Thursday, February 14, 2002
Seriously, if I lived in the US I'd get the fuck out now. On top of the endless stories about the widening rift between the US and the rest of the world, with war on the EU and Japan pending, along with potentially global race war, the domestic crackdowns are getting even more scary. Did you know that now SERIAL CABLES are illegal? Did you know that just possessing the ability to potentially write software that might be able to circumvent copyright is punishable by life in prison (in the land of the free anyway)?
I have the technical skills required to circumvent most copyright protection scheme — when I was sixteen I was working with McQuaid (he was doing software development for the same company I was), so I've got I guess 11 years of experience testing the waters on copy protection circumvension. Hell, I've got the technical skills to take out a big jet even with the current stupid security systems. It's not that hard (certainly well withing the grasp of any top-10% highschool grad). I can't see how knowledge makes you either a pirate or a terrorist. I have no particular motivation to either steal or kill. Are we now banning education and intelligence? Because that's what this is moving toward.
That said, there will come a point at which those of us that have been declared terrorists by the US government start
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Wednesday, February 13, 2002
I added a few more features to my monitoring tool… It still watches the sites for “emergencies”, but now it's got a couple commands it can execute, including watching my iam.alive box. To be honest, this won't help me answer them, but maybe it will help catch the essentials…
Three photos of it in action:
Wednesday, February 13, 2002
Well, my video overlay monitoring tool seems to be working. Right now it's just keeping an eye on the server speeds and the fraud logs on BME. I'll add a bunch more to it later (for example, alerting me if I get emails from specific people, telling me when my favorite news sites get updated, etc.).
(BTW, it only displays the times when it senses a problem; most of the time the screen is blank.)
Tuesday, February 12, 2002
The other project I'm working on is chewing away on a major rendering task, so I had some time to fiddle with a blue beasties shirt (sorry, if you know what a blue beastie is then this means something to you, if not, don't give it any worry) by request… Here's what I came up with. Hopefully people like it:
Tuesday, February 12, 2002
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| Very cool book that I got this morning in the mail! Thank you. I've skimmed it cover to cover and have started reading it in more depth. There's a lot of poetic aspect that to be honest is difficult to interpret cross-culturally, but I think I understand the message it's trying to convey.
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One of my other projects that maybe I'll have a chance to work on today… It's a video overlay device; what it'll do is allow me to display emergency messages over my TV, for example if the system detects a server problem it can notify me if I'm just relaxing (thank god, I do to much of that, right?).
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Sad, sad day. I broke my first-gen Rex. In my opinion this is the best, most functional PDA ever released (the new Rex is better because it has an edit mode, but you know what I mean). Seriously, this thing may be five years out of date, but it's very useful. It does what it's supposed to do; nothing more, nothing less.
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Oh, and the Rex reminds me — before the Rex came out, IBM Japan had a similar device. It was also a PC card, and had a full keyboard (that needed a toothpick to use). If anyone remembers this litte thing, or knows where to get one, I'd love the details.
