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I Fight Dragons and MC Lars Futourama Tour
I hadn’t seen I Fight Dragons on tour since Warped Tour three or four years ago (I missed an opportunity to see them at MagFest a couple years ago), but I really enjoyed that set and I’ve been enjoying their work on their new album. They’ve been sharing the progress of songs from acoustic roughs…
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Two Stories about Governments Not Understanding the Internet
Singapore has attempted to bring websites under the same decency standards are other media. The Singapore government just announced an intention to begin regulating websites that report on the country, requiring a S$50,000 ‘performance bond’ and compliance with any takedown notices from the government within 24 hours. The reason for this is apparently to regulate…
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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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The Easiest Server Setups: ownCloud, Team Fortress 2, and Piwigo
I first heard about virtual machines about six to seven years ago. I couldn’t see a point in wanting to run another computer inside your computer. A few years ago I used VMs to test and blog about Linux distros. In the past year I’ve used it to preview new features in Fedora while the…
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Portal 2 Review and Analysis
If I have to sum up Portal 2 in one word: brilliant! I really enjoyed the first Portal a lot. The sense of not knowing what’s going on and GLaDOS’ obvious demented nature made for a dark video game the likes of which I’d never experienced. It was an artform as much as any other…
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Ubuntu to the Rescue: A Tale of Broadcom Wifi Drivers, Prerelease Software, and a new Acer Aspire One Netbook
note: I wrote this on 17 April, a full week before it is published on the blog Nearly six years ago I bought my first laptop. I’d never seen the point of laptops over desktops – the value per dollar just isn’t there. But I was going to be traveling for work now and again…
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Egypt, Israel, and Palestine
With the current revolution in Egypt I’ve been hearing a lot of speculation on NPR’s Talk of the Nation about who will come to power when the current government falls. There’s been a lot of talk about the consequences of a government run by The Muslim Brotherhood. The fact is that some key figured in…
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The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition
As with my discussion of Recettear, playing The Secret of Monkey Island involved revisiting a gaming genre from my past. Unlike Recettear, TSoMI is not a parodic look back at an old genre, it is an original game from that time period. TSoMI is an adventure game, a genre that is pretty much only kept…
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Doctorow Review: Eastern Standard Tribe & A Place So Foreign and Eight More
On my trip to the Grand Canyon I read Cory Doctorow’s second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe. The book begins in media res with the main character informing us that he’s in an insane asylum and that he is deciding whether to give himself a lobotomy with a pencil. We also quickly learn he believes himself…
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Grand Canyon: 8 Oct 2010 Part 1
While on my trip to the Grand Canyon I kept a journal of my experience in order to create an after-the-fact travelogue. Presented over the next few days is an edited version + photo essay of my trip. (First entry here) —8 Oct 2010 0720 Yesterday was awesome and today I have the sore legs…
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MoMA and Family BBQ
On my Father’s Day Weekend visit to NYC I finally got to see some MoMA exhibits I’d wanted to see for months. First off was a Picasso exhibit called “Variations”. Ever since my parents took me to the Dali Museum in St Petersburg, FL six years ago, I’ve been very interested in painters – especially…
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Shenandoah National Park
Your Browser Doesn’t Support Iframes” Three years ago I was discussing photography with a fellow photographer, pictured below. We were discussing places for good photography in the DC-Baltimore vicinity and he mentioned Shenandoah Valley. He also showed me some photos of deer he had gotten there. He was pretty impressed with how close he got…
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Another Reason Why People Illicitly Download TV Shows
My father-in-law is over today and he’s been dying to watch the Bizarre Foods Paris episode. I’m opposed to buying video media off of iTunes because of the digital restrictions management (DRM). But, he’s been wanting to watch that episode forever and we no longer have cable so I can’t record it onto MythTV. We…
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Review: Gentoo 2008.0 and beyond Part 1
Another distro in the seven distros included in Linux Format Magazine issue #110 is Gentoo 2008.0. This is an interesting release given the recent news that, at least for the time being, Gentoo is not going to be releasing these discs anymore. Apparently for both of the last two years there has been a lot…