Comments from all over (Virtual Kindle Style)

July 3rd, 2009

When the blog was the only outlet for typed thoughts and shared comments, everything got posted here (or, technicall, over at LiveJournal, as that was my blog long, long before I moved it here.) Now that we have Twitter and Facebook and whatnot, those thoughts get scattered throughout the internets.  In an effort to graft some of them back to netninja, I will attempt to summarize and/or expand upon some interesting recent tweets, comments on others’ blogs, and whatnot.

Kindle

I recently ordered a Kindle DX from Amazon.  That and the fancy new iPhone 3GS were at the top of my gadget wish list, but with AT&T’s “you pay an extra $200 because you are an early adopter” tax, I figure my existing iPhone 3G is fine for the 6 months it takes for that tax to become zero.  In fact, 6 months after that, the new-new iPhone is likely to be released.  If I am forcing myself to wait 6 months, I may as well wait another to get the good stuff.

So anyway, back to the Kindle.  I have a growing collection of PDF books, mainly due to O’Reilly’s Rough Cuts series of technical books.  And since the entirety of output on Mac OS X is PDF under the hood, it is an even more compelling file format.  At work, I have chip datasheets to read and end user documentation to edit and approve, all in PDF format.  A few of the datasheets are password protected, which the Kindle does not do, but Elcomsoft makes a handy little app to deal with that. 

The whole thing is a little weird.  A year ago, even six months ago, I was very much against the Kindle.  I am still a little on the fence regarding DRM and the inability to lend books to friends, but the PDF support of the DX has tempered that a lot.  It does read other ebook formats, unencumbered by digital restrictions, and there are a number of other stores (obviously, not as integrated into the Kindle’s system to instantly buy and download books) without DRM.  But overall, it is the size and convenience that won me over.  For example, I would read much more P.G. Wodehouse if I did not have to carry around the 700 page tome I have (casting aside the awkward reality that it is not one of the titles currently offered in Kindle format yet.)

Some titles are unlikely to make good Kindle books.  For instance, I cannot see reading something as dense as Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach on a Kindle.  Certain titles are important enough to me that I will really want a paper edition.  For the vast majority of pleasure reading, though, I can totally see using the Kindle.  For the technical topics that are so cutting-edge as to no have paper books yet, there is no choice but digital text.  Long, long, ago I used to read “pulp” scifi and mystery magazines.  Buying them at bookstores was a little inconvenient, as they were often difficult to find.  The subscription thing does not always work for me for magazines of any kind — they pile up unread.  If I actively purchase a single issue, the odds of it getting read are much, much higher than if I passively receive issues through a subscription.  I am not sure I understand it, but have read that there is a very similar psychological effect with going to the gym — I guess you value the sessions more and are more likely to use them if you pay for them individually versus having an unlimited monthly membership.  The unlimited membership makes more financial sense, but does not psychologically work for some people.  Anyway, some of those pulp magazines (Asimov, Analog, Hitchcock) are still around and available on the Kindle and I expect to pick up a few on occasion. 

As I said, I ordered the Kindle.  They sent me the leather cover, but the Kindle itself is on backorder for up to a month.  I received the cover yesterday, so for the next few weeks, I get to play “The Emperor’s New Clothes Kindle.” 

Because of this XKCD comic, my first book purchase was The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  It is rather appropriate, considering the Kindle contains a free cellular modem and links up with Wikipedia.  Confession: I have never actually owned H2G2.  The several times I read it, it was borrowed from the library.  Since then I have relived it through audiobook, two different radioplays, a British movie/miniseries, and the recent movie.  It is about time I got back to the source material.  Another side note: the iPhone Kindle reader is actually quite nice and has allowed me to start re-reading H2G2.  The automatic syncing is a hot feature, which will allow me to pick up where I left of, regardless of which device I am currently using to read.

Because I am a tinkerer at heart, I have already started researching hacking the Kindle.  It is Linux based, runs the U-Boot boot loader, has a debug serial console (requiring TTL level conversion, unfortunately, so I will have to build/find an adapter), and the user interface is reverse-engineerable Java.  It actually does not seem like that complex of a device, honestly.  It is certainly simple in comparison to the embedded Linux devices I design at work.

Style

In keeping with the book theme — in case you were wondering, The Elements of Style is available in audiobook format.  WTF?  This is a book with information and examples about the usage of apostrophes, commas, and vs. ampersand, colons and semicolons, and contains a large list of commonly misused terms.  Something tells me that the examples probably get lost in the narration, or perhaps the narration is extremely dry.

Virtuality

Due to a few tweets and blog posts about Virtuality, a television pilot that Fox paid for but for which nobody picked up the rest of the series, I had to give it a try.  Oh, man, was this a great opening episode (or now, I guess we have to call it a made-for-TV movie.) Upon reading that parts of it were in “reality TV” format, I was a bit hesitant and skeptical, but you know, it works out pretty well.  Overall, I thought this was a great blend of the human side of things and the hardcore scifi.  I am not a rocket scientist, but know a thing or two about physics, and it really looked like they did their research and hit a lot of little details that most folks would overlook.  The mystery and paranoia combined with the suspense and excitement of the go/no-go (I’m a huge sucker for event horizons, points of no return, heavy machinery spinning up, countdowns to ignition, countdowns to minimum-safe-distance, and the like) really had me on the edge of my seat throughout the whole episode movie.  It is still available for watching on Hulu for a short while (and also can be found amongst the torrent of bits) and is highly recommended.  It is just a shame that nobody bought the series after such an amazingly amazing pilot.

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Posted in Books, Gadgets, Television | No Comments »

Apologies: in retrospect and in advance

June 29th, 2009

First off, I have to apologize in both retrospect and advance if I have been snippy, stressed, or overly emotional.  I have been on some steroids recently that affect my blood pressure and stress levels, among other things.  If you take nothing else away from this post, remember that I am not currently acting like myself and keep that in mind when dealing with me in the next week or two.

I do not usually share a lot of personal details on this blog.  Emotional states other than “happy” are typically left to my offline life.  So why am I breaking that tradition here?  Because some of this is so ludicrous and embarrassing it feels therapeutic to share and make fun of.  Be warned that the rest of this entry contains emotions as well as one thing that can be filed under “too much information.”  More information than you require, even.  If this scares you, you can skip to the last paragraph and be none the worse for wear.  You have been warned.

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Since September, I have had some weird medical stuff going on in my body that has been difficult to diagnose and difficult to fix.  The exact details are both gross and unimportant.  The important thing is that, after bouncing around through several doctors, I am basically all better except for one thing that just won’t heal.  This leads up to last week’s doctor visit.  Remember when I mentioned “too much information?”  It’s not too late to stop reading.  Really, if you’re even starting to hesitate, just skip to the last paragraph.  Let us just say that it was an uncomfortable and humiliating experience involving being naked and face-down on a table while being examined with an anal-probe, not unlike a 6-inch plexiglass dildo.  Under the right circumstances, such a probing might not have been unpleasant, but it felt pretty bad then and there.  And honestly, I think the emotions that flooded in with the wiping up afterward may have been worse.  I haven’t been wiped by an adult since I was a baby in diapers — certainly never as an adult.  So already, before prescriptions, there were some bad emotions floating around.  Embarrassment, violation, uselessness, mortality, and likely others murky enough as to be difficult to name.

As treatment, I started taking the steroids [up my ass, by the way, the steroids go inside my butthole!], and I was kind of punchy for the first couple of days.  Maybe a bit more animated.  As best as I can tell, a discussion I had walking home on Saturday about some self-destructive habits I had as a late-teen/early-twenty-something led to an extremely unpleasant dream Saturday night/Sunday morning.  Then on Sunday I really noticed I was starting to feel amiss.  I was extremely short-tempered and any number of little things caused me to snap.  Totally out of character.  I have always been the calm, grounding touchstone for people around me.

Do you know that feeling when you are about to speak in public, the butterflies-puking-in-your-stomach feeling?  That was today.  All of today.  From waking up to right now this second, as I type this.  I have been on edge, but self-aware enough to temper outbursts.  In fact, I had a quick discussion with my boss this morning, alerting him to the fact that I may not be acting like myself.  Even though it was only a minute or two and pretty straightforward and matter-of-fact, I felt I had to exercise a lot of self control to stop tears from welling up toward the end of that.  Tears!  For a little bit of chit-chat that amount to the first two sentences at the top of this post.

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The good news is that I think I am self-aware enough now that I can control my overblown stress and feelings.  Even though it may feel a bit emotionally and physically unpleasant, there’s no benefit to unleashing that on unsuspecting bystanders.  The other good news is that despite the side-effects, the treatment seems to be working, and that in and of itself is totally worth it.  The side-effects pale in comparison to being sick for 10 months.

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Posted in Dear Diary | 3 Comments »

Cesar Chavez? The boxer?

June 26th, 2009

As you may or may not know, here in Portland there is a movement to rename something to Cesar Chavez Blvd.  As best as I can tell — mainly from friends, the website save39th.com, and its corresponding twitter account — The Cesar Chavez Boulevard Renaming Committee is a group of people with a lot of time on their hands and an overwhelming desire to rename something, anything, Cesar Chavez Blvd.  A year or two ago, it was all about renaming Interstate Ave, but that got pushback and I believe something about the application was botched up.  Later, it was SW 4th. Most recently, it has been about renaming 39th.  I have yet to meet anyone who is actually in favor of the renaming.

I may be a relative newbie to the PDX area, having moved here just 6 years ago, but I’m a taxpayer and a recent homeowner, and therefore have no shame in saying I’m against renaming 39th.  For me, 39th a landmark.  My first taste of Portland was the lower blocks of Hawthorne, up through 39th.  I lived about 10 blocks down from 39th.  I navigate relative to 39th, Hawthorne, Belmont, and Burnside.  To me, that number means significantly more than Cesar Chavez.

Let’s set the Wayback Machine to a point in my life when I did frequent establishments near a street named after Cesar Chavez, shall we?  In late high school or junior college, I lived in Orange County.  Because there was not much to do in The OC (and, in fact, was before it was actually called “The OC”), friends and I would often take the 45 minute drive up to LA.  Once a month, a particular set of friends and I would drive up to Union Station to meet up with some geeky folks by the bank of payphones (don’t ask), then head across the way to Philippe’s Restaurant, then later to the Denny’s across the way from the jail.  These were all landmarks along or near Cesar Chavez Ave in LA.  And you know what?

I thought Cesar Chavez Ave was named after a BOXER.  At the time, there were lots of billboards for pay-per-view fights pitting Cesar Chavez against other boxers.  The name was on the billboards, mentioned on the news, and just generally floating around the collective subconscious.  I never questioned this or gave it a second thought.  I just assumed they were one in the same.  In retrospect, I now realize it was named after the civil rights activist, but I did not consciously come to this conclusion until yesterday, when I looked him up on Wikipedia.  Part of me thought the Portland rename might have been the boxer, and part of me realized that was crazy-talk and that there is probably some other Cesar Chavez that I didn’t really care enough about to look up on Wikipedia until yesterday. 

The problem isn’t a street named or not named Cesar Chavez.  The problem is educating people about the man and his contributions to society.  Am I just going to magically know about him just because I live a mile from a street bearing his name?  Are there many streets named Abraham Lincoln Blvd?  I’m not talking Lincoln Blvd, as I know there are a number of those out there, because we’re not discussing Chavez Blvd — but the full name spelled out?  And yet, I know who Abraham Lincoln is.  I learned it in school.  I’m not confusing the guy on our money with George Washington Carver, am I?  Because I learned about each of them in school.  It seems to me that the money and attention should be focused on teaching who Cesar Chavez is in public schools.  Let the monuments to him arise naturally and organically from the public because of that education.  Heck, even throw in some advertising — some billboards and PSAs about the guy.  It seems to me that this is the sort of naming that needs to start from the bottom up, as a grassroots campaign, and not from the top down, by decree of a small, elite committee of fans. 

But that’s just the opinion of an ignorant guy who spent the first 20 years of his life near Santa Ana and Costa Mesa, in the land of undocumented workers, 40 miles from Mexico, and was never taught about Cesar Chavez.

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Posted in Dear Diary, Portland | No Comments »

Weekend Woodworking

June 22nd, 2009

Over the weekend, I selfishly took advantage of the Father’s Day sales and bought myself a sabre saw (or, as Kim calls it, the sabertooth saw), even though I am not a father (that I’m aware of, at least.) I have been starting to get ideas for things to build that were just a bit beyond the hand-powered cross-cut saw and coping saw in my tool repository.  It was time for a power saw, even if it was a low-end one.

I have not done much woodworking since junior high school.  The stuff I have been doing recently around the house has amounted to surface and trim: punching holes in plaster and drywall, cutting and attaching baseboards, replacing part of an old casement windowframe.  It was about time for a little project.

I have been saving up newspaper, magazine, and web clippings of little bits of furniture and such that would make simple projects.  One such thing was a stepstool.  You see, we have a window in the front of the house that gets a lot of sun and overlooks the bird feeder.  This is prime cat real estate, but Charlotte — the oldest of our cats — has been having trouble with his back legs in recent years.  Arthritis is setting in and he does not jump quite as well as he used to.  I thought it might be nice to put a little stepstool there to give Charlotte easier access: a cat-sized wheelchair ramp, if you will.

Over the weekend, I designed a basic little stepstool based on remnants I had in the garage.  Certain pieces of the design — the depth of the steps, for instance — were highly influenced by what scrap wood I have available.  Other pieces of the design were influenced by the environment it will be used in: the height of the table, for instance.  Overall, it turned out pretty well and the black paint job gave it a sort of piano bench elegance.  There is a minor wobble that can only be felt on a hardwood floor (fortunately, this is on carpet for now.) It can likely be fixed with a bit of shim or planing, but since I forgot to check for wobbliness before putting on some 2×4 braces, planing down an edge is a bit more difficult of an option that it should be.  In the photo, it looks like there is a bigger step between the top step and the tabletop, but that is an illusion — they should all be equidistant: from the floor to the first step, first to second, second to top, and top to table.

Kitty Stairs

If there’s interest, I can scan and post the plans, but it’s a pretty simple design.  The steps themselves are 5″x0.5″ (leftovers from bathroom baseboards.) They were routed to be curved on three edges.  The side pieces are thick plywood from a cabinet that was in the basement when we moved in (which could only be removed by disassembling.) It’s about 0.75″ thick.  The three “corners” (front, lower back, upper back) as well as the mid-back have 2×4 cross-braces to hold things together.  If I was making this for people as well as cats, I might have also put smaller cross-braces under the steps themselves, but they’re actually pretty sturdy as-is.  It was then sanded and painted.

Not bad for not having touched a power tool since the mid 80s, eh?  I’ve learned and re-learned a few lessons and will be that much more proficient with the next project.  I find the toughest part is realizing a conceptual design into a concrete implementation.  A design that is 100% on paper can be perfect.  The corners are square, the measurements are exact, and pieces fit together nicely.  When translating that into the real world, nothing is ever a perfect 90 degrees.  Measurements are only as accurate as the thickness of your pencil lead or saw blade.  Straight cuts are not.  (Admittedly, they would be if I got myself something like a radial arm saw, but I’m not ready for one of those yet.) Things don’t quite fit together correctly.  It’s the same sort of real-world quirks you get when going from pure conceptual physics to applied physics and engineering.  The perfection of a design can only be as good as the tolerances of the components and tools.  This is life.

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Two in the bush

June 20th, 2009

Something a little bit surprising happened last weekend that I briefly twittered about, but never got around to writing down.  Kim was finishing up some gardening in the front yard and Norman the cat was jumping through the grass, digging in the dirt, and just being an energetic outdoor kitty. 

After I got my stuff put away and cleaned up a bit, I took a yowling Ebenezer out on his leash.  By this point, Norman was climbing around in the hedge that separates our house from the little apartments next door.  Ebenezer was curious about the whole thing and was half in the hedge and half in the driveway.  All the while, this sparrow was behaving in what seemed like an odd way.  It would land on the driveway, chirp a bit, fly up to a nearby tree, then chirp some more, then land back down on the ground.  I later realized it was trying to distract the cats and get them to chase him away from the bushes.  There was a sudden very heavy bush-shaking *rustle*rustle*rustle* from the hedge, then Norman shot out and ran to the backyard.  Ebenezer and I chased him and found he had an adolescent sparrow in his mouth.  He was chewing on it, flipped it in the air a few times (once almost hit me in the face), and doing general cat-having-fun-but-in-torturous-ways sorts of things.  Everything said and done, he ate all of it except for one leg and part of a wing.  He continued to prowl around that bush.

Later in the same evening, as I was harvesting mint in the side yard, he came zooming by with another bird in his mouth.  It then occurred to me that birdseed is cheaper than cat food, and if I could get past the moral issues of having lots of low-hanging bird feeders, Norman could catch all of his own food.  This thought was dashed at feeding time when he yowled for food as if he was starving and hadn’t just immediately eaten two birds.  (At least, two that I’d personally witnessed — who knows how many more that I did not see?)

Part of me feels bad for the family of birds that got terrorized by Norman, but really — those birds should know to put their nest up in a high tree, not a bush with branches close enough together for a young cat to climb.

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Anonymous Pro vs Vera Sans Mono

June 15th, 2009

Last week, I saw a tweet from @brampitoyo about a new monospaced font for programmers called Anonymous Pro.  I can appreciate a good font, especially one designed with the unique needs of programmers in mind.  This font has a few extras built in, too.  The common point sizes used for coding have pre-rendered bitmaps, making display quick and consistent.  The designer went out of his way to make sure letters and symbols were non-ambiguous (for instance the slashed zero versus the foreign letter that looks like an uppercase O with a slash: Ø).

Previous to this, I had been using Vera Sans Mono for my day-to-day editing (a Linux box at work) and Consolas and/or Andale Mono on the Mac.  These were picked mainly out of convenience, availability, and not straying far from defaults.  I never took the effort to copy the Vera Sans family over to the Mac, and even if I did, I suspect I might have found it a bit annoying due to the sub-pixel rendering differences between the two operating systems.  With two distinctly different fonts, I wouldn’t be noticing rendering differences.

So given that background, I jumped into using Anonymous Pro for a few days and found I really did not like it.  The characters felt a little too thin and spindly.  The white-on-black of my console windows felt tolerable, but the black-on-white of my editor windows was just a little to thin to be comfortable.  Additionally, it felt just a little too pixelated, but I am not sure if this is how I truly think or if it is just bias creeping in from how smoothly Vera Sans Mono renders.  Let me reproduce a pair of examples:

This is Bitstream’s Vera Sans Mono, the font I have been using for the last few years in the Linux world:

bitstream_vera_mono-sample

This is Anonymous Pro, the newly released font:

anonymous_pro-sample

Anonymous Pro just felt a little too thin and jagged to be a keeper.  Today, I switched back to Vera Sans Mono.

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Ignite Portland 6 news for non-tweeting friends

June 15th, 2009

For those of you that may not be on Twitter (and don’t constantly check the Ignite Portland site or use RSS or are otherwise unconnected; I know there are a few of you that won’t see this except for my LiveJournal or Facebook cross-post), there has been a new Ignite Portland 6 announcement: Come to Ignite Portland 6, No Ticket Needed.  It is all first-come, first-served this time around, with no tickets or reservations.

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Photo dump: mystery switch, window perch, bathroom, sun

June 7th, 2009

When my main machine was the 17″ laptop, I had a great system for pulling pictures directly from my camera, almost immediately after taking them, then pushing them to Flickr with FlickrExport for Aperture.  The new (well, not terribly new now) MacBook Air does not meet the system requirements for Aperture (I got the low end one), so I offload photos into iPhoto as a temporary buffer until I remember to move them over to Aperture.  It is a system that should work pretty well, except for that “until I remember” bit, where it all falls apart.  I end up with days like today, where I import into Aperture and Flickr the past month or two of photos.  I then dump the highlights into one mega-photo-post.

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As I tweeted the other day[1][2], the cassette player in my car broke.  That fact alone should tell you about how old the stereo is.  If you want solid numbers, it is almost 11 years old, and is the stock stereo that came with the car.  Ordinarily, this would be no big deal, as I own no cassette tapes, but given that a good chunk of my podcast listening is in the car and all of my drive music listening is via iPhone/iPod, and the only acceptable way to get that audio into the car is via cassette adapter (I refuse to use those FM radio transmitters), this posed a national emergency in my eyes.

Car stereos these days are almost little computers.  The replacement I picked up is a JVC.  The Sony stereos looked nice, but I refuse to get Sony, for reasons beyond the scope of this blog post.  It has USB ports, one in the back and one in the front.  I guess there is enough of a USB stack in there that you can plug in a Bluetooth adapter.  (I’m still trying to figure out why I’d want to.) You can even plug in a USB thumb drive full of MP3s and it will play directly from the drive.  Additionally, if you plug an iPhone or iPod into the USB, it treats it as a first-class citizen and lets you control things from either the radio buttons or the iPod (so you can have the iPod hidden away in the glove box or, like I do, have it on a dashboard mount.) Although I have yet to use it for a commute — just a short trip out to an electronics surplus supplier in Beavertron — I am quite happy with it.

One thing I did have to deal with is its size.  The old stereo is a double-height one.  The new one is single-height.  I bought a dash kit that has a coverplate for that purpose, but it was this cheap-ass thing that did not fit right and looked pretty bad.  You would think they would have standard interchangable coverplates, like on desktop PCs.  Or maybe not.  The more I think back to the days of building tower PCs, the more I start to remember three or four different styles of coverplate that were certainly not interchangeable.  I ended up fashioning my own and adding what I now call “the mystery switch.”

New stereo and mystery switch 4
New stereo and mystery switch 1 New stereo and mystery switch 3

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A while back, the Make Magazine blog posted about a cat window perch [1] [2] you could make from PVC, wire, and suction cups.  I tried my hand at it and have the main body, but have yet to sew the hammock part.  It has been in this state for a few weeks, and yet I’m married to a seamstress.  Go figure.

IMG_5380

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I do not yet have before and after photos of the bathroom remodel, but I do have a picture of Ebenezer asking for water from the bathroom sink.  In the middle of kitchen.  Not hooked up to anything.

Ebenezer wants water from the disconnected sink

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And, of course, the post would be incomplete without adorable sunny cat pictures.  I have no idea what happened to the sun over the past few days, but a few weeks ago, it was sweltering.

IMG_0045 IMG_5346 Ebenezer in the sun

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Posted in Dear Diary, House, Pictures | 1 Comment »

Radiation Island: a dream

June 6th, 2009

An odd dream from last night:

The oddest thing about the dream was that I was not there.  I was a disembodied third party, watching the action, like the unseen cameraman in a movie or television show.  It started on an island.  Four workers were there, performing their day-to-day job, which I think was just monitoring pipes for leaks, cleaning up driftwood on the beach, and building paths and stairs and other such infrastructure.  They always wore these armor-like suits, like exoskeletons, with digital readouts built into the wrists.  The pipes they were monitoring — mainly from a small concrete building on the beach, but sometimes by going out and visually inspecting them — did not contain oil, but some other, possibly nuclear, definitely toxic, substance.

They had a lot of free time and spent a lot of it on the beach.  Supposedly, there were others elsewhere on the island, but they never saw or communicated with them.  There were two or three wild dogs on the island, hyenas I believe, that they’d play with.  They’d pick a banana, throw it into the ocean, and one of the dogs would bring it back.  After a few times, the banana would turn to much, the dog would eat it, and the workers picked another banana.

There was a headquarters, a base not too far away, that could be reached by submarine.  Since the beach was fairly inaccessible (after all, one of their chores was to build an infrastructure of paths), the only way on and off the beach was by submarine.  They had a couple parked in a nearby lagoon that they could pilot to the base, which was built like an oil drilling platform — a freestanding platform a few miles off the coast, and was only accessible from the underside (hence the need for a submarine.)

On this particular occasion, one of the four workers was in the submarine, en route to base.  The other three were on the beach.  The beach workers suddenly had their wrist displays show a countdown in large red numerals.  It was counting down from about a half-hour.  They’d never seen this before, but knew the procedure and were prepared.  Pulling a book off the shelf, they looked up a few things and noted it was exposure to radiation and had to get to base before the timer expired or no treatment would be possible.  The book had photos of symptoms and as well as pictures of dead bodies — people who never made it back in time.  The workers suddenly realized the bodies were on a beach, on a log path, and it was their beach and their path, except they had just finished installing the path recently and nobody had died or photographed anything.  So where did the pictures come from? The team of 3 took the other submarine back to headquarters.

Meanwhile, the first guy’s sensor and red countdown started, at the same time as the other workers, while he was piloting the submarine.  I never saw what happened to him, but was left with the impression that he was trying to go about the base as if things were normal, hiding the countdown timer, risking infection of others.  (We’ll temporarily put aside the fact that radiation poisoning is not actually infectious.)

When I next see them, the three made it back to base, and were standing in a room with medical personnel and the owner of the company, an older man in a high-tech robotic wheelchair-like contraption.  As the counters neared zero, they went though the sequence to open the exoskeleton-like body-armor, which they would then be able to step out of — but it wouldn’t open.  The old man, in typical super-villain style, started a monologue detailing their situation.  There was no cure.  They were brought back to base to be secretly killed.  The other workers on the island would be told they were cured and given compensation large enough that they could retire early and travel the world.  The radiation permanently and irreversibly mutates and deforms you.  The old man steps out of his robotic wheelchair and we see that it’s just a prop used to hide the lower half of his body, which is a single cluster of hundreds of thin tentacles where his legs should be. 

The old man, though, does not know that the radiation mutates you in a way consistent with your moral compass.  The more evil you are, the more gruesome the mutation is.  The three workers were always true to themselves and others, generally happy, and all-around good people.  When the counters hit zero, they turned into superheroes and brought the old man to justice.  The end. 

✻ ✼ ✻

Yes the end was pretty sudden and I was half-awake though it, trying to force myself back to sleep to see what happened.  I was mainly left with impressions rather than actual scenes.  They were not deformed, or if they were it was in a consciously hide-able way (like a Stretch Armstrong, human torch, or invisible girl sort of way) so they could go about life normally then “switch on” superhero mode.  But overall, everything basically worked out. 

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Posted in Dreams | 1 Comment »

My iPhone’s Star Trek SMS tone (a how-to)

May 21st, 2009

A while back, I set up a Star Trek ringtone and SMS beep on my iPhone.  It worked quite well, but not too long after that, I had to reload the iPhone firmware (I believe due to an update from Apple) and lost the SMS tone.  While the ringtone is trivial to re-add via iTunes, the SMS took a few more steps.  I never quite got around to doing it because, while the steps were easy, I had to re-research what, exactly, they were.  A combination of laziness and more important things than iPhone beeps kept pushing this off.  I recently reloaded the SMS tone, so this post serves as a note to myself about how to reload the SMS ringtones in the future.  Perhaps others will get some useful information out of it, too.

First off, is the ringtone file.  The file has to be in AIFF format.  The one I use is st_tng_chime.aiff, a door chime from Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Second, are the prerequisites.  These are not for the faint of heart.  First you have to jailbreak your phone.  This is the big hurtle that is the most difficult to overcome.  After that, it’s pretty easy:

  • Install the iPhone SSH server and Boss Prefs
  • Enable SSH via Boss Prefs
  • Back up your existing SMS chime with the following terminal command (replacing the IP with your iPhone’s own): ssh root@10.1.2.74 cp /System/Library/Audio/UISounds/sms-received3.caf /System/Library/Audio/UISounds/sms-received3.caf.bak
  • Enter “alpine” for the password
  • Copy the new sound onto the iPhone: scp st_tng_chime.aiff root@10.1.2.74:/System/Library/Audio/UISounds/sms-received3.caf
  • Disable the SSH service via Boss Prefs
  • Go into your sound preferences and change the SMS tone to “Glass” (which is the slot that got overwritten with the custom AIFF sound)

It is a basic set of commands that any intermediate-to-expert person familiar with the terminal has probably already used before.  My main issue was being too lazy to (re-)research the path to the SMS sounds.  I let it go untouched for months.  This post is a capture of knowledge in case I ever have to do this again.

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Posted in Movies, Television, iPhone | No Comments »

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