What I wrote in the YouTube comments

I admit that the avoidance of paying for Microsoft Office was my main reason for beginning to use LibreOffice (Open Office at the time). Same with using Ubuntu over Windows. However, the more I use and learn about free software, the more I sympathize with Stallman’s view, quoted by Nixie: “free software is a matter of liberty, not price.” It’s my computer, and I want to have full knowledge of every instruction running on it. That’s the freedom of free software to me.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7203553/after-upgraded-to-xcode-4-2-organizer-svn-repository-stopped-working

http://derechoaleer.org/acta

http://laquadrature.net

INTERNETS, 18th of January 2012.

PRESS RELEASE, FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE.

Over a century ago Thomas Edison got the patent for a device which would “do for the eye what the phonograph does for

the ear”. He called it the Kinetoscope. He was not only amongst the first to record video, he was also the first person

to own the copyright to a motion picture.

Because of Edisons patents for the motion pictures it was close to financially impossible to create motion pictures

in the North american east coast. The movie studios therefor relocated to California, and founded what we today call

Hollywood. The reason was mostly because there was no patent.

There was also no copyright to speak of, so the studios could copy old stories and make movies out of them – like

Fantasia, one of Disneys biggest hits ever.

So, the whole basis of this industry, that today is screaming about losing control over immaterial rights, is that they

circumvented immaterial rights. They copied (or put in their terminology: “stole”) other peoples creative works,

without paying for it. They did it in order to make a huge profit. Today, they’re all successful and most of the

studios are on the Fortune 500 list of the richest companies in the world. Congratulations – it’s all based on being

able to re-use other peoples creative works. And today they hold the rights to what other people create.

If you want to get something released, you have to abide to their rules. The ones they created after circumventing

other peoples rules.

The reason they are always complainting about “pirates” today is simple. We’ve done what they did. We circumvented the

rules they created and created our own. We crushed their monopoly by giving people something more efficient. We allow

people to have direct communication between eachother, circumventing the profitable middle man, that in some cases take

over 107% of the profits (yes, you pay to work for them).

It’s all based on the fact that we’re competition.

We’ve proven that their existance in their current form is no longer needed. We’re just better than they are.

And the funny part is that our rules are very similar to the founding ideas of the USA. We fight for freedom of speech.

We see all people as equal. We believe that the public, not the elite, should rule the nation. We believe that laws

should be created to serve the public, not the rich corporations.

The Pirate Bay is truly an international community. The team is spread all over the globe – but we’ve stayed out of the

USA. We have Swedish roots and a swedish friend said this:

The word SOPA means “trash” in Swedish. The word PIPA means “a pipe” in Swedish. This is of course not a coincidence.

They want to make the internet inte a one way pipe, with them at the top, shoving trash through the pipe down to the

rest of us obedient consumers.

The public opinion on this matter is clear. Ask anyone on the street and you’ll learn that noone wants to be fed with

trash. Why the US government want the american people to be fed with trash is beyond our imagination but we hope that

you will stop them, before we all drown.

SOPA can’t do anything to stop TPB. Worst case we’ll change top level domain from our current .org to one of the

hundreds of other names that we already also use. In countries where TPB is blocked, China and Saudi Arabia springs to

mind, they block hundreds of our domain names. And did it work? Not really.

To fix the “problem of piracy” one should go to the source of the problem. The entertainment industry say they’re

creating “culture” but what they really do is stuff like selling overpriced plushy dolls and making 11 year old girls

become anorexic. Either from working in the factories that creates the dolls for basically no salary or by watching

movies and tv shows that make them think that they’re fat.

In the great Sid Meiers computer game Civilization you can build Wonders of the world. One of the most powerful ones

is Hollywood. With that you control all culture and media in the world. Rupert Murdoch was happy with MySpace and had

no problems with their own piracy until it failed. Now he’s complainting that Google is the biggest source of piracy

in the world – because he’s jealous. He wants to retain his mind control over people and clearly you’d get a more

honest view of things on Wikipedia and Google than on Fox News.

Some facts (years, dates) are probably wrong in this press release. The reason is that we can’t access this information

when Wikipedia is blacked out. Because of pressure from our failing competitors. We’re sorry for that.

THE PIRATE BAY, (K)2012

• Visit http://americancensorship.org/. Scroll down a bit to the header “‘Censor’ your website in protest.” They have the HTML code. Copy it to your clipboard. (here’s the HTML, also.)

<a style=”width:400px;height:100px;vertical-align:middle;text-align:center;background-color:#000;position:absolute;z-index:5555;top:50px;left:50px;background-image:url(http://americancensorship.org/images/stop-censorship-small.png);background-position:center center;background-repeat:no-repeat;” href=”http://americancensorship.org”></a>

• On WordPress, go to Dashboard>Appearance>Widgets. You should see various widget areas. Drag over a new “Text” widget. Inside the text widget, paste the HTML code.
• That’s it! Save the widget, and go view your site! You might have to modify the coordinates in the HTML in order to position the black box where you want it.

Why ‘censor’ my WordPress blog?

http://blog.reddit.com/2012/01/stopped-they-must-be-on-this-all.html ”we will be blacking out reddit on January 18th from 8am–8pm EST (1300–0100 UTC).”

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 25,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 9 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

The purpose of this article is not to discuss the SOPA and PROTECT-IP bills, though you may be interested to learn more by watching this video from http://americancensorship.org/#nextsteps.

Over the next week, I intend to write down more about my experience at the Rave Cinema in Cincinnati, Ohio. Perhaps by the end of the week, this series of essays will allow me to draw a substantive conclusion about the distress I felt while experiencing and reflecting on our tastes as a nation.

Error message

Serial port “COM1″ not found. Did you select the right one from the Tools > Serial Port menu?

Binary sketch size: 998 bytes (of a 32256 byte maximum)
processing.app.SerialNotFoundException: Serial port ‘COM1′ not found. Did you select the right one from the Tools > Serial Port menu?
at processing.app.Serial.<init>(Serial.java:153)
at processing.app.Serial.<init>(Serial.java:76)
at processing.app.debug.Uploader.flushSerialBuffer(Uploader.java:75)
at processing.app.debug.AvrdudeUploader.uploadViaBootloader(AvrdudeUploader.java:93)
at processing.app.debug.AvrdudeUploader.uploadUsingPreferences(AvrdudeUploader.java:56)
at processing.app.Sketch.upload(Sketch.java:1603)
at processing.app.Sketch.exportApplet(Sketch.java:1568)
at processing.app.Sketch.exportApplet(Sketch.java:1524)
at processing.app.Editor$DefaultExportHandler.run(Editor.java:2293)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:679)

A solution, found on http://arduino.cc/playground/Linux/All#Permission

SET THE PERMISSION

now as normal user from terminal:
ls -l /dev/ttyUSBX
or
ls -l /dev/ttyACMX
you will get something like:
crw-rw—- 1 root uucp 188, 0 5 apr 23.01 ttyUSBX
or
crw-rw—- 1 root dialout 188, 0 5 apr 23.01 ttyACMX
in the first case the data we need is “uucp”, in the second “dialout” (is the group owner of the file).
Now we just need to add our user to the group:
sudo usermod -a -G group-name username
where group-name is the data found before, and username is your linux user name.
Now we have to check if you have permission on the lock folder:
ls -ld /var/lock
you should see something similar to this:
drwxrwxrwt 2 root root 4096 9 dic 21.39 /var/lock
if the permission are not like this, then as root(or sudo) just run:
chmod o+rwx /var/lock
Disconnect the Arduino before logging out.
You will have to log out and log in again for the group addition to take effect.

If you are an aspiring Arduino-ist, you may be inspired by watching this awesome dude.

• Ubuntu Software Center
• Start typing “record”
• Click and download “Desktop recorder.”
• From your Applications menu, find and run “Desktop recorder.”.
• That’s it! Click the “Record” button, and you’re off to the races!

Where did my video go? By default, the video is saved to your user’s home folder. That is /home/nate, which is the parent folder to your desktop. If you open a terminal (Ctrl-Alt-T) and type “ls” you should see your movie called “out.ogv”.

edit: I recommend renaming your videos manually after each capture. This way, you don’t accidentally overwrite a video you want to keep.

edit: sound didn’t work, for some reason. Oh well. You can see the first video I recorded with Desktop recorder at the top of this post.

Alright! You’ve got the basics! Go open the preferences and see if you can change the default save location, the video quality, and anything else you want to. This is Ubuntu, customize it to work for you!