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.
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!
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.
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.
Here are my own thoughts about learning stick shift. Kelsey learned from me, though there’s no true teacher aside from experience. I think there are two essential tricks to learning a stick shift:
1. Practice Makes Perfect.
It’s muscle and reflex training, not head training. It takes time to get the feel of the clutch, especially from a dead stop. Take advantage of opportunities to practice stop-and-go with the clutch. Be sure to do it on hills, too.
2. Listen To The Engine
The tachometer and speedometer tell you interesting things, but the sound of the engine really tells you when to shift gears. If it’s high-pitched, you need to shift. For improved gas mileage, you want to shift sooner rather than later.
[This has been revised since first posted 7/31/10]
I finally upgraded my Mac Pro to Snow Leopard. I give it a “thumbs up” because it was a smooth, trouble free process. It took about an hour, and required almost no input from me. [UPDATED 6/29, 6/30]
Aside from a stability improvement, I saw no immediate, significant changes either good or bad. That was great. Most things worked, including VMWare. I didn’t lose any functionality, either through omission, or through “GUI improvements” that emphasize more common activities at the expense of less common, but still critical, activities.
My biggest gripe is that the Apple “Pro” applications like Aperture were broken by the upgrade. I didn’t find this immediately, since I don’t use Aperture every day. But as soon as I ran Software Update, it fixed the problem. A lame arrangement, IMHO, but at least I didn’t have to go searching for the fix.
I’ve just upgraded to WordPress 3 and to whatever the latest version of Gallery 2 might be.
Both went “sort of” smoothly, though there was a bit of gear grinding to get the two to work together.
Oddly enough, once everything was properly set, I just had to be patient and various problems disappeared on their own. The linkage between WordPress and Gallery 2 works better than ever, though they seemed on the verge of divorce right after the upgrade.
This is a web site regarding the Atwood-Smith family and friends. If you are looking for materials relating to authentication, crypto, or information security, follow the link above to Cryptosmith.
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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.
Themocracy