I took the site offline yesterday in solidarity with the Electronic Frontiers Foundation and other organizations to protest impending US congressional action on “copyright protection” bills.
As a published author I’m happy to have the government enforce copyright laws so that I get paid for my work. But the current proposals are heavy-handed attempts by the entertainment industry to stack the deck in their favor. I’m tired of this. I want copyright protections to make sense both socially and technologically. I want due process when someone’s web site is threatened with closure.
GoDaddy did something weird to their hosting packages a while back. When I tried to upgrade my Cryptosmith blog to the new package, it took them WEEKS to do the migration.
So this time I took matters into my own hands. I created a completely new hosting account and I’m migrating the stuff myself.
The site will probably be down for a couple of hours while they switch the domain name from the old host to the new host, but things should come right back up after that.
Continue reading 'A Mini-Migration'»
I was at the Northern Star Council’s annual meeting today. The PR firm that produced the annual report constructed a Scout’s photo entirely of merit badges. They also produced a Facebook app that converts one’s own photo into a merit badge mosaic:
Continue reading 'Badgetization'»
This is an arcane bit of trivia from the Scouting movement. Traditional scouting groups like packs, patrols, crews, posts, and so on, are chartered through a community organization that is already involved in education and service to youth. This approach arose in England when LTG Robert Baden-Powell collaborated with others to establish an organized scouting movement.
The scouting group renews its charter every year here in the US, and the local Boy Scout council issues a charter to the sponsoring community organization, called the charterd organization.
The local commissioner is a volunteer who visits individual scouting groups on behalf of the local council. Commissioners are usually organized into districts and communities, and take care of packs, troops, crews, etc., in their own neighborhoods. Charter renewal gives the commissioner an annual opportunity to meet with a chartered organization’s leadership, report on the benefits produced by their scouting units, and thank them for their sponsorship.
So, here are my thoughts on how to present a charter.
Continue reading 'Charter Presentations for Scouting Units'»
Biscuit gave me a 64G iPad for Christmas – that was three months ago. Since then I’ve been on a mission to use up at least HALF of the iPad’s storage space. There’s no obvious way to fill the iPad up using Apple software: iTunes assumes that people select files and dump them into a tablet one at a time. If your average file is 1/4 MB long, you’ll have to drag and drop over 250,000 files onto iTunes to use up 32GB.
I poked around on the Internet for ideas, and came up empty. Then I contacted the folks at Tekzilla, a web video magazine on tech that streams onto our Tivo. They made some suggestions that helped a little – but not enough – and asked listeners for other ideas.
Last week, the listeners came through. The winning suggestion was to use the incredible capabilities of GoodReader to upload hierarchies of files. I’ve been using GoodReader for several weeks, but hadn’t dug deeply enough into it to appreciate these features. Thanks to GoodReader, I’ve finally filled up at least half of my iPad!
Continue reading 'Filling up iPad Storage'»
This question arose in an after-dinner conversation last night. A quick Google search on nearby phones uncovered little to clear up the subject, so I figured it was my duty to post something about it.
I admit I’m not up on the state of the art in zombie movies. Most of my knowledge was acquired from cheesy horror comics in my youth. Of course, everything we know about zombies comes from media depictions: written stories, TV, and movies. So the question of zombie odor doesn’t really apply to audiences. “Smellivision” was never a popular concept.
So, what do zombies smell like?
Continue reading 'Do Zombies Stink?'»
We were out about town the night before elections and found this:
The location is both a church and a designated polling place for the next-day election.
A row of parked cars indicated a meeting in progress. When we wandered past later, the meeting had broken up. Cooler and wiser heads must have prevailed, since the sign had disappeared.
Continue reading 'Election Eve Schenanigans'»
Friend and colleague John posted a comment on backlighting, noting that part of a stop can significantly improve exposure. I think there are two observations worth making here:
- Automation is stupid. Until we get Do What I Mean brain interface debugged, cameras will make a best guess.
- This is what I like about photography: the opportunity to exert control over how the image gets captured.
Although I learned a bit about photography years ago, I still blunder with camera settings. I didn’t mind the shutter speed while snapping pics of dancing. I find I have to literally exercise a special bit of my brain to look at the lighting of a scene. Otherwise I fail to assess backlighting or realize that the shadow will make a huge black slash through the image.
I find that I rely heavily on Photoshop-like software to redeem over- and under-exposed photos. It’s usually good for 1 or 2 stops on a digital camera, though the colors may suffer. Unfortunately there’s no related technology to un-blur a moving subject.
This was so cool I had to repost it!
I Love xkcd from NoamR on Vimeo.
Now, if only Randall Munroe would respond to my emails and let me use a few comics in my textbook…
[UPDATE!] He said YES, so I’m reprinting his Map of the Internet in Elementary Information Security, assuming things progress as expected.
A couple of weeks ago, I was phoned by the St. Paul Pioneer Press. They offered me six weeks of the paper for free. All I had to do at the end of 6 weeks was write “Cancel” on the invoice.
I assume this was a last-gasp attempt to boost circulation at the end of the big Back-To-School advertising season. I’ve received this sort of offer from them in years past.
This morning my wife fielded a call from the Pioneer Press disavowing the offer. I also received an invoice in the mail TODAY, instead of receiving it in six weeks. Thus, my free offer has been aborted about five weeks early.
Continue reading 'Pioneer Press Reneges'»
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