blog
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Cats are cat food and water.
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My worst [mistake] was
source ~/.bash_historyvia accidental tab completion. I was expecting.bash_profile. The nasty part was, I couldn't kill it because of all the mess (system instability) it was creating. A couple ofcd ..calls and arm -rf *ended up biking some root directories.I ended up restoring from backup.
— one of many hilarious command-line mistakes
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I came across this one-line command to watch Al-Jazeera English natively in Linux. It uses rtmpdump to connect to the RTMP video stream server and then pipes the output to mplayer. I was so delighted at how well this worked on my low-power computer. It usually struggles to play video which is contained in a flash container and now I could bypass flash! So, I spent some time with google and wireshark (a packet analyzer) and created one-liners for as many live RTMP streams as I could find.
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I want to create a simple application. It awards you achievements for watching films. For instance, you might be awarded 'Trekkie' for watching all the Star Trek films. Whether a film had been rated or not on iMDb.com or Netflix would dictate a film being 'seen'. Easy enough; a prototype should take hours.
If only it were so simple. There is no API (application programming interface) for iMDb, so it is impossible to interact with any data stored on the site. It would be trivial to scrape the data that I want to use but their strict terms of use don't allow it. Netflix actually have an API but they only return the last 20 ratings. You can get up to 500 of the users actual rented discs but that is insufficient.
Of course the biggest problem with all this is that the data that I want is mine; it's just locked up. I can't help dreaming of when open data, standards, source, and government become the norm. I did come across Freebase which gives me hope for the former.
Update: It has occured to me that the precise tool I long for is a scrobbler for movies similar to the Last.fm music scrobbler.
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It never gets easier, you just go faster.
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— Nostalgia, we're never going to hear our hardware again.
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— Dennis Hopper drops some knowledge about drug use
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Man on a bicycle can go three or four times faster than the pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer of flat road at an expense of only 0.15 calories. The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match man's metabolic energy to the impedance of locomotion. Equipped with this tool, man outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines but all other animals as well. The bicycle lifted man's auto-mobility into a new order, beyond which progress is theoretically not possible.
— Ivan Illich, Energy & Equity
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— Danish 'Breaking Away' poster
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Music will continue to play as you browse. — Eko-Låten by Björn Isfält, heard in En kärlekshistoria
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Companies that claim to hold patents used in the H.264 video codec:
Apple Inc., DAEWOO Electronics Corporation, Dolby Laboratories Licensing Corporation, Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, France Télécom, société anonyme, Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Foerderung der angewandten Forschung e.V., Fujitsu Limited, Hitachi, Ltd., Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V., LG Electronics Inc., Microsoft Corporation, Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, NTT DOCOMO, INC., Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, Panasonic Corporation, Robert Bosch GmbH, Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., Scientific-Atlanta Vancouver Company, Sedna Patent Services, LLC, Sharp Corporation, Siemens AG, Sony Corporation, Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson, The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York, Toshiba Corporation, Victor Company of Japan, Ltd
This is why we can't have nice things.
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— Caravaggio
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Warning: the file enwiki-20080103-pages-meta-history.xml.7z decompresses to 2.8 Terabytes. Before wasting Internet Archive's bandwidth, ask yourself: do you really have enough hard disk space to work on this file? -
… the question of whether Machines Can Think… is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim.
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These are the names of all the countries in lots of languages (according to Google Translate).
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— George Hincapie dreams of falling.
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— Marilyn Monroe at 20, a year before she was first on screen.
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We shall grapple with the ineffable, and see if we may not eff it after all.
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We must be humble enough to know that we humans are not the upper bound. Just as we can not know the universe we cannot alone understand ourselves nor any other human. We are drops in a wave of the grand emergence, set to resonate against enforced constraints.
We are a parallel machine running billions of processes. But human communication is inaccurate, it’s second hand, inferior to the ineffable truth of human experience.
An intelligent machine could communicate bit-perfect memories, experiences, thoughts and ideas to another machine. With human-machine augmentation, we could do the same.
The collective consciousness becomes tangible.
