Via Technocrat.net, The SHIFT bike is a bicycle designed for toddlers that effectively changes from a tricycle to a bicycle as the speed increases. Who knows if it actually works, but it looks cool.
Audio and video of the April 14 debate at Cornell about copyright (with respect to music and movies) is now available via Bittorrent. Cornell also has a video in Real format here.
The discussion includes:
It is long but entertaining. They go around and around, never really listen to each other, never budge an inch. The Music/Movie industry makes one thing clear, Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) is here to stay. The great piece of the industries placing such tight restrictions on this content is that the Creative Commons movement probably wouldn’t have happened. DRM may not be such a bad thing after all.
Flickr has finally brought back their Creative Commons section. It was down for way too long. You can select a license then search for photos under that license, but you can only browse the 100 most recent photos which is odd. It does allow you to get a general sense of the popularity of each license:
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License: 548,480 (53.9%)
Attribution-NonCommercial License: 203,232 (20%)
Attribution License: 116,825 (11.5%)
Attribution-ShareAlike License: 110,426 (10.8%)
Attribution-NoDerivs License: 38,641 (3.8%)
Over 70% choose a license that can’t be used for commercial purposes. They also aren’t eligible to be used on Wikipedia.
I’m busy reading John Siracusa’s latest article on Mac OS X (for work purposes of course). This time of he’s (obviously) focusing on Mac OS X 10.4. His pieces are always incredibly detailed, and well written. They must just take him forever to write. I’m only half-way through, but some really intersting technical details are finally available. Maybe I’ll write more when I’m done.
Until then, I bring you Firefox Annoyances that I’ve had as a draft for a while and never published. There are a couple features (mostly extensions) that keep me using Firefox, but man are there a bunch of annoyances, mostly user interface related. If only Firefox extensions could easily be ported to Safari.
Annoyances with Firefox 1.0.3 running on Mac OS X 10.3.9:
Update: Huh? Why the heck isn’t that showing up as a an unordered list? Guess I’ll deal with it later.
A couple days ago I started calculating the amount spent on postage for mailing in Tax returns. (my point being the US government makes a boatload of money just from the postage) However, I quickly hit a brickwall. I don’t know how many people actually submit taxes and I don’t know how many actually send it via snail mail. I was going to just take the number of US citizens above 18, and then just pull a number out of the air for how many submit by mail. But by that time the number would be so incredibly useless that I gave up. I guessed that the number that submitted electronically was pretty small, however VPR reported this morning that according to Vermont Tax Commissioner Tom Pelham, 48% of Vermonts submitted their state tax electronically. And the national average is 58% (they didn’t specify if it was average for federal, state, or combined) . I was surprised that it was this high. Do tax preparers submit electronically for customers? If not, then the US is way more computer savvy than I suspected.
A few weeks ago I decided to do my first Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. Every U.S. citizen should make a FOIA request before they die… I guess.
Mostly curious what the result would be, I made my request for a single Digital Raster Graphic (DRG) map file from the USGS. I used this FOIA letter generator to get started. Then touched it up. Basically explaining that I wanted the fee waived because I intended to make it freely available to everyone on the Internet for research etc.
The FOIA states that the government has 20 business days to repspond to the request. Today, about 20 business days since I sent it, I received my response. I expected them to just say no and give me a silly reason. Instead, they ignored my hearfelt story and wrote: (scan of the letter)
Dear Mr. Benedict:
This is in response to your Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request dated March 25, 2005 and received in this office on March 30, 2005. In your request you sought copies of USGS 7.5 Minute Series Digital Raster Graphic (DRG) topographic map of Morrisville, Vermont. We are enclosing a page from our website (http://topomaps.usgs.gov/drg/) that explains how to order DRGs. If you have questions, call 1-888-ASK-USGS.
Sincerely,
John Cordyack
USGS FOIA Officer
When reading the instructions on how to submit a FOIA request it says to be very clear on exactly you what you want. It failed to mention that you should also be very clear every possible thing that you don’t want. I am fully aware that the USGS has business partners that are more than happy to sell me the map, the reason I went through the trouble of asking is because I already paid the US government with my taxes. The electronic file is public domain. Why should I have to pay again? I’ll keep trying.
When I was a wee lad, I would go over to play at Andrew’s house. Often, our primary activity was playing on his Tandy computer. We spent many hours building stories with this program called Kidwriter. It would allow you to pick a background, then place objects (people, cats, spaceships) on the background. Then you could write a story to go along with the picture. You could build multiple pictures and have it strung together like one big story. It was sort of like an super simplified HyperCard. Well I got nostalgic and just started searching around. (First I had to email Andrew to see if he remembered the name of the software.) I found a ROM of the program for an Apple ][. So I dug up an Apple ][ emulator and got it running. Here’s an mp3 of the unforgettable music for the program. And read more for some screenshots.
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This weekend I sent in my rebate for DirecWay. $100 is nothing to sneeze at. Yeah they’ll start sending me junk mail, and it will take 6-8 weeks to show up, but at least you can check the status of your rebate on-line according to the form. I went to the site and it says down at the bottom:
Please allow at least 5 weeks from the date your submission was mailed before using RebateTrak.
This weeks WireTap: Our fathers. Jonathan Goldstein talks with his father Buzz Goldstein, Scott Carrier, Anna and Heather O’Neil.
I recently made my donation to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
. I didn’t donate a whole lot because their top five paid employees make a whole lot more than I do, but I have to say they would have gotten more from me if their t-shirt didn’t stink so bad. For one thing, the picture to the left is as good as it gets. I can’t even see what it says! But I can see the logo on it, and that is one ugly logo. It looks like it was made in ClarisWorks paint 1.0. An E with a circle with F’s in it? What the? I think it is time for a logo design competition.
This prompted me to look around for web sites that create nice custom t-shirts. I’m not talking Cafe Press (not so hot iron ons and can’t do dark colored shirts). I want a business that has a nice web site (easy to get a good feel for the shirts (color, quality, selection etc.), clear pricing scheme, and it wouldn’t hurt if they cheep. I didn’t come up with much. This made me think, “Man I could do way better than that.” (I use to make some pretty kickin’ t-shirts back in high school)… and we need to do something with the barn. But quality screen equipment seems really expensive. I did however a come across a super neat robotic silk screening machine that had a fancy “self-leveling squeegee”, whatever that means. I can’t find it now.
This blog thing is harder than I thought. Blog feedback so far:
Dr. Icker doesn’t like the design. Although, the modifications I’ve made make it look less terrible. Keep in mind that Dr. Icker is colorblind.
Mike says I blog a lot. By which I suspect he means too much.
Corin thinks it is “cute” that I have a little on line diary. And she likes to point out my spelling mistakes.
With on-line retailers shipping out Mac OS X 10.4 early (oops), more and more hands-on information is being made available. I came across a video of the RSS screen saver (qt movie). I personally just have a “black” screen saver installed because all the others consume too much CPU, but I thought the RSS saver was intersting. Then as I continued to watch it, it seems like perhaps the developer wrote it while hanging out in a strip club. The feed swings around like a stripper on a pole. I swear.
Okay, I showed it to Corin and she said it reminds her of a blender or a revolving door. Oh well.
On this week’s (04/22/05) “On The Media” they talk about the status of Low Power FM licences from the FCC. The whole LPFM fiasco maddened me because NPR helped lobby congress to lower the number of licences they would give out… which in turn meant Hampshire (where I was going to college) would have no chance of getting a license. Later at Marlboro, Pam said she was glad there were fewer licenses because she thought they would all go to religious groups. Well it looks like she was right. According to the OTM story, “The Sound Salvation “, over 50% of the licenses have been given to religious groups. What is really annoying is that many of these stations are just playing canned content that is sent down to them from… heaven I guess. Kind of defeating the original purpose of the LPFM licenses. The entire show can be downloaded here.
BTW – they also interview Brewster Kahle in the same show. It must get really boring explaining what you are doing over and over again. I’ve read, listened to, and watched most interviews/talks by Brewster and 80% of what he has to say is the same. What he has to say is cool (universal access to all human knowledge), but I’m sure he wishes he could just send a video for people to watch.
As noted on slashdot, much like Congress making their own rule up to take Smokey Bear out of public domain, a bill introduced by Sen. Rick Santorum, (R-PA) would “prohibit federal meteorologists from competing with companies such as AccuWeather and The Weather Channel, which offer their own forecasts through paid services and free ad-supported Web sites.” (PalBeachPost.com story)
I thought I would document my current podcasting set up. Basically I’ve created a podcast from Internet streams that I record. My set up is slightly more complex than it needs to be. In theory you could do everything on one computer, but having everything separated keeps things flexible. I also don’t go in to extreme detail. Each piece I use has much better documentation available for specific setup.
General setup
I have a Mac OS X box that just records the streams. Might be overkill, but my main desktop machine gets used a lot, is often under heavy load, and Real Player, Windows Media Player, iTunes are sometimes being used for other purposes.
Then I have a web server. This stores copies of the files, and uses a script to create the podcast rss file.
On the client side, I have my desktop and laptop which download the podcast files.
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At lunch the other day, there was doubt by someone who should know better that the speed of light was a major factor in the latency of my Direcway satellite connection. It is so bad that ssh sessions are maddening.
Here is the math:
22,000 miles – Home dish to Satellite
22,000 miles – Satellite to DirecWay operation center
22,000 miles – DirecWay operation center to Satellite
22,000 miles – Satellite to Home dish
——————————————————————–
88,000 miles – Total distance traveled (approx.)Speed of light: 186,000 miles per second
Time for one packet request to go out and come back: 0.47 seconds
Roughly half a second of latency due to the damn speed of light.
For some unknown reason, I was running WordPress 1.2 without even knowing it. I had installed WordPress back when 1.2 was the latest version. I thought I had wiped it away and installed 1.5 fresh. But apparently I dreamed that. So I’m now “upgrading” to 1.5. I put upgrade in quotes because it is more of a, “completely reinstall everything, then re-tweak everything by hand all over again, but don’t complain because at least you don’t have to type in all your posts again.”
So maybe things will get back to normal soon.
Update: WordPress’ theming is, uh, stupid. The themes don’t just contain presentation information, but all sorts of actual content. So you can’t just enable a new theme and be on your way, you have enable it, then go through and edit all the content. ug.
Jeff Tweedy (from the band Wilco) and Lawrence Lessig (founder of Creative Commons) had a conversation at the New York Public Library on April 7th. Campus Progress now has a written recap, as well as the audio available as an mp3 (43 MB) of the event is now available for download. They also have a windows media player stream. If you’ve heard Lessig give his shpeel (sp?) before, then a lot of this won’t be new, but there are good nuggets.
Last night was the first warm rain of the Spring. Corin, Ketzel, and I headed out to help the Yellow Spotted Salamanders safely cross the road on their journey to vernal pools for reproduction. Here’s photos from last night. And the photos from last year when we did the same thing.
I somehow found myself on the Smokey Bear wikipedia page yesterday and was surprised to see that in 1952, Congress passed the Smokey Bear Act which effectively removed Smokey the Bear from the public domain and required licensing for use. Don’t get a license… and you could go to jail for up 6 months.
I’ve seen instances of Congress making certain public domain map data unavailable due to “security” reasons. But the fact that congress can just say, “Anything that is produced by the US government is public domain, except when we decide that it isn’t.” seems a little crazy.
