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5201

Living Room / Re: NSA Whistleblower interesting technical details

« Last post by 40hz on September 13, 2012, 11:58 AM »

^Likely that's a variation of the Coventry gambit.

But the goal of this sort of thing isn't to prevent crime. It's to protect the security and secrecy of certain entrenched political interests.

Like Hoover said, justice is incidental to enforcing law and order. So is fighting crime since people who are victimized by criminals provide the convenient benefit of demanding more restrictive laws and a larger police presence to enforce them.

To those who pull strings, ongoing violent crime is a win-win. Especially for the proponents of expanded government authority.

5202

General Software Discussion / Re: Roboform, crippling the export function and Bits Du Jour censorship

« Last post by 40hz on September 13, 2012, 11:43 AM »

@Steven - not so much "seems" as does make you do a lot more.  I use Keypass and it's Linux cousin. And you are absolutely correct. Getting auto entry to work is a fiddly exercise at best. And occasionally it's also study in frustration since it sometimes "just won't work" with some websites, no matter what you do.

That said, I still prefer it I over anything that stores passwords to somebody else's servers. But I'm the " wears suspenders AND a belt" type when it comes to passwords.
 

5203

Living Room / Re: Write until you pass out!?

« Last post by 40hz on September 12, 2012, 10:28 PM »

Not that I haven't courted disaster more than once...

-Stoic Joker (September 12, 2012, 01:28 PM)

That's something to a void.

-cranioscopical (September 12, 2012, 04:48 PM)

What an abyss-mal pun that was!!!

-MilesAhead (September 12, 2012, 08:26 PM)

Miles has just fireed his opening valley...

5204

Living Room / Re: Write until you pass out!?

« Last post by 40hz on September 12, 2012, 05:29 PM »

Of course there's some things I've read that made me wish more that the authors had passed out before they had written.

5205

Living Room / Re: NSA Whistleblower interesting technical details

« Last post by 40hz on September 12, 2012, 05:24 PM »

Wow! Can you believe they did that?

Seriously however, that's the real problem with surveillance technologies. They're addictive and they beg to be used. Sad when the people who have sworn an oath to protect the United States of America and all that it stands for have probably done more in the last 20 years to undermine it than the efforts of any "Evil Empire" ever did.

But that's what happens when the paranoia and political ideologies of some in power no longer allows them to see the fundamental difference between acts of patriotism and acts of treason. And once such people adopt the premise that "the ends justify the means," there can no longer be any difference.

5206

Living Room / Re: 1080p playback: hardware discussion

« Last post by 40hz on September 12, 2012, 05:03 PM »

I know it sounds like overkill, but I need a full desktop pc if I'm going to do experiments.

-superboyac (September 12, 2012, 04:22 PM)

It does not sound like overkill at all to me. If you're conducting experiments, and you're not able to run virtual machines, you're creating a lot more work and expense for yourself than you need to. And you can't do something like VMs or serious multitasking on most singleboard computers.
 

5207

Living Room / Re: 1080p playback: hardware discussion

« Last post by 40hz on September 12, 2012, 03:38 PM »

How about XBMC on a Raspberry Pi?

The MPEG-2 license will only cost an additional $3.79. And the VC-1 codec costs $1.90. And that's for registered fully legal use. Read more here.


I plan on running OpenELEC on mine - if I ever get it.

5208

Living Room / Re: Trick-or-treat caramel onions

« Last post by 40hz on September 12, 2012, 03:31 PM »

Well, I used to cook steak with carmelised onions (fry onions with a little sugar till they brown).
Onions are quite sweet when cooked, so why not go the whole hog and do caramel ones -
I'd try them

-tomos (September 12, 2012, 03:12 PM)

Agree. Sounds like it should work!

5209

Living Room / Re: Write until you pass out!?

« Last post by 40hz on September 12, 2012, 03:13 PM »

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said it best when he told one hapless attorney: "This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice."

Don't look to the courts for justice. It's not what they do.

Then there's this:

Justice is incidental to law and order.  ~J. Edgar Hoover

Hmm...

Apparently it's not what the Judicial Branch thinks it does either.

5210

Living Room / Re: Trick-or-treat caramel onions

« Last post by 40hz on September 12, 2012, 02:30 PM »

I think I want to try one of those. What type of onion do they use?

--------------

My town pretty much killed the practice of door-to-door 'trick or treating.' The town now throws parties at the schools for the kids.

That's hilarious. It's both a trick AND a treat! But when I was a kid my mom made me throw away anything that wasn't still in it's original wrapping. If it wasn't wrapped, it went in the trash.

-Deozaan (September 12, 2012, 02:28 PM)

Pretty much the rule in my house too except we were allowed to keep things like red candy apples (which were the Holy Grail of Halloween treats!) or some of those little mixed treat bags, provided we and our parents "knew" the neighbors who gave them to us. And since everybody knew everybody around where I lived, we got to keep most of what we collected - as long as we stayed in the immediate neighborhood.


Note: it was a disaster of near biblical proportions when the neighborhood grandmother "old Mrs. Blier" finally turned 70 and moved down to N. Carolina to live with her daughter and son-in-law. That was the end of red candy apples on Halloween in my neighborhood. She was one sweet lady. She used to do an 'open house' for the kids on Halloween. She provided treats, hot cider, a bathroom to use so you didn't need to go back home to use one. It was like a Halloween homebase for us. And she made these fantastic (extra-cinnamon!) red candy apples. Sometimes (if she thought the other kids weren't looking) she'd slip an extra candy apple into your bag - always with a wink and an admonishment not to "say anything about it" to the other kids. However, truth was, almost all of us ended up getting a second apple that way before the night was over.  

Halloween just wasn't the same once she was gone.

5211

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: SilverNote

« Last post by 40hz on September 12, 2012, 11:38 AM »

@adamc - Thx! That answered my question. Appreciate the quick reply too.

5212

Living Room / Re: Modern and creative electrical outlets, power strips, sockets and switches

« Last post by 40hz on September 12, 2012, 10:49 AM »

The baseboard "picket fence" idea was also pretty clever. Relatively easy to implement as a homebrew project too. But I'd skip the pointed tops and just go with a rounded or flat shape and put the wire slots more like 6"-8" (or 150-200 mm) apart.
 

5213

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: SilverNote

« Last post by 40hz on September 12, 2012, 10:37 AM »

40hz - There is an 80 notes per notebook limit with the free version and no limit with the premium version (and there's no limit on the number of notebooks with either version). The largest notebook that I routinely use has just over 2,000 notes (average about 2-3 pages each).

-adamc (September 12, 2012, 10:11 AM)

Understood. But what I was more interested in was the functional limits for the program. I worry because even though a database may not have a limit in theory, it must have one in reality. Usually it's a limitation of the underlying 'engine' rather than the amount of RAM these days.

So what I was more concerned about was encountering a situation like Microsoft had with some versions of Outlook where if your PST filesize went a little over 1.2 Gb (not hard to do if you saved a lot of messages with attached PDFs), it became inaccessible because Outlook could no longer handle it.

The real problem wasn't so much the filesize limits as the fact Outlook gave no warning nor did it gracefully degrade. You went from "working" to "broken" in one fell swoop. And the data 'recovery' process suggested by Microsoft was a kludgey hack and a royal pain to go through even when it did work. (And it didn't always.)

So that's why I was wondering about absolute file sizes.

5214

Living Room / Re: What books are you reading?

« Last post by 40hz on September 12, 2012, 10:17 AM »

^I've been dorking with Que's WordPress In Depth the last few weeks.

Be forewarned - it isn't.

I'd call it more like "WordPress for the clueless." And I'm very disappointed since most of the In Depth titles have been quite good in the past.

This book feels disorganized. But that may well be because WordPress itself is rather disorganized - besides being mostly written in pHp - which (from my admittedly limited experience with it so far) has to be the single most sloppy, poorly implemented, and sprawling of any scripting language.

There's nothing in this book you couldn't get by looking around online or reading the official Codex.

Not recommended.

5215

General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox 15 less of a memory hog

« Last post by 40hz on September 12, 2012, 09:20 AM »

^I'm seeing a lot of exactly that on YouTube pages.

5216

Living Room / Re: Raspberry Pi's $35 Linux PC

« Last post by 40hz on September 12, 2012, 09:18 AM »

^I've been given to understand Cthulhu sits on that school's Board of Trustees.

5217

Living Room / Re: Modern and creative electrical outlets, power strips, sockets and switches

« Last post by 40hz on September 12, 2012, 09:09 AM »

I'd like to see that "plug with a hole" concept become more popular.

5218

Living Room / Re: Raspberry Pi's $35 Linux PC

« Last post by 40hz on September 12, 2012, 08:56 AM »

Ok...something I've been waiting to see happen has happened!

They have built a supercomputer out of Lego blocks and 64 Raspberry Pi boards. It has a total of 1TB of RAM (via 16Gb SD cards installed on each Raspberry Pi); and it runs on standard AC mains power. Cost is about $2500 for the hardware. All software was obtained from F/OSS sources.

Awesome!

You can read more about it on the phys.org website. Link to the full article here.


Professor Cox and his son James with the Raspberry Pi supercomputer

Engineers build Raspberry Pi supercomputer
September 11, 2012

(Phys.org)—Computational Engineers at the University of Southampton have built a supercomputer from 64 Raspberry Pi computers and Lego.

The team, led by Professor Simon Cox, consisted of Richard Boardman, Andy Everett, Steven Johnston, Gereon Kaiping, Neil O'Brien, Mark Scott and Oz Parchment, along with Professor Cox's son James Cox (aged 6) who provided specialist support on Lego and system testing.

Professor Cox comments: "As soon as we were able to source sufficient Raspberry Pi computers we wanted to see if it was possible to link them together into a supercomputer. We installed and built all of the necessary software on the Pi starting from a standard Debian Wheezy system image and we have published a guide so you can build your own supercomputer."
.
.
.
< Read the rest of this article here.>

As was noted in the above article, Professor Cox was also good enough to provide full details (available online or via PDF download) so you can roll your own if you're feeling ambitious.

I don't know what's more impressive: the fact they built this thing - or that they were able to score 64 Raspberry Pi boards to do it!

(I'm still waiting for the one board I ordered.  )

5219

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: SilverNote

« Last post by 40hz on September 12, 2012, 05:33 AM »

@adamc - first up, welcome to Donation Coder. I think you're going to like it here.

Second, out of curiosity, have you tested for the maximum file size (or number of items) for a notebook? And if so, what is it? I ask because I sometimes need to assemble very large data collections. So I always worry about lockups, file corruption, or getting frozen out of a collection if it inadvertently exceeds a program's limits.
 

5220

General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox 15 less of a memory hog

« Last post by 40hz on September 12, 2012, 05:02 AM »

I'm having scrolling problems occasionally too - page freezes when scrolling with mouse wheel.

-tomos (September 12, 2012, 03:45 AM)

Same here. However, the other problem I mentioned previously regarding lock-ups when attempting to open new tabs seems to have mysteriously gone away. Weird...

5221

General Software Discussion / Re: School Regrets Swapping Laptops For iPads

« Last post by 40hz on September 11, 2012, 10:32 PM »

Wasn't meaning to be a boar…

-cranioscopical (September 11, 2012, 10:03 PM)

You weren't. No ham done.

5222

Living Room / Re: Recommend some music videos to me!

« Last post by 40hz on September 11, 2012, 09:15 PM »

first...the violin chick is hot and I want her to move in with me.

-superboyac (September 11, 2012, 08:11 PM)

Gently...

Some of the folks at CBN are like family to me.

5223

General Software Discussion / Re: School Regrets Swapping Laptops For iPads

« Last post by 40hz on September 11, 2012, 06:42 PM »

@ Chris - thanks for spotting my typo since I suspect you won't buy it as being my own coinage.

I did type that on a smartphone which ties in very nicely with your earlier observation about rooms and keyholes.

Oh yeah...I fixed it too, ok?

5224

Living Room / Re: Recommend some music videos to me!

« Last post by 40hz on September 11, 2012, 06:06 PM »

@tomos - Thanks for the above. Never heard of a tin fiddle before. Interesting video about fiddle playing in general too.

A few of the CBN people have done cigarbox violins. Some of the results have been surprising. This particular one by Elmar Zeilhofer sounds quite amazing in the hands of an obviously talented and classically trained player by the name of Phoebe:

Although you'd never mistake the sound of a box violin for that of a fine concert instrument, that doesn't take away from just how good it does sound. Something that flies in the face of the myth that decent sounding violin-type instruments are beyond the scope of the average instrument builder to create.

Elmar is also involved in several other interesting projects such as this experimental "harp" guitar. This design combines several old ideas (i.e. 'harp' strings) with some modern innovations such as his own "flat pickup" design and using the obscure 'sliding rail' mount for a magnetic guitar pickup.

The results are wonderful:

 

5225

General Software Discussion / Re: School Regrets Swapping Laptops For iPads

« Last post by 40hz on September 11, 2012, 05:18 PM »

Surprised?

Did any of them try typing anything longer than a paragraph on a touchscreen and then tell the school staff you can just as easily write a report on a tablet as you can a laptop?

Our source says staff were initially thrilled at the prospect. “Most staff are IT illiterate and jumped at the chance of exchanging their laptop for an iPad,” he writes.

Nice phrase: "IT illiterate." That's the problem in a nutshell. Talk about buying the proverbial "pig on in a poke."