Look! A blog post!

This morning I posted a link to an anti-DRM comic on my Facebook feed.

There was a comment thread that I wanted to save, so I decided to put it into a blog post.

A friend posted the following comment (slightly edited):

A. I use that very same system to legally download audiobooks from Henn Cty Library and once you figure it out the first time it's fine.

B. I think that DRM is meant to protect the rights of the artist and isn't just something created by lawyers to bug us.

C. DRM wouldn't need to be so complicated if people were honest and just simply didn't desire to steal copyright content.

My response was as follows:

A. I'm glad it works for you. But why should I have to "figure it out" to listen to an audiobook? But what about the people who don't run Windows? Can I listen to these audio books on my Linux laptop? I doubt it. Also, any extra software you have to install adds more complexity to the computer. I already have at least three ways to play mp3s on my computer. Can you listen to these audiobooks on your non-iPod MP3 player? Can you burn them to a CD and listen to them in your car? These are all legal uses, but the DRM stops you from doing them. Additionally, DRM software quite often slows the whole system down, or worse, has rootkits or backdoors in it. Google for Sony rootkit sometime.

B. DRM is designed to prevent consumers from using content in legal ways, not protect the artists. When you buy a book, it's yours to do what you like with (within reasonable copyright limits). You can lend it do someone - try that with a DRM audiobook. You can sell it - try that with a DRM audio book. "But we are talking about a library book here" you say. Okay, when you check a book out of the library you can't sell it, but you can lend it to a friend. DRM is a product of the media corporations and is designed to cripple your rights as a consumer so they can make more money. The media giants scream about piracy, but there have been many studies that show its less prevalent then they say it is. As a matter of fact, studies have shown that many people who download music illegally go out and buy the albums. Other studies have shown that releasing content in non-DRM forms results in MORE sales, not fewer. There are many artists that have spoken out against DRM and there are even artists that would like to release their art in non-DRM formats but the media corporations will not let them.

C. See my comments in B. But also, why do you think it is acceptable to punish the legal consumers because other people do illegal things? DRM does not stop anyone from downloading the content illegally. I guarantee you that any audiobook you download in DRM format from the library is available in non-DRM format on the internet. How is the DRM protecting the content? It's not. All DRM can be and is broken. The only thing that DRM does is add hassle for the legal consumers. Why is this acceptable?

DRM and the media lobbyists also brought us the DMCA - one of the worst laws ever passed.

If you are truly interested in why so many people are anti-DRM you can start your research at these links:


http://www.wired.com/listening_post/2007/02/how_to_explain_/

http://www.eff.org/issues/drm

http://www.learnoutloud.com/content/blog/archives/2006/11/the_top_10_argu.html

And for information about the DMCA and why it's so bad, you can start here:

http://www.anti-dmca.org/whats-wrong.html

Cool. Here's my 15 minutes.

I emailed my "Christian Side Hug" posting to Melissa over at Shakesville and Deeky put a link to it in his post about it!

Woot! Welcome Shakers! 450+ hits already.

Srsly?


"Gimme That Christian Side Hug"

This is so much in this video that is so weird.

Christians are so hung up about sex that they can't even hug face to face?

The juxtaposition of claiming to be a "rough rider" and being scared that you'll get aroused by a "front hug" is very funny to me.

Add in the whole idea of "Christian Gansta Rap" (and yes, it's supposed to be Gansta - sideways hats, sirens and gun shots) just adds another level of hilarity.

(And yes, that's the Star Wars Imperial March they are rapping over.)

[Transcript] [I can't believe I listened to it over and over again to try and get the words...]

(gun shots, sirens)
Oh yeah!
Hands Up!
2009!
What's up Ladies and Gentlemen?
Ya'll ready to party up in here?

(chorus)
Gimme that Christian side hug
That Christian side hug
Gimme that Christian side hug
That Christian side hug
I'm a rough rider
Filled up with Christ's love
Gimme that Christian side hug
That Christian side hug

(rapper 1)
Hoopties are the EG rule so
Pay attention, it's essential
This ain't no front hug zone
You ain't that fly, you ain't my jones(?)
Stop! and listen
No front hugs and no kissin'
I ain't that scared to call yo' mama
You'll be ridin' home wit a coma [mimes hitting - others fall down]
I got my crew
You ain't got nothin
Follow these rules
'Cuz D ain't bluffin
Now ah, you ain't no rabbi
You ain't no priest
So rise up off me
Like the (garbled) with no piece
Now ah, don't use that front hug, boy
That (garbled)
That's inappropriate
You back up off her 'cuz
We wanna keep our minds pure
Wanna keep away from sin
That means it's you too girl
(garbled) arms around him

(chorus)

(chorus)

(rapper 2)
We be walkin' like
We be talkin' like
We be side huggin'
Every day and night
It's how we do, boo
This ain't no club
So don't be hatin' on me when I show no love
We livin' holy
It ain't no thing
So put your hands in the air and let that shoulder hang
I'm goin' global
'Cuz you don't know me
I'm buyin' babies like Angelina Jolie [wtf?]
So quit that huggin'
And slow down mama
And hit my fist like President Obama
Now, Democratic shift in the Congress
Repub! (?)
Democratic shift in the Congress
Repub! (?)
Democratic shift in the Congress
Repub! (?)

(chorus)

(chorus)

(rapper 3)
I'm a married man
You know I can hold hands
Front hug all day long
With no other demands
But as for all of you
Until you say "I do"
No front huggin' or PDA
Or EG time is through
But some of ya'll is slick
Try to pull this trick
Your hug starts from the side
But soon it turns legit
So if you end up here
Then go ahead and scream it:
"When I hug people I leave room for the Holy Spirit"
If a girl walks up
With her arms spread wide
And she's front hug bound
With that look in her eyes
You'd better
Turn to the side
Pat her on the back
Jesus never hugged nobody like that! [how do they know that?]
Screamin'!

(chorus)

(chorus)

(gun shots, breaking glass, everyone falls down)

Well, new to us anyway.

Just got done buying a 1997 Volkswagen Jetta GLX with the VR6 motor in it. It was owned by someone who worked in a body shop, so the body is in pretty darned good shape. It's starting to get some more rust bubbles, but in general it's good.

164,000 miles on it and it drives pretty good. Needs a good cleaning inside, but it's not too dirty.





Sad to say, the Neon is now on the block. It needs more work put into it than it's worth.

Got the K1100RS all put back together last night and drove it to work today.

Here's a shot of it's new skin.

Just got back from a trip to the St. Louis Park Home Depot and I almost smashed up the truck on the way.

Heading east on 394 I get off on the Xenia/Park Place exit. This ramp (if you haven't seen it) is three lanes wide at the end. One left turn lane, one left turn or go straight lane and one right turn lane.

The light was red as I hit the bottom of the ramp. I was going about 60 and coasting down. There were four cars stopped in the center lane at the light and a Jeep Cherokee heading up the ramp in front of me.

I put on the blinker for a left turn and head for the far left lane. The Jeep puts on his right blinker and heads for the far right lane.

As I was about halfway up the ramp in the left lane the light turned green. I started accelerating again to make the light and beat the cars in the middle lane through the corner. I was probably doing about 40.

At the last possible moment the Jeep decides he wants to turn left. And he wants to do it from the far left lane. The lane I'm in. He puts on his left turn signal and makes about a 90 degree turn across the lanes right in front of me. Frankly I'm surprised he didn't clip the back end of the last car in the middle lane, he left it that late.

I've been watching him - since my spidey sense was tingling - so I see his blinker and as soon as I realize he's coming all the way over into my lane I stomp on the brakes, jam on the horn and steer as far to the left as possible.

By the time I get stopped he's in front of me at about a 45 degree angle and my front right corner can't be further than 2 inches from his door. My horn is still blaring and his window is open, so I know he knows I'm there.

What do you think he does next?

He completely ignores me and the fact that I just about smashed in the whole side of his Jeep and heads up the ramp and around the corner.

Most annoyingly he turns left again on to the service road and doesn't go to Home Depot! I so wanted to yell at him!

I'm happy the ABS helped me stop (I'm sure faster then without) but I sure missed the sound of locked up tire squealing.

If it wouldn't have been such a hassle for me I would have steered a little less and not braked quite so hard. But of course, I would have been hitting him from the rear and it would have been all my fault.

Putz.

In case you didn't notice, I've gotten a twitter account and have added my tweets to the left sidebar.

My account name is twforeman if you care to follow my stream. It's golden....

Daniel Miessler has posted a top ten list of the most important Firefox plugins for the InfoSec Professional.

It's a pretty good list - I knew about a couple of them.

I have them all installed now.

Get your mind out of the gutter.

First off we have Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pwning the fuck out of the Dumbest Congressperson on the Planet, Republican Mike Pence of Indiana:


Transcript here

Next we get to see Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pwning the fuck out of Republican Chris Smith of New Jersey on Reproductive Rights:

Transcript here
I just love seeing the words "Secretary of State Hillary Clinton".

(h/t to Shakesville!)

Yes, I am referring to Michelle Bachman. That big bag of bat-shit crazy that we (well not me, as I'm not in her district) sent to Washington.

Michelle is a model Republican in that she likes to make stuff up. Hell, let's call it like it is, she tells lies. And the main stream media doesn't call her on it.

Good thing we have bloggers like Wonkette:

Michele Bachmann’s got her name in the newspapers again! This happens very easily: go on the wingnut’s radio show, get asked “what’s the reaction” in Minnesota to the fact that the state has an “openly” Muslim congressman (Keith Ellison) who knows Muslim people (Barack Obama?), and argue that the liberal media is not concerned enough about this very obvious terrorism, what with the Flying Imams and stuff who probably all know Ellison from Muslim parties and Al Qaeda.

The transcript is full of teh crazy.

The four co-founders of website The Pirate Bay have been found guilty of assisting the distribution of illegal content online by a Swedish court today and have been sentenced to a year in jail and a $3.6m (£2.4m) fine.

Read the full article and view an interactive timeline of the case on The Guardian's web site.

(Pirate flag graphic from Immolation Central - Used under CC license)

(Sorry about the lame image lapping down into the previous post - this style has some issues I guess.)

Hey, a technical blog post with real, useful information in it!

I was trying to get a server setup at work with 802.1q VLAN tagging and it wasn't working. It turns out that if you don't want to use a native VLAN configuration on your switch the doco is all WRONG. I could not find anything on teh Google that explained the correct configuration for this to work.

First off, you need the 'vconfig' package installed. All 2.6 kernels support VLAN tagging, so you don't need anything special there.

If you have a native VLAN configured on the switch, it's easy. You just configure your NIC device (eg. eth0) to use the native VLAN and then add the tagged VLAN information in an ifcfg-eth0.tag file for each VLAN. That works as described all over the net.

But if you don't want to have a native VLAN configured on your switch then you have an issue.

Even the RedHat doco is wrong. They say that you can strip out all the lines in your ifcfg-eth0 file leaving just these two:

DEVICE=eth0
ONBOOT=yes

Then you create your tagged interface files (eg. ifcfg-eth0.9) like this:

DEVICE=eth0.9
BOOTPROTO=static
BROADCAST=10.9.255.255
HWADDR=00:22:19:19:52:BB
IPADDR=10.9.0.100
NETMASK=255.255.0.0
NETWORK=10.9.0.0
TYPE=Ethernet
ONBOOT=yes
VLAN=yes

But this DOESN'T work. When you restart the networking stack it tosses an error about wireless networking (?) and then the VLAN creation errors out with "eth0 device doesn't exist" errors because eth0 doesn't come up.

WTF?

After beating my head on the desk for a bit, I thought "maybe it's trying to do a DHCP request or something for eth0 and failing." And that's what it appears to be doing.

Adding the line:

BOOTPROTO=none

to the ifcfg-eth0 file makes it all work just fine.

I reallly <3 Jon Stewart.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Baracknophobia - Obey
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis Political Humor

"I think you might be confusing tyranny with losing"

"See, now you're in the minority. It's supposed to taste like a shit taco."

So true.

Two weeks ago I got an email from my brother-in-law telling me there were two pinball machines up for auction by the State of Minnesota.

Last week I won the auction for a 1979 Gottlieb Genie pinball machine!

I got it home and immediately tore it apart for cleaning. It was in pretty good shape, but it was filthy.

I cleaned off the playfield, replaced all the rubber bits and a bunch of the light bulbs. The Marvin 3m site has a great page about all the things you should do to an old System 1 machine, so I did most of them:

• Changed the big capacitor on the power supply
  
• Tested all the coils to make sure they weren't burned out
  
• Tested all the transistors on the driver board to make sure they were good
  
• Ran additional ground wires to all the circuit boards
  
• Replaced the on-board memory battery
  

I did not replace all the pins in the connectors as they all looked fine. If I start having issues I can do it later.

I also bought some corn cob cleaning media at a gun shop and put a bunch of the metal parts into an old rock tumbler I bought at a garage sale for $5. Man, that worked sweet! The ball arch and ball gate cleaned up so well they look brand new! I'm going to have to tumble some of the parts on my other machines now.

Last night I got it all back together and was able to play it. It all works! There are a few bulbs with bad sockets (dim/flickering) and a couple switches need tweaking, but overall it's in good shape.

Rosalyn managed to put up a score of 475,000 on her first game and totally kicked my ass!

I also spent a bit of time to figure out why my Drop-A-Card machine wasn't resetting correctly. Turns out there was a contact on the reset relay that needed a bit of adjusting. Sleuthing with the ladder diagram and chasing some wires reveled the problem.

This brings the total number of pinball machines in the house up to three:

• 1971 Gottlieb Drop-A-Card
  
• 1974 Gottlieb Sky Dive
  
• 1979 Gottlieb Genie
  

While it may be pushing it to declare the motorcycle season has started here in Minnesota, it did reach 60+ degrees today!

I rode the sidecar to work and back today and then got a ride to Home Depot on the FJ1200 after dinner.

There was some ice on the roads this morning and I was glad I had the sidecar as an outrigger.

The roads are covered with sand and oil and when they are wet they are slippery. I had both wheels slide a bit on an on-ramp on the FJ! We need a good rain or two to clean the roads now.

In other motorcycle news, I've got one of the crabs for the BMW R100RS rebuilt and I thought it would be fun to take a before and after photo of the two crabs.


Two crabs

I bought a pair of stock Bings to put back on the R100RS a while ago. I ordered the rebuild kit, took one apart and then just stopped. I finally decided to finish up the job and put the one back together.

After taking the photo above I tore apart the second one and started cleaning it up.

I'll have to buy some parts to put these back on the bike, but it should be more reliable than the Mukinis that I put on it a long time ago.