Enno Rehling

wilwheaton: samaralex: megsokay: STOP IT, self-help manatee....

Fri, 03 May 2013 10:48:43 -0700

samaralex:

megsokay:

STOP IT, self-help manatee. I actually just cried because of LAST MONTH.

Thank you, self-help manatee. I needed that.

This is just beautiful.

Just when I thought I was sick of animal memes, someone invents self-help manatee.

"Five things everyone should know about U.S. incarceration"

Thu, 02 May 2013 18:36:40 -0700

"Five things everyone should know about U.S. incarceration":

1. The US incarcerates more people per capita than any other nation in the world: Approximately 1 in 100 adults or more than 2.2 million people are behind bars in the US, according to the Pew Center on the States. In addition, another 4.6 million (or a total of almost 7 million) people live under some form of correctional supervision.

Although the US is widely recognised as a “land of liberty”, it could also be described as a nation of prisons. It incarcerates more people per capita than any other nation. Its imprisonment rate (per capita) is almost 50 percent higher than Russia’s and 320 percent higher than China’s.

Within the western hemisphere, the US incarcerates five times as many people per capita as Canada and almost 2.5 times as many as Mexico.

2. Mass incarceration is not a result of higher crime rates: The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world not because it has higher crime rates, but because it imprisons more types of criminal offenders, including non-violent and drug offenders, and keeps them in prison longer.

With the exception of homicide, US crime rates are comparable to other European countries with much lower incarceration rates.

High incarceration rates are the result of “truth in sentencing”, “mandatory minimum” and “three strikes” laws which have limited judicial discretion in sentencing and parole release. As a result, sentences are now mainly determined by what the prosecutor decides to charge. And prosecutors routinely over-charge defendants in order to encourage plea agreements.

An egregious, but not unusual, recent example illustrates this point. In 2012, a Florida woman, who fired a “warning shot” in the direction of her physically abusive ex-husband (who was not hit by the bullet), was charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.

The judge, as a result of mandatory sentencing legislation, was given no discretion in her sentencing. He sentenced her to 20 years in prison.

3. Mass incarceration disproportionately impacts US racial minorities: Mass incarceration has had a devastating effect on blacks and Hispanics in the US. African Americans are six times more likely to be incarcerated than a white person and non-white Latinos are almost three times more likely to be incarcerated, according to the Pew Center on the States.

Incarceration hits hardest at young black and Latino men without high school education. An astounding 11 percent of black men, aged between 20 and 34, are behind bars.

Much of the racial disparity is a result of the US’ war on drugs - started by President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. By 1988, blacks were arrested on drug charges at five times the rate of whites.

By 1996, the rate of drug admissions to state prison for black men was 13 times greater than the rate for white men. This is despite the fact that African Americans use drugs at roughly the same rate as white Americans.

4. Mass incarceration is expensive: Imprisoning people is not cheap. The average cost of housing an inmate is approximately $20,000 to $30,000 per year. This price tag comes at the direct expense of public money that could be spent on public education, medical care and public assistance. And it is one reason why so many states face fiscal crises today.

To put this in perspective, the state of California spends 2.5 times more money housing and feeding its inmates than it does educating students. California is not alone: five states “spend more on corrections than higher education”, a 2008 Pew Center study revealed.

5. Mass incarceration disguises the US’ real unemployment rate and exacerbates inequality: The current unemployment rate in the US is high. And if we factored in all the people who are not looking for work because they are behind bars, it would be higher - especially among young black Americans and people without a high school diploma.

A recent research by Becky Petit reveals:

“Employment-population rates adjusted to include inmates suggest that only 26 percent of young black, male dropouts were employed in 2008, while over 37 percent were in prison or jail. Over half of the joblessness of young, black, and male dropouts is linked to incarceration.”

Incarceration also negatively impacts former prisoner’s ability to earn a decent living. Several studies suggest that there are at least six million “ex-prisoners” living within society and when they look for a job, they are 50 percent less likely to be hired than job seekers without a criminal record.

Former prisoners are paid less than those who have not been to prison. In addition, incarceration of a parent reduces a child’s prospects for economic mobility.

Take that, China. USA, Number One!

michafrar: 1 out of ? of my NES Hoaxes - Journey...

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 09:59:51 -0700

michafrar:

1 out of ? of my NES Hoaxes - Journey (PS3)

Journey has some pretty landscapes <3 wanted to imagine how an NES adaptation would be like. I tried to stick close to the NES limitations. :D I know it exceeds them, though.

Looks pretty good to me.

bookshelfporn: A walk in bookcase. This is far more appealing...

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 18:33:32 -0700

bookshelfporn:

A walk in bookcase.

This is far more appealing than a walk in closet.

Echo House in Ottawa, Canada

Times like this is when I want to own my own place. In my house, this would be hidden behind a secret door, obviously.

Photo

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 15:37:57 -0700

‘Meiecundimees üks Korsakov läks eile Lätti’ by Winny PuhhHow...

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 18:43:20 -0700

‘Meiecundimees üks Korsakov läks eile Lätti’ by Winny Puhh
How did this not get picked to represent Estonia at ESC this year? It is amazeballs!

‘Tramp the Dirt Down’ by Elvis Costello is my new jam.

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 10:13:09 -0700

‘Tramp the Dirt Down’ by Elvis Costello is my new jam.

When a member wants to keep a bio experiment in the food fridge

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 15:15:52 -0700

runningahackerspace:

Reminds me of a friend, whose lab partner was doing her thesis on “the cow patty as an eco-system”. She eventually had the fridge all to herself.

Homegroup encountered an error.

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 15:13:00 -0700

This error message has been kicking my ass today. It turns out I had two problems:

The homegroup was created by a computer that is no longer on my network. Solution: Leave it form all machines, and create a new homegroup.
IPv6 needs to be enabled. For some reason, homegroups only work over IPv6. Solution: Enable IPv6, and welcome to the future.

Edit: I spoke too soon. Still cannot make two computers talk to each other. I am going to have to revert to good old sneakernet and a USB drive.

How programmers multiply

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 21:39:00 -0700

This afternoon, a discussion about base64 strings prompted the question “How much is 64^2?”. I didn’t have a calculator in hand, and I figured I should be able to calculate 64*64 in my head. The thought process went something like this:

64 is 256/4, and I know by heart that 256 = 2^8, and 4 = 2^2, thus 64 = 2^(8-2) = 2^6.

By the same method, 2^6 * 2^6 = 2^(6+6) = 2^12.

I have memorized a few more powers of two besides 256, and the easiest to remember is 2^10 = 1024.

2^12 = 2^10 * 2^2, so the answer I’m looking for is 1024 * 4 = 4096.

64^2 = 4096. Easy to do in your head when you know arithmetic (or you’ve worked too much on CPUs that don’t have MUL or DIV operators).

0o00o0: From, The Bukowski Tapes I have a strong feeling that...

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 20:02:44 -0700

0o00o0:

From, The Bukowski Tapes

I have a strong feeling that my next trip to the library is going to be dedicated to Mr. Bukowski.

This is my emergency travel kit. Some days, you have to leave...

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 13:03:16 -0800

This is my emergency travel kit.

Some days, you have to leave the house on short notice, and you’re going to stay somewhere overnight, because there is a game jam in the city, or you’re going to the ER, or an earthquake rocks your continental shelf. Other days, you have to take a flight to Europe that ends up taking 3 days, during which all you have is your carry-on luggage. For those days, I have this kit. It’s ready-packed in my bathroom, and I can grab it and just go, or drop it in my carry-on bag, and my worst-case experience just got so much better. An inventory, from left to right, top to bottom::

Q-Tips (instructions say not to stick them in ears, but I’m a rebel)
Small hotel bottle of shampoo
Hand sanitizer, because other people are also at this convention.
band-aids, especially compeed against blisters.
medication against sore throats, headaches, allergies and colds.
hotel-sized bottle of moisturizer, and a stick of lip balm.
dentist-giftbag versions of toothbrush, toothpaste, floss pick and mouthwash.
emery board, because I tear nails and the TSA are afraid of clippers.
an IKEA pencil, for writing things down.
contact lenses, because I always forget to pack them.
A deodorant towelette for an emergency cat-wash.
sleep mask, because I like to take naps at odd hours, especially on intercontinental flights.
earplugs, because babies fly on planes, too, some people snore, and some co-working spaces are just too damn loud to get anything done.
shaving kit, complete with tiny re-sealable tube of shaving cream

The key is size. The whole ensemble fits into a pocket of my hoodie, because every item in there is tiny, and is probably only good for one-time use. The idea isn’t to replace my usual toiletry kit, but to tide me over an unexpected day when I can’t get at it, because my luggage got lost, my bags are in the bowels of the plane, or I didn’t actually plan to stay a night. Many of the items are scrounged from hotels, or bought as a result of a specific inconvenience.

Do you have an emergency kit like this? Did I forget something? What are your essential travel items?

Android Wi-Fi problems

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 09:49:50 -0800

I set up a second Wi-Fi AP in our house, because the signal from the first one doesn’t reach my bedroom, and my Nexus S phone and the new Nexus 7 tablet need internet to make me happy. This was fraught with problems.

My AP is a disused 2wire HG27-1HG-B DSL router from the time I had AT&T internet at my old place. I plug it into the wall, disable DHCP and DNS to make it behave as a bridge and play nice with our existing network router. My netbook gets good quality internet from it. I toy with the idea of using the same SSID and password for both APs, and letting devices switch between them based on signal strength. That works for the netbook.

Alas, not so for the Android devices: They pair with the extremely weak signal of the first AP downstairs and refuse to talk to the 2wire AP at all. So for testing, I swap a letter to give it a slightly different name, and now I see that the phone and tablet are endlessly trying to connect, getting a connection for a fraction of a second, then starting over.

Now, this is very odd, because in my old home, the phone has been talking to this AP all the time, when it was still my DSL router for AT&T. I switch to WEP encryption, and suddenly, the androids can connect! We can’t have WEP encryption, though, so something is rotten and I need to find out what it is. I switch back to WPA2-PSK, and the old problem comes back. Then I decide to use the same SSID and password that I used at my old apartment, and voila, the androids connect with WPA2-PSK. What is this sorcery? Why is the name or passphrase of my SSID a factor in this at all?

Current situation is that we have two SSIDs in our house, and my mobile devices know both of them, but I have to manually switch to the strongest one based on which floor of the house I am on. This is by no means ideal, I tell you. I may have to convince my roommate that we must use a persian poem as the shared SSID for our network.

Stencyl at Hack the Future 6

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 03:29:29 -0800

Last Sunday saw another installment of our popular children hackathon at the Tech Museum in San Jose. We get a room full of middleschool students, pair them with hacker mentors, and let them play with all kinds of technology - programming, electronics, robots, that sort of fun stuff.

I had decided that I wanted to show them how to make flash games in Stencyl. It turned out to be a super popular station,I feel like I gave a lot of kids the gift of game-making to take home, and feedback was positive. Stencyl got mentioned as a highlight in quite a lot of our feedback forms.

What really worked was knowing the tool that I was teaching, and having a plan for how to introduce the kids to it. Stencyl is a game programming framework, but I figured out that “game” is the fun part of that, and “programming” is more of a necessary evil. Except it’s not immediately necessary: The secret sauce to my table was to use the pre-made example games in Stencyl (particularly the run-and-gun game and the angry birds clone), and use them as a basis for exploring the possibilities of Stencyl.

Very much like the Pong and Chess Javascript games I’d used earlier, this gives you a thing that already works: Starting with a single-level Angry Birds game gives you something you can play immediately, and because the kids have all played it on their phone, they know immediately that it is incomplete and have ideas on how it should be made better. And the first steps to making it better involve making content, not features: Everyone started building their own levels (the built-in physics are fun, that also helps), and eventually got to a point that needed a small bit of programming (transitioning from one level to the next), so by the time they got in touch with the scratch-like language, it was because they wanted to solve a very specific problem, and were already quite familiar with how the game was constructed.

This was totally a recipe for making my life easier, too: I had to install the game on their computer (bringing a USB stick saved my life), get them started with the game and show them the level editor, and they’d be self-sufficient for the next 30 minutes. I will probably run this station exactly the same way again next time. What didn’t work well was when the kids wanted to make their own art: The built-in image editor is not very good, didn’t work at all on Linux, and making game art takes a LOT of time during which you’re not really learning something about making games. I found it was best to steer away from that and make them recycle the existing assets in creative ways.

Almost all the kids at my table installed Stencyl on their own computers, and I feel positive that they’ll work on their game (pun intended) until the next HtF, because they clearly had fun. It was great that Stencyl works on Mac, Linux and Windows, because I had about equal amounts of each come to my table, and it would have been a shame to turn someone away.

Sore point that I want to improve: I didn’t get to show anyone how easy it is to embed the game they were making on a web page. I think that the ability to share their games with friends at school might encourage them even more to keep working on their project between events. Finding an easy way to share games is something I want to do before Hack the Future 7, which is going to be at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View on April 20.

Found at http://9gag.com/gag/5731838. Some men just want to see...

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 14:15:11 -0800

Found at http://9gag.com/gag/5731838. Some men just want to see the world burn.

The People's Bailout

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 11:09:03 -0800

The People's Bailout:

howtosharpenpencils:

This is a long post but it’s about something pretty interesting so I hope you’ll indulge …

Like many folks, Occupy Wall Street has been some doing good work in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, helping people on the ground.

Now OWS is launching the ROLLING JUBILEE, a program that has been in…

timoni.org: Why I wear the same thing every day, and what I wear.

Thu, 14 Jun 2012 16:57:14 -0700

timoni.org: Why I wear the same thing every day, and what I wear.:

timoni:

A couple of years ago, I decided to wear the same outfit all of the time. I realized that shopping, and then deciding what to wear every day, was taking up too much time and energy. It’s not that I dislike fashion: I love high couture, but I’m no Daphne Guinness; I enjoy fashion as an art…

Web round-up for the week of 05/27 to 06/02

Sun, 03 Jun 2012 00:57:45 -0700

Rather than post a million tiny links all the time, here’s only the best of what I’ve seen on the web this past week, by categories

Most Funny: Free-To-Play On $20 A Day
Most Useful: Git Submodules
Change we can believe in: Military to avoid embarrassing pictures by banning photography
Video Game Announcements: First Gameglobe Gameplay Trailer and Screenshots

Import/Export from wordpress to tumblr

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 21:44:24 -0700

Today I wanted to import a Wordpress blog into my tumblr so I could get rid of that old thing. Wordpress has an export function, that’s nice, but tumblr no longer has an import option. I guess spammers took care of that. They do have an API, and some people have written scripts to read the wordpress XML and hit the tumblr API with requests. None of these scripts work very well, so I took one of them and adapted it a little bit.

If you need to do this, feel free to grab this PHP script for your purposes. Beware though that tumblr has a daily post limit (I just hit it, and I can’t even queue posts now or save a draft).

That script is not perfect: It does the basic job of copying posts and back-dating them correctly, but tags are not transferred. It does not screw up your HTML, but it uses the old v1.0 tumblr API, so your password is going to get transferred in clear-text when you do this. My advice would be to change your password after you’re done importing.

To the person I stole the code from: Please, never ever re-implement http_build_query. You’re not a good enough programmer to do it.

Solved: "File marked as permanent failure on server"

Thu, 31 May 2012 12:28:00 -0700

Google Music has this annoying problem where it will sometimes barf on your MP3 files with the error message you see above. And it won’t tell you what’s wrong, either. The internet doesn’t know, either.

So I set out to take those unprocessed files and apply any change to them I could think of, until one of them made the upload work. And the answer is (drumroll): Bad VBR headers. I suspect these are created by bad MP3 encoders, in my case by LAME3.99r.

To fix this, you can install Foobar2000 (still the best multi-format Swiss army knife of a music player), and perform “right click on the file -> Utilities -> Fix VBR MP3 header”. After you rewrite the file, Music Manager will detect that it has changed, find it to be no longer broken, and upload it.

You’ll want to open up %LOCALAPPDATA%\Google\MusicManager\FailureReport.txt and scan this for all the files that MusicManager complained about, then fix the MBR headers on those.