Month: January 2010

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Responding to Disingenuous “Debate”

Not apropos of anything in particular. Just a comment on the passing scene.

C.S.Lewis, commenting on the Martin Marprelate Tracts, enunciates my own view toward those who would stifle legitimate debate in the public forum today:

“Those who refuse to let their opponents dispute have no right to complain if they hear instead lewd catcalls in the streets; in a sense, it is what they have chosen.”*

And so, if I sometimes resort to “lewd catcalls” and mockery of those who would stifle debate–or even worse, corrupt discourse with deception and outright lies–I have the eminent company of such personages as “Martin Marprelate”.

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“With Love, The 0!”

I swear… *sigh* After the last year of assaults upon reason, good taste, public and private liberties, MASSIVE attempts to make citizens over into serfs of the “feddle gummint” (say, “Crap n Tax” and “Obumascare”) and more, nearly half the U.S. still expresses support for The 0! in polls and in the mid-to-upper 30% of those polled strongly support this front man for TOTUS.

I’m beginning to think that photos of The 0! “in bed” with a burro, autographed by The 0!, “XXOO, love ya B” wouldn’t be enough to turn the hard core idiots against him. Heck, the “hard core” idiots would probably be delighted…

*sigh*

Let me repeat myself:

“In a democracy (‘rule by mob’), those who refuse to learn from history are in the majority and dictate that everyone else suffer for their ignorance.”-third world county’s corollary to Santayana’s Axiom

Thanks, once again, brain dead majority.

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A Useful Tip for Advanced Win7 Users

If there actually be such critters. 😉

Create a new folder on your desktop. Rename the folder anything you want, followed by

.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

(Yes, the period begins the text to copy-paste in the file name, just like a hidden file or folder in Linux.)

It’s that part I’ve included above in the blockquoted section that’s important, because it creates a folder that’s chock full of user controls that are not otherwise easily accessible via the GUI. Sure, some–even most–of them can be accessed via various buried dialog boxes, but quick and easy access to 15 “Action Center” applets/controls, 10 Admin tools, management for all attached devices and much, much more all in one location is pretty neat.

Warning: some of these tools and applets can get the naive user in trouble, so don’t come crying to me if you fit the bill and go ahead and play in this sandbox. But if you have a good idea what you’re doing and make fairly frequent Restore Points, back up your system regularly, nothing in this collection will toast your Win7 install.

And it’s just too handy for words to have it all in one place. Especially in a Windows box. Very nice.

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Minor Gripe With Win7 Disappears

The chief appeal of Windows 7 for me has been the much-improved Windows Media Center. In fact, WMC is what convinced me to finally bid farewell to all my travails attempting to make an HTPC work right in Linux.*

But.

The proprietary “wtv” format WMC uses to record television shows has been the one and only gripe I’ve had. Every now and then, I’ve made desultory searches for a way to deal with the issue of burning off DVDs from WMC, since doing it “the Microsoft way” results–at best–in archive copies that are good for that alone, copies that cannot be played in an ordinary DVD player.

Now, that’d be OK if I had also gotten off my lazy butt and finally built a media server and connected it to TVs that we want to view the files from, but I’ve not, and my schedule looks to become hectic in the coming months, so something to convert the files would be nice.

Here it is. Simple really. Win7 already has a built-in .wtv-to-.dvr-ms file conversion facility. From there, it was a simple thing to find a free (yeh, I am a tightwad) utility to convert the file to something usable on an ordinary DVD player.

Bob’s your uncle.

Of course, later on, with file storage on the NAS I’ll build when I get a round toit (I lost mine somewhere and need a new one) and a media server the files can be accessed through, this will become less of an issue, but for now, DVD-Rs are cheap and easy to burn.

Finally.

It’d still be nice if M$ didn’t cause this kind of thing with its proprietary file formats, but the workaround is actually simple enough, and WMC is still far, far easier to implement and use, and more “complete” than any other approach I’ve found.

*Don’t get me wrong. I still use Linux Mint for a primary work platform (and other OSes for other uses), just running in a Virtualbox VM on a Win7 host. It’s just easier that way to have the advantages of Linux and still use WMC to record those shows we do want to watch, but in “time-shifted” mode–in better-than-hulu quality.

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Poor “Mother Earth” Just Can’t Catch a Break…

Treehuggers may doom the environment:

Will Vegetarian Humans One Day ‘Emit’ More Carbon Dioxide & Methane Than Cows?

In a suppositional 2060,

“…the relative significance of direct human flatulence to the total carbon dioxide and methane loads was shown to have increased dramatically by a massive human shift to a highly legume- and cabbage-dependent diet. More vegetarian farts, in other words.”

At least folks’d have the wherewithall to perform CPR w/o having to get up close and personal with a stranger’s lips… well, in one sense at least. (OK, I’m linking the video, but I’m not posting it here. *heh*)

This video, OTOH, just begs to be posted with this topic:

(Of course, this all presupposes that CO2 is “bad” for the environment. Plants don’t seem to think so, though, and even if it were to cause “global warming” it’d just extend growing seasons, etc. Methane? Yeh, well, we could bottle that… )