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iN8sWoRld.net has gone dark from April 21, 2012 at midnight until April 22, 2012 at 8:00 pm to protest CISPA and the Gutting of Existing Privacy Laws.

Remind your legislators who they are supposed to be representing.

“This bill undermines the privacy of millions of Internet users,” said Rainey Reitman, EFF Activism Director. “Hundreds of thousands of Internet users opposed this bill, joining the White House and Internet security experts in voicing concerns about the civil liberties ramifications of CISPA. We’re committed to taking this fight to the Senate and fighting to ensure no law which would be so detrimental to online privacy is passed on our watch.”

Not actually my first since I did go out with my youngest for a short trip around some of the main trail last weekend, but the first serious ride. It’s been so much colder than normal for so long now and I usually don’t start taking the bike out till its at least 50F (I never got a winter kit together and well, I’m lame). I procrastinated all winter and didn’t get a new bike so I’m still on the 2002 Giant and I realized yesterday that the rear brake was rubbing against the disc. Turns out *both* rims are bent now and the rear brake assembly must have taken a hit because it was all out of alignment.

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I was looking into getting a minecraft account for the kids, and not knowing much about the game I started out on wikipedia just to see what the hype about the game was all about. I know what the game looks like of course and in my mind it was just virtual lego, but I wanted to learn a bit about the company (especially if I was going to hand them some money), what the multiplayer aspects of the game were like and whether I could run it on Ubuntu, or run my own minecraft server. Maybe I’ll write up something about minecraft someday, but the investigation led me to a game which was supposedly one of the influences for the author of minecraft: Dwarf Fortress. I was immediately intrigued. I have a small Dwarf army for Warhammer Fantasy Battle, and some of my favorite characters in RPG games have been dwarves. For non-geeks: we’re talking Dwarves ala Tolkien, not Disney here. I also read Casey Johnston’s ARS article on DF which can be read either as a warning or a challenge – you choose.

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Back in December, 2011 when I first got my ASUS Transformer TF101 it came loaded with android 3.2 (Honeycomb). The OS was pretty slick, though Honeycomb was only the first tablet-ready android so there wasn’t a lot of polish to it. Over time I accepted the various ASUS-vetted updates to the tablet and eventually got one that upgraded it to version 4.0 (ICS, or Ice Cream Sandwich). Suddenly this awesome little device became a nightmare of reboots, freezes, and crashing apps. To add to the pain, the upgrade introduced a little bug which was also present in various distributions of linux that made it impossible to connect to a specific kind of VPN (which just happened to be the one I need to use). Since then, subsequent updates (coming through ASUS) to 4.0.3 and 4.0.4 made the device more stable, but didn’t solve the problems entirely and this despite my wiping the device clean, reinstalling the latest firmware and manually installing all my apps. I was hoping that eventually ASUS would release 4.1 (Jelly Bean) which might fix all my issues, but rumours of a release in October, 2012 got pushed out to November, and more recently folks were speculating it might not come at all. ASUS has a bunch of faster transformers out now – why would they waste time supporting my old model?

This weekend I got tired of waiting and decided to install Cyanogenmod (CM). Doing so is a risk. It certainly will void the warranty (no longer a concern to me since that has expired in my case), but it also can render the device non-functional. This might not be a permanent condition, but some folks are less interested in diagnosing this kind of thing than I am and recovery might take a considerable amount of time and investigation you might not want to be bothered with. You have been warned.

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Ive got a small and very underpowered System76 meerkat hooked up to my LCD TV.  The meerkat is the first “net top” they released in 2009 which you can think of as the desktop equivalent of a netbook (remember those?) and shipped with an Atom processor, one GB of RAM and an 80GB hard drive.  It came in with Ubuntu 8.10, but has been upgraded many times over the last three years and currently runs Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.  Although its integrated Intel video makes it feel slow, it boots up pretty quick.  It won’t do full screen HD without choppiness so its definitely on the list to be replaced at some point, especially since pushing video to my TV is this things only job in life, but I can run video in a standard quality which looks pretty good on the big screen anyway. Mostly I use the thing to stream YouTube or TED Talk videos, but sometimes I’ll stream music from another machine on the network and run a slideshow, or the kids can play some silly online games on it.  I never bothered to upgrade the hard drive in the thing which might make it more useful as a storage device, so with its little 80GB drive I end up storing nothing on it at all.  Once in a while I might copy a bunch of MP4s or other ripped video to it, but not often.  With my old Logitech S 510 cordless keyboard and mouse connected to it, theoretically I could lean back on the couch and control the action in comfort.  What actually happens is that I end up putting the keyboard on the coffee table and hunching over it because I can’t see the text on the screen.  I could probably solve this problem easily by just getting a pair of glasses but I hate wearing glasses unless I really have to.

Youtube promised to make it possible for me to control whats playing on the TV from a handheld or tablet device with their new YouTube TV service. The idea here is that most of you now have a handheld device and are hanging out on the couch with it while the TV is on, hitting up IMDB when you see an actor you recognize, or looking up some obscure factoid on Wikipedia inspired by the educational program you’re watching… well, thats what I’m doing. The media execs think I’m rushing off to Amazon to buy whatever crap they’re hawking in the commercials I don’t see since I use noscript and adblock. Whatever.
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