Author: Captain Skyhawk

Categories
Rants and Raves Reviews

Radiohead’s New Album

It can be free; go see for yourself.

This article sums up what’s happend so far. According to a survey taken of the people who’ve downloaded the new album, about a third paid nothing at all: $0.

Some people make a big deal of that (like Fark’s headline, A third of the people offered Radiohead what their new album is worth: $0), but they’re missing the big picture — if a third of downloaders got it for free, that means that *the other two thirds paid for it, even when they _could’ve got it for free_*.

According to the survey, many paid more than $20, and the average price was $8 (I paid about $4, myself). Do the math — even with this survey not necessarily representing all people who downloaded the album, that means that at an average price of $8 times 2/3 of a million downloaders (~8*666,000), that’s like…

*5.3 MILLION DOLLARS*.

And that’s money that’s going straight to the band. No middlemen, no greedy record executives to pay, no RIAA cartel to cozy up to — just straight hard cash going to Radiohead so that they can continue to make good music.

What’s the downside of this type of purchasing system again?

Nothing, from what I can see. Everything I’ve ever heard of seen tell me that bands make very little money off of album sales when they go through a major label and an organization like the RIAA — most of the money they make is through performances and band “stuff” (you know, t-shirts, autographs, and the like).

And while $20-25 bucks (what you’ll pay in a store) for a new album is FAR too much if you ask me, paying the same amount to be 10-20 feet from my favorite band whilst screaming my head off along with thousands of other people? Now, _that’s_ worth $20. I’ve paid that amount before to see bands play in a venue (hell, I usually pay twice that), and I’ll continue to do so — but I haven’t paid for an CD in years.

Categories
Life Science and Technology

Well, I broke my cell phone. :(

Yep. A completely incongruous series of events which led to its poor little LCD screen being smashed upon my knee.

First, I was wearing a pair of pants that I had that couldn’t use the side pockets on — the pockets were too small (what the hell were they good for then, eh?), and couldn’t be used for anything more than my pair of keys.

Thankfully (or not), there was little “mid” pocket on them, about halfway down the leg that had a zipper and everything — perfect for those items that are too big to put in your side pockets, right? So, I stick my cell phone in there and forget about it. It’s sitting around banging against my knee when I walk, but at least it’s not falling out of my pocket and getting lost.

Well, later on Nina and I go to my sister’s house for supper (she was cooking Italian sausage soup that night, so at least that part of the night was good), and she’s showing us the new bed that her and my brother-in-law had recently got, and she’s all like, “Jump up and see what it feels like,” and I jump up on it, knees first like an idiot, and then Crack! it’s broke.

I knew just from the way the “crack” felt that it was broke. I pull it out of the pocket and the LDC screen looks like someone’s spilled chemicals inside it — those things look weird when they break, I’ll tell you what.

Luckily enough for me, my phone still worked — I just couldn’t see anything on the screen. Text messaging is impossible, of course, but at least it still functions as a phone.

And that’s that. What do I do? I bought it outright so that I didn’t have to get a 2-year contract with my cellphone company (almost unheard of where I live), and I don’t have the money to pay full price for a new one right now. So, I thought about repairing it myself.

I actually wanted to give Alltel a chance to make some money (why the hell not — they’re one of the better cell phone companies in America), so I took it up to them to ask if they could fix it. I was willing to pay a little bit more for “quality” service from them, if they could fix it immediately.

Well, I found out that not only do they not repair cell phones at the local Alltel shop where I live, but that they couldn’t even send off for the phone to be fixed — they said that it wouldn’t be “cost effective.”

Read that as: “We’re selling these phones to you at a 1000% markup — you’re paying $300 for something that cost us like $30. Why the hell do we want to repair it? Just buy a new one.”

Sorry, Alltel — no can do.

So, I go on Ebay and find a new LCD screen for $20. Hell, it’s worth it — even if it doesn’t work and I have to get a new cell phone in the end, I’m only out $20.

Categories
Book Reviews

Quick Book Review: Double Star

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_by Robert Heinlein_

Another great Heinlein book. I’ve only read three of his (_Starship Troopers_, _Stranger in a Strange Land_, and _Double Star_), but all have been great. _Double Star_ is about a down-and-out actor who’s clandestinely hired to fill in for a high-ranking political leader who’s been kidnapped — just temporarily, at first, but then various events keep putting off his leave date, and it begins to look like he might not have a chance to ever leave the role!

While I love Arthur C. Clarke’s books for the technical specificity, I love Heinlein’s for the _writing_. His writing style is very “lively,” to say the least — hell, his dialog could even be described as “hokey” sometimes, but that’s just part of what makes it so fun to read!

If you _ever_ get to read one of his books, though, please—please, please, please—please make sure it’s _Stranger in a Strange Land_. There’s a good damn reason why that book’s called by many to be the greatest science fiction novel ever written.

Categories
Book Reviews

Quick Book Review: Debt of Bones

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_by Terry Goodkind_

An enjoyable read, even if I finished it in one day. More like the _old_ Terry Goodkind, and not the haughty, _full-of-himself-after-just-having-read-Atlas-Shrugged_ Terry Goodkind.

One issue, though — for one thing, the book is richly illustrated with very nice drawings every so often dealing with the events happening on those pages. Now, if you know anything about the “Midlands” in Terry Goodkind’s world of the _Sword of Truth_, you know that it was a land where a woman’s status in society (her class) was apparent by how long she could grow her hair — the higher in class society you were, the longer you could grow your hair.

The protagonist of the story, Abby, remarks in the first few pages (after seeing the Mother Confessor with her waist-length golden hair) about how _her_ hair “covered her ears but no more.”

Then a few pages later, you see an illustration showing Abby walking into the Wizard’s Keep on her errand… *with her long hair reaching past her shoulders*.

…is it that bloody hard to coordinate some sort of communication between a writer and an artist? Did anyone even look at these pictures (however nicely drawn they were) before they went to print?

Categories
Book Reviews

Quick Book Review: The Postman

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_by David Brin_

Damn good book — not at all like the movie. Very well written. Starts off as a neat post-apocalypse movie and turns into an examination of the reasons behind man’s inherent need to destroy (and how it can be stopped).

Definitely worth a read.

Categories
Linux Science and Technology

Managing Partitions with Linux

Well, this morning I decided to move around my partition tables on our main gaming computer — yeah, I know, silly idea, right?

“Why do you keep fucking around with stuff if it’s working fine?”

Because if I didn’t, I’d never learn anything new, would I? :P

Anyway… I moved around the partition tables (I wanted to make one partition bigger), and all of a sudden Ubuntu wouldn’t boot correctly anymore.

I mean, it worked, but it would hang during boot and give me a terminal screen. At this point, I could safely press Ctrl-D to continue the boot process, and everything would be fine. Annoying, but workable, I guess… but I want to know how to fix it.

So, I notice it’s hanging on something called “fsck” during the boot process (some kind of disk management utility for Linux), so I google it along with the word “Ubuntu,” and it leads me to this page:

fsck.ext3: Unable to resolve

Turns out that in your “/etc/fstab” file in your Linux installation are a collection of entries regarding which boot partitions will be loaded at boot time, and there was an old entry for the drive that I had resized (I had actually deleted it and created a bigger one, now that I think about it).

I just commented out the line (with a “#” character) that referred to the old drive that I had deleted, and whatta-you-know… it works. No more dumping to the terminal screen during boot.

Now, the partition manager I used is called Parted Magic/ — it’s a great little application that comes in the form of a bootable CD (by way of .ISO file). It’s got an amazing GUI-based interface (looks like it’s based a bit on KDE), and is easy as crap to use, trust me. It runs amazingly fast and has booted fine on every computer I’ve tried. Try it!

Categories
Science and Technology

Home Keys on a Mac

God, the default behavior drives me nuts! In case you’re not “in the know,” pressing the “Home” key on your keyboard if you’re using a Mac will scroll whatever window you’re in to the top — on a Windows computer, if just sends the cursor to whatever line you’re currently typing on.

Well, “to each technology its own and all,” but I’m used to Windows’ behavior, so I’m going to have to change that if I’m going to type on a Mac.

So, I set out to look for a way to change it, and found this site on the web — pretty straight forward, if you ask me!

Just add the following lines to your “~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict.” file (if it doesn’t exist, create it):

{
/* Remap Home / End to be correct :-) /
“UF729” = “moveToBeginningOfLine:”; / Home /
“UF72B” = “moveToEndOfLine:”; / End /
“$UF729” = “moveToBeginningOfLineAndModifySelection:”; / Shift + Home /
“$UF72B” = “moveToEndOfLineAndModifySelection:”; / Shift + End */
}

And that’s it! Just restart any application that you want to reflect this behavior and you’re good to go!

Categories
Gaming Science and Technology

Perpendicular Recording of Your Mind

Well, I’m helping out a friend of mine by setting up a new hard drive in his computer (a Seagate Barracuda 250-GB), and I just got it in today. I do jobs like this for friends and family, free of charge — it’s kind of a hobby. I also help fix cars and provide free legal advice. :P

Well, my friend’s motherboard is an oldie but a goodie — the venerable ASUS A7V8X-X for the AMD Socket A chipset. The chip I helped him pick out (nearly five years ago now!) was an Athlon XP 2600 — it’s still fast as hell today, and plays just about any game you can think of.

That knowledge in hand, I know it’s a good motherboard. So, I hook up the new drive (and a new power supply — his old ones keep burning out), and the board recognizes it immediately. Even sees that it’s a 250GB drive; that’s pretty neat, because I’m pretty sure even the technology involved for this didn’t exist five years ago.

However, when I put in his Windows XP install CD (and old one without SP2), the damn thing only recognizes it as being about 137GB or so.

Well, at first I’m like, “Oh Shit — the hardware’s not compatible.” (I usually think of the worst things first — a small character flaw.) I go to the Seagate site on this drive, thinking that this must be a pretty common problem (incorrect initial hard drive sizes usually are). Of course, it is, and I find a handy dandy little help topic page about it.

It says that your motherboard needs to support “48 bit LBA addressing,” and of course I’m thinking, OH NOES, we’re not even going to be able to use this new drive to its full potentional.

But then I remember that the motherboard’s BIOS was able to see the 250GB limit, and the answer was clear — it wasn’t the board, it was just a limitation in this version of Windows XP (the first of many, as you know). I downloaded Seagate’s DiskWizard’s starter ISO, burned a CD of it, and formatted the drive.

The good point of using the special burning software from the company like this — it actually lets you format your partitions in FAT32, instead of just NTSF!

(By the way, as I’m writing this, it’s just completed a full installation of Windows XP in only 7 minutes — damn, this drive is fast as well as big!)

Unfortunately, the added case fans I got for my friend can’t go in his case (he’s been having a bit of heat problem in his case) — there’s only one extra fan connector on the ASUS A7V8X-X, and I’ve already got an additional exhaust fan at the back of the case taking it up. Luckily, the CPU fan upgrade I got did fit, however the old screws aren’t big enough and it didn’t come with any new ones! Arghh!

Either way, it’s now got a super big drive, and it’s running cooler. Plus, the new parts are able to be carried over to his new system whenever he upgrades. I say it’s been a success.