The most important paragraph in Corey Doctorow’s essay:

No, the worst part is that, like the lady who had to swallow the bird to catch the spider that she’d swallowed to catch the fly, any technical system that stops you from being the master of your computer must be accompanied by laws that criminalize information about its weaknesses. In the age of Google, it simply won’t do to have “uninstall HAL9000.exe” return a list of videos explaining how to jailbreak your gadgets, just as videos that explain how to jailbreak your iPhone today could technically be illegal; making and posting them could potentially put their producers (and the sites that host them) at risk of prosecution.

I haven’t seen Gone Girl, but my wife condensed the 2 hour movie into a 30 minute play-by-play summary. There are three things I don’t like about the plot. (In case it’s not obvious….spoilers ahoy)

1. In a world in which women already have a hard time getting their rape allegations believed, the plot point in which she fakes a rape to ruin her ex is quite damaging. Not quite Rolling Stone “we made up a story  because it was too perfect to fact-check” sort of damaging, but still provides a frame of reference for everyone who doesn’t want to believe a rape victim.
2. It remains to be seen how well this works for anyone in practice, but I can imagine defense attorneys mounting the “my wife is Gone Girling me” defense in mariticide. At the very least, it may be just enough to create a shadow of a doubt in juries given how popular this movie is and how much it’s penetrated the popular culture.
3. This is the least offensive point as it can be used against anything: movies, video games, books, etc : It’s probably given some of those less balanced members of society ideas they may not have had. Just as playing Team Fortress 2 or any other shooter hasn’t made me shoot up the world, most normal people wouldn’t act on this movie (starting with the fact that things need to go perfectly correct for this to play out well in real life), some people out there might now be planning some interesting scenarios.

At the end of my interview about starting the Kickstarter project, Brian Mazzaferri of I Fight Dragons opened the door to speaking with him about the process when it was all done. It was, as is the case with many Kickstarter projects, very exhausting and we only recently had time to actually do the interview. In the interview I briefly mention the delays in the vinyl album. This actually a pretty big problem in the music industry at the moment. Demand for vinyl has increased to a point where the record pressing plants can’t keep up with demand, but not yet to the point where it makes sense to open a new factory (with all the upfront costs involved). Even The Protomen’s new album The Cover Up has had its vinyl release delayed due to production delays. Of course, the new old tech is cassette tapes, so perhaps vinyl demand will fall a little. Time will tell. Without further ado, the interview:

Way to make me feel old, Spotify. #ThrowbackThursday music today is from when I was in high school and beginning of undergrad.

I got so used to the clack clack clack of my dying power supply that the office sounds eerily quiet now

When I think of the world and my daughter’s place in it, nothing upsets me more than the fact that misogyny is still the norm and not the exception; especially in the tech sector and on the web.

Civilization: Beyond Earth (7 hrs): This game was a great evolution on Civ V. I enjoyed that they continued with the same sense of humor. I also thought they did a good job evolving things so that it felt different enough. It’ll probably take a few games before I get the hang of all the government options.

Super Mario Galaxy (1 hr): Just wanted to get past the opening section on my emulator so I could not have to repeat that silly story section again if I even want to play some SMG. Also wanted to test the USB sensor Dan got me for Christmas.

I wonder if any sociologists or anthropologists have traced the history and evolution of Little Johnny (Spanish version: Pepito) jokes.

As KDE 5 reaches 5.2 and many begin to debate its features (this is a small evolution on 4 compared to the difference between 3 and 4) there has been an ever-increasing assertion that Activities are pointless. (At least it appears that way to me) I wanted to share how I use Activities, why they make me more productive, and why they’re the biggest feature keeping me on KDE.

So, I have lots of Activities: Main, Media, School, Photography, Video Games, Video Editing, Programming, and Reading. In its current implementation, each Activity must have the same number of virtual desktops; three in my case. In each activity I make use of different widgets. On nearly all of them are the brilliant folder view and application launcher widgets. These allow me to quickly see the folders relevant to the task at hand. In the case of the Multimedia activity, desktop 1, this is very useful for my workflow. Let’s look at that desktop:

I know there are a lot of weird things in legal documents that aren’t actually enforceable. It’s one of the reasons every contract has a part that says invalidation of one part of this contract doesn’t invalidate the whole contract. But this one makes 0 sense to me for eBooks:

“You may not:copy or burn the book or extract to a device whose principal function is to act as a storage device, for example, a CD/DVD or USB stick;”