nyquil.org

Preparing for he 4th of July with a road trip

nospam@example.com (jer@nyquil.org) — 2009-07-02T05:40:47Z

Greetings from Bellingham Washington.

We decided this morning that the best thing we could do to celebrate the 4th of July, our country’s day of independence, would be to spend it in Canada. We poured the kitties, ratties, birdies, fishies and piggy some huge-ass piles of food and water (the fishies have a whole other tank), threw some clothes in some bags and headed northward.

After driving all day and timing rush hour in Tacoma, Seattle, Everett — really an place along I-5 that might have a rush hour — JUUUST right to maximize the amount of time traveling 60 MPH below the speed limit, we decided to call it a day about 20 miles from Our Neighbors to the North. Tomorrow, after a continental breakfast, we’ll be off to one of the other countries with the unfortunate distinction of sharing a landmass with us. I hope they won’t judge us too strongly for that.

Priority #1 is not hearing any freakin’ fireworks. Based on the rumored politeness levels of the average Canadian, their long wait times for medical care, and laws prohibiting anything that’s loud, smelly or illuminated, that shouldn’t be a problem.

Priority #2 is to acquire some Mountain Dew — and not just because it rhymes. I may have been making up the laws in the prior priority, but one that I’m NOT MAKING UP prohibits translucent soft drinks from containing caffeine in Canada. Which means that Mountain Dew has none. Crazy.

Oh, yeah: Priority #1 was ACTUALLY to make sure we turn off roaming on our Android phones so that we don’t rack up 11K of international data charges, because, even combined, we don’t have enough Twitter followers to qualify for the “50K followers so the rules don’t freakin’ apply to you” discount that Adam Savage gets. We’d actually have to pay our bill, so we’re smart enough to take action to prevent it from happening in the first place.

Unlimited Free Calls Using Google Voice and Gizmo

nospam@example.com (jer@nyquil.org) — 2009-06-10T15:52:33Z

Today, after some tinkering, I accomplished something of which I’ve long dreamt: placing a Voice-Over-IP call, from a real phone number to a real phone number, from my Android phone, using only my 3G/EDGE data connection. No plan minutes involved.

Here’s a brief how-to (that’s not even dependent upon having an Android phone):

1) Get Google Voice. (This step is going to be kind of a buzzkill for most people, as Google is still in some sort of indeterminate closed beta with the Google Voice system. I’m not exactly sure how I ended up with access, so I don’t know what to tell you to do to get it too.)

2) Create a free Gizmo account.

3) In your Google Voice settings, add the ‘SIP’ address that Gizmo gives you to your Google Voice account, selecting ‘Gizmo’ as the type of number. (Detailed instructions.)

4) Install a Gizmo-compatible client on your phone. The folks at Gizmo have written clients for many popular phones. You can get one at http://gizmo5.com/pc/products/mobile/. If your phone supports ‘J2ME,’ then chances are they’ve got you covered.

(On Android, I installed ‘sipdroid,’ which isn’t a Gizmo-specific application, but one that can handle any Voice-Over-IP service. (You can find sipdroid in the Android Market, but that version only works via wi-fi. Get the full version which supports 3G/EDGE calling via their site.) Configure it using the info from the Gizmo support page.)

5) Use Google Voice’s web interface to tell it to call whatever number you want, selecting your Gizmo number as the one to ring when connecting. (Gizmo offers incoming calls for free; telling Google Voice to initiate a call and ring your Gizmo is technically an incoming call, even when you’re calling a friend.)

6) Tell the Gizmo client on your phone to answer the call. You’re now connected, and you’re not using any minutes.

A nice side-effect of this Gizmo compatibility is that you can run Gizmo clients on any computers you have around. When someone calls your Google Voice number, all the computers will ‘ring’ as well as your cellphone, so you can answer it from one of them instead. More minutes saved.

Poster Prognostication: Toy Story 3

nospam@example.com (jer@nyquil.org) — 2009-05-20T18:31:04Z

I think Disney/Pixar are headed in a very wrong direction with the 3rd Toy Story film:

Behold, a DVD release of High Strung? (Unfortunately, no.)

nospam@example.com (jer@nyquil.org) — 2009-05-09T19:59:40Z

One of my favorite movies is Steve Oedekerk’s High Strung. Chances are you haven’t seen it, because it wasn’t released theatrically, was only available as a rental, and the company that put out the VHS tape went out of business. You may occasionally run across a copy at ye olde video shoppe, but it’s pretty unlikely since most rental copies have since been stolen.

Over 10 years ago Steve Oedekerk’s official website reported that they had finished the video mix for a DVD release, and all that needed done was a 5.1 audio mix and menus and extras and whatnot. About 3 years ago I ran across a VHS copy, digitized it, and made a torrent of it so that more people could have a chance to see this gem of a film — and maybe increase demand for the “any time now” DVD release in the process.

It’s been a couple years since I’ve checked for an update on the DVD release, but yesterday I came across a copy online purporting to be a “DVD rip.” So I downloaded it. Turns out that it is a significantly higher-res copy than the one I put up, and even wide-screen to boot, but still pretty obviously VHS-sourced. It smelled fishy, so I pulled out my copy and compared them side by side.

Click for larger

I then found the same frame in each version and did some scaling and lined them up. Here, the “wide-screen” version is outlined in red, overlaid atop my full-screen version.

Click for bigger

So, as you can see, someone simply cropped and stretched the full-screen VHS copy and pretended as if it were a 1.78:1 wide-screen-sourced copy. Since it is cropped down, it means that there’s even LESS of the film visible, and since it is scaled it means everyone has put on a good 10 pounds. It also means that there is still no DVD.

Bummer.

(Until a DVD does get released, you might want to check it out here: http://thepiratebay.org/details.php?id=3464649. It makes me very happy that 3 years later there are still seeds on that torrent.)

Validating "the Google Defense"

nospam@example.com (jer@nyquil.org) — 2009-05-08T23:37:00Z

I’d like to take a second to commend this dude: http://www.thepirategoogle.com/

Essentially he just proved that the “Google Defense” is, in fact, a perfectly valid argument.

From the site:

The intention of this site is to demonstrate the double standard that was exemplified in the recent Pirate Bay Trial. Sites such as Google offer much the same functionality as The Pirate Bay and other Bit Torrent sites but are not targeted by media conglomerates such as the IFPI as they have the political and legal clout to defend themselves unlike these small independent sites.

UPDATE: Google has blocked this site from searching Google. How retarded is that?

Embeddable Google Latitude: extra-tasty-creepy

nospam@example.com (jer@nyquil.org) — 2009-05-08T21:36:44Z

Google’s Latitude just got cooler.

Now, in addition to sharing your location with your contacts via your phone’s maps app and your iGoogle page, you can embed your Latitude location into any page, enabling ANY CRAZY PERSON to stalk you with near-realtime accuracy. The neat thing is it defaults to automatic zooming, using your positional accuracy to determine how detailed the map is. With GPS turned off, using cell towers for location info, it zooms out to a city view with a blue “somewhere in here” circle. Turn it on and it zooms down to street level. Very awesome.

It looks like this:

The map atop my blog has long been non-functional due to the hassle involved in keeping it updated, but IT LIVES ONCE MORE, thanks to the fact that my phone is always updating positions with Latitude. Thanks, Google!

If you’re interested in using Latitude in this way, head on over to http://www.google.com/latitude/apps to get your embed code. Assuming, anyway, that your phone is compatible.

Here’s a handy list:

All Android phones.
Most Java-enabled (J2ME) mobile phones.
Palm devices with Palm OS 5 and above.
All color BlackBerry devices.
Windows Mobile devices with Windows Mobile 5.0 and above.
All 3G Symbian devices.
Not iPhones. Pbbt. (I’m guessing the 3.0 update will have Latitude support. Still — suck it, iPhone.)

Android App Demo 2: youtube Sleuth

nospam@example.com (jer@nyquil.org) — 2009-04-30T00:20:56Z

Here’s a little demo of ‘youtube Sleuth,” my second Android app available in the Android Marketplace.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjcwbSYS87A

Unlike the first one, this app will be beneficial for most Android users. Like with iPhone, Android lacks Flash capabilities, and thus handles YouTube by using a stand-alone player app. When a user clicks a YouTube link, the YouTube application fires up and immediately begins playing the video, full-screen. (If you can really call a phone’s display “full-screen.”) This means you don’t have the luxury of seeing any information about the video before you play it.

My app solves this problem rather handily. Instead of sending YouTube links immediately to the YouTube app, they go through my app first, causing a popup with title, description and thumbnail image. And then a button at the bottom which will send the video to the YouTube app if you really want to watch it. If not, just hit back or the ‘ignore’ button. No more Rickrolls.

Like with my first app, this one is available both as a paid app and as a free app for the cheapskates. My logic is that the more people actually get benefit from an app, the more likely they’ll EVENTUALLY be to throw me some cash. If they have to pay upfront, very few people will even try it.

(For the interested, this logic has proven to be very, very flawed; after 48 hours in the Marketplace, the free version of youtube Sleuth has well over 1,000 users. The $0.99 version has 9, and one of those was D. (Unlike on iPhone, you can “refund” apps you don’t like within 24 hours of purchase — but the catch is you can only do it once. If you install it again you are stuck with it. I was testing it and accidentally “bought” it from myself using D’s phone one too many times.)

A Little Demo of NZBdroid, my first Android app (now available in the Android Marketplace!)

nospam@example.com (jer@nyquil.org) — 2009-04-24T18:13:59Z

My first foray into Android app creation has come to fruition. NZBdroid is live in the Android Marketplace, both for ~~$2.00~~ $0.99 and also COMPLETELY free. It’s up to the user whether they want to buy it or not, which seems to me to be a pretty cool way to do things.

What NZBdroid does is allow the user to click on .nzb files in the Android browser (or in any app, really) and have that .nzb file sent off to your ‘net-connected instance of SABnzbd+, where it will be downloaded and ready for you to access it when you get home.

(My rambling tutorial about downloading from Usenet via SABnzbd+ can be found at Easy Auto-download of Recurring Content from Usenet)

Anyway here’s a little demo of the NZBdroid in action, clicking a link on tvnzb.com (but keep in mind, the Android emulator runs really slowly on my computer):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2xC8hkeIyE

Snopes Oversteps Their Bounds: more evidence at the untrustworthiness of Snopes.com

nospam@example.com (jer@nyquil.org) — 2009-04-12T19:56:47Z

There’s a story floating around the various link aggregator sites about how the Snopes.com people have taken to using their site as a forum to espouse their political bent. The Snopes article in question is regarding statements that Barack Obama allegedly made regarding his stance on his recent plan for veteran healthcare.

Long story short, Snopes has classified the story as ‘MIXTURE,’ containing both true and false elements, despite saying in their first statement that it is false.

The claim:

Statement reproduces President Obama’s response regarding opposition to his veterans’ health insurance plan.

The beginning of Snopes’ response:

This item is another entry difficult to classify as either “true” or “false.” It’s false in the literal sense that President Barack Obama did not utter the words attributed to him above; this piece is an excerpt from a form of satire that makes political or social points by putting outrageous words into the mouths of others.

However, even if the words aren’t literally true (i.e., they’re not something Barack Obama actually said), the issue they reference is not, as in most satirical pieces, a fabrication or a highly exaggerated version of reality.

Ah yes, the old “in a literal sense” conundrum.

The point here is that the claim they’re addressing is whether the words actually are Obama’s. They come right out and say they’re not, but then go on a huge rant about policies of which they’re obviously not fond. Many people are outraged by this. I’m guessing it’s because everyone has always thought of Snopes as the last bastion of unbiased truth on the Internet. Everyone but me, that is.

A few years back I saw Snopes’ analysis of an anecdote that Tony Blair allegedly told at a dinner party that regarded George W. Bush’s widely known vocabulary… issues. Despite the fact that nothing in the article is substantiate-able, they jump to Bush’s defense claiming it a big red ‘False.’

This is bothersome to me because many Snopes-checkers rarely read past the green or red ‘True’ or ‘False’ indicators on any given subject, trusting that Snopes knows what they’re talking about. In this case, their declaration of it as ‘False’ is not justified by the actual evidence they’ve presented.

Now, I’m not saying that Tony Blair did tell this amusing anecdote at a cocktail party, but the only “evidence” they have regarding its untruth is speculation from a man whose job it is to make Tony Blair look good — a man that wasn’t even present at said dinner party in the first place. In legal dramas on television, I believe they’d call that “hearsay.” And I object! It’s the word of someone who was present against someone who wasn’t. Not exactly fair reasoning. (It is my claim, however, that had Tony Blair’s press secretary been present, and had Tony Blair actually said it, the secretary would still say he didn’t. That’s his job, afterall.)

With evidence like that, Snopes could, at best, only classify the story as “unverifiable.” After discovering this, I spent several hours going through all the George Bush articles on Snopes.com looking for bias. Granted, my results clearly showed my own confirmation bias — I’m just going to pretend like that’s not a problem. Suffice to say, according to my research, the statement that “Snopes is generally favorable towards Republicans whenever blatant evidence to the contrary doesn’t make it impossible to do so,” is a big fat “True.”

So anyway, if you rely on Snopes to determine whether or not the things you hear are true, then you need to — at the very least — actually read their evidence for whatever determination they make and then use your own skills of deduction before you go snidely emailing it off to whatever poor sucker repeated it as fact.

You might not actually deserve the smug, self-righteous feeling you get when you do that.

A Trouble with Twitter: I try to stop people from looking like idiots.

nospam@example.com (jer@nyquil.org) — 2009-04-04T18:41:08Z

I’ve noticed a new trend on Twitter lately, one which bothers me a great deal. I’d like to share my thoughts about it now so that you all can help nip it in the bud.

People have been ‘retweet’ing pretty much since Twitter’s inception; that is, they post something on their stream that they saw someone else post. The defacto standard format for doing this is to say ‘rewteet’ (or, more commonly, ‘RT’) followed by the username of the person who originated the message, then followed by the message. Like this:

RT @TeddTheodorLogan Remember the time I asked Missy to the prom?

Lately, however, people have been trying to popularize a new format for retweeting — one which has been largely employed in the blogging world. This new method is to just post the message, followed by (via username). Like this:

The only thing I know for sure is that Joan of Arc is NOT Noah’s wife…(via BillSPrestonEsq)

The problem with this is two-fold: firstly, it takes up more characters. More importantly, it’s misusing the word ‘via.’

See, what “(via so-and-so)” actually means, is “I heard about this content by way of so-and-so,” and has been used for years to denote that the link I’m blogging about came to my attention because someone else blogged about it, and is designed to sort of give the person who found the content the credit. This is only used when you’re linking to a story that’s written by someone other than the person you heard about it from — to give sort of ‘scoop’ credit to someone who found it before you did.

When you retweet, in almost every case, you are simply quoting the person who said something. You didn’t hear it ‘via’ them. Your readers are hearing it ‘via’ YOU. (Granted, if you are retweeting a retweet, then ‘via’ could be properly used — but you’d have to say it’s ‘via’ the person who originally REtweeted it, rather than the person who tweeted it — which is of no information to the reader.)

If you really don’t like the ‘RT username: message’ format — and for this I don’t blame you; it’s clumsy and non-intuitive — I suggest you do it the same way people have been attributing quotes since the dawn of written language. Like this:

“Four score and seven BEERS ago…” -abrahamlincoln

With your help, perhaps this gross misunderstanding of the Latin language can be wiped from the face of twitter.

Easy Auto-download of Recurring Content from Usenet

nospam@example.com (jer@nyquil.org) — 2009-04-02T18:44:03Z

There are things on Usenet that you want to download regularly. Doing so is a time-consuming chore that’d be better accomplished through automation. This guide aims to show you how.

The problem with Usenet is that, even with the requisite utilities, you still find yourself manually extracting RAR files, applying PAR2 files to regenerate missing chunks, and then disposing of all the compressed/encoded files after extracting your media file. Not to mention seeking out and downloading every episode of everything you want to download. It’s not for the faint of heart.

Here’s where it gets awesome, though. There’s a free, open-source application called SABnzbd+, available for every platform, that does all that for you. Even awesomer, it can monitor RSS feeds and watch for user-defined strings in the filenames to facilitate the automatic downloading, unpacking, repairing, renaming and moving of files into your media library with zero intervention on the user’s part. After setting up SABnzbd, the content you want to download is magically downloaded FOR you, with no intervention on your part. This is the future, and it is AWESOME.

To get started with your magical new life of automatic content delivery, you first need a Usenet account. And, you’re probably going to want a ‘premium’ account, meaning that you’ll have to spend some money every month. There are many different options when choosing premium Usenet providers, but I recommend Giganews. They even have a free trial, allowing you to see how awesome this whole thing can be. You can sign up for your free trial by clicking the nifty banner below. (We’ll supposedly get referral credit or something if you end up being a paying customer.)

The next thing you need to do is install SABnzbd on a computer in your household. On Mac/Windows it’s a super-easy installer, and it runs using a web interface rather than a GUI. Upon installation you’ll need to specify the username/password for your Giganews (or other Usenet provider) in the Config tab.

The next stop is giving SABnzbd one or more RSS feeds to monitor looking for things to download. There are many different options for sites that provide RSS feeds of nzb files. A quick Google search can help you find one that has the type of content you’re looking for. Once you add a feed, you can enter in names/words in filenames to either ‘accept’ or ‘reject.’ SABnzbd will then periodically check the rss feed, and when it finds an nzb that matches your rules, it queues it for download.

You then configure the Folders option to specify where you want finished downloads to end up. That’s really all there is to it. Now your computer will periodically check any configured RSS feeds for things it should download, and when it finds something, it just does. And then it decompresses, repairs (if necessary), and then gets rid of the compressed stuff. No muss, no fuss. Set it and forget it.

An average 360meg file downloads in about 2 and a half minutes. But you don’t care how fast it is because it’ll just be there waiting for you automatically.

An added perk, is the SABnzbd Firefox extension , which gives you a constant indicator of things that are downloading, right in your browser’s status bar — and also the ability to click on any nzb file from any nzb search engine and have SABnzbd automagically start downloading it, even if you’re surfing from a different computer than SABnzbd is running on. Very awesome.

UPDATE: I’ve now written an app for Android phones that will allow you to queue nzb files on your SABnzbd installation: NZBdroid

Cleaning Up My Desktop; half-baked idea

nospam@example.com (jer@nyquil.org) — 2009-03-30T20:27:56Z

One of the downsides to using an operating system that doesn’t require you to reboot it all the time is that you occasionally find something open on another desktop that you’ve completely forgotten about.

About a month ago, I spent 5 minutes before work roughing out a stupid idea I’d had while half asleep. Then 31 days passed, and I forgot all about it.

I’ve since lost interest in the idea, but figure I’ll share the rough version anyway:

(Aside: do you know how hard it is to find high-quality Horton artwork that ISN’T from the recent movie? Hard.)

A Truly Fantastic Doctor Who Episode

nospam@example.com (jer@nyquil.org) — 2009-03-06T17:36:50Z

I’m not what you would call a “Doctor Who fan,” but we’ve been watching all of the recent series on our Roku Netflix box lately. There are a lot of pretty cheesy episodes, but I’ve generally enjoyed most of them.

However, the other night we watched an episode entitled “Blink,” from season/series 3 (episode 10), which I believe originally aired in 2007. Holy crap that was a good episode. I mean, not a “good — you know, for Doctor Who” type of good, but a seriously fantastic hour of television. The story is great, the writing is great, the villains are great. It’s scary. It’s clever.

In short, it’s amazing.

If you’ve not seen this particular episode, I heartily recommend doing so. Netflix streams it here and an illicit download can be easily found if you’re not a Netflix subscriber.

I Solved It: amazon takes my advice

nospam@example.com (jer@nyquil.org) — 2009-03-05T02:00:50Z

Remember last year when I wrote Amazon a letter suggesting that they put Kindle content on non-Kindle devices? Well, they listened to me:

You’re welcome.

Now I just hope that the Android version comes along quickly at the heels of the iPhone version, because I don’t use my iPhone. (Want to buy an iPhone?)

Playing with video: My Trek Around Lacamas Lake

nospam@example.com (jer@nyquil.org) — 2009-02-23T13:52:04Z

A few days back I took a little hike, upon which I brought my spiffy new FlipHD camcorder. I didn’t really have a plan of what I was going to shoot, so it started off one thing and then became another, but I share it here anyway, since some of it really cracks me up. (I am a dork.)

Click here for non-embedded, or here for HD.

Playing with video like this does bring up the subject of a future post: the state of video editing on Linux is pretty abysmal. More on that later.