Guys, guys, guys!

I'm famous. Well, more like I bought myself some fame from a cool webcomic that my friends recently introduced me to, Poly in Pictures (hi PiP visitors! sorry my site's so neglected and cobwebby). (And now the recursive linking circle is complete.)

Because it's not a proper webcomic post without an example:

Massive ancient underground cities

Tens of thousands of people in a single underground city?! So cool. Apparently these cities are thought to have been used for religious purposes and to escape persecution and attackers.

One tunnel, wide enough for three people walking abreast, connects to another underground town six miles away.

Pirate Bay and "Cybernorms" Researchers Collaborating

"Pirate Bay becomes 'Research Bay' to aid P2P researchers"
The part that especially caught my eye was the conclusion from their 2009 report:

This reveals a large discrepancy between the viewpoint of copyright legislation and of young people regarding what is right and wrong. File sharers do not believe copyright legislation should interfere with how they use the Internet in their living rooms. If we choose to ignore this discrepancy, we run a clear risk of diminishing younger generations respect for rule of law.

Wait, we respect the rule of law? I mean, large swaths of law, sure, but as a whole? Not even close. Speeding laws? Alcohol? Pot? All widely considered dumb laws that much of the cultures I've experienced widely reject. And then of course there's mountains of laws that aren't simply dumb, they're overtly discriminatory or immoral. The rampant abuse of copyright law by the MPAA, RIAA, AP, etc is only one more in a long history of legislation that is contrary to the public opinion and common law. In addition to promoting outright "piracy" (I still hate that term, but it's less bad than the very misleading "theft."), I think this witch hunt is promoting a broadening of what we consider fair use in response. I have certainly seen that shift in my life at least, but I can't really say for the larger population(s).

Updating OCZ Vertex 2 SSD Firmware on a Mac: A Theoretically-Helpful Guide

So, because I couldn't find any guides for quite what I did I figured I'd write a quick summary in the hopes that it can help someone else. Also, I feel like procrastinating a bit. It is hardly a comprehensive tutorial, and I can only speak for my specific setup.

The situation: I have a MacBook Pro 15" Core2Duo running 10.6.7.* I recently swapped in an 80gig OCZ Vertex 2 SSD for the boot drive in place of the old hard drive and moved the hard drive to the optical bay slot using an OptiBay.** I have been having kernel panics every time I try to wake it up from Safe Sleep*** after power loss (swapping batteries w/o power cable). It seems this is a known issue with the OCZ Vertex 2 (and other similar) SSDs. A firmware update**** seems to fix the problem. Unfortunately OCZ has shit-awful support for updating firmware on any non-Windows platform.

I found a few helpful forum discussions, but this is what I did:

First, check your firmware version: In System Profiler (Apple menu --> about this mac --> more info) under the Serial-ATA window in hardware you should see your SSD. Look for the "Revision" next to "Model" and "Serial Number." That is your current firmware version.

To actually change the firmware you need to deal with Windows. I already have Windows 7 installed via Bootcamp on the hard drive, and NTFS-3G installed so OS X can read and write NTFS (the Windows file format). The OCZ firmware updater is a small Windows program. For it to work, the SSD can't be the drive that Windows is booted from, and the SSD needs to have at least a small Windows-formatted partition.

Using Disc Utility I shrunk the existing OS X boot drive partition and added a second partition that was about 6 gigs big. It could probably be smaller. I formatted it as NTFS (possible thanks to the NTFS-3G plugin), but FAT may work or you could format the partition as NTFS from Windows or the Bootcamp Utility app. You don't need to instal anything onto the partition, it only needs to be Windows-formatted (I'm not sure if it must be NTFS or if FAT will also work).

I booted into the existing Bootcamp Windows instal on the hard drive, and ran the OCS firmware updater program following their instructions. (When I first tried I didn't know you had to have a Windows-formatted partition on the SSD, and the program didn't recognize the SSD even though Windows saw it just fine.) Somewhere along here you'll probably have Windows or some antivirus program you installed and forgot about yell at you to register or update or whatever because you haven't booted into Windows in months and never bothered to put in the license key. I cursed a couple times, mashed some buttons to make the dialogs go away, and rebooted into OS X.

I checked the firmware in System Profiler again, saw a higher number, and felt triumphant. A quick test of the Safe Sleep issue was successful, so hopefully that fixed it. Now you can remove the extra partition on the SSD in Disc Utility and have a sandwich.

* I believe this guide applies to all Intel MacBooks, including unibodies, running any OS X, but this is the only unit I have tried.
** The OptiBay has adequate but mediocre build-quality, and at $100 w/ external drive case included is rather over-priced, but it did the job. I have since learned that there are alternatives, but I don't know the specifics.
*** Technically Deep Sleep I believe, but the Mac automatically enters that from Safe Sleep under default settings (I think).
**** In my case the current firmware is 1.32, I believe I started with 1.22 or 1.24 but I didn't keep good notes because I fail at life.
[Edited to fix NTSF to NTFS because yay dyslexia]

Epic VFX Time

Let's get funky. Too much funk, keep it tasteful. [via Jesse]

couple more not-train photos

Cmnd-Option
My desk at night - I actually had my DSLR in reaching distance, but opted for my iPhone instead even though the technical quality of the photos clearly suffered some (sharpness primarily). Telling.




Desk.

The Department of Defense's Corrosion Department

Random stuff like this interests me way more than it should.

The Pentagon itself spends something in the neighborhood of $23 billion per annum to combat the problem. "Weapon systems are routinely out of commission due to corrosion deficiencies," the DoD observes. "For example, corrosion has been identified as the reason for more than 50 percent of the maintenance needed on KC-135 aircraft."

So—get this—the Defense Department has an entire agency that does nothing but try to figure out ways to fight corrosive gunk.

"Gene and the Machine - The shocking truth about the electric Volt"

Perhaps the best auto review of all time.

So this won’t be a conventional automotive review. First, I’m not qualified to write a conventional automotive review, inasmuch as I know next to nothing about automobiles. Second, I am nakedly biased. I very much wanted to hate this car. It challenges my worldview.

Life is bewildering — essentially, it’s a fatal disease of uncertain course and unknown duration. If we are to make any sense of it, if we are to tame our existential terrors, we must gratefully cling to those few established truths on which we know we can rely: Day follows night. Sex causes babies. To lose weight, eat less. American cars suck.

[old, and been sitting in my too-read 'pile' long-enough that I can't figure out who first linked me to it, but still worth a read]

PINK FLUFFY UNICORNS DANCING ON RAINBOWS

confidence is an illusion

I came to this view of because people insist on viewing my various behaviors through the framework of confidence. When I have a realistic view of my ability to do some particular task well, I am labeled confident, as opposed to simply accurate. When I predict that I would be below average at some particular task, based on years of knowing myself, I am labeled unconfident when in fact I am simply right or wrong. Where does confidence come in?

I would extend this to optimism/pessimism - I hate those terms. They're both... useless.

I have friends with Mad SKILZ (tm)

webdesign fail

when this is your webpage you have failed:

(yes, I am being a bit hypocritical since my own site is so... 'in need of work' to put it kindly)

genderfork

"I'd much rather have 'geek' as my gender. It tells you so much more about me." -Genderfork

engineered idea viruses

Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert):

Ideas are a lot like viruses. Neither a virus nor an idea is alive, technically, but both reproduce though contact with other people. And both are hard to eradicate. For example, 20% of the American population believes Obama is a Muslim. That's actually an increase since he was inaugurated.

Most idea viruses are the bad type. But I see no reason we couldn't engineer good idea viruses. Such a virus would have three traits:

1. It must be catchy, so you never forget it.
2. It must be something you are inclined to share.
3. It must cause a positive change in the world.

My Kitchen Window (photos)

definitely time to practice me some HDR techniques

be a douche nozzle

Budget Planner – Mint.com posted pretty much entirely because I love that phrase and plan to reuse it whenever I can...

How to piss off nerd

...my head, it hurts.

they see me rollin... (kitteh :-)

[via Azurejade]

The New Cosmopolitan

Looking for fans is about looking for people who appear to have given a great deal of thought to how they dress and what they’re doing, and who have, in the process of applying all this thought to their daily lives, concluded that they would like to behave differently from the norm.
....
Reading Patterson’s recent biography of Robert A Heinlein, Learning Curve, I was struck by how much fringey stuff old RAH dabbled in: telepathy, radical politics, polyamory (or ‘‘companionate marriage,’’ as it was called in his day), nudism, and all manner of funny business, all of which is reflected in his books, and all of which can be summed up with ‘‘all laws are local.’’

It's rather arrogant of me to claim this, but I like to believe that this is the philosophy of my entire life. I think that this is why the geek worlds tend to be much more embracing of things like "alternate" gender presentation, "fringe" sexuality, or many "nontraditional" lifestyles in general with barely a second thought.
[via Waxy Links]

model train hotel room

oh Japan, of course you'd have an over-priced hotel room with a model train... it looks like all pretty boring store-bought stuff (albeit Japanese prototype of course, so outside of my area of expertise) - can't even make out if it's HO or N scale from the pic...