compose. And that’s just not something that Podman is ever going to officially support. This makes sense because Red Hat is thinking enterprise. And in the enterprise there are two scenarios: 1) Orchestration - vanilla Kubernetes, OpenShift, etc - and 2) are devs running docker run (or podman run) to test the images before putting them into the orchestrator. I’m an anti-pattern, even if I’m not the only one doing things this way.

Just in time for Halloween I discovered the Dracula set of dark themes.They’ve got themes for nearly every code editor and shell/console program you can think of. Here’s Yakuake with the Dracula Konsole theme:

Yakuake with Dracula theme

And here’s Kate with the Dracula theme:

Kate with Dracula theme

I like the color scheme, but the font’s a bit small, so I might make a variant theme with a slightly larger font size.

Clarkesworld Magazine has wonderful metadata for their issues and anthologies that requires little work from me:

Tor books had an awesome DRM-free policy that I love and that allows me to go to the ebook vendor of my choice. And they give away a free book every month as long as you agree to get some marketing emails from them. But their metadata is not so great:

Come on, Tor! You publish Science Fiction! Let’s get some better metadata on those ebook files!

Yesterday I was at a conference dedicated to DevOps and so Red Hat and Google were there to talk about containers, especially Docker and Kubernetes. While summarizing it to some of my employees today, I was asked about what I see as the benefits of Docker containers relative to Virtual Machines. I mentioned that one of the great things is that Docker containers are immutable. All of your data’s actually written to a folder that’s essentially mounted in the container.

My grad school Alma Mater, Stevens Institute of Technology has discovered how your Fitbit or Smart watch could give away your PIN:

Stevens researchers discovered that the motions of your hands as you use PIN pads, which is continually and automatically recorded by your device, can be hacked in real time and used to guess your PIN with more than 90 percent accuracy within a few attempts.

The Stevens team outfitted 20 volunteers with an array of fitness wristbands and smart watches, then asked them to make some 5,000 sample PIN entries on keypads or laptop keyboards while “sniffing” the packets of Bluetooth low energy (BLE) data transmitted by sensors in those devices to paired smartphones.

There was a good chunk of time where I was converting all my Canon Raw files into DNG files on the thought that it would be better and make them more readable in the future. But with KDE able to read Canon files as well as the libRaw in Linux - it seemed a waste of time.

This article by a professional photographer gives another reason. Certain software may not be able to produce as good a result from DNG as when the files come unadulterated from the camera.

18 GB RAM on Bowser

Thanks to mom, now I have 18 GB of triple RAM on Bowser. Incidentally, it’s the first time I’ve used the Task Manager in Window 10 and it’s really slick! I like it - it matches the look/feel/usability of the similar utilities in KDE’s Plasma 5.

I found one way around the situation involving a DNG going to RawTherapee and creating a JPEG image that’s missing the title and tags when read by Digikam’s Exiv2 library. It may not be perfect, or even the best way. But it’s one way around the issue that I was easily able to confirm with about 5 minutes of messing around today. First up you want to tell Digikam to make XMP files to go along with all files:

I still really love using Linux, but I don’t follow the Linux press like I used to. I’ve settled into a comfortable zone where I only follow Fedora and KDE news since that’s what I use. But I followed it very closely for nearly 10 years. Every year there’d be multiple articles asking whether this was the year of the Linux desktop, meaning people would finally see the Microsoft hegemony for what it was and throw off the shackles of proprietary software. It never came. Thanks to Ubuntu and Vista, we almost got there. Then there were the Netbooks, but the manufacturers chose horrible versions of Linux and underpowered machines and Microsoft came out with Windows 7 starter edition. And people went to Macs instead of Linux in the biggest tech comeback of … ever.

A year ago I started using Ting, a Sprint MVNO, as my cell phone provider. A month later I wrote an update as well as a review of my most used apps. Well, now it’s been a year and I’d like to talk about what it’s been like.

I started off the year with a Samsung Galaxy Victory. It is a decent and capable smart phone, but I like to use a lot of programs like Doggcatcher and SmartBooks and the phone was having issues working correctly when I had more than a few programs running. So I switched to a Nexus 5 and it’s working perfectly for me.

[caption id=“attachment_7784” align=“aligncenter” width=“392”] Seinfeld - Kramer Moviefone[/caption]

I heard today that AOL is getting rid of Moviefone. Makes sense, I haven’t used it to find movie times in at least a decade. Shoot, I rarely even go to the Moviefone website. I just use Google’s ability to show showtimes, go to the actual theater’s website, or Fandango. Lots of people remember Moviefone from the pretty funny Seinfeld episode in which Kramer answers the phone number (when the phone numbers get switched?). My favorite line: “Why don’t you just tell me the name of the movie you want to see?”

First of all, here’s my referral link. Click here to sign up and they’ll give you a $25 credit you can use on a phone or against your bill.

The account sign-up was painless and pretty quick. The part where it did a bunch of stuff to my phone took a couple cycles to take, but once that was through it worked perfectly sing. I decided not to do VOIP for calls at home as I thought I would. As I went through the instructions, it turned out to be too complex and unreliable. People complained that it turned off their alarms (which I use to wake up for work) and other strange nonsense. I decided not to stress it. I barely talk on my phone anyway - ever since my parents became business owners, it’s been a lot harder to get a hold of them. At the end of my fist month I only had used a little over half of the smallest chunk of voice minutes that Ting sells. I’ve decided that whenever Hangouts for Android gets feature parity with iOS and allows VOIP calls, I’ll investigate that. Strangely, the one time I tried to use Hangouts on a desktop to call, it didn’t work as a touchtone phone.

[caption id=“attachment_7470” align=“aligncenter” width=“449”] LG Chocolate Touch - the phone I will be talking about in this paragraph[/caption]

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 smart phone. I just wanted a phone with a decent camera. I absolutely love my dSLR; it helps me take the best photos I’m capable of taking. But I rarely have it with me unless I know I will be going somewhere I want to be able to take photos; I always have my cell phone. I spent an hour in the Verizon store finding just the right phone - it looked and behaved like a smart phone (for the most part) and it had a great camera compared to my dying phone. I got the phone and the agent told me I’d need to get a data plan. I informed him that I didn’t want one. He told me about all the functionality I’d be missing. I didn’t care. This phone did what I wanted - it made phone calls and it took nice photos for a point and shoot. OK, he did some wrangling on his computer and told me the data plan was removed. I fought with verizon every time a bill arrived because the system kept adding a data plan. Eventually, I was told I couldn’t have it without a data plan and so I got rid of the phone.

[caption id=“attachment_6182” align=“aligncenter” width=“500”] Best Selling Jeryk - weird Amazon Typo[/caption]

Especially because I would expect this to just be automated. Someone at Amazon decides to put jerky on sale, it should auto-generate the email title. It should NOT be written by a human that could end up with a weird typo like this!

[caption id=“attachment_6153” align=“aligncenter” width=“450”] Firefox (aka Red Panda) busy Not Spying on You[/caption]

A 1 May Ars article and 30 April Wired article mention that a UK company known as Gamma International is selling spyware that pretends to be Mozilla Firefox. Both articles mention that repressive governments have used it to spy on dissidents, but it’s unclear from the article whether the company purposely sells to evil governments or whether it sells this to anybody, including foreign governments. The Wired article mentions that Gamma markets it to governments in general and so, if pressed, would probably say that it’s not meant to be used by evil governments - just people like the FBI trying to catch criminals. Either way, Mozilla has sued for trademark infringement. I applaud them for doing so. Governments may have both legitimate and illegitimate reasons for spying on computer communications, but I don’t think they should be abusing the good will of other companies to do it. Imagine if Gamma was selling Ford cars that were bugged. No one would want to buy a Ford car for fear it might be a bugged version. Come on, guys! Figure out a solution that doesn’t screw over the folks at Mozilla.

Earlier this year I wrote about using xbmc to create your own private Netflix.  I thought I’d update my readers on how I like it.  Here’s what the current version looks like with the default skin:

[caption id=“attachment_5672” align=“aligncenter” width=“500”] xbmc - default skin as of 20121031[/caption]

I have linked it up with trakt.tv to track my tv and movie watching (just like music scrobbling with last.fm) Using it has allowed me to catch up on shows that I might not have otherwise had the time to watch.  It was easy to start going through all the Buffy episodes while waiting to feed Scarlett at night since they were sitting on my computer and I didn’t have to go find the DVDs.

Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote about replacing my file and print server with a Pogoplug. Overall, it’s worked perfectly. I even made it my DNS server because the number of internet connected devices in my was growing so much and on some computers (like the laptop and netbook) I was constantly changing distros so DNS became preferable to maintaining a bunch of /etc/hosts files.

Everything was working just dandy until I wanted to install mysql to have all my xbmc installs reference one library. I wasn’t able to install it because the mirrors and package lists were out of date. Being unfamiliar with arch, I decided I needed to upgrade my system to get that ability. And, as part of the upgrade, yes, it did update the mirrors and package lists and I was able to install mysql. But it also did something that killed ssh. So I could no longer connect to my Pogoplug (babyluigi).

It’s my second time in Vegas and I definitely think that the best way to first experience Vegas is arriving at night, as I did this time.  The city really looks wrong and ugly during the day.  Like a bar where they need to keep the lights dim so you’re 100% sure what that person you’re flirting with looks like.  Today I was up early (0700) to make it to the conference.  Vegas is weird early.  Most of the tourists are sleeping so they do all the maintenance work that you don’t see at night.  It’s very weird as if all of Vegas is on some walk of shame after an all-night bender.

Dear Amazon and Valve,

I write this to you because you are the largest and most powerful companies in your ecosystems.  The digital world has become ridiculous and you need to be leaders in rectifying the situation.  Let’s start with Amazon.  The two biggest digital things you sell are books and music.  Back in the analog world before commerce became a Wonderland distortion, if I bought a book or CD, any member in my household could access this item.  It didn’t matter if I bought the book or my wife bought the book.  We could both read it.  The same went with a CD.  Either of us could grab the CD off the shelf and put it into our portable CD player.  But now go to the Kindle (or any other e-reader system) and Amazon CloudPlayer.  Sure, either of us could pick up the e-reader to read a book.  But what if we both want to read a different book at the same time.  How can we access each other’s libraries?  What about if we each want to listen to the same music library from Amazon CloudPlayer on our smart phones or other devices?  For various reasons, like Amazon recommendations, it makes sense for us to have different accounts instead of a family account.

A little past the end of February I started having problems with my internet connected devices.  In the basement we have a Roku box that the wife uses to watch Netflix.  She reported that it was no longer connecting to Netflix.  We’d had issues before with it needing to be re-registered with Netflix, but that did not seem to be the case.  I’d click on the Netflix channel and it would say “retrieving movies” for a while and then pop back to the main menu.  At first I thought something was wrong with the Roku box, so I tried the Amazon channel, but that worked and I was able to watch my content.  I figured it’d resolve itself.  So she just popped in the latest DVD from Netflix into our DVD player.  Later that night she was in the bedroom and learned that our Samsung BluRay player was no longer connecting to Netflix.  I thought that was weird, but figured maybe it was a Netflix problem.  I checked on my computer and I couldn’t log into the Netflix site.  Neither could Danielle on her computer.  These were Linux boxes (Fedora and Ubuntu respectively) so I tried on my Windows computer.  Strangely, that one could log in.  That’s weird.  I tried on both Firefox and Chrome with no difference.  So then I tried the guest computer - that computer hadn’t been used since December and I knew it was working for Netflix back then.  That would help me eliminate the possibility that I’d installed a distro update that had killed it for me.  (I knew that didn’t totally make sense because of the BluRay Player and Roku) That one could reach it either.  What was going on here?  Was Netflix blocking Linux?  Well, I figured it might go away so I waited until the next day.

I wrote this code a while back because a website that does the same thing seemed to miss my posts every other week.  So I figured I’d write my own in python to do the same thing to me.  Then I just put it into a cron job to automatically run it every Sunday.  I’m going to be posting the code on my GPL code page.  Here it is for you to see and for Google to index.  Just fill in the appropriate variables with the secret keys you get from each site’s API.

After writing my Boxee review based on my experience over the weekend, I tried to use it again Tuesday and Wednesday. There two shows that I watch Tues-Friday: The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. I’m not sure what API or screen scraping Boxee uses for these sites, but it needs to be improved. When I went to look for Monday’s episode on Tuesday, it wasn’t there. And Colbert didn’t appear to have any shows since mid-November. That tipped me off to check their websites and see that they did, indeed, have new episodes. Very disappointing. I don’t want to pay $200 for a device that works worse than a web browser on the shows that are important to me.

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.  I went with the iPod shuffle because it was sub $100 and I didn’t really need to spend the money for the screen in the Nano.  Not having a screen meant just listening in order and having to check gtkPod to make sure I’d listened to all the podcasts before clearing the iPod.  Let me get into my workflow and why the shuffle became a real pain.

I forgot what post online got me thinking about this stuff, but I really don’t customize my computers’ desktop environments much.  Generally, I tend to change the background image and leave it at that.  I took a look over my desktop image gallery here on the blog to confirm my suspicions.

Starting at the bottom with Windows, you can see that until 2009 I was just going with the default look.  I tended not to add launchers to my panel because, with Windows XP, it ended up really limiting the space for listen the open programs.  I also didn’t have too many launchers on the desktop.  I tend to always have programs maximised if I’m in front of the computer, so the only programs shortcuts I’d leave on the desktop are programs I’d be likely to launch upon starting up the computer.  In fact, whenever I pay attention, I tell the installer not to put icons on the desktop.

I never really knew much about how CPUs worked until I took a class in CPU design at Cornell.  Until that point I never knew about registers and cache and pipelines.  Ever since then I’ve been growing in my understanding of how the CPU works and how all the parts fit together.  This culminated in me building five or six computers for myself and relatives.  In that past few years, these computers have been dual or quad core computers.  I’ve been using a dual core computer for my Linux computer for around a year now but I didn’t really think about it too much until this weekend.  I was working on a new strip for my webcomic, " I’m Not Mad"  (which I do with Nothing to the Table’s Daniel).  A particular panel was taking forever to render, so I opened up the system monitor to take a look.  The image was split into a bunch of squares and each square was given to a CPU core to work on.  And, for basically the entire render time, both CPUs were maxed out as I expected.  When it only had one square to do, one of the CPUs dropped to idle because there wasn’t anything for it to do.  Nothing out of the ordinary there.  But then I noticed this crazy pattern:

This year I attended my first HOPE conference.  HOPE (Hackers On Planet Earth) is a hacker conference organized by 2600 The Hacker Quarterly.  After hearing about the talks they had at 2008’s HOPE (The Last HOPE) when I was listening to the 2600 podcast, I knew I had to attend this year.  I was not disappointed.

HOPE, if this one is an indication of how they usually are, is like an East Coast version of Defcon.  Really, the only difference is that the atmosphere of the talks is slightly different given the HOPE being located in NYC vs Defcon being located in Las Vegas.  While the playful hacker spirit is present at both, there’s usually an extra bit of an anything goes feeling in Vegas.  There were also a few talks that were presenting preliminary versions of the data they hoped to present at Blackhat/Defcon.  It makes sense, since those are the more prestigious hacker cons.

Heard about Jeffrey Friedl’s lens focal length plot plugin for Lightroom and decided to check it out.  Here’s what it produced from my entire library.

[caption id=“attachment_2818” align=“aligncenter” width=“1036”] Apparently I mostly shoot wide[/caption]

Nearly 60% of my photos are in the wide to short telephoto range and nearly 40% is exclusively wide.  Now, I do have SOME photos from others in my Lightroom catalog, but not enough to skew the results.  I would say the reason for the huge concentration of photos in the 33-82mm range comes from the kit lens and its equivalent focal length USM version that I shoot a lot of photos with.  The large concentration around the 308-330mm range comes from the 1.6x crop factor of my XT and XTi on the Tamron 55-200mm I use for wildlife photography.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Kinda like this. Only with wires and computers and, really, having nothing to do with clouds.”] [/caption]

I previously blogged about cloud computing and, as you may remember, I am no fan.  Recently, while listening to The Command Line Podcast, I came across yet another reason to stay away from the cloud.  Cmdline mentions Bruce Schneier’s recent post on file deletion in the cloud.  Bruce’s main point is that you can be reasonably sure on your own computer that a file is gone when you’ve deleted it.  This is not the case with cloud computing.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Thanks to podcasts, NPR maybe be obsolete”] [/caption]

I am a huge listener of public radio programming, but I no longer listen to my local NPR station. Most of the time I just listen to podcasts of the shows that would otherwise be broadcast on NPR. The basic force behind this is the same as the reason why I loved my MythTV when I had cable TV. I don’t want to have to do appointment radio listening any more than I want to do appointment television. In many cases this is because the shows I enjoy listening to come on the air while I’m at work, in the gym, or sleeping. The shows I listen to are produced by NPR, Public Radio International (PRI), and American Public Media (APM). That includes Fresh Air, Talk of the Nation, On the Media, Media Matters, Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, Away with Words and On the Money with Christ Disimio. Together with other non-radio programs and some BBC programs, these provide for all of my radio-listening needs. This started out (and a big reason I got into podcasts a few years after most techies had) because, in Baltimore, the local NPR station at 88.1 is interrupted by XM (or Sirius) FM transmitters. So I got pissed that whenever I happened to be available when a show I liked was on, every time someone with satelite radio passed by I couldn’t listen to my program. This is why I donated to the Washington DC NPR station - that one isn’t subject to interference so I’d rather pay for a station I can hear.

One of the new features of Gnome 2.22 is the fact that Totem now has a plugin to access your MythTV programs. I installed the plugin and found myself wondering what to do next. I checked on Google for totem mythtv and didn’t find anything until today when Google finally got around to indexing a forum post about it on the Ubuntu Forums. I followed the directions about editing Gconf and had success!

Brought to us by Randal Monroe of xkcd:

Also, you much check this one out both for its mention of Python and the Asus EEE PC.

Whenever you’re working with the file directory structure or with text in general, you can’t do any better than using the command line.  For example, I was recently copying a bunch of files off of some old CDs because I was noticing that they were starting to develop bit-rot.  (I couldn’t access all the files anymore)  For reasons I don’t wish to get into right now, it’s easier to not have spaces in filenames in Linux.  It’s not because Linux can’t handle spaces in filenames - it can.  But if you’re a semi-hacker like me, spaces in filenames can wreak total havoc on your scripts.  So I wanted to remove spaces off of around 200 or so files.

Long time readers will know how much I love building computers.  And I have been given the chance to build another one!  This time it’s for Danielle’s aunt who saw the one I built for my father-in-law.  Her old computer is not fast enough for what she needs it to do so she asked me to design her a new one.  I decided to go with a nice, sleak Shuttle case since they don’t have tons of room in NYC for the uber-towers I typically use for myself.  Also, it’s pretty much 100% likely that she isn’t going to upgrade it - ever.

Time and again I’ve warned my readers of the perils of DRM.  (Specifically here and here).  That’s why I don’t buy music on iTunes and have given all of my digital music patronage to Amazon.com.  Even my wife, who’s not as into FOSS and all that as I am, has become disgusted as she’s understood what DRM means for her - regular Jane Consumer.

I’m not the only one who’s made these claims.  Yet others say, “you guys are just using that as an excuse to malign DRM.  It’s necessary for protecting content from piracy and you just want to pirate stuff.”  Oh yeah?  Well, are you prepared to give up your rights to expect your paid content to work when you come back to it in the future?

Despite what the MPAA claims, it’s not us consumers who need to be restrained by DRM, but their own people. This website demonstrates how movies are pirated by the movie companies and members of the Oscar committee.

Here are some key quotes:

For the last few years, the movie industry’s battles with Internet pirates offered an entertaining diversion during Oscar season. Their problem: they need to “leak” their films to Academy members for consideration, but don’t want those official leaks to fall into the hands of pirates. In 2003, the MPAA banned all screeners, causing a massive uproar from directors, actors, critics and indie studios. The plan was eventually scrapped in December 2003

So, readers may remember that when I upgraded to Fedora Core 6, I lost dual screen abilities. Well, after today’s update of the nVidia drivers from livna, it suddenly was working again (after I tried to set it up). But then compiz no longer wanted to work! That frustrated me as I wanted to have both the advantages of dual screen as well as the helpful and fun eye candy of compiz. Well, Yupman in Fedora’s freenode chat helped me through it and showed me how to change my xorg.conf to make it work.

I have finally uploaded my public encryption key to the main pgp server that is the default on KGPG, the encryption program I use on my Linux computer. I also set up my Thunderbird email program to digitially sign all of the messages I send with my public key so that anyone who gets an email from my Gmail account will now have the assurance that I sent them the email and not someone spoofing me. In fact, if they have the ability to check GPG keys on their computer, they will be able to check the key against the server and make sure that the email has not been changed since I wrote it.

I was trying to pay my Verizon Wireless bill a few weeks ago and it kept having problems. I checked the credit card number, the expiration date, and every other field, but it was still not working. Finally I got fed up enough to call tech support rather than risk being locked out or something. So I gave them a call and the lady says to me, “oh, you’re using Firefox aren’t you?” “Yes I am” (because I don’t like viruses and other M$ exploits taking over my computer) “Oh well, I’m sorry, but you can’t use that browser here to pay your bills.” “What?” “Oh, don’t worry, our engineers are working on it.”