Going from Windows XP to Ubuntu 10.04 the first time was pretty easy; I just used UNetbootin and followed the instructions with little fuss.

But after adding some applications that locked up the computer shortly before displaying the login screen — effectively locking me out of the system — I didn’t know how to roll back and reinstall Ubuntu. Most instructions relied on being able to boot from a Live CD to fix things, and obviously I didn’t have that option.

“Netboot Install From Internet” HOWTO wiki page had my answer. I was able to (1) use a different computer to download some key files to a USB stick, (2) transfer the files from the USB stick to the /boot directory using the rudimentary command line available from initrd, (3) reboot and use the grub command line to initiate the netboot installation.

Earlier in the evening, I also tried a more extreme solution with a friend — we pulled the hard drive from the Fujitsu, put it into a Dell machine that could boot from a USB stick, and installed the basic, command-line only Ubuntu system that way.

There are options if you don’t have a system with bootable media. Good luck!

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is one of the best organizations focused on defending people’s digital rights — and we know how to throw a great party! Join us!

Anyway, Left 4 Dead feels dark, scary and authentic, yet it remains eminently playable. Though the polish seems effortless, these features were calculatingly considered and brought to the surface with some very artful techniques. Check out the following blog posts, in which Valve designer Randy Ludeen discusses the “filmic effects” and lighting design that contribute to Left 4 Dead’s quality and success as a game.

Learn more about this video and support EFF!

I didn’t quite expect that I would be allowed to watch the DVD, but I also wasn’t counting on being given the option to change my computer’s region code. Not that this makes me happy — region codes are just another bullshit way that Hollywood tries to control culture in the name of profit.

However, I’m violently shaking my fist at Upper Deck Entertainment (UDE) for putting random game boards in the Deluxe Edition boxes instead of marking explicitly which game board is in the box. I accept the idea that the booster packs (miniatures only) have a random assortment of characters, but random game boards? With each Deluxe Edition set costing $50, I should absolutely be able to pay $150 and be guaranteed ownership of all three game boards. But as it stands, dumping $150 into 3 Deluxe Edition sets only gives me a 22% chance of having all three boards.

The squabble is over a fake letter sent out by Taco Bell Corp. asking 50 Cent to change his name for one day to 79 Cent, 89 Cent or 99 Cent to help publicize its value menu.

Michael Masnick of Techdirt describes Taco Bell’s letter as an open letter, which seems to lump this activity in with a nascent trend of for-profit corporations adopting “dot org” strategies and messages. Open letters strike me as a tool used by the “little guy” (consumers, activists, public interest organizations) to open up an assault on a more powerful entity; receiving any kind of response from the target is basically a victory. Here, Taco Bell has co-opted a strategy more often used to bring about a public good — instead successfully using it to bring about a private good (awareness and profits for itself). They inverted the typical power structure too — in this odd situation, a huge corporation used an open letter to pick on an individual rapper.

(Photo of 50 Cent Wheelie Bin by David Jones under a Creative Commons 2.0 Attribution-Noncommercial License.)

Extrapolations aside, this whole episode is plainly hilarious.

From Wikinews, we heard from Volunteer Coordinator Cary Bass and Wikinews volunteer Jon Davis. Wikinews articles are written by volunteers and are only published after meeting a set of guidelines: copyright (or “not infringing anyone’s copyrights,” most likely), newsworthiness, verifiability, neutral point of view, and style. Wikinews has done some breaking stories with original reporting, and has a particular advantage in being able to continuously update a breaking story as it unfolds.

Bass and Davis stressed that ultimately, they need more users. If you’re interested in participatory journalism, consider contributing some time and effort to Wikinews. It seems like you could get a lot of eyeballs for your investment — articles are indexed by Google News and the organization is instantly recognizable thanks to the tie to Wikipedia.

Here are some brief, somewhat disjointed notes about Wikinews:

• Wikinews has implemented “flagged revisions,” (an effort to mitigate the effects of article vandalism and preserve quality) where the public version of a page is one that was vetted by a trusted editor.
• Wikinews has a “newsroom,” where contributors can go to see what articles are being developed and may need help. A lot of work gets done through the IRC chatroom.
• Story writers can use any photo available in the Wikimedia Commons.
• Wikinews rarely exercises fair use when looking for photos/images to add to a story.
• Wikinews articles have no bylines. (This seems like a factor in their low participation rate — if Wikinews could develop some kind of joint byline system, where writers are credited on the basis of how much of their contribution makes it to the final article, I think they may see more people signing up to write.)
• Wikinews articles are licensed with an attribution requirement only — share alike is NOT required.

We also heard from an interesting non-profit funded startup called Spot.us. David Cohn, a journalist and geek, won the Knight News Challenge — a contest/grant given to develop community-focused news and information projects, services, and programs. His idea was to create a site to promote community-funded journalism. Note that the product is not necessarily community-written journalism, a distinction that I think is rather important.

So, Spot.us strikes me as pretty cool. Citizens can submit “tips,” which are leads to stories developing in their community. Freelance, professional journalists can submit “pitches,” either in response to tips or of their own conception, that introduce the idea and boundaries of a potential story. Users can then fund the story with donations, creating the resources and incentive for the freelance journalist to investigate and write.

Crowdfunding is not exactly a new idea, but Spot.us is doing something really interesting — for the first six weeks, Spot.us tries to sell the exclusive rights to the produced story to a local news organization. If Spot.us makes a sale, it pays the original crowdfunders back. Also, six weeks after an article is produced, it is Creative Commons-licensed, giving the public the right to make use of the work.

Cohn believes that by having the articles Creative Commons-licensed, the end product is a public good — the public “owns” the end product. But Cohn also noted that Spot.us is partially an experiment to answer the question: “Is journalism a public good?” Will the public be interested in funding journalism in order to gain a benefit from it? Having come from a journalism background, I think it’s an interesting question to be asking now.

Also, Spot.us is built on Ruby on Rails and is open-source.

Goofing off at a CC Salon last year.

Judging from the Upcoming.org page, this CC Salon looks like it’ll be well-attended. If you’re in town, join for drinks, music, and some presentations on citizen journalism from Wikinews (community-written news) and Spot.us (community-funded reporting). It starts at 7pm!

I heard about the World of Warcraft Miniatures Game months ago, forgot about it, then got really excited when I saw a wall full of miniatures at the local GameStop. So my fianceé and I picked up a WoW Minis Core Set Starter from Gamescape in San Francisco. Here are photos of the unboxing:

My fiancée and I have played two games so far with the starter set characters and have really enjoyed it. (The rulebook is here if you’re interested in such details.) The characters have only a few action options per turn, so the gameplay isn’t too overwhelming. However, having the miniatures move around on the game board adds real richness, with ranged and melee attacks, line of sight, and minor terrain bonuses. Combat is resolved by rolling variable numbers of 10-sided dice — and die rolling in games is always fun.

The game also features a sharp “clock” system that makes good use of the rotating bases beneath the figures. Actions cost “ticks,” which determine the next time the character acts — bigger actions (more damage, stronger effects) generally cost more “ticks,” which may result in your opponent getting a chance to act before you do. I figure that players familiar with World of Warcraft will appreciate the strong correlation to the video game’s combat mechanics.

If I could make the time, I’d be interested in playing casually against others and maybe even in some kind of organized play… But my main fear is that the game will grow unbalanced. There are “boosters” available (for $15.00, natch) to give players more miniature characters and action cards — and like collectible card games, some miniatures are more rare than others. In my experience, this can lead to a “race to the rare,” where the game ceases to revolve around ingenuity and luck and instead transforms into shelling out the dough to obtain benefits that are made artificially scarce. On the other hand, I think that most modern organized play is based on draft rounds where choice and strategy still matters and the role of rarity is diminished.

Otherwise, for mass-produced plastic, the miniatures are surprisingly detailed, brightly colored, and well-scaled. Even off the board, I’m enjoying having a little row of recognizable characters to glance at near my desk at home.

(Photo of Detalle de la conexión al MacBook by iBuffet under a Creative Commons 2.0 Attribution-ShareAlike License.)

What does this mean? Well, High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) is an insidious form of DRM that prevents video sources from transmitting to non-compliant receivers. Conventionally speaking, it was designed so that new generations of disc players would only output to HDCP-compliant TVs and projectors — and not a DVR, computer, or general-purpose recording device.

To my limited knowledge, it works by encrypting the video coming out of the device’s port, then having the devices “know” what’s on the other end of the cable. If the player doesn’t “recognize” the device that’s displaying the movie, then the player stops*. (In the screenshot in the Ars article, the MacBook error message tells the user: “This movie cannot be played because a display that is not authorized to play protected movies is connected.”)

It’s extremely vexing to see Apple implementing DRM on its display ports — and it’s pushing me even further away from choosing an Apple laptop as my next computer.

* Depending on the devices being used, the player may instead simply lower the quality of the image, completely ignoring your hard-earned dollars of investment in “high definition.”

You can find some instructions on the Create Digital Music blog.

(via Banterability, via remiel)

Friedlander told the story of traveling across the country in a camper as his father completed photo shoots throughout the summer. With masterful, guitar-style plucking, he drifted through folk, soul, and other quintessentially American sounds, imbuing each of the photographs with history and character. With his performance, Friedlander ably introduced me to something I’ve never really felt before — an authentic sense of our national character.

If Friedlander ever comes to your town to perform, I’d highly recommend checking it out.

While Lessig did a fantastic job of drawing the audience to the inevitable necessity of making a serious effort to reform Congress, the Change Congress movement itself is pretty simple. Loosely, the campaign will challenge candidates for office to brand themselves with Change Congress badges on the basis of which three reforms they support, specifically:

1. refusing money from lobbyists or political action committees (PACs)
2. abolishing earmarks
3. endorsing public financing for campaigns

Simply, it’s a campaign to unite disparate reform movements through common branding, and it’s simple enough to get some traction.

But Lessig also mentioned some things that I hadn’t heard before — a piece of the puzzle he described as additional “layers”. The branding is the first layer, which is to be supported by a second “carrot” layer and a third “stick” layer.

The carrot is conventional enough — a pledge of funds for candidates that take up one, two, or all reforms as part of their campaign.

The stick, however, is a bit more unconventional and interesting. People have rightfully challenged the Change Congress badge idea at the outset — why would a campaign pay any attention to these badges and/or why would anyone pay attention to whether or not the candidate is badged? Lessig posits that people should “escalate the cost of running without a badge” by running themselves. When candidates ignore the campaign and avoid taking positions on those reforms, regular citizens can and should run as single-issue candidates, bringing the issue to the surface.

It’s interesting and hard to pooh-pooh, frankly, because of technology. One observation is that small communities really are engaging in a broader discourse through blogging, tagging, and commenting; another is that local media are paying more attention “downward” to their readers and local constituents because they provide valuable resources in the form of news leads, online comments and flamewars, and pageviews. Imagine housewives, programmers, sysadmins, grandpas, high school kids, having some baked-in media juice (and maybe even some money) thanks to a national “Change Congress” campaign…? It doesn’t seem that far-fetched and most of all — it sounds pretty fun.

Stay tuned — I’ll try to update with audio and/or video when it’s posted.

Come to San Diego and join EFF in honoring Mitchell Baker and the Mozilla Foundation, Michael Geist, and Mark Klein at the 17th annual Pioneer Awards! Michael Robertson, the Founder and CEO of MP3.com, Linspire, MP3tunes, and Gizmo5, will keynote the ceremony with his talk: “What to Expect When You’re Expecting… To Be Sued”.

Awarded every year since 1991, the Pioneer Awards recognize leaders who are extending freedom and innovation on the electronic frontier. This year, the Pioneer Awards ceremony will be held in conjunction with ETech at the San Diego Marriott Hotel and Marina on Tuesday March 4th, 2008. The event begins at 7:15 p.m. and is open to the public.

Tickets to the Pioneer Awards ceremony and Michael Robertson’s keynote address are $35. You can buy your ticket in advance at:
http://secure.eff.org/pioneerfundraiser

TCHO is the Platinum Sponsor for the 2008 Pioneer Awards ceremony. Founded by Wired co-founder Louis Rossetto and legendary chocolatier and former technologist Timothy Childs, TCHO is “a new chocolate company for a new generation of chocolate enthusiasts.” TCHO will sample a “beta release” of their dark chocolate during the awards ceremony. Attendees are invited to taste two different formulas and vote for a favorite. Feedback directly influences the formula used for the national release bar. Learn more about TCHO at:
http://www.tcho.com

Bronze sponsors of the 2008 Pioneer Awards ceremony include: MOG, Three Rings, JibJab, Atomic PR, Barracuda Networks.

For more information about the 2008 Pioneer Awards:
http://www.eff.org/awards/pioneer

For the Upcoming.org page:
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/441454/

Join EFF in celebrating our 17th year of defending digital rights! Since 1990, EFF has been there fighting for freedom and civil liberties.

The birthday bash will be on January 15, 7-11 PM, at 111 Minna Gallery in San Francisco. Headliners Adrian & the Mysterious D (A+D), the DJ duo that founded the seminal mashup party “Bootie,” will be dropping a shameless, genre-smashing blend of tracks, backed up by DJ sets from Bay Area copyfighters Ripley, Kid Kameleon and EFF’s own J Tones and Qubitsu.

The EFF party will also feature an exclusive chocolate sampling with TCHO, “a new chocolate company for a new generation of chocolate enthusiasts.” Founded by Wired co-founder Louis Rossetto and legendary chocolatier Timothy Childs, himself a former technologist, TCHO will be bringing a “beta release” of its best dark chocolate to the party table. Attendees are invited to vote for their favorite TCHO beta chocolate flavors at the party — feedback that will help define TCHO’s next steps as they gear up for a national release.

We’ll be asking for a $20 donation at the door. No one will be turned away for lack of funds, but all proceeds will go toward our work defending your digital freedom.

What:
EFF’s 17th Birthday Party

When:
January 15, 7-10 PM

Where:
111 Minna Gallery
111 Minna Street
San Francisco, CA
94105
www.111minnagallery.com
Tel: (415) 974-1719

This fundraiser is open to the general public. 21+ only, cash bar.

Please RSVP to: events@eff.org

A year later, and I’m seeing the same shtick employed in high-profile ad campaigns for gadgets and tech toys. Commericals for Sirius Satellite Radio, the LG Voyager from Verizon, and an advertisement for AT&T featuring domino-ing flat screens all seem to crib heavily from those earlier web videos.

The venue, booze, and dance music drew a yuppie-hip crowd—the experience was a lot like shopping at a expensive, über-trendy, ad-hoc mall. Despite experiencing some sticker-shock, I can appreciate the appeal of a unique piece of fashion or art, and to be honest, quite a few vendors appeared to be selling at a discount. Though I’m slightly more partial to events that skew “crafty,” like the unspellable Bazaar Bizarre, I’m sure I’ll check out Chillin’ Productions’ next event.

The dean of students said he saw two girls kissing. He checked the surveillance tape then shared what he saw with the parents of one of the girls. They then pulled her out of school, which then pulled the peninsula school district into a big controversy.

The TV station brought the issue home to Kentucky, because a number of schools in the county, from elementary school to high school, have surveillance cameras.

The situation serves as a good example of what is inevitable in a surveillance culture—everyone gets trapped by what the camera sees. Look at the issue from the surface and there’s an obvious question: Was the dean merely scandalized by seeing what he interpreted as “deviant” behavior? Would he have made the same parental report upon seeing a young man and a young woman kissing? What does it mean about him, (and more significantly, the level of tolerance in our culture) if he’s acted upon viewing the homosexual act and not the heterosexual act?

But play with some variables, and there are other troubling questions raised by the surveillance. What if the dean fiercely wanted to keep it a secret, but feared retribution should someone later realize that he had failed to say anything to the parents? The video evidence could reveal his inaction; it could become a mark on his record. Imagine another extreme—what if he was deeply religious and saw this as a way to punish the girls, less for violating school policy, and more as a way of asserting his morality? Or perhaps a more ambiguous situation—he just saw it has his duty to report it to the parents and is now shamed and sorry that he disrupted the lives of these students in a way that he will always regret. There is a great deal about what happened that day that just plain feels icky.

That’s the problem with a surveillance culture. Surely, one benefit of surveillance is greater knowledge, but the knowledge that it imparts doesn’t come with guidance on what to do with it. Secrets allow people to safely explore the world around them, make mistakes, and learn. But with constant surveillance of any environs, that exploration can be tragically denied, to the eventual detriment of everyone but the thoughtless camera.

My three observations about the iPhone:

1. It’s not an open platform and there’s no development kit (yet). For now, Apple is the only company that can make applications for the iPhone, apart from what developers can make work from a web browser. But what makes a computer great is the ability to freely utilize its storage ability and processing power to solve problems. In general, Apple can be trusted to provide good, flexible solutions (You can customize fields in Address Book, for example), but how much can Apple afford to program to the idiosyncratic needs of bloggers, photographers, DJs, stock traders, teachers, and students? An open platform is the way to allow unique solutions and people-powered innovation to come to light. Solutions require innovation, innovation demands creativity, and creativity is fostered by openness. Apple is enlightened enough to know this, but they unfortunately realize that they would be undercutting their own short-term revenue potential and business relationships with the wireless carriers if they opened the iPhone up for public development.
2. No tactile feedback. I’m sure you can eventually learn how to type without looking at the “screenboard,” but please don’t argue that the learning curve isn’t going to be significantly higher than a device with a dedicated, physical input component.
3. AT&T? For now, you can only get the iPhone by signing up with one carrier for two freakin’ years. And have you seen any of this or that?

Meanwhile, the leading-edge of the revolution in phones is quietly bubbling up in the shadow of the almighty iPhone. Nokia recently announced the stateside availability of the E61i, a open-platform phone running on Symbian. You can buy it unlocked from Dell. And then there’s the Neo1973, being offered via Internet order on July 9th, running the open-source, Linux-based OpenMoko.

Computers got “big” when everyone had a chance to play. Isn’t it time we got to have the same fun over our handheld devices?

Without making a moral judgment, I will say that if the bill passes, I can see it pushing consumers to the Internet in droves. People are curious—the youth especially. When TV ceases to bring life to the world that exists on the boundaries of their experiences, the consumers will lose interest and new generations will cease to pick up the TV habit. (Perhaps better said as, “The consumers have already lost interest and new generations haven’t picked up the TV habit.”)

At this juncture, the “consumer choice” that the bill proposes is the choice to narrow programming, rather than expand it. Unfortunately, in an age of unprecedented choice in entertainment, I can’t see it providing many long-term benefits to consumers, other than hastening their collective migration to other entertainment options.

The first stirrings of major intergenerational conflict are already being noted. The basic rights of the recent past – a safe job, free education and healthcare, secure homes to raise a family, a modest but comfortable old age – have slipped quietly away, all to be replaced by a myriad of vapid lifestyle choices and glittery consumer trinkets. Excluded from a national social housing scheme sold off by their parents, unwilling to give birth in the UK’s draconian new system of rental accommodation which gives tenants no more than six months grace from eviction, and unable to afford homes of their own in 85 percent of the country, today’s iPod generation is stunted: trapped halfway between childhood and adulthood. It now takes them until 34, on average, before they can afford a house, let alone have a family of their own. Little surprise that they are such a woeful models of grown-up responsibility for their younger siblings to emulate. Mom and Dad aren’t much better. By blowing their children’s inheritance on 80 percent of the UK’s luxury good purchases, from SUVs to cruises and antiwrinkle creams, Britain’s baby-boomers seem hell bent on ensuring that, even without coming resource shortages such as Peak Oil, their offspring will be the first generation in living memory to have a lowered standard of living.

Honk if you felt a pang of déjà vu. Take a look at the article and feel free to hit me up with some comments.

Saletan ultimately cites evidence that suggests that women may choose to eliminate periods not because of physical discomfort but because of social pressure—that periods are seen as a weakness and a nuisance by males (i.e. boyfriends) and masculine institutions (i.e. corporate jobs). And thus, Lybrel may simply become another expression of control over women. Saletan closes with the line, “I’m glad women are free to take Lybrel. I hope, in the future, they’ll also feel free not to.”

The whole article is great and you can read it here on Slate.

This event sounds like a lot of fun. It’s going down this weekend, March 24 to March 25, at the Little Radio Warehouse in downtown Los Angeles.

Everyone who comes has to contribute in some way. However, in the words of the BarCamp wiki: “Do I have to come with a presentation? Not necessarily. Barcamp is about participation. And a presentation can be about a lot of things. Demo a new product. Share a methodology. Participate in a panel. Suggest a topic. Make jello shots, host werewolf or bring your Wii and some games.”

So, I’ll be there, hopefully presenting a little workshop on beatmatching and DJing–although I’m keeping my mind open for ideas of something somewhat more inspired or insightful.

This aggressively soothing blog post made me feel better about attending.