Assorted Robot Meats

Robots on an Orange FIeld

se7ensamurai — Tue, 10 Apr 2018 22:00:26 +0000

Why? seriously, why not?

AUGUST 2014 4th Amendmant Collection

se7ensamurai — Thu, 28 Aug 2014 22:13:37 +0000

Guess what? I made some new shirts for my Zazzle store last night.

Check them out and let me know what you think. Here is a brief description of each as they came into my head:

Another in an apparently LONG line of ‘My Other T-Shirt’ shirts. I couldn’t find anything exactly the same, but only mildly different already on the nets, so we’ll see if I have blatantly ripped off someone else when the DMCA notice lands in my inbox.

My other T-Shirt was at the dry-cleaners on Alderaan… so yeah.

I get a LOT of help desk tickets daily. Approximately 2/3 (ish) of them are so vague, i have to wonder if these people even know what the real issue is. I’ve wanted to start answering all emails and phone calls with a paraphrase from Star Trek: Please State The Nature of your IT EMERGENCY (because they are ALL emergencies, right?) now i have a t-shirt that says it for me!

http://www.zazzle.com/turn_it_off_and_then_on_again_t_shirt-235789987291294420?gl=AsstortedRobotMeat

" data-image-caption="" data-medium-file="https://se7ensamurai.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/turnitoffandonagain-front.jpg?w=228" data-large-file="https://se7ensamurai.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/turnitoffandonagain-front.jpg?w=228" class="alignleft wp-image-1083 size-full" src="https://se7ensamurai.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/turnitoffandonagain-front.jpg?w=627" alt="BSOD!" srcset="https://se7ensamurai.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/turnitoffandonagain-front.jpg 228w, https://se7ensamurai.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/turnitoffandonagain-front.jpg?w=140&h=150 140w" sizes="(max-width: 228px) 100vw, 228px" />

ROBOTS! we love robots here at the Assorted Robot Meat Company! obv. So, this is a new-old design. Was first posted back in like 1978…. or later probably.

A couple more one-offs, because t-shirts get boring sometimes. You need a hoodie and a mug of coffee on a cold day in Seattle to do the deep thinking required to under stand the #NSA…

The last thing is just a self-indulgent crap-shoot. Like MC Front’s glasses, I don’t actually expect anyone to BUY this, but just knowing that i can put it up for sale makes me feel good about myself:

DMCA, apparently repercussions for false take downs are not enforced…

se7ensamurai — Sun, 13 Jan 2013 19:07:31 +0000

So, heres the thing that pisses me, and a bunch of others, off. The DMCA can be used to stifle free speech, but it is almost never enforced on bogus take-down requests. Why should we respect the law when the law doesn’t respect us?

“Buffy vs Edward” remix is back online, but no fallout for Lionsgate | Ars Technica.

How NOT to do a comments section

se7ensamurai — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 22:44:42 +0000

This is exactly how NOT to do your comments section.

See the problem there?

Does this local news site (Verde Independent) really get that much spam that their built in filters can’t catch them that they NEED a capacha? And really, a captcha would be fine. A little annoying, but fine. Lots of sites have them.

BUT to then add insult to injury: REQUIRE EVERY FIELD AVAILABLE!

I don’t like giving out my FULL NAME to begin with, and email… well, that’s actually understandable. But, you do NOT need my phone number. I never gave my real phone number to Radio Shack, I’m certainly not giving it to you.

Look, newspaper guys… do you want to know how to make MORE money, get more hits on your website and let the community you are supposed to be serving engage in a CONVERSATION? make it easier for them to engage you and comment on stories.

not.harder.

thanks!!!

Jon Kyl responds to my inquiry with… a lame duck.

se7ensamurai — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 19:38:30 +0000

For the first time in the history of my writing to my congressmen, Jon Kyl actually wrote me back!!! but his letter is basically just an admission that hes not even going to try because hes retiring:

Dear Reverend David:

Thank you for contacting me in support of the Internet Radio Fairness Act (H.R. 6480/S. 3609). That legislation was introduced in the House of Representatives and the Senate shortly before both bodies adjourned last month, and thus the committees of jurisdiction have not yet had time to act on either measure.

When Congress reconvenes in mid-November for a lame-duck session, it is only likely to take up certain must-pass legislation – including bills to deal with the looming threat of across-the-board spending cuts and massive tax increases, as well as funding for federal government operations for the remainder of the fiscal year. That means action on the Internet Radio Fairness Act is likely to be deferred until 2013.

Since I will be retiring from the Senate when my term ends later this year, I hope you will share your views with my successor after he is seated in January.

Thank you again for caring enough to contact me about this issue. Please let me know if there is any other way that I might be of service during the next few months.

Sincerely,

JON KYL

United States Senator

P.S. If you wish to share additional comments about this or any other matter, please visit my website at: http://www.kyl.senate.gov/contact.cfm. Do not reply to this email.

Senator McCain Responds (sort-of) to My Anti-SOPA/PIPA letter

se7ensamurai — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 16:43:51 +0000

From the: CAN-YOU-READ-? Dept.

Along with millions of other people back on January 18th, I wrote letters to my Congressmen, Senators John McCain and Jon Kyle, and ‘Representative’ Paul Gossar. To date, one has responded. Mr McCain (or, more accuratly a computerized form-letter-machine) has written to address my fear of Internet Regulation, censorship, and my growing distaste for a private industry buying politicians with money and favors.

Well, kind of. It doesn’t really address anything from my letter except maybe some of the censorship stuff, but if you actually READ my letter (MCCAIN! I’m talking to YOU buddy!), you’ll see that the argument goes much deeper:

Dear Sen. Jon Kyl and Sen. John McCain: I oppose S. 968 (“Preventing Real On-line Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011”) because… More and more draconian measure like these are not going to stop ‘Piracy.’ This is obviously a business model issue for legacy gatekeepers who do not understand technology, the Internet, or even human beings. This is bad legislation written by shortsighted corporations who refuse to follow the rest of the world into the 20th century. And YES, the RIAA and MPAA have written these bills. The lobbyists and corrupt politicians who take the bribes wrote these bills, not for the betterment of the people of the US, but for their own laziness. These are the same people who said that Cable TV, the VCR and the player piano were going to ‘Destroy the Industry.’ Please, listen to the people of this country and do not regulate the Internet. Please do not censor us the way other countries are censored. Do not make us like China, Iran, or any other regime. We are better than that and deserve the freedom promised us in the US Constitution.

As you can see, there are several concerns listed, one of which is the fear of a Chinese-Style Great Firewall. Here was Mr McCain’s response:

Dear Mr. David:

Thank you for contacting me regarding Internet anti-piracy legislation, specifically the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). I appreciate hearing your views about these important pieces of legislation.

            As you know, online piracy is a major issue facing the American economy as more and more digital creations, such as music, movies, software, and books, are sold online. The Internet, which has delivered so many benefits to our economy, has unfortunately also allowed bad actors to more easily steal and sell these stolen works. It is estimated that our economy loses more than $58 billion annually as a result of online piracy. As part of an effort to fight back against these losses, Members of Congress introduced two bills, the PROTECT IP Act in the Senate and SOPA in the House of Representatives, respectively.

            The intent of these two bills is to help the owners of intellectual property and the federal government more effectively utilize legal tools to protect American intellectual property. During the weeks leading up to the vote on the PIPA, legitimate concerns were raised about the potential unintended consequences of the legislation. As a defender of the First Amendment and rights of free expression, I believe it is important that we work to solve the problem of intellectual property theft in a way that does not run counter to our founding principles. Going forward, I will work to do just that.

            The PROTECT IP Act was passed out of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary and SOPA has been referred to the House Committee on the Judiciary on October 26, 2011. Please rest assured that should these bills come to the Senate floor, I will keep your views in mind. Thank you again for sharing your thoughts on this important topic. Please feel free to contact me regarding this issue, or any other in the future.

Sincerely,

John McCain

United States Senator

JM/mv

Now that you’re done laughing at it’s ridiculousness… Let’s take this in chunks:

As you know, online piracy is a major issue facing the American economy as more and more digital creations, such as music, movies, software, and books, are sold online.

Not really. Piracy is not nearly as huge a problem as the MPAA and RIAA would like people to believe, and all of its numbers on job losses and ‘missed sales’ etc are completely overblown and highly debunked. There is absolutely NO truth in this sentence. Even a rudimentary Google search will show you how completely false this is.

The Internet, which has delivered so many benefits to our economy, has unfortunately also allowed bad actors to more easily steal and sell these stolen works. It is estimated that our economy loses more than $58 billion annually as a result of online piracy.

Yes, the Internet has delivered many benefits to our economy. More than any other segment of the economy in fact. As predicted when i was a kid, Tech jobs are the highest paying, most sought after and fastest growing in the nation. All because of the Internet. However, these “bad Actors” must be stopped? we have to overly regulate the Internet because a couple of people can’t play fair? NO, it’s because one single segment of the economy refuses to adapt it business models to a changing market. Claiming that file-sharing and ‘piracy’ is killing the economy just shows ignorance. Show me the actual theft here. Does Disney no longer have the Little Mermaid franchise? Did The Dark Knight not break box-office records despite being one of the most pirated movies of all time? The ‘Entertainment Industry’ has been GROWING, not shrinking. Every year the movie studios and musicians (if not the actual large corporation music publishers) show record profits and growth.

The intent of these two bills is to help the owners of intellectual property and the federal government more effectively utilize legal tools to protect American intellectual property.

As opposed to the laws that already exist to allow content owners to sue (since copyright infringement is actually a civil matter under current law) and issue content take downs (The ever hated DMCA)? As opposed to the ICE/DHS take downs and ‘theft’ of sites that post LINKS to infringing content? Like blogs and websites seized by the Justice Department on flimsy evidence and no adversarial hearings? GUILTY UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT IN THE INTERNET AGE! Other people’s speech and property don’t seem to matter to the MAFIAA and the DOJ. Let’s only protect it when the lobbyists want us to.

Another thing that really tics me off about politicians trying to regulate the internet (especially Republicans like Mr McCain) in such massive ways, is the refrain we keep hearing about how Big Government is bad, and we should reduce regulation. I guess we should only regulate what Hollywood says we should right? Let’s de-regulate Wall Street, but put massive liability on Websites for user created copyright infringement. Brilliant!

Anyway, thanks for responding Mr McCain (or rather “JM/mv” whoever you are) even though you still don’t seem to understand what the protests over these two bills is really about. May i suggest a nice tool called Google, and another called Wikipedia that i hear all the kids are using these days to learn about stuff. We all know that most of our elected officials are clueless idiots when it come to technolegy (series of tubes indeed), can’t they do some simple research on these things before they go legislating them?

We can hope that they will, but in the end, we simply need to keep up the fight to stay free in a free world. keep writing to your congressmen and other elected officials. Don’t let the fight end with SOPA/PIPA, make these people accountable for being bought by Hollywood and gleefully stating their ignorance of how this internet-thingy works. It’s up to all of us to keep reminding these jokers that they work for US, not Corporation and Lobbyists.

Reorg. Part 2: REBUILD!

se7ensamurai — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 05:13:00 +0000

I will rebuild you. You will be stronger, faster, smarter… BETTER!

[See: Reorg. Part 1: DEMOLISH for prequel info]

Well, it’s done. Mostly. I took the box apart last week or so, reconfigured some stuff, removed and re-seated the CPU, added an older 500 gig HDD… and then, installed Mythbuntu. er… 3 times actually. Yeah, took me 3 install attempts to get it working right. Not sure exactly HOW I screwed up the first 2, but #3 was the winner by far. Here’s a sample of my progression:

Attempt #1:

Install FAILED miserably due to selecting the wrong drive. Yes folks. Instead of simply setting up a fresh install on the new 500gig HDD, for some reason i told the installer to put it on the original 750gig drive. I dunno exactly why. Something about how SATA was set up in the bios and I got a little confused. I’m really lucky that I didn’t over-wright the entire disc. Seriously, could have lost 1000 episodes of Charmed that I’ve been saving for my *ahem* daughter.

Attempt #2

Install FTW!! yay! OS installed without a hitch [Mythbuntu 11.04], although it did hog some bandwidth with updates and such. Dylan got a little pissed because he was trying to watch something on Netflix at this time, and it kept losing the connection. 2 things got screwy on this install which is why I had to try, try again: 1) I did …something… to LIRC. Still not exactly sure, but it worked at first, except that it was reading each buttonpress twice. I checked the usual sites and forums for the answer and edited some config files, and then it completely broke, and I couldn’t get it working again. I probably could have fixed it eventually if it weren’t for 2) Frakking BOXEE. Apparently, every time Ubuntu gets upgraded to a new version something happens that breaks Boxee. The reason is almost always that Boxee is behind the times. This time around it’s a dependancie issue. Some little media player’s library was updated and most major OSs went with the NEW version, effectively dropping the OLD version from all repositories. Unfortunatly, Boxee depended on the OLD library. There was a long and convoluted way to edit the .deb file so that it would use the NEW library, but there was also something about it messing up HULU and some other stuff, so it became painfully obvious that the only solution was to:

ATTEMPT #3!!!

Beautimus. Downloaded and installed Mythbuntu 10.10. Slightly older version, sure. whatev. BUT, everything fucking works out of the BOX YO! LIRC didn’t have the same duplicate button press issue, Boxee and Hulu Desktop installed without a hitch, and with 2 small copy-paste codes into the main menu file, I had a nice *working* interface. There was one little issue with the sound being incredibly low. But that was fixed easily with some careful adjustments to ALSA mixer (EVERYTHINGGOESUPTOTHEMAXIMUM!).

Yeah baby! now everything WORKS, and functions and is pretty awesome. Now I just need to find a nice, cheap little dual PCI (not e) tuner card and we’re golden. Anyways, that was over a week ago, so I’ll try to get some screen shots of the new system one of these days… maybe. Working VER HARD on secret project#2 right now.

piece, we’re OUT!

-Se7en

Reorg. Part One: Demolish

se7ensamurai — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 04:42:33 +0000

It’s quite late. Almost 2 am, and I’m exhausted. But for a nerd, you have to stay up late to get shit done.

We’ve been busy as hell lately for a relatively few reasons.

We moved. Packed up house and kids and drove 2 miles down the road to set up shop in the BFE. House is nice. A little smaller than the last one, with more weeds and dirt, and bugs. But its nice. Always takes me a while to get used to a new place though. Great thing about this place; Awesome double garage with work room. Yes. Totally. Will soon be lining up computer boxes and shit. gonna be awesome. So the move has taken up a lot of time and effort, which is worth it.
Getting Secret Project #2 off the ground (Secret Project #1 is still under development, stay tuned). A LOT of research, forms, digging, phone calls, money, etc going into this one, which will eventually allow the completion of Secret Project #1, and a slew of future Secret Projects to be completed. It will also, hopefully, reduce the stress put on The Samurai and his family. It will also give me more free time in the long run. Haven’t even got the damned monsoons yet.
Other stuff, every day stuff, stuff I’d rather not get into.

Anyway, I digress, and my intros running long. The point of this post is to begin a story about a Family Media Center which has been slowly falling apart since early inception. Not sure if I mentioned this on my blog, although I’m sure I complained a lot on Twitter. The origin was this: Low cost substitute for overgrown Satellite TV bill. No Shit, huh? Inception began with being given a quite old Shuttle XPC. Which is basically a very, very small form factor PC with all the bells and whistles except for extra space for stuff like new hdds and cards. Which was fine, didn’t need much to get it working. The original vid card died after a day and substitute had to be ordered as I was out of PCIe cards. meh. THEN, it turned out that a P4 2.6ghz wasn’t good enough for our friends at Hulu. Fuckers. So, it was swapped with a Micro atx with an Intel Core2Duo and a couple gigs in my old cube case with the noisy fans. (sad: the xpc died a few weeks later of natural causes and is somewhere in the new garage awaiting organ transplants to other machines)

So, we were doing fairly well with the thing running Kubuntu 10.04 as a base with Boxee and Hulu Desktop, and of course the wii for Netflix. I’d finally figured out (sort of) LIRC, and had yet-another-goddamn-remote in the pile. All was good until a few weeks before the move when ALL CBS content started acting funny in both Boxee and on the website. Only CBS content… weird, showed up into the top left quarter of the screen for no reason. [EDIT: figured this out this morning; fixed by turning off Harware Acceleration with Flash] Still ran great on the lap tops, but not on the damned media center. So, I’m in the process of rebuilding, and expanding. I think I’ve got the phantom ‘over clock’ errors figured out with the shite bios the thing has, and added another 300gig HDD. I’m also going to do the install correctly this time. Since I have another PCI slot, I will end up getting a cheap digital tuner card for attaching to the aerial, and will need a back end to record the free ota trans from local TV. This will be accomplished with a neat Mythbuntu install! hahaha. I used to use KnoppMyth, which was pretty awesome, but abandoned it years ago when we moved to satellite ~~raping~~, i mean service. To be fair, I did try this weekend to re-install Kubuntu etc… But for some reason couldn’t get LIRC working, and that would be a no-go for us. Hate getting up to do shit. Plus with Mythbuntu I don’t think we’ll have the same problems with Hulu Desktop going black every 10 minutes on the dot. Everything integrated from the start will be a nice change of pace for this machine. Will beable to launch Boxee and Hulu from the front end, and then have a ready to go box for when I’m able to install the tuner card. Damn, might have to get another HDD with a few TBs available, huh? Well, all that does is change my priority for distributing the content on my network. Can always get an xbox to run a Myth front end, or even XBMC. Or even cheaper, get a couple of little Apple TVs to run Boxee in other rooms NACH. OK, like I said. 2:00am and tired as hell. Will detail whats going on with the rest in the morning, or later. thanks, -SE7EN

[NOTE: I actually wrote this several weeks ago, and forgot to hit the PUBLISH button. All apologies, 7]

Bunchalines

se7ensamurai — Sun, 29 May 2011 20:17:58 +0000

Bunchalines, a photo by AssortedRobotMeat on Flickr.

Bunchalines

Sketchbook Pages #2 pt2

se7ensamurai — Thu, 19 May 2011 22:00:15 +0000

A couple of days ago I posted this from my sketchbook. Something I started a while ago and wanted to come back to. Well, I did the other night. Still a work in progress, and my hands were kind of shakey trying to do perfect circles… But still, the inking is going pretty good i think.