[Blogging Intensifies]

Building a Better Dance Pad

Ramen Junkie January 24, 2012 0Comment

So a while ago, I designed and built my own Dance Dance Revolution Dance Pad. I’m not going to go too much into the details behind that, but for a variety of reasons, I’ve actually used it considerably less than I’d hoped. I also found recently that the arrows don’t detect properly anymore since they are connected to the Directional Pad which reads as analogue not digital.

So, I fixed it. While I was fixing it, I finally added the button box I’d been meaning to add.

The button presses of a Playstation Controller are simply the creation of an electrical contact. This can be replicated on any similar button by soldering wires to either side of the PVC board’s pads inside the controller.

Anyway, the first task was to rewire the pad’s “buttons” to the shoulder buttons of the controller board. Simple enough. Now they show up as “buttons” and not analog pulls in the PC.

Step two was to make the box removable from the pad for easy storage. This also allowed me to replace the ball of wire that I’d ended up with when building it the first time.

This mess becomes a network cable and a network jack. The network cable is the one used for the new connections tot he shoulder buttons.

Next is the box, which I wired to the four face buttons of the controller. It really doesn’t matter if I use the “start” and “select” buttons since in the end, the Playstation shell is tossed out and I simply map the buttons to whatever I want in game (I have yet to see how this will affect it if i use it on the Playstation).

IMGP5408

The end result is much cleaner and much more reliable all around. I will probably add some stickers or something to the box to make it look prettier.

Opinion/Editorial/Life

Some Thoughts on SOPA and PIPA

Ramen Junkie January 18, 2012 0Comment

The whole internet is abuzz with SOPA and, to a lesser extent, PIPA talk. Basically, these two bills in congress, one for the House, one for the Senate. You can get plenty of information through Google or if you’d like, try the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The gist of this bill, is that it would allow media companies, through the government, to block websites with “pirated content” through manipulation of the Internet DNS system. Without proper due process of law. DNS, is essentially the phone book of the internet. You could also compare it to a road map. It’s what computers use to know how to find the websites you look for online. All websites are in fact a series of numbers called an IP address, however remembering 74.125.227.114 is tricky. Remembering “Google.com” is not.

Feel free to use that link, it leads to Google. Which brings up one major flaw with this bill. Pirates will easily circumvent these blocked DNS entries by using IP addresses. If say, the Pirate Bay is blocked, people will just use it’s IP address instead.

Also likely there will simply be “rogue DNS” servers.

I am not endorsing piracy, I am saying the bill will not do anything to stop it. People also may suggest the idea of “if you’re not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to be afraid of”.

The problem with this logic, in every situation, is that the question of “what is wrong” is extremely subjective and often changes. Guess what, in a world where SOPA passes and becomes law, it starts off simply as it’s told. Places which host “pirate content” are effectively removed from the internet. Nevermind that there will also be legal content taken off as well when sites like Megaupload are taken offline. The block is not single file or even single subsite specific.

But hey we’re all happier now without The pirate Bay and Megaupload right?

Until people start hosting their content through loopholes on blogger or WordPress. Sure, it’s against the TOS and both companies work to remove them as they are found but hey, guess what, now they need to be blocked. Thousands, probably millions, of independent bloggers are now silenced.

Or perhaps the definition of “piracy” and “copyright infringement” gets pushed out even more. Universal studios puts out a big blockbuster movie, it cost them a shitload of money top make and it gets totally panned by the internet. Nobody wants to see this movie, all this negative press floating around, well hey look, Blogger Bob used the movie poster in his review. Nevermind that this may fall under the fare use clause, that’s infringement, let’s close down BloggerBob.com because his negative reviews may be hurting ticket sales.

Just remember, governments generally don’t start off deciding to become repressive totalitarian regimes. (NOTE: Link will not work 1/18/2012)

I mean hey, we have a precedent now, plus, once a site is “gone” people won’t notice right? Universal killed BloggerBob, why not suppress a few of those “anti government kooks” out there spreading bad spirits through the country while we’re at it. We have the mechanism in place after all. John Q Public doesn’t know what DNS is, he thinks it’s a new sandwich at Subway.

It’s not even that it’s a terribly BAD idea, it’s more that, in an effort to make things “move more quickly” it rejects the idea of due process, and facts, and evidence.

Which also brings up what really is a whole different rant. The world is changing. The world is not the US, or Europe, or China, or the Northern Hemisphere. It’s an entire globe. The internet is even more-so, and it’s the driving force of the world these days. Which is the real problem here. Because despite the best effort to push more crap on what used to be a pretty ignorant and docile public, it’s not working anymore. Any sort of exaggeration or lie in favor of “marketing” is almost instantly debunked. People who used to be made to feel better or pushed aside as isolated cases of problems realize that they are not alone. The internet is the ultimate engine for real democracy. look at the whole election system, when it took days and months to ride a horse across the country, then things like congress or the electoral college etc were a great idea. is it even necessary anymore when people can express their opinion and desires to the world instantly?

PC Hardware

The Build Process

Ramen Junkie January 3, 2012 4Comments

I got a stack of boxes last Thursday, somewhat previously discussed.

I already owned the case. It’s this one here. It’s basic, holds a shitload of hard drives, and has several huge quiet 120mm fans. I also already had a 1TB SATA drive to use.

It’s been a while since I have built a PC, but, in general, it’s pretty simple. The hard part is picking out the components really, which obviously, I’ve already done. He was not around for the build but my son asked if I thought I would be done putting my computer together within a few months. He seemed surprised when I told him it would take maybe an hour, once I had all of the parts.

The only real key is making sure the heat sink on the processor makes good contact and works, since otherwise, you’re liable to burn up an expensive component.

The place to start is the Motherboard. Here it is, removed from the box and placed on its static bag.

This part is essentially the central nervous system of the computer. It connects all of the other parts together and lets them communicate. It does a few other things but at it’s core, that’s what it does. The Motherboard can’t do math for crap though, which is why the next step is to add the Processor, which more or less only does math… very very quickly.

It’s small, maybe an inch and a half square. This one runs at I believe 3.3 Ghz, with 4 cores, which essentially means it does 3.3 Billion calculations per second and can do four calculations at a time. This chip costs more than any other individual component in this computer. Because it works hard and runs everything, it also gets hot quickly. Which is why the next step is to add the heat sink.

Ok, so a little story on this humongous heatsink and fan. The last time i bought a processor, it did not include a heatsink of it’s own. Heatsinks, personally, a pretty generic and unless you’re overclocking the CPU, you really don’t need much. So I threw the “Number one selling CPU Heatsink on Amazon that was only like $20 anyway” on my order. The pictures on Amazon make it look like a standard chunk of metal that sits on the CPU with the fan on top.

Turns out the chip came with a heatsink and fan. It also turns out that the one I bought was like four times larger than expected. I decided that since it was cheap, I may aw well use it rather than return it.

Hence, gigantic heat sink. Fortunately, the case I’m using is pretty large.

The last step before bolting the Motherboard assembly into the case is to stick the RAM in. It’s nothing particularly exciting other than I had to consult the manual to figure out the optimal slot placement.

After the board is in the case, the power supply can be strapped in as well. The manual suggested putting the PS in first but my experience has been that often the PS obstructs access to the Mother Board. It didn’t in this case (pun intended) but I waited anyway. I also stuck the hard drive into the drive bay and reinserted it.

While the view is still relatively clear, I also wired in all of the front panel controls and lights. Just a side note, I ended up putting all of these in reverse, which meant opening the case later and flipping them all over. No biggie.

Finally, the Graphics card is inserted.

The desire to upgrade the GPU was a heavy driver in my decision to build a PC to begin with. This one can be expanded to a second card using some ATI technology that I forget the name of if I want to add a second one. It’s huge and pretty impressive to look at.

Finally, everything is assembled and it’s time to power things up.

I go through and describe the build Process for a home desktop PC.

Aside from the flipped button leads, I also had a bit of a worry when turning it on with the cooling. The PS fan doesn’t power up unless it’s needed, so it didn’t immediately spring to life as expected. This wasn’t helped by rear fan, which it turns out is dead. I’ve since bought a replacement for it though I have not installed it yet.

I also ran into a slight snag when I went to install the OS. I don’t own any SATA CD/DVD/BluRay/Disc drives. Fortunately, I have a USB DVD drive for my netbook, which functioned just fine for this use.

I also had to wait a day for my Monitor to come in and later realized I don’t own a second USB Keyboard or Mouse (no PS/2 Ports).

It’s been running just fine for several days now.

I can run all of my games on super uber graphics mode with no stutter or slow downs. It boots up very quickly, despite the non SSD hard drive. Basically, it’s everything it’s supposed to be.

PC Hardware

Building a New PC

Ramen Junkie December 26, 2011 0Comment

I am extremely familiar with the insides and mechanics behind build a PC from scratch. I’ve put together several machines for both personal use and at (my old) work. I also have done numerous upgrades to hard drives, RAM, GPUs, etc over the years. I’ve wired up cases for better cooling and upgraded a PC so much that I rebuilt the original PC with all of it’s original parts.

I’ve never ever bought all the parts at once to put them together as a cohesive whole at the same time.

In the recent move, I’ve gained an office space. Part of my desire for this office space is that it’s not going to be where the kids hang out to play on the computer. Unfortunately, I can’t just stick them with one of my extra older PCs, it’ll never work out. So I’m using the opportunity to build myself a new gaming rig. Computer components have gotten so ridiculously confusing these days. The last time I seriously build a PC it was simple. If the processor speed was higher, it was better. A 2 GHZ PC was pretty much always going to be better than a 1.8ghz PC. Unless it’s a Celeron, then it just sucked no matter what.

Now it’s all Cores and i7s, and i3s and Phenom IIs and crazy numbers that are mostly just ePeen related. Fortunately I am aware than GPU means more to a PC than CPU. That’s why I started with GPU. My old machine actually performs much better than I would ever expect considering it’s only Dual core and it’s a stock Dell machine with a new GPU and some RAM. The key was, I picked out a good GPU when I bought it.

So I did some research on benchmarks and performance and came up with a Sapphire AMD Radeon HD 6850. It’s not a top of the line card but it ranks very highly and costs about half as much as the cards ranking similarly. I’m still being budget conscious with my choices and trying to get the best value I can.

I then did move on to processor. As I said, modern processors confuse me, so I started off looking into the AMD chip recommended by Amazon to go with the GPU. It was a place to start more than anything. I’ve had a lot of AMD CPUs and always liked them. They used to be the top dog but I was pretty sure Intel had come back to the lead.

Some Google searching suggested that it’s not real great unless it’s overclocked and I’m not really interested in trying to overclock anything. It’s not that I don’t think I could do it, it’s more than I don’t want to have to buy another $150 processor when I fuck it up. One thread I found on this chip had several recommendations for the Intel i5 2500 3.3Ghz. It’s a Quad Core chip. I did a bit more research and decided to go for this chip. Mostly my research was into i5 vs i7, but this i5 is supposed to be pretty decent. Besides, CPU is less important and I’m going to better value with a good punch.

On a side note, I also am hazy on the details but I also know that more cores doesn’t always mean better. 4 cores doesn’t make this a 12 Ghz processor, not every application uses multiple cores. However I do a fair amount of Photo editing with Photoshop and I do a fair amount of editing with Adobe Premier, BOTH programs I know benefit from using multiple cores.

At this point I threw on a compatible fan nothing fancy, it was cheap and ranked 1st in fans on Amazon so I bought it. I also threw on a 500W power supply to run it all. I have a 500W power supply but it’s got some bad bearings in the fans and runs loud. I could probably fix it but electricity scares me and I am pretty sure power supplies can be dangerous even when un plugged.

all that was left was to tie it together with a motherboard. I picked up one from the list of recommended ones, it’s listed as Gigabyte Intel Z68 ATX DDR3 2133 LGA 1155 Motherboard GA-Z68A-D3H-B3 and is very Blue.

So, because it coordinates, I picked up 8 GB of Blue RAM with flashy cooling fins to go in it.

I didn’t need to get a case, I have a very large and nice case I bought last time I built a machine. it is absolutely boring as hell in it’s designs but that was what I wanted, something that “wasn’t curvy and swoopy and neon and looked like a Riced up Honda PC”.

I’m not showing this thing off for looks.

I also already have some hard drives. I have a 1 TB that I’ll probably stick in it out of my current machine. It keeps disappearing from the OS, but I am 90% sure it’s because that stock Dell Power supply sucks and can’t handle running 3 hard drives and a GPU.

I also don’t need a Monitor. I ordered a decently large LCD a week ago when I thought I was going to be running a different older machine in the office.

Anyway, I’m pretty stoked. I also went in for the Amazon Prime trial so everything should be here by Thursday.

Opinion/Editorial/Life

Copyright, SOPA, Why You Should Care

Ramen Junkie November 17, 2011 0Comment

So yesterday was “American Censorship Day”. This was to… commemorate really REALLY is not the right word, maybe acknowledge or point out that yesterday Congress had a hearing about SOPA, the “Stop Online Piracy Act”. There are plenty of sites out there talking about this better than I probably can explain but the general gist of the bill is that it would give the movie and music industry, the MPAA and the RIAA, the ability to have a website blocked by DNS servers if it contains infringing or protected copyrighted works.

Now, this is all feel good and great on paper. If it passes we can block sites like the PirateBay or MegaUpload which are often used to distribute infringing materials. But then, people often use Bittorrent to download infringing materials, it should probably get clocked too. Then you have folks uploading TV shows and clips to Youtube, it should probably be blocked too, besides, that gives the secondary benefit of removing all of those entertaining cat videos people seem to prefer to watch instead of crappy sitcoms. There is also that Facebook thing, where people like to post those videos, which infringe on IP, let’s block it too.

Granted, this is the whole “worst case scenario” mindset and I really doubt Facebook would be blocked.

At least not initially.

Before we get too off track, let’s point out that many people use ThePirateBay and MegaUpload and similar sites to distribute legitimate content. Even if that’s pushing it, Bittorrent is definitely used for legitimate content. Download bandwidth is relatively cheap but upload bandwidth is not. Being able to distribute the file hosting system across hundreds and thousands of hosts with Bittorrent is excellent technology.

Back to the “major players” of Google (with Youtube) and Facebook, yeah, it is probably unlikely they would get blocked. However, there is a greed mindset that comes in with unchecked power where Youtube could easily be a candidate to be blocked. As I mentioned, people are increasingly growing interested in independently produced media, be it heavily produced independent films, video bloggers in their bedrooms and offices or even just some guy who filmed his cat for 8 hours and cut together a 30 second string of the best moments.

The movement towards disintermediated user generated content away from the big business models of expensive shows and movies and music is the true “enemy” of the music and record industry. It’s just not real Politically Correct for the big bad media industry to blame the obvious because there isn’t anything they can really do about it in the end. The internet revolution for lack of a better term is quickly killing the middleman economy of the past. I’m not going to get too far off on this tangent though because it would make this even longer than it already is and it’s a topic I’d like to touch on in a separate post.

The point is… the big media giants can use SOPA to essentially close Youtube preventing a lot of independents from even getting exposure in the first place. The desired and expected outcome would be that everyone comes crawling back to buying albums at $17 each that have 2 almost decent songs on them so they can make money hand over fist ripping off their customers like they did up until 10 years or so ago.

I should point out that I’m using Youtube pretty generically here as it’s interchangeable with pretty much any website centered around user generated content.

Now you might ask, “why would they shut down Youtube, why not just shut down the infringing channel/person?” This is an excellent point, why can’t they do that? Doesn’t shutting down a whole website seem a little extreme? Here’s the punch line for ya, they ALREADY HAVE THIS ABILITY. It’s called the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act”. Under the DMCA, if someone starts posting a bunch of episodes of Glee to Youtube, Fox can issue a DMCA takedown notice to Youtube and have those videos removed. Simple, easy, somewhat effective. The problem of course is that there is more Youtube content uploaded every minute (maybe it’s second) than there are hours in the day. Policing all of the content for infringing videos is essentially impossible. Youtube already has several systems scanners and algorithms in place that scan new uploads as they arrive but they aren’t 100% effective.

They can’t be. People are clever. They’ll slow the music down slightly so it doesn’t get caught. They’ll flip the video of a scene so it doesn’t match.

Which brings up another point. SOPA will do nothing to stop Internet piracy. People will find a way if they want to pirate copyrighted materials. DNS can be blocked but people will just start using the IP address of the websites being blocked. People will use TOR Networks, people will use proxies that are out of the country (like they do in China which firewalls itself out of the rest of the world). People will find a way. PC games started getting ridiculous with their DRM yet there is always a crack available, often before the game is released. Music on iTunes and other MP3 stores used to have DRM preventing unauthorized play and people figured out how to use the “analogue hole” or just burned them to CD then re-ripped them. People will find a way.

The people who suffer from all of this tend to be the honest folks. The guy who didn’t realize he could only authorize iTunes on 5 computers or devices or whatever and now he’s got a new machine and can’t play his songs. Or the person who wants to play their new PC game on their laptop without having to carry the CD around but the game requires the CD for authorization. Or worse, the game requires an internet connection to be played at all, which BTW, there are still many people WITHOUT regular internet access who still like to use PCs and play games and use software.

To stop what? Pirates? They downloaded an ISO that included a hacked EXE that breaks the encryption or DRM or need for the disc a week before the game was in stores.

The other side of this bill which is quite sinister is the lack of due process involved. DMCA takedowns are bad enough as they don’t always require proof. They also get issued against websites which use copyright materials under the Fair Use clause. Fair use most often involves a copyrighted work being less than a certain length and used for parody or criticism purposes. Like if a person has a music blog where they review songs, under fair use (I think, I’m not a lawyer) they would be allowed to embed 30 second clips of the tracks into the review. This takes down entire websites without any due process and barely requires any actual proof of infringement. Essentially if they say “take it down”, it goes.

The really terrible angle here, as they say, power corrupts and this bill gives too much power to people that don’t deserve it, is, for example, that hypothetical music review blog I mentioned. Let’s say they are fairly harsh and don’t give too many positive reviews. We can’t have this negativity floating around getting readers now, negative reviews affect our bottom line. So the site gets a SOPA notice and disappears.

Criticism out of site, out of mind.