Senator McCain Responds (sort-of) to My Anti-SOPA/PIPA letter

From the: CAN-YOU-READ-? Dept.

Along with millions of other people back on January 18th, I wrote letters to my Congressmen, Senators John McCain and Jon Kyle, and ‘Representative’ Paul Gossar. To date, one has responded. Mr McCain (or, more accuratly a computerized form-letter-machine) has written to address my fear of Internet Regulation, censorship, and my growing distaste for a private industry buying politicians with money and favors.

Well, kind of. It doesn’t really address anything from my letter except maybe some of the censorship stuff, but if you actually READ my letter (MCCAIN! I’m talking to YOU buddy!), you’ll see that the argument goes much deeper:

Reorg. Part 2: REBUILD!

I will rebuild you. You will be stronger, faster, smarter… BETTER!

[See: Reorg. Part 1: DEMOLISH for prequel info]

Well, it’s done. Mostly. I took the box apart last week or so, reconfigured some stuff, removed and re-seated the CPU, added an older 500 gig HDD… and then, installed Mythbuntu. er… 3 times actually. Yeah, took me 3 install attempts to get it working right. Not sure exactly HOW I screwed up the first 2, but #3 was the winner by far. Here’s a sample of my progression:

Attempt #1:

Install FAILED miserably due to selecting the wrong drive. Yes folks. Instead of simply setting up a fresh install on the new 500gig HDD, for some reason i told the installer to put it on the original 750gig drive. I dunno exactly why. Something about how SATA was set up in the bios and I got a little confused. I’m really lucky that I didn’t over-wright the entire disc. Seriously, could have lost 1000 episodes of Charmed that I’ve been saving for my *ahem* daughter.

Attempt #2

Install FTW!! yay! OS installed without a hitch [Mythbuntu 11.04], although it did hog some bandwidth with updates and such. Dylan got a little pissed because he was trying to watch something on Netflix at this time, and it kept losing the connection. 2 things got screwy on this install which is why I had to try, try again: 1) I did …something… to LIRC. Still not exactly sure, but it worked at first, except that it was reading each buttonpress twice. I checked the usual sites and forums for the answer and edited some config files, and then it completely broke, and I couldn’t get it working again. I probably could have fixed it eventually if it weren’t for 2) Frakking BOXEE. Apparently, every time Ubuntu gets upgraded to a new version something happens that breaks Boxee. The reason is almost always that Boxee is behind the times. This time around it’s a dependancie issue. Some little media player’s library was updated and most major OSs went with the NEW version, effectively dropping the OLD version from all repositories. Unfortunatly, Boxee depended on the OLD library. There was a long and convoluted way to edit the .deb file so that it would use the NEW library, but there was also something about it messing up HULU and some other stuff, so it became painfully obvious that the only solution was to:

ATTEMPT #3!!!

Beautimus. Downloaded and installed Mythbuntu 10.10. Slightly older version, sure. whatev. BUT, everything fucking works out of the BOX YO! LIRC didn’t have the same duplicate button press issue, Boxee and Hulu Desktop installed without a hitch, and with 2 small copy-paste codes into the main menu file, I had a nice *working* interface. There was one little issue with the sound being incredibly low. But that was fixed easily with some careful adjustments to ALSA mixer (EVERYTHINGGOESUPTOTHEMAXIMUM!).

Yeah baby! now everything WORKS, and functions and is pretty awesome. Now I just need to find a nice, cheap little dual PCI (not e) tuner card and we’re golden. Anyways, that was over a week ago, so I’ll try to get some screen shots of the new system one of these days… maybe. Working VER HARD on secret project#2 right now.

piece, we’re OUT!

-Se7en

Reorg. Part One: Demolish

It’s quite late. Almost 2 am, and I’m exhausted. But for a nerd, you have to stay up late to get shit done.

We’ve been busy as hell lately for a relatively few reasons.

1.  We moved. Packed up house and kids and drove 2 miles down the road to set up shop in the BFE. House is nice. A little smaller than the last one, with more weeds and dirt, and bugs. But its nice. Always takes me a while to get used to a new place though. Great thing about this place; Awesome double garage with work room. Yes. Totally. Will soon be lining up computer boxes and shit. gonna be awesome. So the move has taken up a lot of time and effort, which is worth it.
2. Getting Secret Project #2 off the ground (Secret Project #1 is still under development, stay tuned). A LOT of research, forms, digging, phone calls, money, etc going into this one, which will eventually allow the completion of Secret Project #1, and a slew of future Secret Projects to be completed. It will also, hopefully, reduce the stress put on The Samurai and his family. It will also give me more free time in the long run. Haven’t even got the damned monsoons yet.
3. Other stuff, every day stuff, stuff I’d rather not get into.

Anyway, I digress, and my intros running long. The point of this post is to begin a story about a Family Media Center which has been slowly falling apart since early inception. Not sure if I mentioned this on my blog, although I’m sure I complained a lot on Twitter. The origin was this: Low cost substitute for overgrown Satellite TV bill. No Shit, huh? Inception began with being given a quite old Shuttle XPC. Which is basically a very, very small form factor PC with all the bells and whistles except for extra space for stuff like new hdds and cards. Which was fine, didn’t need much to get it working. The original vid card died after a day and substitute had to be ordered as I was out of PCIe cards. meh. THEN, it turned out that a P4 2.6ghz wasn’t good enough for our friends at Hulu. Fuckers. So, it was swapped with a Micro atx with an Intel Core2Duo and a couple gigs in my old cube case with the noisy fans. (sad: the xpc died a few weeks later of natural causes and is somewhere in the new garage awaiting organ transplants to other machines)

So, we were doing fairly well with the thing running Kubuntu 10.04 as a base with Boxee and Hulu Desktop, and of course the wii for Netflix. I’d finally figured out (sort of) LIRC, and had yet-another-goddamn-remote in the pile. All was good until a few weeks before the move when ALL CBS content started acting funny in both Boxee and on the website. Only CBS content… weird, showed up into the top left quarter of the screen for no reason.  [EDIT: figured this out this morning; fixed by turning off Harware Acceleration with Flash] Still ran great on the lap tops, but not on the damned media center. So, I’m in the process of rebuilding, and expanding. I think I’ve got the phantom ‘over clock’ errors figured out with the shite bios the thing has, and added another 300gig HDD. I’m also going to do the install correctly this time. Since I have another PCI slot, I will end up getting a cheap digital tuner card for attaching to the aerial, and will need a back end to record the free ota trans from local TV. This will be accomplished with a neat Mythbuntu install! hahaha. I used to use KnoppMyth, which was pretty awesome, but abandoned it years ago when we moved to satellite raping, i mean service. To be fair, I did try this weekend to re-install Kubuntu etc… But for some reason couldn’t get LIRC working, and that would be a no-go for us. Hate getting up to do shit. Plus with Mythbuntu I don’t think we’ll have the same problems with Hulu Desktop going black every 10 minutes on the dot. Everything integrated from the start will be a nice change of pace for this machine. Will beable to launch Boxee and Hulu from the front end, and then have a ready to go box for when I’m able to install the tuner card. Damn, might have to get another HDD with a few TBs available, huh? Well, all that does is change my priority for distributing the content on my network. Can always get an xbox to run a Myth front end, or even XBMC. Or even cheaper, get a couple of little Apple TVs to run Boxee in other rooms NACH. OK, like I said. 2:00am and tired as hell. Will detail whats going on with the rest in the morning, or later. thanks, -SE7EN

 

[NOTE: I actually wrote this several weeks ago, and forgot to hit the PUBLISH button. All apologies, 7]

Bunchalines

Bunchalines, a photo by AssortedRobotMeat on Flickr.

Bunchalines

Sketchbook Pages #2 pt2

A couple of days ago I posted this from my sketchbook. Something I started a while ago and wanted to come back to. Well, I did the other night. Still a work in progress, and my hands were kind of shakey trying to do perfect circles… But still, the inking is going pretty good i think.

Sketchbook Pages #3

From a few months ago i think. Keep finding pages in my books that are drawn on…

Sketchbook Pages #2

Another page from my sketch book. Had completely forgotten about this one. I love it and want to finish it. Scanner is not working today, so have to make due with the phone cam.

Whats interesting, while trying to get a good picture of it, i tried various setting on my camera. one of those was negative:

Then i put it through the GIMP to try and define the lines better. Want to get a decent vector off of it, but didn’t try to hard. But, while I was messing around, i made it a bit too blue:

Pretty cool though huh? I am going to try and clean it up a little more and make it look like awesome robot blueprints.