nyquil.org

Strange Dancing Predators Improved by the Addition of Another Predator

nospam@example.com (jer@nyquil.org) — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 12:17:48 -0700

I recently found some bizarre footage from the set of Predator 2, and have been trying to pass it off as being from the upcoming Robert Rodriguez film Predators, cuz I’m a jerk like that. Alexa suggested some minor changes that she thought might improve it, so I spent a few minutes figuring out how Windows Movie Maker works. (Easy to make something crappy, hard to make something nice.)

Here’s the result, which I think you’ll agree is a significant improvement.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFCDgwMCHc0

No More Owls: An Open Letter to HootSuite

nospam@example.com (jer@nyquil.org) — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 15:41:43 -0800

Dear HootSuite,

Seriously, knock off the linkjacking. It’s not cool.

I’ve been getting irritateder and obnoxiated every time I inadvertently get sent to an ow.ly shortened url only to find it’s been link-jacked. So I just did some ‘research’ and discovered that NOBODY USES OW.LY except your popular range of Twitter clients. People love your client, and they love sharing links. This results in them sharing links WITH YOUR CLIENT. Which results in me swearing and owls being threatened.

This means you are squarely to blame for this annoyance that I face on a daily basis. So knock it the crap off.

In my frequent rantings about this on Twitter and Buzz, people always say “Oh yeah! I HATE that!,” so I know I’m not alone. I’m just one of the few bothered to say anything about it. Here are a few that I ran across today:

@ahockley – I consider the use of ow.ly as an indicator of someone I probably should ignore

Linda Lawrey – Oh.. Now I know.. I don’t like those links for that exact reason!

Duncan Rawlinson – You’re right. I forgot how annoying that thing is! I turned it off although it really shouldn’t exist at all…

Woodsy the Owl – Give a ‘hoot’ don’t pollute… the Internet with your shitty linkjacking.

Seriously. I’m beginning to hate owls now. And it’s your fault.

UPDATE: Someone from HootSuite contacted me and clarified a few things. First off, they say ow.ly shortening is “opt-in,” that users have to go out of their way to get HootSuite to shorten the url via ow.ly, that they are free to use whatever external shortener they want. It’s just that prominent ‘Shrink It’ button that uses ow.ly.

Secondly, they point out that one can just click the X in their linkjack bar to turn it off “permanently.” I’ve clicked that X a number of times, yet keep seeing it.

Thirdly, they advised that I install browser hacks to circumvent their doucheyness on a more permanent basis:

HootSuite_Help @nyquildotorg BTW, if you want to disable the ow.ly bar another way, try this: http://toys.funcy.co.uk/userscripts/hootFix.user.js

and that if I want to keep my content from being linkjacked, that I should just install ‘framebusting’ code which has been used for years. Great, so I need to take action to prevent not only myself from being affected, but also my content. Douchey.

And finally, they have this to say:

HootSuite_Help @nyquildotorg Sure, but ow.ly is free. We make no money off it. If people use our service, we’ll frame it. Otherwise, use something else.

HootSuite_Help @nyquildotorg You can always choose not to click an ow.ly link. ^CT

There you have it, straight from the owl’s beak. They know what they’re doing is douchey, but don’t give a hoot. The solution offered is a really simple one, though: “Don’t click on the links your friends send you.”

And that’s the plan. I hope you’ll keep this in mind when you decide how you want to share links.

UPDATE UPDATE: I asked why they jack links if the service doesn’t make them any money. This was the reply:

HootSuite_Help @nyquildotorg Ow.ly integrates with our stats, and allows us to offer an all-in-one solution for customers. We do customer support for it.

There you have it. HootSuite acts like a douche to the entire Internet to make it easier to charge their customers for things. Nice.

Converting Amazon Kindle For PC Books Now Possible

nospam@example.com (jer@nyquil.org) — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 09:03:58 -0800

UPDATE 2/11/2010: Updated the included unswindle to the latest version, fixes errors on unDRMed books.
UPDATE 2/27/2010: Added specification that users install the 32-bit version of python 2.6 for Windows, even on 64-bit systems.

People have been asking me if there’s a way to convert Kindle books downloaded with Amazon’s Kindle For PC application pretty much since the day it was released. Sadly, despite a lot of tinkering on my part, there was no elegant solution^* until now.

A fantastic Kindle For PC conversion tool has been made. And it works really, really well. And it is significantly easier than the old “Kindle-only” method.

Here’s how it works:

1) Install 32-bit python 2.6 for Windows, from here even if your system is 64-bit you need the 32-bit version in order for this to work) : http://www.python.org/download/

2) Download unswindle.pyw and mobidedrm.py via this zip file and unzip it somewhere on your PC

3) Open the unzipped folder and double-click unswindle.pyw

Kindle For PC will now open.

4) Select the book you want to convert.

5) When the book loads, simply exit Kindle For PC

A ‘Save’ dialog will open asking you where you want to save your new decrypted .mobi file. And we’re done.

(As it uses mobidedrm, it still won’t work on Topaz/.tpz files, and the first one I tried happened to be one. Still, most books will work.)

*: I did work out a scheme wherein you record video of your desktop, scroll through the book in Kindle For PC, remove all duplicate frames from the resultant video and then convert to PDF, but it was rather unwieldy.

Converting Kindle Books: a painful process that works for reading Kindle books without a Kindle

nospam@example.com (jer@nyquil.org) — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 11:33:18 -0700

Update: This tutorial is largely superseded by the much nicer and easier ‘Kindle For PC’ method: see it here.

UPDATE 2: included Preston Lee’s online PID generator.

D recently bought one of those new-fangled Amazon Kindle thingies for purchasing and reading books in an electronic form. (She loves it.)

I like to read books in an electronic form on my iPhone, but find that it’s pretty hard to come by them legally; there are many different sellers and formats, some of which have certain books but not others. Sometimes they have the book, but not in a format I can do anything with. It’s generally easier just to illegally download them from torrent sites.

Amazon has tons and tons of books available for Kindle, and have chosen the standard MobiPocket format as the one their reader uses, meaning it is theoretically trivial to purchase them and convert them to something else. Except that they won’t sell them to you unless you have already purchased a $400ish Kindle on which to read them. Meaning you don’t need to convert them…

In any case, now that our household has a Kindle, it frees me up to purchase books from Amazon in Kindle format without actually having a Kindle myself. I then just remove the DRM that Amazon puts in the files (to keep people from converting them, natch), and then convert them to HTML or txt to read in Books.app on iPhone. Want to know how to do the same thing?

Howto:

Step 1) Find someone with a Kindle.

Step 2) On their Kindle, go to the Settings menu, and type ‘411’ on the keypad. This will bring up a little information dialog with a bunch of things in it, of which you only need the Serial. It is a 16-character string of letters and numbers. Write it down.

Step 3) Ask the Kindle’s owner to buy a book for you. Give them some money so you don’t look like a mooch. Once you’ve given them the money, ask them to log in to their Amazon account and navigate to their ‘Kindle Downloads‘ page from your computer. When they complain, mention that you’ve already given them money. The Kindle Downloads page will list all the books they’ve purchased, and yours should be right at the top. Click ‘Download to computer’ and you’ll get a file named ‘Title-of-Book.azw’

Step 4) Download MobiDeDRM.zip, which is a small suite of Python scripts that some kind soul wrote and then distributed through links that expire all the time and can be kind of a pain to track down. I’ve hosted them from my site so that they won’t expire. This .zip file contains mobidedrm.py, mobidedrm2.py, kindlepid.py and mobihuff.py.

(These scripts require that you install Python on your system, which is something outside the scope of this howto. I’m on linux, but there’s a Python for Windows called “ActiveState Python.” Google will help.)

After unzipping the archive, open up a terminal window and pass the Kindle’s serial # (which you previously wrote down) to kindlepid.py. Something like this:

python kindlepid.py XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Where all those Xs are replaced with the Kindle serial number. It will return something that looks like this:

Mobipocked PID for Kindle serial# XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX is Z1QFCDQ*74

Make note of that last 10-character gibberish.

The easiest way to get your PID (or secret code used to unlock the Kindle book) is to use Preston Lee’s online Kindle PID generator. Simply follow the instructions there.

Now that you’ve got your PID, we’ll need to remove the DRM from any books purchased for that Kindle.

Step 5) Now it’s time to remove the DRM. Do this:

python mobidedrm.py Title-of-Book.azw Title-of-Book.mobi Z1QFCDQ*74

where my 10-character gibberish string is replaced with the one you made note of in the last step. This will take about a minute, and when it finishes you’ll see:

Decrypting. Please wait... done

Now you will have a decrypted MobiPocket-formatted ebook that you can read in any MobiPocket reader.

If, however, you want to convert it to HTML to read on any device you wish, you’ll want to install MobiPerl. (This, of course, will require you to install Perl. MobiPerl’s website will walk you through that.)

6) With MobiPerl installed, do this:

mobi2html Title-of-Book.mobi

This will create a directory named ‘unpacked’ that will contain Title-of-Book.html

Things that can go wrong:

Amazon seems to compress longer books in a slightly different manner than shorter books. If your resulting .mobi file and/or .html file are oddly gibberishy (for example, if the first line starts in the middle of a sentence, and clearly not the beginning of the book), let’s go back to step 5.

Step 5b) These ‘huffdic-compressed’ books require a slightly different script to remove the DRM. Do this:

python mobidedrm2.py Title-of-Book.azw Title-of-Book.mobi Z1QFCDQ*74

Note the ‘2’ in ‘mobidedrm2.py’ in this one and remember to replace my gibberish PID with yours.

6b) The ‘huffdic-compressed’ files also require a different script to convert them to HTML. Do this:

python mobihuff.py Title-of-Book.mobi Title-of-Book.html

This script will output the .html file in the directory from which you are running it.

All in all, this is as much of a pain as it looks, but the selection and availability of books on Amazon makes it worthwhile to me. They have far more books than The Pirate Bay does, and I feel better paying for them

Good luck.

Update: several readers have alerted me that there’s a much newer version of mobiDeDRM available. You can download it here.

Thoughts on Google Buzz

nospam@example.com (jer@nyquil.org) — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 09:58:44 -0800

I’ve been thinking a bit about Google Buzz since a few days before it was announced, and I really think it has the potential to be huge. Especially when one takes into account all the stuff the API already does, and all the things it promises to be able to do in the near future. Having one open spot to have masses and masses of interesting content aggregated to you from your Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Livejournal, Blogger and Wordpress contacts is pretty cool, but when they’re able to pull in all comments via Salmon, pretty much anything anyone ever directs towards you on the Internet will be accessible there as well.

Post a comment on some random stranger’s blog? If it gets a reply, it’ll (one day) show up in your Google Buzz. That’s pretty darn cool.

Magical utopian fantasyland aside, the current implementation of Buzz leaves much to be desired.

Problems I’ve encountered in order of annoyance:

No love for Apps for Domains accounts. I have used my jer@nyquil.org account as my Google account for the last several years, but it doesn’t yet have access to Buzz from within Apps for Domains’ GMail client. Which means if I want to play with Buzz on my PC, I have to use my otherwise-unused jerwarren@gmail.com Google account. (Actually, that account is used for my Google Reader subscriptions, which will brings me to a future point.)

GMail clutter. I haven’t yet figured out the magics that determine when something shows up in your GMail inbox as well as in Buzz, but some things do. Other things don’t, however, which makes it far more annoying. Sure, you can set up a filter easily enough to hide those from your inbox, but I’d really like to know how it determines what should go in your inbox in the first place. Is it just replies to Buzz posts older than a certain age? Who knows. In any case, I’m sick of getting email notifications of things I’ve already read in Buzz.

I frequently share interesting things I see from my Google Reader account. Over the years I’ve amassed quite a few cool people that also share cool things, and often encounter really cool stuff I wouldn’t have otherwise. I’ve always been bummed that most of the stuff I share is pretty much unfindable by those who don’t use Google Reader — and there are more that don’t than there are that do — which seems to have been solved by the incorporation with Buzz. However, my Google Reader contacts are now full of people I’ve added on Buzz, often who share things in which I have no interest. Even the things that I do have interest in are frequently seen in my Buzz stream before I find them again in my Google Reader. There needs to be some better communication between the two so that I don’t always end up seeing everything everyone shares in two different places. Add GMail clutter to the mix, and I often see the same content in three different places.

The promised ability to learn your preferences and hide people’s sandwich updates seems to be vaporware. I can’t find any way to mark things as being uninteresting, thus Buzz never knows what I find uninteresting. Where is this promised functionality? (I did notice, however, that it hid a whole bunch of “this is my first Buzz!” posts from me, so it’s obviously somewhat functional. I just want to be able to make it hide other things as well.)

I have great hope that Buzz is going to make many, many irritating things a much nicer experience than the Twitters and Friendfeeds and Faceooks currently offer (primarily because it promises to be able to put all that content in one nice place to which I can interface in unlimited ways ) but I worry that people are going to be annoyed to death before it gets to that point.

Even with these annoyances, however, Buzz is still infinitely more usable and less annoying that Google Wave, though. I can actually see myself using Buzz.

If you’re not already following me on Buzz, you can do so by adding jer@nyquil.org, and jerwarren@gmail.com. (Due to the aforementioned schism between Apps for Domains Google Accounts and GMail accounts.

Helpful Hacks: tricking Google Buzz into letting you in

nospam@example.com (jer@nyquil.org) — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 16:03:33 -0800

Want to play with Google Buzz before they get it rolled out to your GMail?

The magic of Google Chrome can hook you up.

Create a shortcut to Google Chrome on your desktop, righ-tclick on it, select Properties, and then paste this after everything in the ‘Target’ field:

—user-agent=“Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.0.1; en-us; Droid Build/ESD56) AppleWebKit/530.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/530.17”
(That’s two dashes before user-agent, not a hyphen. I can’t figure out how to get my auto-formatting to display it properly. Also, you might need to replace the quotes with non-“smartquotes.” Smartquotes are DUMB.)

Then go to m.google.com and click on Buzz. This will, however, make all pages Chrome loads behave as if you’re browsing them from a Motorola Droid, so it’s advisable to make another desktop shortcut with user-agent=”“ to reset everything.

Netflix Adds More Watch Instantly Titles; People Complain

nospam@example.com (jer@nyquil.org) — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 07:28:58 -0800

I read yesterday that Netflix made a deal with Warner Brothers to delay DVD releases in echange for having access to more of Warner’s library for their Netflix Watch Instantly feature.

Interestingly, people seem put off by this, which, as a long-time Netflix subscriber and a Netflix Watch Instantly early adopter has me a bit perplexed. Anyone who’s ever used Netflix knows that they often won’t get a specific movie when they expect it, and in fact end up altering their movie watch behavior accordingly. Watch Instantly, however, DOES allow people to, funnily enough, “watch instantly.”

D bought me the first Roku box when it was first announced, which allows us to watch Netflix Watch Instantly titles (and now Amazon VOD titles as well) right on our TV, using a remote to navigate. In HD, even. The box keeps track of where you are in each title if you decide to stop watching and finish later, and even keeps track of which episode in a TV series you’re on. Even without the 2-day time advantage the Watch Instantly service has over having a disc mailed to you, there’s value added in keeping track of this stuff. Anyone who’s ever had to figure out which episodes they haven’t seen after a several month hiatus of watching a particular show can attest to this.

Netflix Watch Instantly is now available on Xbo and PS3, as well as a host of DVD players and Blu-ray players, televisions and other boxes you may already have in your home. Soon, it’ll be available on the Wii that you have collecting dust, and there’s a range of different Roku boxes that will hook you up inexpensively if you don’t already have one of those other boxes in your home. Streaming is the future, and getting more titles available for people to stream is a great advantage for Netflix, helping ensure that they’re not only in the game, but at the forefront of it.

So, it seems to me that Netflix is in a win/win situation; not only are their customers already used to delays of new releases, but adding more titles to Watch Instantly will help keep customers like us happier for longer. We use Netflix via Watch Instantly almost exclusively and haven’t even received a disc in probably close to a year. I look forward to a sudden influx of new things to watch.

If a 30-day delay on Batman Begins Again DVDs means I can stream the rest of the Batman franchise, then I say delay it. If I really need to see a title within 30 days, there’s always a Redbox machine nearby.

Thanks, Netflix, for making deals like this.