Blrg - News & Events

Updating Rogers HTC Dream

keilaron@keilaron.ca (Keilaron) — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 22:03:58 -0500

Yeah, so I have an HTC Dream from Rogers because my boss wants me to be able to get e-mails and calls when things go wrong - expensive for an on-call phone, eh? - and I was having difficulty updating it. See, Rogers has been for the past month demanding that users update their phone due to a bug concerning dialling 911 (apparently, if you have GPS enabled and try to call 911, the call fails or somesuch; but I never have GPS enabled anyway, since Google tracks you if you have it on and I have no use for it - besides, the cell location works better), and they disable your data plan until you update. After trying to update it on two Windows systems and trying to manually put the firmware on it as well as calling Rogers tech support, I finally found these instructions:

Windows 7 Instructions for Rogers HTC

It's actually pretty simple, but here's the real problem I was encountering:

I had mistakenly assumed that since it was a new device, the SD card was formatted FAT32, as they need to be for the update. However, it was not (Good job, Rogers). After getting everything off the card and formatting it to FAT32 then replacing the firmware onto the card, I was able to update the phone without a hitch.

I'm still disappointed that it took Rogers so long to update the HTC Dream... ...and didn't even provide a real update. Geez, guys, get with the program already.

The Blue Marble

keilaron@keilaron.ca (Keilaron) — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 11:57:28 -0400

This spectacular "blue marble" image is the most detailed true-color image of the entire Earth to date. Using a collection of satellite-based observations, scientists and visualizers stitched together months of observations of the land surface, oceans, sea ice, and clouds into a seamless, true-color mosaic of every square kilometer (.386 square mile) of our planet. These images are freely available to educators, scientists, museums, and the public. This record includes preview images and links to full resolution versions up to 21,600 pixels across.

NASA has posted on their website some beautiful high-resolution (2048x2048, also 540x540 for the squeamish) pictures of the Earth, entitled "The Blue Marble". What nice desktop images they make... at least, if you like the space view of the Earth. I may share some optimised pictures (GIMP autocrops the image to 1840x1840, meaning there's a good 54-pixel black border on each side - and I mean pure or near-pure black, not including the fading blue around the Earth.) and some resizes if anyone is interested.

Pop Quiz: Day or night?

keilaron@keilaron.ca (Keilaron) — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 12:03:10 -0400

Can you tell if it's day or night?

Kudos to you if you can figure out the approximate time, too.

DRM in Canada? Why of course...

keilaron@keilaron.ca (Keilaron) — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 13:07:07 -0400

Vito Pilieci from The Ottawa Citizen states in a Canada.com article titled "Copyright board OKs levy on iPods, MP3 players":

The Copyright Board of Canada is again backing a tax on Apple Inc.'s iPod and other MP3 music players that could boost the price of the devices by almost 30 per cent.

This is truly unfortunate and ridiculous. It's becoming into some odd fight against the innocent consumer, the computer-illiterate consumer that has no way to do anything about this. Those who're pirating aren't going to care about this (and computer-literate users are going to see this "tax" as an encouragement that says "Oh, don't buy it from the store - buy it from Ebay.ca") since they likely already have portable audio players or they don't have nor want one and only use their computer for music anyway.

Despite all that, it doesn't surprise me in the least: Big Suit types never want to research anything, they just want a quick fix and they want it now. Anything they can do to justify their salaries and make it seem like they're actually doing something productive. The sad part is, it'll injure them in the long run.

And since when are recording devices taxed, anyway? Were tape decks ever taxed this way? Ghetto-blasters? Stereos? And what's next - CD/DVD recorders get taxed since they're "recording mediums"? Copyright is an outdated system for outdated governments (and don't get me started on patents) - I realised the futility of it as a child, and I realised the ridiculousness of it when a teacher at college copyrighted a code skeleton file, and I now realise the obsolescence of it as it lacks any real structure or system.

It's... been a while.

keilaron@keilaron.ca (Keilaron) — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 18:55:37 -0400

Time flies. I really don't know what it is, but it seems I've little time for anything these days. I guess it's more a matter of prioritising things, and I haven't been doing that; Problem is, that's a task on it's own. I figure, though, people deserve an update, especially a certain someone out there who doesn't seem to be fairing too well and probably doesn't have the time to contact my directly. My heart goes out to you and I hope things get better... and yes, I'm na?vely thinking they will.

Well, let's see - my posts have been far and few between, as well as rather bare. I'm going to take what is probably going to be a few hours, and try to give some detail on what's going on. Knowing myself, though, I'm probably going to get tired of it halfway through or forget things I wanted to mention.

On the job front, I now have no job. My time as a casual ended in mid-may, and for the next month I was working as a contractual worker. Thankfully, I was still able to apply for EI and that seems to have gone through without a problem - either I applied correctly, or they were able to mistake my misunderstandings. Either way, seems to be just fine there. I just have to keep in mind that EI's only going to pay me if I can prove I've been trying to get a job - sometimes I get lax about these things for over a week, and it seems that's not going to be an option ;> It's possible that I get a permanent position at my old job, though, which is kind of interesting. I have mixed feelings about that, honestly, but I'm not sure how in-depth I want to go about that in public - maybe I'll write another protected entry for that.

I've been trying to add some content to my forum - hopefully I'll get a few more interested people. I'm not certain whether I want to keep the politics (et al.) sections hidden to members only, though; I'm thinking of opening them up until I can get some regular (if sparse) traffic. By the way, I've resolved the spam issue for the time being. Until the Akismet plug-in for punBB matures, I won't be using it: It apparently does not have any setting other than "ban immediately" - I don't care how easy it is to unban people, I don't think they deserve to be banned outright. It's bad enough that punBB claims that hidden forums are "invalid" (I wish that were an option, but I may just manually hack that in myself) and don't suggest that maybe you need to log in.

I've just updated my copy of Windows Live Writer; Functionally it seems mostly the same, but they've added their fancy UI to it now. Seems a slight bit more sluggish due to that, but that may also be because I had to lower my hardware acceleration setting (My mouse does not move if I have hardware display acceleration set to the maximum. Not sure why, and I really don't know what caused it. I may have to get myself a new... uh... sheesh, I don't know. I'm at a loss on this one.). Sadly, my hardware woes don't end there; About as recently (But no, not simultaneously) my DVD drive has decided it no longer wants to eject - and before you try to help me with it, I'm convinced that it's a mechanical issue; It seems to be the same problem that "Drive X" (for lack of a better name) had: when the tray attempts to eject, something gets in the way and instead it just goes "clunk" and fails to move forward. This one doesn't have a pop-open door, though, so the only way I'll be able to inspect it is to open it up. For the curious, I have a LITE-ON DVDRW SOHW-1633S finally showing it's true colours, and it's way off the warranty (not sure it ever really had one anyway).

Interestingly, it seems I didn't post on my birthday. Hmm. Don't remember what I got; I'm sure I updated my wishlist, though. Speaking of getting things, ... wait, I did mention the camera. One thing I didn't mention was the 160 GB USB drive I got (Wee~!). I'm actually planning on taking the drive out and replacing it with a 20 GB, and using that; The 160 GB will likely go either in my PC, or in a future NAS that I'm planning to build when I move out (or right before, since that might help with moving). On that subject - I'm now the one that has no job, and now Eth has to put up with me :P

On the technology/news side of things, ignoring the over-hyped piece of crap that is iPhone, Apple has announced that it will offer non-DRM music in it's iTunes store at a higher price - but I think what's more interesting is that EMI says people love it. I'm reading between the lines when I say this, but, I get the impression Steve Jobs is doing this intentionally as to try to give DRM a shove away from domination. If so, I've more respect for the man than ever, to be so bold as to actually consider the option.

(Certainly more respect than I've got for a particular worker from Futureshop, at any rate, but I'm going to blog about that only later once I've got a response from him about his blatant goof - much to Futureshop's shame I might add - and know whether or not he was letting himself get hot-headed on the subject.)

Among my other findings on the Internet are an interesting view on global warming, which if you are about to watch I strongly suggest you watch all videos posted by the same person (It really doesn't make sense to only get half his opinion - people are entitled to correcting themselves, as the above paragraph demonstrates ;>).

And finally, one last thing and this one's from the paranoia department: Why use email encryption? It's an interesting view on e-mail encryption, though personally I believe that encrypting every e-mail might be a tad overdone - but then again, since once you've got it set-up it's mostly a "fire and forget" type of thing (Not that you can't change it's settings, mind you), you almost might as well. I currently force all e-mails going out on my name-e-mail-address (Yes, I have an address that's my first@last name) to be digitally signed, even if the recipient can't necessarily verify that signature, since I use this for official contact (e.g. work, applications, etc.).

Phew! On the project side of things, I've gotten a co-worker (well, was-co-worker since my contract ended) interested in helping me translate Ozy & Millie - I think I'm going to write to the author and webmaster again soon once I've got a steady stream of strips going and tell them that someone's actually going to get things going for the French version ;> (It seems a few other people have already gone at it - sadly, there's not even fifty strips translated yet! Arg! What a sad state it's in!)

I've been really tempted to buy myself a GP2X - but there's four things holding me back:

The cost - Buying a GP2X, though possibly worth every penny, costs about as much as a PSP right now. And that might even be without taking shipping into account.
The lack of stores having it in stock - The only store I know that stocks the GP2X in Canada is one I've never heard of, GamerSection. It appears to be a Qu?bec company, but oddly the French translations are poor if even present. On the other hand, there is a representative from TigerDirect who tells me he can get it custom-ordered for me; We'll see how the price ends up looking like soon.
The apparent lack of quality games, as playing games that already exist on other platforms seems to be one of the few quality options. The fact that it would be possibly to port any SDL-based game as well as easy develop my own games for it is nary a comfort.
I'm not even sure I'd use it! I've not finished the games I have for my PS2, never mind the ones on my GBA, and I hardly use my portable audio player during this time of joblessness. Speaking of joblessness, I'm also not sure I want to spend money while I have no job.

Eh, it finally happened. I forgot what I was going to say. Good enough for today, I dare think.

A few interesting news articles...

keilaron@keilaron.ca (Keilaron) — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 11:50:02 -0500

A few things I thought were interesting:

Slght [sic] of hand: How to fold a t-shirt in 1 easy step

A short video depicting a simple way to quickly fold a t-shirt. I wouldn't call it one step, exactly, but it is very short: Even the movie itself is ~20 seconds (or one minute if you see the English version). It's pretty neat - I might start using it myself. Sleight of hand, indeed.

Best Buy Confirms It Has Secret Website

Now, every company has it's intranet, but this is just sad. That they'd stoop so low to commit fraud - yes, I consider this fraud - and deny customers of specials by having their intranet display different sites than their Internet site... makes me... I don't know, really. I just hope they and their brother (Futureshop) go out of business.

What? One can hope...

Vista brute force hack update: it might work, if you let it run for a year

Much controversy behind this one, but it all boils down to:

Yes, it works.
You may need to run it for a long, long time before it comes up with anything, or it may take less than two minutes to come up with something.
Anything it generates is potentially valid, not guaranteed to be valid.
Really: Buy Windows, or go Linux. (Or stick with XP... WFM. So does Foresight, so far :>)

The Brick violating copyrights, or SCO?

keilaron@keilaron.ca (Keilaron) — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 19:10:55 -0500

My mother was listening to the TV the other night while I had Eth over. Just as I was about to show SCO (Space Cowboy) to him, a The Brick commercial came on, and... the music was familiar. Very familiar. IRRITATINGLY familiar. I recognised it fairly fast because I quickly found it irritating in the game - it’s the ANI city theme.

So the question is: Is The Brick violating a copyright? Is SCO? Or did they both obtain a fair licence of the same music track and this is nothing but a co-incidence?

Perhaps I should record the commercial and show what I mean?

Finally, some snow!

keilaron@keilaron.ca (Keilaron) — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 01:13:25 -0500

Work's been fairly boring, unfortunately.

I've been playing Space Cowboy. Free MMORPG, and it isn't too bad.

But more on all that later.

Recent weather

keilaron@keilaron.ca (Keilaron) — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 15:02:36 -0500

The weather this month has been craptastic. A lot of people seem to be unconcerned, though, which makes the whole situation worse. I'm sorry, the fact that it's bright, sunny, and warm in December is not a good thing any way to slice it.

We're heading towards something bad, I'm sure of it. Just like I predicted last year (or the year before, I forget), the weather is shifting about. Perhaps not quite in the way I imagined it (wintertime shifting to summertime and summertime shifting to wintertime), but I was at least partially right.

And I predict, this time, that the next summer is going to be one of two things: Either it's going to be similar unstable weather as we are having now, or it's going to be a dangerously boiling-hot summer.

It's no longer I'm dreaming of a white Christmas, but rather, "I'm having nightmares of a green Christmas." ;_;

How poetic: Snow and rain on the 1st of December.

keilaron@keilaron.ca (Keilaron) — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 22:11:23 -0500

Yes, you read that right.
On the very first of December, we had what would have been our first permanent snow. It wasn't very much, but it would have been enough to stay, and lightly coat everything as though flour in a cake pan (Grr...). And yet, hours later came what most feared would come instead of the snow: Freezing rain.
And lots of it.
Thing is, the rain wasn't content with washing away the snow. Oh no. The snow stayed, indeed, and became slush. Frozen slush. Thankfully, I had brought my (totally awesome) umbrella today, which was completely unfazed by the heavy wind and rain...

[It was a dark, rainy day, and all about was frozen slush, and I hoped, hoped, that there would be no accidents.]
Actually, that reminds me that I'm glad I take the bus.

So yeah, how poetic. The first of December sees the first snow. Snow and rain, on the same day.
I kinda liked it.

This makes me happy I don't have Sympatico...

keilaron@keilaron.ca (Keilaron) — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 17:45:03 -0500

Rogers was criticized some time ago for implementing bandwidth limits (caps) on their subscribers' connections.
However, they're at decent, reasonable limit of 60 GB (combined) which is fairly unlikely to hit (unless you're downloading and sharing, say, PS2 games).
However, Sympatico is planning on having some really stringent caps, some of them as low as 1 GB. What's worse is that the less you pay per month, the more you pay if you go over your limit.
Okay, 30 GB is a reasonable limit, but it's still half of Rogers', and it really doesn't make sense to start tightening down on users' connections now as bandwidth prices are getting lower, not higher.

Bump keys, and why today's mechanical locks may be insufficient

keilaron@keilaron.ca (Keilaron) — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 20:50:49 -0500

For those of you who have alarm systems, this may not seem to be such an issue: But pay attention to what is said about insurance companies, and you'll know why 90% (according to them) of key-based mechanical locks may be insufficient (read: easy to bypass)
We need better key-based locks... or perhaps not make them key-based at all. Personally, I don't think I'd mind carrying around a USB key with a 4096-bit key ;> But that might be a little complicated for others...

Bump key video

Play time and work time get confused!

keilaron@keilaron.ca (Keilaron) — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 12:06:32 -0400

Recently, a friend of mine told me about a game named Okami, which I've gotten a copy of and so far has been a fairly interesting and very beautifully made game. While I've been able to find a few glitches (mostly related to invisible walls), it's been a fairly solid experience and I've been trying not to play it too much - I've limited myself to only an hour or two per day so that I don't finish it too fast. I also appear not to be the only one who thinks there are similarities to Zelda in this game - I think my sister may enjoy playing this game as well, so perhaps next time she's around I'll introduce her to it :)
I've found the music score to be so beautiful that I've written and highlighted the OST on my wishlist (Which, by the way, has lost most of it's items due to the database loss previously described.). I've already found a download for the whole OST and gotten it, but I'd much rather actually have those five CDs... as well as the game itself. Normally, I'd also back this up with And hey, I'd be supporting the company!, but it turns out that Clover Studio, the creator of Okami, will be dissolved by it's parent company, CAPCOM.
I've got a digit up at 'em.

Speaking of music, though, I've been finishing some uploads at Jamendo, and the music is pretty sweet. I'd recommend having a listen to Simon Slator and/or Saelynh, depending on your music tastes, or perhaps just browing by tags. It's too bad there aren't people as interested as I am in choruses*. Hard to find, that.
Moving on to more technological things: My mother recently decided to have VoIP installed at our house, though I've no idea why. She must've gotten an offer in the mail - I thought I threw that thing in the recycling! - and decided to go for it. Sigh. Though I've not had the chance to verify yet, I think this means that my bypass method can't be used anymore - Mereo, care to test this with me? Anyhow, I'd forgotten that I'd split the TV cable and run it to my room (without Rogers' permission... I guess that's where they make their money) at some point to test something out. So, the guys (Yes, there were three Rogers techs here to install the damned device!) decided to cut every cable except one TV cable, the internet cable and the VoIP cable. This might've been fine, had they picked the right TV cable... so we had to get someone to fix it the next day.

The recent downtime of my server was caused by me shutting down everything so as to completely upgrade and recompile everything. (Technical details: gcc & glibc update, you see; While C programs are actually mostly unaffected by such an upgrade, C++ programs usually all need to be recompiled. The problem is that you can't really tell one from the other, so you pretty much have to recompile everything that's C-based.) Thankfully the process wasn't all that long.
Also, on the subject of the server: Since I've been forgetting to do the changes on the gallery, I've been thinking of allowing access to it right now, but to still exclude the albums I haven't done the work on yet.
And one final thing: It seems more spambots have found me and decided to try to plague me. Although this one, while it gave me several spam comments (~8-10), was using pretty much the same URL each time so I only had to add that to the filter list. It seems even diabetes medication has made it to the spam market.

One of my cousins is supposed to visit near the end of November. Joy.

And finally a local event: Municipal voting has begun, and once again I wasn't on the voters list. I suppose it's not all that surprising, but anyway, I found it amusing that I didn't even recognize the names of most of these candidates, nevermind knowing who they are or what they're planning. I only know two because one of them keeps getting talked about (though he's apparently not the current mayor?), and the other I saw his ads on the bus about lowering bus fares. Hah.

* A particular type, I should mention. I'm very picky on the subject for some reason, and it's not even a steady mood.

It was a bright and stormy day...

keilaron@keilaron.ca (Keilaron) — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 10:18:53 -0400

Pretty hefty winds out there today. I think it managed to open the screen door for the cat a few times now.
In fact, I'm not sure if the cat's outside or not, at the moment...

My brother and I have been playing Starcraft on and off recently. Yeah, it's a nine year old game, and people still play it - they (Starcraft players) account for over a third of the people on Battle.net, still. Only about 3% of those don't have BroodWar (the expansion set), which is interesting: By now, most people have noticed that the Starcraft Battlechest / Set goes for about 20-30$ - even here. Oddly enough, my brother only recently got the expansion set from Futureshop, along with a copy for me (so that I would have a legal copy - I somehow have two keys spare to use, but no actual copy of SC)...
...and somehow managed to buy the French version.
(By the way, when I checked Battle.net just now, there were 48517 games in progress. Of those, 20189 were reported to be Starcraft: Broodwar games (43%)! Only 598 (1%) of them were regular Starcraft games, however. Mind you, neither comes as a total surprise: More SC games are required for more players fairly often, considering two things: People often play private games with their friends, not allowing in the general public; Also, people often don't wait for their games, as the average age is fairly low, and the average attention span is lower.)

Anyhow...
It seems I've not spoken of Wombat here yet (at least not of his currenct condition); He had a lump growing on the side (behind) of his jaw. He was diagnosed with a curable form of cancer, and is undergoing treatment. It's pretty bad for him; He can't go to work, and his work only pays him for the days he works. He can't do much and has a reduced attention span, not to mention being fatigued all the time. And his hair is gone. It's really taking a toll on him...

Talk Like A Pirate Day

keilaron@keilaron.ca (Keilaron) — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 09:21:00 -0400

I'd rather: Go Play Air Buccaneers Day, honestly. A least then we'd spend time playing friendly games of 3D in-the-air-"battleship". ;P