SOPA and PIPA

Once again they are at it again. Here’s my stance on this. It’s like gun control. No matter how much lawmakers make something that’s already illegal, MORE illegal, will not stop it from occurring.

Piracy is just going to happen no matter what they try to do. This time they want to basically turn off the sites that might have pirated/stolen content. What draconian bureaucrat is going to make that decision? Doesn’t that break a constitutional amendment? What about fair use? If i say “finger licking good” will KFC have the right to shut this blog off?

And how exactly are they (mpaa, riaa, etc all) losing billions of dollars (as a whole) when they are making trillions of dollars in profit? Sure they base this on an “estimated” count on how many times a particular material is copied. However this isn’t the kind of “loss” where they had to pay someone. This is pure theoretical “potential” money that they could have made if all those people who pirated said material had bought it.  Which everyone knows isn’t how this works. If (in some parallel universe) piracy didn’t exist these same people wouldn’t have bought that material anyway.

Heck, these corporations who complain about losses due to piracy might save money if they weren’t spending billions on lawyers and paying off lobbyists to give blowjobs to politicians who write these draconian laws.

MagSafe isn’t!

Last Monday something went wrong with my Mac. When plugging in the magsafe connector, the machine just went black. I had just unplugged it from one wall, onto another outlet wall because i wanted to move. Hell it’s a portable computer, i should be able to PLUG IT IN SOMEWHERE ELSE when i want to.

So it took less than 5 seconds to unplug it, move it over to another AC outlet, and as I sat down putting my MBP on my lap, it turned it self off.  As if something shorted out and it turned off as a precaution. Maybe I bumped the magnetic connector or something. Now with the 1st power adapter I had, it went bad on me when the wires inside were fraying near the magsafe connector, and wasn’t able to keep a consistant connection. I had to bend and pull the cable to make it power my mac, then it just died a couple months later.

Anyway, so now the newer power adapter, that i’ve had for about 9 months, doesn’t seem to work anymore.  It no longer powers nor charges my MBP, as if the power brick is dead like the 1st one was. I was looking at about $30-$90 to replace the power adapter, since I didn’t bother with an extended Apple service contract, and it’s over a year old from when I bough it. This is the SECOND TIME in the past 15 months this fucking thing has broken on me.  Hell the old Xbox 360s lasted at least 2 years before they RRoDed on me… SIX TIMES for the past 6½ years.  I digress…

So I ignored my Mac for nearly a week. Preoccupied with Skyrim and Fallout DLC. So I power up my Mac just on batteries since I knew it worked; I just didn’t wanna waste battery power till i get a new power adapter. The Mac behaves weird. It boots much slower, the keyboard doesn’t light up even though it on screen icon shows it’s going brighter and darker. The fans were on full blast the moment I hit the power button.  Once it got to the desktop, I noticed that on the status bar for the battery has a big X on it, and clicking it stated “NO BATTERY PRESENT.”  So what the hell is powering it then, magic power from the spirit of Steve Jobs?

So something got damaged. My guess is whatever governs power between external power, batter and when it should charge.  Turns out this is called the PMU (Power Management Unit) that deals with AC and Battery power and recharging the battery, as well as the fans  It’s likely my power adapter works just fine, it’s just this PMU is having PMS.

So.. after Googling this issue, and learning about the existence of the PMU; I found out how you reset it!  I had my doubts a simple keyboard keystroke with it TURNED OFF would matter.  It first said with it off, to plug the magsafe power in, and I wasn’t even sure if it was broken or not, since it doesn’t light up when it’s plugged in. So with Job’s faith, I pressed shift-control-option with the power button, and let go of all of them simultaniously. Then power back on as normal, and hallelujah it powered back on as normal!  The green light lit up on the magsafe connector, then it turned orange as it does when it charges.  It went to my desktop and everything seems to be… normal!  YAY!  Macs are so.. WEIRD. Well not so much Mac’s but I’ve only owned 2 laptops in my entire life (the 1st one being a netbook) and never really had to deal with PMUs.

And to think they wanted me to pay about $350 for an Apple service contract, when I could have bought another laptop for that? BTW this is my 300th post on my WordPress blog.  Yay!

Now if I can just get NoSleep, or Insomniac to work properly on OS X Lion. Arg! No sleep works well, but when you reboot it’s no longer installed, it just isn’t THERE anymore. It doesn’t install in the traditional .dmg way; it uses an actual installer app like windows. Where as Insomniac just doesn’t work at all.

Political Rant: Fuck it ALL!

This is not rant against Obama, nor rant against business nor corporations. Please keep that in mind when reading this. I’ll explain this towards the end.

Wanna know why Obama hasn’t been doing jack shit since he entered office? If Obama ever did do anything in the interest of “the people” and not corporate/lobbyist interests, he’d be shot. Just ask JFK, or his brother RFK who almost became president. Oh and ask MLK about that too while you’re at it.

If, for the sake of argument, Bush was reelected for a 3rd term we’d be in the EXACT same situation right now. It makes no difference which puppet is in the White House; it’s the same people for the past several generations pulling the strings. Lets also say for the sake of argument that Obama does NOT get a second term, do you REALLY think any of these idiots the Republicans are parading on TV going to do anything different that Bush or Obama have done?  Bachmann, Gingrich, Perry, Romney, Santorum, etc are all fucking idiots. They will not bring any “change,” since the last president to bring actual change (in a bad way) WAS Bush after 9/11. How can anyone really think that another republican douche-hat will change anything since Obama (remember a democrat) hasn’t done anything?

What about Ron Paul? Even if he did get elected he would just veto all day and congress won’t give him a leg up. Or he might just get assassinated. Which goes back to my first point I made a few paragraphs back.

We voted for Obama because he wasn’t a republican in 2008, now everyone is going to vote republican in 2012 (assuming the world doesn’t end) since we now hate Democrats for the same reasons we hated Republicans four years ago.  This is a fucking JOKE!  This back and forth has been going on since… FOREVER!  Why was Carter elected, because Nixon was a crook, and Ford was a fuck-tard, so Carter was elected simply because he was NOT a republican.  Then Carter totally fucked it up, and everyone hated Democrats because of him so everyone Voted for Reagan since he wasn’t a Democrat. Rince, and repeat for the next 40 FUCKING years.

Republican, Conservative, Democrat, or Liberal, is all MEANINGLESS now because with Obama in office,  it apparently doesn’t MATTER who has “the power” since the President no longer has it, or uses it. Could because of fear, or he’s been paid to do so? Even when Democrats apparently had a majority at the capitol, they got nothing done. Now Republicans are in majority control, and STILL nothing gets done.  When will people realize that these political ”parties” are all the same group of people and makes no fucking difference who you vote in.

Oh wait! Except losing our constitutional rights, that’s all that’s getting done between Senate/Congress vacations every season.  What exactly are our troops dying for if our own lawmakers keep using White-Out on the Constitution?

Now it’s about corporate greed and special interest lobbyists Vs. the rest of us; yet we are enabling them. So what makes them special? Corporate money that used to be ours until you decided to buy some irrelevant product made by these “…corporations,” advertised and hyped by the media sell outs.

We do not live in a real democracy, it’s bought and paid for by so-called “corporations.”

However these business are are not accrual corporations since we do not live in a real free market.

It’s a scam and we buy into it every day.  This is why this is not really a rant against Obama nor corporations since they aren’t REAL anymore everything is faked now.  Obama is not the president, he has no real power, it’s faked.  Corperations aren’t real since we have no free market anymore; they just buy up all competition and keep selling you worthless crap that the media hypes up in ads.  It’s all fake. Fake news, fake media, fake people, fake products, fake money, fake politics. Only thing that is real is war, and people are STILL dying over.. fakeness.

Keep eating McD’s fries so you’ll end up diabetic and sick and be on Big Pharma’s medications for the rest of your life… SLAVE.

Keeping your PC running smooth

I’ve been doing tech support off and on for over a decade, and the majority of issues I run into is simple neglect. It isn’t necessarily about how some users are still using the same PC for the past 5+ years and assume their PC is just to old it can’t run Second Life, World of Warcraft, or any other semi recent video game.  Games like this are likely OLDER than the PC they are using, so they aren’t using outdated hardware.

Some of the possible reasons why your computer sucks could be damaged hardware.  Just because your PC seems to run fine, boots up and does email and youtube videos, dosen’t mean it won’t fail at other things. You can spend all day updating drivers but if your hardware has any damage it won’t matter. Most common hardware damage is RAM and video card RAM, and your hard drive due to long term excessive heat in your PC. There are applications that allow you to “burn-test” both system and video RAM and find any obvious flaws.

A common system RAM tester is MemTestx86. This comes as a .iso you can burn to a CD (or floppy, or boot USB drive) boot to it and it starts to automatically run pattern tests in your system ram looking for miss-matches. This can take some time depending on how much ram you have (about 2 hours) so let this run over night.

An app to test the ram on your video card is Video Ram Test. This app runs almost EXACTLY like MemTestx86 thats used for system ram, but this also comes as a windows app you can run. But for best results you should use the boot-iso version so that it’s accessing ram directly (and not though cache)

If you find ANY problems with your video card’s RAM or your system RAM using these tests, you should REPLACE them!  The only exception to this is if you’re overclocking, in that case you should step-down your overclocking to “stock” speeds and run these tests again and see if you still have these problems.  If not you shouldn’t overclock anymore, and by doing so you’ve already shortened the life of your hardware.

For harddrive testing, this really depends on what brand of hard drive you’re using. And if you’re using a normal mechanical harddrive or a solid-state drive (SSD). You could just run checkdisk from windows, and let windows scan your hard drive(s) which can take ALL day.  However any problems you MAY find on your harddrive can be corrected and you don’t need to replace your harddrive, assuming there is no major damage to the surface of your harddrive.

Should you Defrag?  no. I’m all my years of using PCs I’ve NEVER found any benefit from defragmentation. Only until the end of the 80s did defragging matter. Modern HDDs do not read and write in sequential pattern, which defragging puts your data in a sequential order, so defragging may SLOW DOWN your hard drive performance. Or does nothing other than add a little more wear and tear to your HDD for something that may not bring any benefit.

If you’re using an SSD this can shorten the life of your drive if you defrag, so DO NOT DO IT. With normal HDs it’s only with HEAVE HEAVY use does the data on your HD get fragmented and you MIGHT consider defragging if you have VERY large files that need to be read quickly. Otherwise it’s pointless, modern OS file systems tend to take care of these things for you automatically now.

One app i’ve found (not used) is called HDDScan. This should show you if there are any issues with your harddrive(s) but im not sure if it performs any surface tests for bad sectors.

Many end users buy pre-made PCs with windows preloaded and with that a ton of useless apps are pre-installed. Install and run PC Decrapifier. This should remove all those useless trial-run applications that are virtually worthless. This will also free up some hard drive space to boot! The reason new PCs come with this crap is because these software makers PAY these OEMs so that it lowers the price of the PC when they preload apps since you might be encouraged to pay for full versions of these useless apps. This is the main reason why windows PCs are so cheap now. Where as Macs still remain expensive since you do not get this sort of BS on Apple products.

The NUMBER ONE reason why most users have poor performance, and technical problems running SL, and games is their install of windows is just OLD and has collected a lot of “bit rot.” This dosen’t mean you need to update to windows Vista or Windows 7; you just need to do a FRESH CLEAN install of your existing OS. Be it Windows 2000, XP, Vista and yes even Windows 7.

What i mean by a “clean” install is not to install windows over what you already have, that won’t fix anything. This wont clear out any glitches with software, conflicts with drivers, and possible malware that might be preset on your harddrive. You want to FORMAT your boot C:\ drive (or better yet delete the partition) and install windows fresh from the CD/DVD.

Users should reinstall windows at least once a year to keep their system clean. This goes for ALL platforms, not just Windows. I don’t know how many times this has cleared up small annoying technical issues i’ve had that simply went AWAY after reinstalling my OS, cleanly.

Yes this means you will lose everything stored on your hard drive (on C:\ anyway) so it’s time to back up your stuff.  DO NOT backup applications since you can just reinstall those. But DO back up any media files, documents, and pr0n!  I don’t recommend doing a system transfer which is a windows function you can use. This can also transfer whatever problems/glitches you were having in the first place and would defeat the purpose of doing a “clean” install of windows.

The same goes system backups.. those backups will also have the problems. bugs, glitches and other technical nightmares stored on your backup too.  It’s actually pointless to back up your OS and your applications since you can always reinstall them again ANYWAY. You only need to backup things you simply can’t replace again (or it would be too difficult to get back again)

The best way to run your PC is to have two hard drives (or two partitions). Install, or create a D: drive and place all your downloads there.  Keep your media files and pr0n there. Only put your OS and your apps on your C: drive.  So when it’s time to do another clean OS install, everything you need is still on your D: drive for you to install and use after you’ve formatted C: drive and reinstalled your OS clean.

I did mention malware and viruses, but honestly I do not run anti-virus apps, nor a firewall, other than what already comes with Windows Security Essentials. Any other 3rd party apps will just cause MORE problems than it does from preventing them. If you use common sense when exploring the web, you will NOT run into viruses, and malware on the net.

Do not use Internet Explorer, do not let any thing download you’re not expecting as you surf the web. Do not RUN anything you’re not expecting. So not install any plugins you’re not expecting when you know you already have it installed (like Flash, Searchlight, Shockwave, etc.) Use a reliable web browser like chrome that can isolate you from the malware.

Logging into There

With the limited logins There.com has imposed to keep the chaos controlled many users use an “auto clicker” that automates the login process to get on There.com so they can do this unattended. I’ll try to explain one way to do this.

1. Download Macro Recorder ”free download”
2. Install, and once you have it running click the “Settings” button on the toolbar
3. Click the “Playback Settings” tab and set “Continuous Replay” to zero for infinite playback.
4. Now run There client, and make sure you have it the proper login and password set up.
5. Go back to Macro Recorder, and click the record button. It’s window should minimize to the top left.
6. Manually click the login button on There.com a few times, then press CTRL-Q to stop recording.
7. The main window of Macro Recorder should reappear. Now just press play.

That’s it.. it should now be clicking the login button continusly until you stop it by pressing CTRL-Q. This can take up to 30 mins during high usage times. Also keep in mind you won’t be able to use your computer for anything else while you’re using Macro Recorder to auto-click the login button. Press CTRL-Q to stop it in case you want to do something else.  Click the play button again to resume, assuming There.com’s window is still open. The easiest time to login to There.com is past 11pm PST.

So to quickly re-cap. Download and install Macro Recorder. In settings set coninuous playback to zero for infinite playback. Run there.com client, and start your recording of yourself clicking the loginbutton a few times. Press CTRL-Q to stop the recording, and then press the play button to allow it to automatically click the login button for you.

Only things to keep in mind is to not move the there.com client window around since that will move the login button into the wrong posistion. For this reason i don’t bother saving the recordings, since almost every time you run the There client software the window will be in a diffrent posistion.  Plus it takes a few moments to make a recording, there’s no need to save them.

Macro Recorder I believe is shareware with a short free trial. However the restricted log-ons will only last until There.com goes fully live which most of us expect this to happen in less than two weeks. By then you’ll no longer need Macro Recorder.

Noobs with Boobs

Really sick and tired of people weating this awful looking breasts like pictured here.

It’s not just about how the skin tones don’t match, but the fact the “points” of the back ends of the breasts come to the center of your chest like this, and positioned so high up on your body it looks like it’s growing out of your neck. COME ON PEOPLE!  Learn to edit your shit!

 

 

 

 

 

 

And while on the subject…

Stop walking around in your ruthed avi body shape, with no physique, walking around with a constant hard-on. IT DOES NOT IMPRESS ANYONE!  Stop it already!  At least this avatar isn’t wearing pants over the penis, or wearing undies that makes the penis look like a strapon.

What There.com needs

With the impending opening of There.com, there are some things I just want to address:

Get rid of the zone chat in Phoenix Park (aka CosmoGirl, aka Tiki Cove park for you OGs). This place isn’t a funzone, ppl use it to spam voice, no one chats in it, and I really don’t give a shit when ppl come and go from Phoenix Park. It keeps making my there-icon blink in my task bar and it’s just FUCKING IRRITATING. Please REMOVE IT.

Deleted quest kits are still present in my inventroy, but are hidden. This was an issue from about 4-5 years ago. These were skill items that I never wanted. I couldn’t delete them so I had to request them t be deleted, and all they managed to do is just “hide” them. But I can still see them load up during login (espcially if it’s a bit lagged).

Drop reliance of Internet Explorer. It’s common sense to NOT use internet exploder.

Use re-sizeable screens!  I really don’t like how I’m forced to use fixed-resolutions while in windowed mode.  Almost all games (including second life) let you re-size the screen to anything you like.

Drop fixed camrea posistions.  I want to be able look around.. not be forced to what there.com thinks i should be looking at.

Use passive IMs. Instead of having to “call/page” someone to answer an instant message, the message is just sent. In There.com you have stop what you’re doing and answer the IM. Plus you’re limited to about 4 IMs. Where as in SL, IMs can be freely sent, even to offline users who will see them when they login (usually).

Consolidate the inventory. My BIGGEST gripe of all is how much the inventory, and the UI in general is one big clusterfuck. There are like 2-3 diffrent ways to deal with friends lists, inventory, and decorations. Oh and if you want to organize them you have use yet a DIFFERENT applet to do so.  Why not have it all in once place, and not have to fuck with a half dozen menu popups.  I suggest deleting everything and expanding on Organizer to deal with all your invntroy. buddy’s list, droppables, clothes, etc.  Yes even getting rid of changeme and it should only appear at the spa.

Speaking of spas.. why not just get rid of them anyway and be able to edit our bodies with out having to goto a spa?

USPS dead yet?

Well I heard it was going to go bankrupt last month, but I’m still getting junk mail, political ads, and bills. Rather than jacking the price of stamps on consumers every year (who are using postal mail less and less) why not jack the prices on the companies that habitually use it? …instead of the rest of us who rarely use USPS to send anything. Stick it to the organizations that send me junk mail, political “vote for this douchebag” mail, bills, pennysavers, fake news papers, ads, etc. etc.  Jack the fees up on bulk mailers, not regular people.

This will cause two things. We (might) get less junk mail every day, and this will increase the revenue of the USPS. Of course logical ideas like this befall large and old institutional organizations.

Ubuntu (again) 11.04 with Phoenix

Is a fucking nightmare.  Let me point out first that I am using a rather old PC running Ubuntu 11.04, on an old Athlon XP 3000+ Barton with an nvidia 6200 w/ 256mb.  So no 64bit, and no SSE2. So that leaves out any mesh support, and Firestorm just doesn’t even bother launching. Phoenix runs, but just barely.

So the first problem I ran into was th new “Unity interface” that attempts to do what OS X Lion has done to the Mac, and what Windows 8 will do windows, by creating a touch-tablet friendly internface, and keeping the interface consistent across PCs, phones and tablets within the same brand.

While unity runs well on this old PC and it reminds me of Snow Leopard, but it introduces glitches into the UI because Phoenix Viewer is making assumptions about cursor placement. One is that if you run phoenix in fullscreen mode, Unity removes the top header border you see at the top, and leave a blank gap at the bottom of the screen. This offsets the cursor and Phoenix thinks your mouse pointer is hovering over areas about a half-inch above where your cursor actually is. Disabling Unity and using Gnome fixed this issue.

Any time i move, or minimize Phoenix and restore, the viewer basically locks up… ALMOST. If’s as if the framerate drops to one frame every minute. Just barely enough to keep my avatar logged in, but trying to do anything is utterly useless which forces a relog.  Switching back to Gnome ui didn’t fix this.

So the viewer runs just fine in Ubuntu with gnome, with “okay” frame rates.  No noticeable difference in performance when with windows on this same machine. But not as glitchy, just as long as i don’t minimize or do anything else on this computer, or Phoenix goes into limbo.

Firestorm Wishlist

These are just some ideas I have in my head

Diffrent IM sound when a group chat pops up. So you can tell the diffrence between a normal IM from a resident, and group chats

Seperate block lists of residents and objects.  I like to clear out my resident block list from time to time but i usually keep object mutes alone.  having them separate would make this much simpler.

Built-in ruth/cloud fix function in the viewer. Everyone has experienced being stuck as a cloud, and you cannot wear any items because your shape hasn’t loaded. You can’t even wear a different shape since your 1st one hasn’t loaded.  There should be a one click and you’re fixed and then you’re allowed to wear what you want.

Windlight toggle setting in preferences. Rather than going into the console and setting “useenvironmentfromregionalways” to false, which is too cumbersome to remember.

Kill those stupid “chicklets” that linger on even after you’ve relogged teling you pointless information you didn’t care about in the first place.

That said, make region shut down warnings from LL for a rolling restart more NOTICEABLE.

When clicking the [▼] button at the bottom next to the local chat field, the Conversations window should minimize on one click, not two.