Ubuntu 12.04 disappoints

Finally heeding the warnings that my version of Ubuntu was out of date, I upgraded my Thinkpad T42 laptop to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

Bad move. It seems the ATI Radeon Mobility 7500 video adapter which has been supported for many years is now no longer supported. My laptop is now infuriatingly slow and there’s apparently no cure except to reinstall an older, less-douchey version of Ubuntu.

Between this and Ubuntu’s dumping of the Gnome desktop I’ve about had enough of Ubuntu’s boneheaded design decisions. Looks like I’ll be taking a look at the latest Fedora. At least it’s a hometown Linux company (i.e. Red Hat).

Rocky support from Earthlink

Yesterday I discovered that at least one of Earthlink’s mail servers has been listed on a spam blackhole list, meaning mail sent through that server disappears from the Internet.

I searched in vain on Earthlink’s support page for an email address to a clueful engineer. Instead, I made do with a “live chat” with someone named “Rocky.” Rocky dutifully followed his script but instead of hearing me when I told him that Earthlink’s servers were blacklisted, Rocky had me recheck my email settings.

It’s sad when I know more than the support person who supposedly is there to help me.

Please hold for the next available agent. Your chat should begin in approximately 0 minutes. You may type your question while you wait, but you won’t be able to SEND it until your chat is assigned to an agent.

‘Rocky S’ says: Thank you for contacting EarthLink LiveChat, how may I help you today?

Rocky S: Hello, how may I assist you today?

CUSTOMER@earthlink.net: I just got a bounced email which indicates an Earthlink mail server is on a blackhole list.

Rocky S: Please stay on hold for three minutes, while I go through the issue.

CUSTOMER@earthlink.net: 550 5.7.1 Service unavailable; Client host [209.86.89.69] blocked using Trend Micro RBL+.

CUSTOMER@earthlink.net: Were you aware of this?

Rocky S: Thank you for being on hold.

Rocky S: I am sorry to hear that. I’ll do my best to resolve this issue.
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Lucid dream tracking with my Zeo

Lucid dream tracked by my Zeo

What you see above is a graph supplied by my Zeo sleep headset showing how I slept last night. The green bars indicate dream sleep while the orange bars indicate wake events. My Zeo does a fantastic job of tracking my sleep but there are moments when it gets confused. For instance, the two orange bars to the left don’t indicate when I was physically awake, they show when I was experiencing lucidity in my dream. You see, my mind was fully awake and aware in my dream. I became aware that I was dreaming while I was dreaming!
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Cheap Thoughts: automating appointments

After years of constant sessions spent updating our respective calendars, Kelly and I recently began to share our calendar details directly. It’s been much easier to know who’s supposed to be where, and it all happens automatically.

Why is it that coordinating appointments is still difficult if not impossible? I subscribe to a lot of mailing lists for charities and the like, and each one has important dates that they share with me. Yet, I have to manually add the information to my electronic calendar, risking typos and errors in the process.

Why hasn’t this been automated by now? An appointment has a set number of common fields, like date, time, description, participants, etc. It should be easy to standardize, yet everyone still does things the hard way. Why?

The iCalendar format was invented to solve this problem and most mail clients now support it. Still, it’s rare that I get an iCalendar invitation in my email: usually an event is described only in plain text. Why is this?

Facebook’s events are convenient for announcing events but this is only available to Facebook users. If someone came up with a easy-to-use calendaring server that put event details into an iCalendar format reached through a shortcut link, I think it would be heavily popular.

Ting – a different mobile phone provider

Frustrated by the glacial pace of Virgin Mobile to add newer phones to it’s prepaid service, a friend alerted me to a new phone provider called Ting. Ting was started by Tucows, the first company to bring competitive pricing to domain registrations, so I have high hopes Ting can shake up the telecom world.

Ting offers pay-for-what-you-use pricing plans. If you don’t use the minutes or data you signed up for, Ting credits your account. You have very finite control over how your plan looks as well, choosing very specific amounts of minutes, texts, and data you think you’ll use.

Ting also offers tethering with its phones, allowing you to share your phone’s Internet service with up to 5 computers. Ting also supports power users and seems open to allowing its subscribers to extend their phones’ functionality.

Overall, Ting looks to be setting itself up to make some waves in the mobile phone provider market. I hope to purchase one of Ting’s phones soon and give their service a test drive.

Making FreeNX always suspend

I’m running my Rivendell radio automation software on a virtual host, connecting to it using FreeNX. It works very well for the most part, but there’s been one little piece which could cause disaster: the FreeNX server’s habit of asking me if I want to suspend or terminate my session. Because my music will stop if the session terminates, I don’t ever want that option. I want it to always suspend.

I spent a few minutes tonight tracking down the best way to do this. It turns out the /usr/bin/nxdialog script is being called. By patching this script, I can force the suspend option every time. Problem solved!

Below is the code that does the magic:

— nxdialog.orig 2011-10-24 11:45:14.000000000 -0400
+++ nxdialog-mine 2012-03-30 21:41:33.000000000 -0400
@@ -415,6 +415,11 @@
exit 0
}

+always_suspend()
+{
+ return 3
+}
+
#
# main case statement
#
@@ -427,7 +432,7 @@
${dialog_interface}_yesno
;;
yesnosuspend)
– ${dialog_interface}_yesnosuspend
+ always_suspend
;;
panic)
${dialog_interface}_panic

You can also download the raw patch here.

Cheap Thoughts: focused magnetic fields

Magnetic lines of force

I’ve been thinking that there must be a way to focus magnetic fields to very precise shapes. As I drove to work this week, I imagined my car driving through such a field in a way that my car’s speakers vibrated from the field’s effects, creating sound as the car moved through it. I think it would be a neat trick to get sound from a car’s speakers independent of whether or not they’re connected to anything!

For a while I’ve been thinking that perhaps magnetic fields could be used as antennas. Rather than have a big, metal dish to collect signals toward a focal point, a magnetic field could be generated that would invisibly reflect radio signals toward a focal point. By strengthening or weakening the field, the virtual dish could be expanded or contracted as needed, raising or lowering the gain.

Magnetic fields are circular in nature and the challenge would be how to create a parabolic shape with a field. I also have no idea if a magnetic field can even be made to reflect radio signals. It’s an interesting idea, nonetheless.

Update 25 March: I am reminded that a device exists that can beam sound to a remote location, only for this one the receiver isn’t just a speaker, it’s a human brain! Behold MEDUSA, which makes use of the microwave auditory effect.

Digiboo DVD download kiosks

Movie Booth DVD download kiosk

Remember last year when I spied that intriguing DVD download kiosk in the Seattle airport? Looks like it is similar to the kiosk service put together by a startup company called Digiboo, according to a news story today.

The rental service, from Santa Monica, Calif.-based Digiboo, is being introduced at a time when consumers are shifting away from movie rentals to online movie streaming. Whether the Digiboo kiosks mark the next evolution in watching video, or just another dead end like the Betamax VCR, they illustrate the enduring allure of the movies even as technology morphs them into new forms.

[snip]

The first kiosks were installed at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. Next up: the Seattle and Portland airports, Thomas said. If the concept is successful, thousands of kiosks will be put in a variety of public places, he said.

I thought initially today that the booth I saw might have been a Digiboo booth but the article seems to indicate that Digiboo hasn’t been installed at the Seattle airport after all.

I guess the mystery remains as to who owns the DVD download kiosk at SEATAC.

Update 12:10 PM: I did a little Google sleuthing and believe the “Movie Booth” kiosk I saw was from a company called LightSpeed Cinema in Los Angeles. I found one press release from December 2008 that mentions that LightSpeed Cinema is Santa Monica-based, as is Digiboo. Are these companies one and the same? I’m guessing they are and the DVD kiosk I saw in Seattle is an early Digiboo model.

Here’s Digiboo’s website. Also, this press release offers more details on the company.

Yet another infographic

An Internet acquaintance forwarded to me this email he received from our infographic-making friend Tony Shin:

From: Tony Shin imtinytony@gmail.com
Date: Sat, Mar 17, 2012 at 1:17 AM
Subject: A graphic on the ethics of the wealthy
To: blah blah blah at gmail.com

Dear Editor,

While I was searching for blogs and posts that have talked about social psychology, I came across your site and wanted to reach out to see if I could get your readership’s feedback on a graphic my team and I designed, which focuses on the studies found on how those socially and financially well-off behave unethically compared to the lower ladder.

If you’re interested, let’s connect.

Thanks! =)

—
Tony Shin
@ohtinytony

The infographic in question can be viewed here.

Google search turns up many infographic mentions

This Google search on “infographic my team built” seems to find many of these spam emails posted on various websites.

Look closely and you’ll find a few sent by our friend Tony Shin, too. Here’s another, and another, and another.

Here’s a whole blog post of Tony Shin’s infographics. Here’s another.

Here’s another from Peter Kim. It was taken from the HackCollege.com website, which is (surprise!) also registered through Moniker:
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