Goodbye Smoky Air - You Won't Be Missed

Today is the last day of dirty, stinky public air. No, sorry, I can't promise that actually. I can say though that tomorrow is the first day where the fantastic new Iowa smoking ban will be in effect.

I'm freaking thrilled about this. Any public place is basically now a safe haven from something I despise. Despised isn't actually strong enough - pure hatred is better. In fact, after my introductory post, the very first post on this blog was against smoking.

Some will say this goes too far and infringes on personal liberties. They'll say that it is a slippery slope of government control. I don't give a rats ass. I'm normally very careful about allowing government to get into our affairs too. The difference here is that this is something that effects others, not just the brain dead who is puffing away. I'm still not legally allowed to beat the hell out of them or defecate on them, so I think it fair that they can't smoke around me.

The only disappointing thing to me in this is the very few loopholes that still made it in. Casinos and hotels still have exemptions. F the casinos, I'll stay away from your smoky, old folk piss establishments. Now I just need to find a hotel chain that positions themselves as non-smoking.

How to make music fun

I know - it looks like I'm just padding my posts count at this point. I'm on track to have as many posts this month as I have the entire rest of the year. Have to take advantage of it when the ambition is there.

Parts of the music industry (mostly the evil parts who hide behind a shell company known as the RIAA) are bemoaning the fact that people are not buying their music anymore, and that interest in their manufactured crap is on the decline. [completely wacky sidenote: I realized yesterday you can't say "Fiduciary Duty" without saying "douche"]. This zombified race of former humans can't figure out what they should do to get people to enjoy music again, so they err on the side of suing everyone and introducing painful and ugly DRM into their music.

Well, as I again realized over the past few days, that's completely the opposite direction to go. Music is a social creature. Just like the scorpion, that it's nature. Music is not really appreciated until it shared and experienced by many people. The RIAA is running scared and doing exactly the wrong approach.

I've enjoyed some fantastic musical sharing over the past few days, and I haven't even been to any concerts. My daughter loves all kinds of music, and I have been making CDs for her lately. There's not much more fun than doing that. It started with some bedtime music. Initially I started pretty mainstream, but more recently we ended up with a Marley (Bob and Ziggy) CD that she loves. Yesterday and today we created a "rock" CD for her. It turns out she has inherited her dad's wide range of musical taste - we have everything from pop, to 70's hard rock, to some modern and classic country.

The other sharing dropped in the form of a new 5 of the now from Ryan. Ryan came up with the 5 of the now a few years ago on his blog, and it's great both from the creating and listening perspective.

As his post and my previous post demonstrate, there is no lack of free music out there. Have no fear - music wants to be free and always will be in the end. Wise up RIAA.

Digital Battlefield

It's too bad other companies did not have the foresight and unique position of Apple to make their online music stores truly succeed. I say this not because I don't like iTunes, I've said before how it is pretty much my primary source if at all possible. However, some other companies are starting to do some good things and it is just a nearly insurmountable obstacle for them to overcome, which I think limits some progress that we should be seeing.

Okay - that was a long run-on way of getting to my real point. Amazon continues to improve and add to their excellent MP3 download service - yet I still basically forget about them entirely unless something pokes me to remind me. This is especially weird given that for almost all of my other online shopping, I prefer to use them first.

I received an email pointing out that Amazon has weekly album deals that are really good. We're talking $5 or $7 full album, non-DRM downloads of some really good artists. I assumed these would be pop radio schlock, but they actually have a good assortment of some good music.

Then, on top of that, I find out that Amazon has weekly free songs, just like iTunes, except again they are DRM-free of course. These songs change weekly (and possibly daily, some that I saw yesterday are no longer featured). Here is a link where you can find some, or signup for their weekly newsletter if you're like me and need a poke to look outside the iTunes garden and see the other music all around.

iTunes is still the simplest path around for me, without question. Nobody else can yet pull off having a single app where I can search their store, manage my music, and drop it on my device all in a well-designed interface. Amazon's downloader does a decent job, but I still consider it somewhat of a hack. However, low-priced DRM-free music is a good way to at least get me looking at them.

Adding on quick - here's another link to 30 free hip-hop/R&B songs courtesy of AllHipHop.com. A bit of a pain, you have to get your iTunes code via email - but some pretty good songs.

Quick Techie Splatter

After changing something on my Linux home router today, I realized I should make a post about the Tomato replacement firmware. Yes, I realize most people have no idea what I'm talking about right now, but for those that do, keep reading.

Tomato is one of many replacement open source firmwares available for the Linksys WRT54G family of access points and routers (among other devices). Most people are familiar with this little ubiquitous device, and many are aware that you can replace the firmware on it thanks to open source software (and some people behind the scenes who poked Linksys until they "did the right thing" with their open source support).

DD-WRT has been one of the most popular of these firmware packages for quite some time. I was a big fan myself. However, a few things began to sour me on it. First and foremost, DD-WRT does a fair job of stepping all over the spirit of open source. Yes, it is technically possible to get the source, but good luck ever figuring out how to get it to build. Moreover, I have seen many (possibly rumored) reports of less than desirable behavior related to the DD-WRT codebase.

Over time, a "subscription" version of the firmware has become available. I see any new features in the future likely only being available to people willing to pay for this, and the free version simply stagnating. This along with the firmware itself having an ever-growing amount of services that bordered on adware made me want to look elsewhere.

It turns out unless you really needed every last knob of DD-WRT, Tomato is both far simpler and equally fully featured. In addition, its hot-set capability for nearly all parameters is very slick.

I won't go into exhausting details feature by feature of the two. I'll suffice it to say that I see no reason why someone wouldn't be equally or more satisfied by using Tomato vs. DD-WRT. A quick Google search of "tomato wrt" brings up others opinions on this subject as well.

Linux Recovery Single User Mode

I recently found myself not knowing the root password on a Linux server I have in my house (it is temporarily relocated until a new hosting location is ready).

I had tried very successfully to forget all of my years of mucking with Linux servers, so it took me a bit to remember how to pull off resetting the root password. I'm throwing it on here in case I forget again in the future.

Since I had local keyboard and monitor access, this was really rather trivial. This was an older server still running Slackware. Slackware was the distro I first learned Linux with, and where I really polished my Linux skills. That said, I'll never use it again. I'm just not interested in the mucking any longer, Ubuntu server is the way to go for me.

Since this was an older Slackware box, it was still using Lilo. So, I stopped the boot process at the Lilo prompt by holding shift. I then used the following command line:
linux rw 1 init=/bin/sh

Now to explain a bit. "linux" was the name of my kernel image, "rw" says that I want to mount the root filesystem read/write, "1" is how I signal to drop to runlevel 1. All of that would be sufficient for simple troubleshooting. However, I needed to startup as root in order to reset the root password. Setting init to /bin/sh takes care of that nicely.

Firefox 3 Extensions

First of all, I really do love Firefox 3. Most people already knew I preferred Firefox to all other browsers. Firefox 3 was exactly the kind of updated I like. It didn't add a bunch of extra fluff and bloat that I didn't need. Instead, they focused on making it quicker, more stable, and even simpler to use. Fantastic.

People often ask what extensions I like or must have. I used to have a monstrous list back in the early Firefox days. Anything that seemed remotely useful I added. I have since tried to make my list be more of an "essentials" list. Some will argue my list is still fairly large, and some are still just niceties. However, I find that every item in my list in some way enhances my browsing experience on a nearly daily basis so they are all worthwhile.

I didn't feel like exporting a text list, so I'm going to be lazy and give you a screenshot instead. About the only extension I would really still like is a better version of the Google Calendar notifier that I used to have (which doesn't work in FF 3).

Take the Long Way Home

I've been meaning to blog several things, but just haven't had the motivation. The flooding has pretty much zapped whatever was left of my ambition. Kudos to KCRG and the CR Gazette though for turning news sources that I often chastise into awesome online sources during the floods.

For something with an equal mix of silliness and depression, I created this Google map of how we had to traverse one of the very few (and possibly only) routes between my current town and my hometown today.

Click on the link near the bottom to be able to see the points of interest better.


View Larger Map