Captain's Log

Using Jing with Dropbox

2010-08-10T19:48:00.001+02:00

Jing is a pretty nice screen capture software, it also has a video capture feature.
As many software around it has a freeware version and a pro version. One big difference is that in the freeware version they give you limited space to store your captured images and videos and also they are "framed" with annoying ads to Jing and other products of that softwarehouse.

But with Dropbox the problem is solved.

In the Public folder of your Dropbox, make a new folder called "Screenshots" and one called "Video Captures" (or whatever you want). Add a file in each one of them, anything really. We’ll need this for later.

Then open up Jing and in the preferences, select "Sharing Buttons: Customize...". Now select your Save button, it's the second one, it has the symbol of a floppy disk, and when you hover over it "Edit Save" appears.
Under Save Location, find your new Public Dropbox folder we created above, the one we proposed to call "Screenshots", Then in Clipboard contents, select Custom Code.

Now go back to your "Screenshots" folder and the file you added. Right click this file and find Dropbox… Copy Public Link. With that in your clipboard, go back to the Custom image code box in Jing.

Paste your text into the box. It will be a URL. Delete the filename from the end and add [filename] instead.

(In the end it will be a URL like this: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/XXXXX/Screenshots/[filename]
--- XXXXX would be your precise UserID, each Dropbox user has a different one)

Repeat the same process with the file inside the folder called "Video Captures", paste the URL in the box called "Video custom return text". Remember to remove the filename and add [filename] in the end.

Now you should be ready to go. Test it out by taking a screenshot with Jing, and saving it. It should now automatically add the public URL to the file, ready for you to paste into wherever you need it.

Using Dropbox as an automatic and free Web Publishing solution

2010-08-10T18:39:00.000+02:00

Here is a very interesting article I found about using Dropbox as your automatic and instantaneous web publishing service.

Shazai: and you thought you knew how Japan was alien to you?

2010-08-01T19:04:00.001+02:00

Big Fat Greek Funeral

2010-05-22T13:38:00.000+02:00

It is hard to say when an article is better than another, but once you start reading this one by Mark Steyn you'll have no doubts that you're going through the best one of the year... well, at least so far.

Earthquakes!!! It must be hotter this year!

2010-02-11T18:40:00.001+01:00

Sometimes I find one of those articles that really cracks me up! I nearly drop my iPhone reading this:

ENSLER: Well, I just think the idea that she doesn’t believe in global warming is bizarre.
BEHAR: Every scientist at every note believes in it but Sarah Palin doesn’t believe in it.
ENSLER: And I think we just kind of have to walk around the world at this point and look at what is happening to nature and earthquakes and tsunamis.

But the best are the comments, although, since the comments would be eventually pushed down by other comments, I'll repost here the best ones so far:

Peer reviewed.

a capella on February 10, 2010 at 10:42 AM

If only Luke Skywalker had command of global warming instead of The Force … global warming is soooo much more powerful.

darwin on February 10, 2010 at 10:43 AM

These two are almost as good as Al Nobel Prize Gore, who calmly stated that the core of the Earth is the same temperature as the core of the Sun.

jwolf on February 10, 2010 at 10:44 AM

Let me get this straight: A woman whose only claim to fame is talking out loud to her vagina is now lecturing us on climatology?

Yeah. OK.

A Balrog of Morgoth on February 10, 2010 at 10:49 AM

So, plate tectonics are ruled by climate change? Who knew!

mizflame98 on February 10, 2010 at 10:54 AM

Maybe global warming can melt steel….

Vashta.Nerada on February 10, 2010 at 10:55 AM

ENSLER: Well, I just think the idea that she doesn’t believe in global warming is bizarre.

(Your two little girls schoolyard-like obsession with Palin is bizarre considering she currently holds no position of power)

BEHAR: Every scientist at every note believes in it but Sarah Palin doesn’t believe in it.

(No, you bon-bon eating chubby dumbass. See link for The Global Warming Petition Project. Thousands of Ph.D’s would disagree with you.)

ENSLER: And I think we just kind of have to walk around the world at this point and look at what is happening to nature and earthquakes and tsunamis.

(It’s called faulting, you geography-challenged dimwit. The earth is a living thing in continuous motion.)

RepubChica on February 10, 2010 at 11:01 AM

If you were to fabricate a carrying case for a salt molecule and place the combined intellectual capacity of these two rocket scientists therein, the salt molecule would still have room to put its feet up.

Bruce in NH on February 10, 2010 at 11:04 AM

Plate tectonics could be effected by GoreBull Warming, because remember, according to Al Gore, the Earth’s Core is several million degrees.

ronnyraygun on February 10, 2010 at 11:06 AM

Sea change...

2010-01-26T04:23:00.001+01:00

...Sea change!

I would like to imagine...

2010-01-21T20:18:00.003+01:00

I would like to imagine with what new traits despotism could be produced in the world.

I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls.

Over these is elevated an immense, tutelary power, which takes sole charge of assuring their enjoyment and of watching over their fate. It is absolute, attentive to detail, regular, provident, and gentle. It would resemble the paternal power if, like that power, it had as its object to prepare men for manhood, but it seeks, to the contrary, to keep them irrevocably fixed in childhood … it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their needs, guides them in their principal affairs…

The sovereign extends its arms about the society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of petty regulations—complicated, minute, and uniform—through which even the most original minds and the most vigorous souls know not how to make their way… it does not break wills; it softens them, bends them, and directs them; rarely does it force one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting on one’s own … it does not tyrannize, it gets in the way: it curtails, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

Alexis de Tocqueville

Couldn't have said it better myself. This is exactly what we talked about on the plane. Journalism=same old pattern, if you try to think for yourself and outside the box, your thoughts are constantly supressed until you learn to think like the rest. Then it´s all machine factory from there. The same recipe. Applaus. Until you one day meet yourself in the mirror...

Signy Eika Klempe

...and you might not like what stands in front of you, looking right back at you. But if you don't have anything different in your mind, in your "box", if no other vision, paradigm, ideas ever wondered in there then what you are likely to fall into is a sterile malaise of our soul. Since there is no other path you can follow but the same one over and over again therefore your hope to change the situation will be as absent as your knowledge of the pattern you're in.

Alexis de Tocqueville wrote those words more than a century ago, he forseen the risk of betting on a bloated governemnt, that everything embraces and everything regulates, so that we can live happy and without a worry in the world like the donkey-kids in Pinocchio.
Peter Høeg once said that the failure not necessarily must presents itself like an abrupt fall, it is sometimes more common to be like a slow descent to resignation. And so apparently seems to be the fate of the western democracies, softened, clogged and bridled by the immense weight of the modern bureaucracy that steadily follows the mother of all directives: politically correctness.
Truth, facts are of no meaning and no use to it.
In the previous centuries, the "government" was maybe going to tax you heavily, maybe to finance wars, maybe to finance buildings or road constructions, but not a lot of services it used to provide to its subjects. Today, we might be told and used to consider ourselves luckier due to the fact that a miriad, an umbrella of services are covering all our needs, from cradle to grave, so that we don't have to do anything, neither worry nor prepare and learn how to act in case the problem arises.
Lucky? Not exactly. Besides the demographic argument and the fact that our pension system, being comparable to a big "Ponzi scheme" will inevitably fail though leaving its users in a condition of not receiving the service and not be used nor prepared to provide for themselves together with the inexistance of the structural inability of finding this help elsewhere.
And here lies the heart of it, this "structural inability".
If the government set itself to provice all these services then it will ask for the money to its very users, hence our lives will gradually be conducted to a greater dependance of the individual on the provider, but also due to the higher cost of life, a cost that is inevitable cos we pay in advance for all the services that we might or might not use, the families will become smaller and smaller, the old age is cared for by the provider [government], not anymore by the rest of the family.
In the previous centuries, the sons and grandsons would have cared for the old age of the person. Today, statistically speaking there are no sons and grandsons to do that, or they are too few and then again, the care has been already paid for.
So why then the old system would be inherently better? After all, what we need to do is just making the new system work. The heart of the problem in my opinion lies in the fact that the old family was indeed a strong organism, and was also naturally forming real bond with the other families of the community, village, town, ....
This created an extraordinary strength that widthstood an immense and never ending sequence of wars, invasions, deaseases, pestilences, ...
Even in case of a major war, when the governement was indeed wiped off, the substructure: the families, the communities were nonetheless going on.
Today, we are more and more dependent with a direct link to the government whilst the family and community cohesion is less and less. In case of a major war, in case of this superstructure being wiped off, the life as we knew it would cease to exist, we would have societal collapse.
But we don't need to imagine such gruesomes scenario; petty criminality is also a good example. Such a society would not be able to face an individual smart new organism that enters the "environment", such a petty criminal has no need or ties to the government, it moves freely, has no restrains.

Margaret Thatcher once said: "There is no such thing as Society, there are individuals and there are families".

This sentence might appear at odds with what I just said, because how can there not be a thing called Society if I used it and criticized it several times in the previous argument?
The point of the sentence is that Society is a non-entity. It is, to use a word dear to our century, a virtual concept. We built everything on the idea of society, and being society something that has no essence, inevitably causes the system to have an inherent weakness mainly due to the depersonification of the human being.
It's a centralization of everything, every need and service to a central power. Once this central power is for any reason unable to perform we'll have herds of people unable to live working lives.
The central power, the government should not consider its subjects (besides the fact that in my opinion it should not consider them subjects in the first place) a community, a society, should not try to regulate or legislate for anything else than individuals and families, doing so will inevitably provoke problems and injustice.

If you make a law to give special, therefore different treatment to, say a religious group or an ethnic minority, you will end up treating people differently and unjustly and once you go down this road, it never leads you to a happy place.
Everybody should be exactly the same in front of the law and the government should never meddle with communities (a "community organizer" is just another word for: I'm the government and I'll lay out special treatment for special interests), they tend to regulate themselves due to the fact that a community is just the sum of the individuals and family it is formed with.

"He who is merciful with the cruel, will end-up being cruel to the merciful"

Kohelet Rabba 7:16

Metals?

2009-12-16T19:44:00.000+01:00

Here’s an interesting insight that I obtained from a friend involved in energy issues:
1) Solar power and electric car batteries rely heavily upon rare earth metals.
2) The world’s largest repository of rare earth metals is China.
3) China has indicated that it will not export these metals, hence solar panels and car batteries will have to be built in China.
So, who is it that will benefit from “green jobs”, exactly?

Danny Lamieux

The Dog Ate My Tree Rings

2009-11-30T12:01:00.000+01:00

This is the apotheosis of madness. UK is going to be The Country where I'm sure I won't go to live!

A "good" explanation

2009-11-28T14:07:00.000+01:00

This Climategate is starting to become insane. Now it hits even New Zealand. The self called "scientists" at NIWA claim to have a "good" explanation for falsifying the data. Yeah! And the Main Stream Media stands in silence!

Peer Review

2009-11-28T13:48:00.000+01:00

Now THIS will most certainly have your jaw drop on the floor and you set your (provided you were so fool to buy it) DVD of "An Inconvenient Truth" on fire.

I'm so disgusted and infuriated, again, let me have a little pleasure: I TOLD YOU!!!!!!!

UPDATE 01: this is even more interesting.

Rahe on Tocqueville

2009-11-25T15:19:00.000+01:00

The thing that Tocqueville noticed when he came to the United States, that was unheard of and unthinkable in France to this very day, is that most of the things that for which the French looked to the government Americans did for themselves.

Paul Rahe

When the shit hits the fan

2009-11-25T02:42:00.000+01:00

The results "to me" never added up, let's not even start talking about the models that never predicts the future, but when the data is a complete error riddled disaster and best scenario have more holes than a slice of Emmenthal then I'll say it: I TOLD YOU!

The sad thing is that in the end is the normal people to pay for this.

UPDATE 01: some more details on what now is apparently being called Warmergate.

UPDATE 02: the US monodailies journalists are doing what they do best: bankrupting their newspapers by writing more and more BS.

Environightmare

2009-10-30T13:05:00.000+01:00

A very interesting insight of how much imbecile people can get if anything gets done to them in the name of the environment.

Nutty nutty England

2009-10-30T12:28:00.000+01:00

After reading news like these, one has to ask where in the world is England going?

Madness and more madness.

The Chicago Way

2009-10-28T11:36:00.000+01:00

Things at the White House are getting more grotesque by the minute.

Economically Moribund Feudal Backwater

2009-10-15T22:58:00.000+02:00

"Why squander your presidency on trying to turn an economically moribund feudal backwater into a functioning nation state when you can turn a functioning nation state into an economically moribund feudal backwater?"
Mark Steyn

Even higher CO2 in the Ice Age

2009-10-15T22:45:00.000+02:00

And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

Don't mean to pile on here, but yes, our CO2 levels have been rising. They're currently at a whopping level of 360 ppm, which is higher than they've been for some time now. But if we go back a few years, say to the Ordovician Period, which was but a mere 450 million years ago, the CO2 levels then were at 4,000 ppm. Funny thing is, this was during a major ice age. So how on earth did CO2 levels get so high back then when there was no "man-made" warming. Let me guess, the climate models were all wrong.

Jeff Talbot

Just Another Day

2009-10-15T22:28:00.000+02:00

Here is something to write about on the subject of the NFL and Rush........If I recall the details correctly, Arizona was the only state to allow their citizens to vote on whether the gov't employees should get a paid day off or not, and call it Martin Luther King day. They voted it down. Not the recognition, just the idea of giving state employees another paid vacation.

The NFL yanked the Super Bowl from Phoenix as punishment.

Someone from Arizona called the NFL offices on MLK day on a hunch. Turns out the it is just another day for NFL employees . A spokesman said that it is a busy time of year for them, so they can't honor MLK by giving their workers the day off.

Dave Mikelson
Saint Paul, Minnesota

Nobel Prize for Peace... here we go again, and again, and again....

2009-10-11T04:58:00.000+02:00

I wanted to write something witty and teasing about the recent decision of the Nobel Prize Committee to give the Nobel Prize for Peace to Barack Obama but I prefer to link to an exceptional post by the one man global content provider, Mr Mark Steyn.

But... one more thought about this "Prize"... I have an omen about the 2010 prize: Ahmadinejad... so much for appeasement boosting with a sprinkle of hopeychanging!

UPDATE 01: So the White House has declared that Obama said he accepts the Prize with "humility", yeah.... about that... it doesn't really work that way. Especially with the concept of "humility". You can be humble and behave likewise but you cannot preemptively tag yourself "humble" and expect people to stop judging on their own and use your suggestion instead.

UPDATE 02: About the "Wow!" supposedly pronounced by Obama at the moment of receiving news of the victory of the Prize; so the candidacy to the Nobel Prize had as a deadline a couple of weeks after he started to govern at the White House... So that probably explains the WOW, since this is a hopeychangey presidency then also the Prize must have been for having done nothing... Oh yeah... the Great Orator (except when the teleprompter is offline) talks and talks about milk and honey scenarios of peace, love and understanding... but what he's done is less than nothing, he literally screwed up the relationship with some of America best allies, while appeasing the worst dictators around,

Again Steyn is funnier than me:

I assumed this was a reference to his rip-roaring success in winning the Olympic Games for Rio, but as it turns out the deadline for Nobel nominations was way back on February 1st.

Obama took office on January 20th. Gosh, it’s so long ago now. What “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy” did he make in those first 12 days? Bowing to the Saudi King? Giving the British Prime Minister the Wal-Mart discount box of “Twenty Classic Movies You’ve Seen A Thousand Times?”

“Er, Barack, I’ve already seen these.” “That’s okay. They won’t work in your DVD player anyway.”

For these and other “extraordinary efforts” in “cooperation between peoples,” President Obama is now the fastest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in history. Alas, the extraordinary efforts of those first 12 days are already ancient history.

UPDATE 03: "I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who've been honored by this prize." - yeah...about that... I'm pretty sure that going on that road maybe one day he'll be of the same caliber of Al Gore, Kofi Annan, Jimmy Carter, Arafat... he just needs to take inspiration from Jimmy Carter and great advices from his foreign policies adviser (Zbgniew Brzezinski).

Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant heard by the Canadian Parliament

2009-10-11T04:52:00.000+02:00

And so it happened.... I'm not sure the Canadian MPs that "listened" to Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant really understood the words the said, the concept they expressed and explained in so many different ways till you stop and think that maybe the whole hearing itself is simply useless, cos maybe Canadian authorities should and must be intelligent enough to realize by themselves that Section 13 is an abomination because I take it that to ask for them to be intelligent enough to never had legislated for it is surely asking too much from them.

Here is the official transcript.
Here is an interview by Rob Breakenridge to Mark Steyn.

Shining - Spanish Version (Preview)

2009-10-09T18:16:00.003+02:00

Reminds you of something?

2009-08-24T01:56:00.004+02:00

It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.

James Madison (1751-1836)

Health Care

2009-07-30T18:53:00.000+02:00

Oh, and in case you are still utterly confused about what health care means and what one controlled and run by your government will mean for you, here is an enlightenment:

THE NATIONALIZATION OF YOUR BODY

Steyn, me and the Climate

2009-07-28T16:38:00.003+02:00

I am often astonished reading posts and articles by Mark Steyn, and I guess here in this blog that is no news at all. Yet I must admit that it's not often that I find such a complete manifesto matching so beautifully with my ideas about the AGW and the global climate in general:

Further to the post below, several readers have asked why I didn't refute the case made against me. Well, the case made against me is that I'm an uneducated clod, and I agreed with that. But, if you mean the argument on "global warming," my general line is this: For the last century, we've had ever-so-slight warming trends and ever-so-slight cooling trends every 30 years or so, and I don't think either are anything worth collapsing the global economy over.

Things warmed up a bit in the decades before the late Thirties. Why? I dunno. The Versailles Treaty? The Charleston?

Then from 1940 to 1970 there was a slight cooling trend. In its wake, Lowell Ponte (who I believe is an expert climatologist and, therefore, should have been heeded) wrote his bestseller, The Cooling: Has the new ice age already begun? Can we survive?

From 1970 to 1998 there was a slight warming trend, and now there's a slight cooling trend again. And I'm not fussed about it either way. But here's how Media Matters corrects me:

In fact, as Media Matters for America has noted, annual global average temperatures have both risen and fallen over the past 11 years, and while there have been some relatively cooler years during that period — including a decline in each of the past three years relative to the year before — climate scientists reject the idea that those temperatures are any indication that global warming is slowing or does not exist.

Gotcha. Those scientists "reject" the cooling trend of the last decade and think it's part of the "long-term" warming trend of the previous three decades. Just as, presumably, when he published his book on "the new ice age" in 1976, Lowell Ponte thought the warming trend of the 1970s was part of the "long-term" cooling trend of the previous three decades.

If you dig that jive, I'm happy for you. Glad you're a satisfied customer — like the lady who went to see the fortune teller and was told she'd meet a tall dark stranger the following Wednesday, and on Thursday met a blond midget! Amazing! But I like the way Prof. Ian Plimer puts it:

I’m a natural scientist. I’m out there every day, buried up to my neck in sh**, collecting raw data. And that’s why I’m so sceptical of these models, which have nothing to do with science or empiricism but are about torturing the data till it finally confesses. None of them predicted this current period we’re in of global cooling. There is no problem with global warming. It stopped in 1998. The last two years of global cooling have erased nearly 30 years of temperature increase.

In the mid-nineties, which climatologist and which model predicted the cooling trend of the turn of the century and the oughts? And, if they didn't, on what basis do you trust their claims for 2050 or 2100?