Annular Eclipse

As in an Annulus or Ring. Today features the longest annular solar eclipse for the next 1 k years.

Our Review of Avatar

Watching Avatar in 3D was an incredible experience. Avatar seems 10 years ahead of its time in terms of technology and effects. In terms of story, it was refreshing to see a major film so blatantly subversive towards the status quo of military imperialism and corporate environmental destruction. James Cameron has demonstrated that the traditional theatre must adapt and push the envelope of what is possible to stay relevant. Audiences will pay.

Technocalyps

Technocalyps is the most detailed documentary I have seen yet on the topic of the coming Transhuman revolution. While the mainstream is obsessed with the usual tired propaganda, distraction, and manipulation, scientists are moving forward in building our post-human future. Issues of science, technological progress, environmental change and humanity's role therein should be at the forefront of cultural awareness.

As Bruce Sterling points out in the film:

It is important to realize that [Posthumanity] is not the end of history. It does not solve all our problems. It just creates new problems and this is going to intensify...Posthumanity does't liberate you from yourself, it makes you more than you were before...You are just going to have more power..When you have more power you have more responsibility not less.

Technocalyps can be found on Google Video and preferably on the Torrent Networks.

Alex Jones Reviews Avatar

Alex Jones is a man with a perspective worth understanding. His review of Avatar succinctly expresses many of his fears about the direction society is heading. In his mind, Elites, Corporations, and Environmentalists are collaborating to depopulate the planet and subjugate those remaining. His vision may not be too far from the mark. Humanity needs to properly understand and address the forces at work which could bring about the next depopulation event, be it from nature or human design.

Recommended Android Applications

Google Voice,Nestoid,Listen,Advanced Task Killer,PDANet,Nestoid,DroidLight,i Music,ApkInstaller,AK Notepad.

Guava is good if you have a Gizmo5 Account, but it interferes with the Google Voice Ap. It is good to have available but uninstalled if you get in a bind and have used all your 'Anytime' minutes.

We are looking forward to Fennec.

Swype Keyboard works quite well.

Game Emulation on Android

We are not hugely in favour of video games as they suck up a lot of time. When that is what you are going for, keep in mind that Android has a free NES and SNES emulator. iPhone has an emulator also, but no keyboard which makes it effectively unplayable. The Droid keyboard and D-pad work, but cannot compare to a proper Nintendo controller. The G1 keyboard looks better for gaming than the Droid's which is too compact. Gaming should not influence your smart phone decision much, but if it does, remember that the iPhone has a ton of $2-5 games, but there are hundreds of classic S/NES ROMs free with BitTorrent. Palm Pre was a nice try for a Linux Smartphone, but it is a dead-end platform with poor signal coverage and no applications or games to speak of unless it involves NFL, NASCAR, or ESPN. Enough said.

Off The Record

Pidgin, Trillian and Adium are great IM softwares. Off The Record is a plugin for those programmes which enables encrypted communications with Perfect Forward Secrecy using standard clients such as Google Talk, ICQ, AIM etc.

Trillian now has an iPhone version. It is very important that an OTR application, or similar technology, is developed for mobile platforms like iPhone and Android so that people might have secure mobile communication.

*UPDATE: It recently came to our attention that Pidgin Saved Passwords are saved in plain text in an obvious location. Thus, anyone gaining access to the user's filesystem can obtain all their IM passwords, including their Google Account if they use it for Google Talk. This is a major security vulnerability. Be aware!

Please Don't Tell

If you would like to have a nice evening in New York, we highly recommend you visit the speak easy 'Please Don't Tell.' The service and retro 1920s ambiance is top notch and one of a kind. It creates a brilliant use of what would have been a rather mediocre piece of basement real estate next to a Hot Dog joint. In fact one must enter through the hot dog stand and ring the phone in the booth to gain access. If you visit, you had better have a reservation made by phone, 212-614-0386. Call at 1500 or shortly after that day if you are going to successfully make a reservation. We failed two nights in a row before successfully making it in, but they were the best $14 drinks we have had.

Droid - Acquired

We have acquired a Verizon Motorola Droid. Verizon is known to have the best network as far as coverage and Voice service in the United States. Compared to what we have witnessed for Sprint and ATT, this is quite believable.

Droid runs on Android 2.0, the soon the be Open Sourced OS sponsored by Google. Google Voice is integrated seemlessly, and the Gizmo5 Guava ap allows VoIP through a WiFi connextion (although it is currently a bit buggy). For us as Java programmers, it is an ideal match. The OS is very slick and functional and quite competitive with the iPhone. Furthermore the Droid has a built in Keyboard in addition to an on-screen keyboard, thus giving it a bit more utility than the iPhone.

Droid is capable of USB Tethering through the PDANet software. At first we had trouble establishing a normal PPTP VPN through this tether, but OpenVPN seems to work with no problems, thus solving our practical problem.

Up until the Droid, the iPhone was clearly the best phone available, but finally a competitive product has arrived that does not need to be jail-broken by default.

Once we get the Spotify Mobile Ap working, then all your base are belong to us.

We are at last upgrading to the Droid from a seven year old Samsung N400. Good Riddance.

Media Centres

Tonight we were introduced to LinuxMCE, a slick Computer Media Interface. We will update this post with further details, but what was really novel was to see a WiiMote configured to control LinuxMCE. WiiMotes cost about $30 USD versus $100 USD for an equivalent Bluetooth Remote Product.

Another good programme to consider is XBMC.

Lastly, the very impressive PS3 seems to do everything under the sun in Media Centre Entertainment, including the most powerful gaming console around, for $300 USD.

Droid

Motorolla has finally released Droid. The company tries to rape its customers with the Data Plan Tethering $30/month option, but luckily a $30 One time programme delivers the same functionality to the user. PDANet. Overall, Droid looks like solid hardware and quite hackable. We plan to start a demo this week. PDANet also works for jailbroken iPhones.

Fall of the Republic

I will have more to say about Alex Jones. In the meantime, his new propaganda film, Fall of the Republic, is worth watching.

Google Voice

Google Voice allows callers to forward calls to their Google Voice number to any other phones simultaneously until one picks up. Therefore someone could set their home, mobile, and work phones all to ring when someone calls. Constant availability with one number including SMS and it is free. Google Voice provides a web interface and an Android Application for mobile phones to change settings. It can be connected with Gizmo5, a Skype alternative, to allow one to send and receive free US phone calls or make cheap international calls.

Google voice will maintain a permanent record of voicemails and will transcribe them and email them along with the audio to the owner. The option exists to receive SMS of the transcription as well.

We have been using Google Voice for over a year and it is wonderful. It has become our primary phone number. All other phones have become access points to the Google Voice interface.

GV is brilliant, unparalleled and free.

The Nobel Peace Prize

Many Americans were stunned by the award of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize to President Barack Obama. Indeed, he has "changed to tone" of US foreign policy towards greater cooperation, internationalism, and globalism. As we noted before we are encouraged by nuclear disarmament, the logical consequence of peace.

Barack Obama has already committed war crimes in Pakistan and Afghanistan. He joins a cadre of other war criminals who have won the prize including Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt. The Barack Obama Nobel is even more ridiculous than Al Gore's award for a poorly made Powerpoint on Global Warming.

In a very well stated response to the news, Ron Paul indicates that Obama has in fact suppressed the peace movement in the United States because those members largely voted for him and so do not want to criticise their man. Ron Paul has been actively campaigning for a true position of peace and military isolationism for his long career. If any US politician were to have been awarded a Nobel it should have been Paul; not a president who has continued the Bush legacy of two Wars going on a third in Pakistan, secret CIA detention facilities, and an illegal Guantanamo Bay Prison.

Perhaps Obama will end up accomplishing some very significant substantive movements towards Peace, but at the moment his actions have been far too mixed to merit a significant Peace Prize. We must conclude in light of this and past questionable awards that the Nobel Peace Prize has simply become a politicised tool with no merit.

The Folly of Near Term Manned Mars Exploration

The Mars Underground (torrent) (imdb) is a well made documentary film featuring director of the Mars Society Robert Zubrin. Zubrin was instrumental in shaping the current direction of NASA towards a Manned Mission to the Red Planet. Despite any romanticism, this is a complete waste of time, effort, and resources.

Long term, of course people will need to inhabit Mars and establish presence elsewhere beyond the Earth if we are to guarantee human existence. However, in the short term, governments would be better off developing artificial intelligence and robotics, and sending their best and most robust machines to explore and one day terraform Mars. The public investment in such useful technology pays off for everyone. The Mars Underground film does not even address this possibility. It unquestioningly assumes that the pinnacle of Humanity's existence would be to make physical contact with the Mars then expediently return to the Earth. Ultimately, the film amounts to a piece of cultist propaganda.

Make no mistake, the Apollo Moon programme was a waste of resources, but it did produce some political, scientific and economic dividends that offset some of the costs. At the time, computers were primitive although robotic probes were nonetheless useful. The Moon is also significantly closer to the Earth.

Regarding Mars, there is a third way which would waste far fewer resources, and do something to satisfy the Monkeys on Mars Cultists. The answer of course is to send people on a one way trip to establish a permanent Mars colony. Put in this context, the cultists are forced to ask themselves why they are so obsessed with returning people to Earth if Mars is worth visiting. Is this nothing more than a sexually frustrated egotistical fantasy of trillion dollar tourism, or is there some sensible purpose? If Mars is worth visiting, it should be worth staying. This is the argument of Lawrence Krauss who fundamentally advocates robotic explortation of Mars. Audio of his NPR Science Friday Interview. Crazy though it may be, plenty of sexually frustrated scientists who would jump at the chance for a one way ticket to Mars.

Robots are expendable, cheaper, and far more effective as a tool of scientific exploration and human colony construction than people will ever be. Let the private sector send people into space if it is economical and put public funds back where they belong: in scientific and technological research and development.

OpenVPN

We highly recommend the Open Source OpenVPN software. It is not necessarily a comprehensive VPN package, and as far as we can see is not compatible with other VPN products such as the convenient VPN client built into Windows, but it is nonetheless a free and effective way for one to create a secure highly encrypted software based tunnel between many locations. It works for any major OS. The major drawback is that the install and setup is not trivial. To create an OpenVPN server you must know something about command-line, config files, and something about the basics of computer networking. Once established, it allows for extremely fast encrypted connections with the potential to max out one's bandwidth capacity with a normal processor. With such levels of security, imagine the possibilities...

Envirosax

Envirosax are a great idea, and we own several. They are attractive, strong, durable bags which can fold up to a very small volumes. They are perfect as shopping bags holding up to 20 kg, and women can easily fit them in their purses. They also make great gifts. If the trend of such products picked up, possibly encouraged by taxation or interdiction of paper or plastic shopping bags, the environmental footprint of consumers would be noticeably reduced.

doubleTwist

From Wikipedia:

doubleTwist Corporation is a digital media company founded by Monique Farantzos and Jon Lech Johansen. It is backed by Index Ventures (Skype, Last.FM) and Northzone Ventures.

The doubleTwist application enables users to send photos and videos to their friends and sync their media library to a wide variety of portable devices.

We do not particularly endorse the doubleTwist product, but we admire their philosophy, the work of their financial backers, and particularly love the founder: DVD Jon. This new anti-Apple advert from doubleTwist is certainly worth watching. Despite the original 1984 Apple propaganda, Apple has always been the product of monopoly, the company of total enslavement, the brand to eliminate choice, thought, freedom and convenience. Just ask anyone over age 50 who has needed to move their iTunes library.

The Anti-Transhumanists

We are not well versed in the Anti-Transhumanist movement, but in full recognition that some Transhumanist outcome is inevitable, we respect challenges to any trends towards human elimination, subjugation, or redundancy. The folks at TransAlchemy have a website a blog a Youtube channel and to me most significantly, have produced a documentary entitled "The Age of Transitions" expressing their reservations about transhumanism. Most notably, the TransAlchemists assert that Transhumanism directly succeeds the politically defunct Eugenics and Social Darwinist movements which enabled the National Socialist Holocaust. TransAlchemy is currently filming a second documentary featuring Singularity Summit coverage. Their motto: Save the Humans.

Palm Post

Our trial of the Palm Pre is concluded. With tethering enabled, the Pre is adequate, but despite being a Linux phone, there are simply no applications for it to realise its potential, and a 2 year lock in to Sprint is a tough pill to swallow - not to mention the $350 price tag for the Pre.

We are holding out for an Android phone hopefully on Verizon later this year. The greater support, adoption, flexibility and programmability of Android we hope will make it worth the wait.