Voder-Vocoder

A fool and his money are soon parted. I, on the hand, felt that the economy needed stimulating. So I bought a new sub-notebook computer. It’s a Sony VAIO PCG-SRX87 (not to be confused with a Swarny WOW). I meant to install linux on it as soon as possible, but soon gave up, seeing as the install program failed to recognize either my DVD drive or hard drive.

So instead, I installed a lot of cygwin stuff on top of XP. I’m using windowmaker on xfree86 on cygwin.

Now I have five different ways to connect to the internet from the notebook.

1. Dialing in to my isp.
2. Dialing into work.
3. Wired ethernet to wherever.
4. Wireless ehternet where I can find it. (I’ve been moderately successful with this. Mark’s house has wireless, it worked there. I’ve also found a signal at the Memorial Union, although I couldn’t get the authentication to work. The other day, I found an open network from the stifskeller. I am tempted to chalk it, but that might be considered graphiti when you do it on the inside of a building. I think a better thing to do would be to get out my pocket knife and carve the warmark into the table. Then noone would notice. )
5. Wireless ethernet to connect to my desktop. Then ssh into the
   desktop, start the ppp conection remotely, and use X11 forwarding to
   run browser remotely.

I started reading the Anarchy FAQ the other day. In order for me to be an anarchist, someone is going to have to show me that a 100% anarchist society would work. On the other hand, I do believe that anarchy works in certain situations. I’d like to see the internet become even less organized. We shouldn’t rely so much on DNS. DNS is not the internet.

The reason I’m thinking about this is that I’d like to see someone organize a wireless cooperative in this city. The idea is to buy bandwidth in bulk and distribute it throughout the city using cheap wireless hardware.

Fun links: one and two.

A while back I purchased a subscriotion to Salon. So far, I’m happy with it. It’s better than most newspapers that I’ve ever subscribed to. Especially considering how much I hate killing trees just to print up boring sports scores or 14 hour old stock prices.

This image on the left is just me playing around with the gimp and my digital camera. Nothing all that cool. All the same, I’m happy with the way she looks.

Here’s a decent weblog. This is really more of a reminder for me to bookmark it.

Today is columbus day. Do we really need this holiday anymore? However, it does make sense. It would be pretty hypocritical to have a “Gee we’re sorry, Native Americans, that we took away your land and killed most of you.” day. At least we’re consistant.

Some cool things in my life:

1. I heard Stephen Wolfram talk. That was much cheaper than buying his book. And I don’t need another thick book to work on at the moment. I’m currently trying to get through Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. It has taken me a year to get through 15% of the book.
2. Last sunday I heard a live harpsichord performance of the first prelude & fugue from The Well-Tempered Klavier. That was unexpected.
3. I finally got the broken seat in my car fixed. I am no longer driving a wreck-waiting-to-happen.

Cool Factoid of the week: Owen Taylor says, “Support for changing resolutions on the fly was just added to XFree86 CVS a couple of days ago.”

Inane Comment of the Week: “If cloning is banned then only bans will have clones!”

Cool link of the week: Checker Shadow Illusion.

Coming soon: my review of Psyche.

For some years now, I’ve had crass commercialism hidden away on the book section of my site. Now I’ve moved it to the front page. Why, Hal, why?

1. Every product that I encourage you to buy, I do so first because I think it’s a good piece of art, and the artist deserves support.
2. This server costs me a few of dollars a month in rent, and the
   domain name cost money, too. This is a better way to offset that cost
   than banner ads (which are much more tacky).

More Linux news. (Skip to the next section if this bores you.)

RedHat is the distro I use at home, for good or bad. Mostly good. Since I got a job, I’ve occasionally supported them by buying shrink-wrapped products. I plan on continuing this practice. And I thank RedHat for making their iso’s available for free to college kids with no money.

Anyway, RedHat Linux 8.0 came out this week. I tried 6.0 and 7.0 when they each came out, with mixed results. So I am inclined to wait until the bugs are sorted out, at least until 8.1.

But there are a couple of drawbacks to that plan. I’m going to miss out on the newest versions of several packages that I use. One thing I especially want is a newer version of Evolution, which I’ve begun using for IMAP mail recently. (I like Evolution’s gpg support.)

The biggest thing introduced in 8.0 is antialiased fonts. Antialiased fonts in X11 make me salivate. I’ve been waiting for that day for over three years. Over three years.

Should I wait, or should I go for a bugfest with antialiased fonts? The more I think about this, the more I want to try out 8.0.

I am against screen savers. Why?

• Any good GUI should automatically blank the screen after some amount of time. For instance, XFree86 can be set up with screen blanking using xset.
• Most screen savers are no more interesting than flying toasters. Granted, some of the programs written for xscreensaver are cool, but even the coolest graphical hack gets old after so many repetitions.
• They waste power. Lots of it. They keep the CPU sufficiently occupied that it can not go into power saving mode. And monitors are even worse.
• I can’t sleep with a screensaver bothering me.

This week is be nice to your car week. I’ve already taken part in the celebrations by:

1. Replacing the valve cover gasket that’s been leaking oil for months.
2. Putting in new oil.
3. Replacing the fan belt that has been whining for the last 3000 miles.
4. Replacing the worn brake pads.
5. Taking it to the car wash, where the inside was vacuumed and cleaned.
   Note that all of the above was performed by trained professionals. I wouldn’t know what to do with a brake pad.
6. Ordered a replacement for the part of my seat that broke.
   I will attempt to make this repair. Wish me luck.