This is going to be wow. I hope Wikipedia will melt phone systems in Washington on Wednesday. Tell everyone you know!

January 16, 2012 1:15 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@jimmy_wales

Jimmy Wales

The Internet is going to be turning black on Jan. 19th because of the copyright legislation currently going through the two houses of Congress. SOPA in the House of Representatives and PIPA in the Senate both threaten the wonderful community of creation that is the Internet.

If either of these bills are passed the major and minor sites (such as this one) could be taken down just for linking to a site that may or may not support piracy. Youtube could be taken down for one copyright infringing video. Same thing for Facebook, Wikipedia, or Etsy. That is why this site and many others will be going black on Wednesday.

Sites That I Know Are Going Black:

• Reddit
• Wikipedia (you better write your essays ahead of time)
• Mojang
• Major League Gaming
• Cheezburger Sites

If you operate a website I suggest putting up a stop SOPA banner to increase awareness. It’s the only way we can keep the Internet as it is.

Minecraft is the insanely popular sanbox game from the swedish developer Mojang. It is currently running in a beta. But anyone can buy and download it for 25% off of the sale price when it comes out in November. Anyways enough with the boring description. You want to know how I fail at Minecraft.

I tried to avoid the hype but I couldn’t last, the numerous posts on Reddit and advice from people in real life caused me to fall for Minecraft’s creeper claws. I had quite a few problems with the game before it even started. My current computer is a Hp Mini 311. Admittedly, it’s a little under powered. It is one step above a netbook. So I can’t say I expect all games to run at one hundred frames per second. But I said to myself “look the art is all pixelated why would it need a good computer to play it on? That would be silly”. So I forged on entered my paypal details and hoped for the best. (Okay, I actually did check the system requirements but they were innacurate).

I downloaded the game. Logged in and was confronted with a screen to name my world. I quickly deleted the place holder “New World” and replace it with “Brave New World“. Why? Because I can. It takes a minute or two to get everything running and it drops me in the randomly generated game world. I look around and my frame rate drops to nearly zero. I back out of the game and type into google.

After some failed attempts and repeated google searches I found out how to mod the game and add some changes that would increase my frame rate. (if you need some help check out Optifine and one of the various mod loaders. Downloading optifine seemed to help a little bit and increased my framerates. My first of many obstacles was overcome. Now Minecraft was playable.

I booted up Minecraft and landed back in Brave New World. I looked around and said to myself  ”What am  I supposed to do? Where are all those cool creations that are found on youtube?”.  I alt-tabbed out of minecraft and started googling. I found out I need to cut down trees and build a house. Why did nobody tell me this? I started on my way, but was too slow to create a house before dark and I was killed by some exploding thing. Another lesson I learned the hard way. Things kill you in Minecraft. Again I rage quit.

The lure of the building blocks and /r/minecraft brought me back to Minecraft within minutes. I was determined to set everything right. Cue montage. I chopped down trees, I ate my lunch and built myself a wonderful cave home. Like a Minecrafting BOSS.

That’s all I really got done in my first day. I am now in an endless cycle of wishing I actually had enough resources to build something, and then getting lost in the unexplored abyss that is my minecraft world. Hopefully I will find some redstone dust in the next century. Until then I will keep cutting down trees and being killed by random creepers.

This is the worst mistake I have ever made. There is more cursing on this show in five minutes compared to a whole episode of Southpark. It is painful to watch this crap. It is so hard to change the channel though. I guess that’s what makes it so darn popular.

Lately it seems as though the amount of television I watch decreases every day. I hardly watch either of my two favorite channels, History and Discovery. I used to watch them to hear and see history. Now it seems all they show are modern reality Tv shows. I’m sorry “Ice Road Truckers” & “Pawn Stars”. You are mighty fine, but not all that informative. Sometimes I learn an interesting fact or two, but that’s just dumb luck. Now all the good shows are stuck on side projects run by those two countries: The Military Channel (Discovery Channel Owned) and History Interactive (I think that is what it is called).

I hope you come back to your old ways…

I love my new Kindle. It came into this world as a book-less blank slate on December 25, 2010. Every since then, my life has changed. My Kindle is thin, sleek, simple, and dare I say sexy. Over the past couple of weeks I have read Stephen King’s “Long Walk”, Karl Marlantes’ “Matterhorn”, and A.J. Jacobs’ “Living Biblically” (plus some others, but that’s besides the point). The Kindle is the ultimate gadget for someone who has over two bookshelves overflowing with books (myself). 

The Advantages:

There are many reasons why the Kindle beats regular books. First, I do not have to buy another bookshelf. I have already saved myself a couple hundred dollars there. Second, I don’t have to keep five books on my nightstand all of the time. Seriously, I have five books lying there right now. Books, I wouldn’t have to see if I had all of them on Kindle. Also, I save money by buying ebooks. Ebooks generally are two or three dollars less than their paperback counterparts, and don’t even get me started on their price compared to hardcover books. Secondly, I don’t have to waste my time and energy trekking out to Borders every other weekend. I am receiving books in less than sixty seconds!

The Disadvantages:

One disadvantage is that now that Amazon has my credit card I am more likely to spend money. Also, not all books are available. There are always going to be more books available as books and not as Kindle ebook (for a long time anyways). Secondly, there is no feeling of accomplishment. It is harder to visualize how close the end is. And lastly, there no feeling of the paper crinkling beneath your fingers.

I guess that’s it. The kindle is amazing for people who travel a lot, and don’t have the space for hundreds of books in their home. But it’s not for the weak of heart, and those who enjoy books. 

Fast, yet expensive.

Running a Website on a Minimal Server

Currently my website is being hosted on a tiny account on A Small Orange servers. It includes 150mb of disk space and 4.5gb of bandwidth.This might not seem like a lot of resources to most people but it is more than enough for many websites. I run many different programs on my account some that are for the public and many that I use personally.

The most resource intensive program that I use is my WordPress blog install. It uses about 30mb of space on my hardrive and uses the most bandwidth. I still manage to stay under about 250mb per month depending on whether or not I post some pictures or something else that takes a lot of bandwidth.

I will admit that if I ever encounter a huge rush of traffic from Digg or somewhere else my website will be crushed within minutes. That is why I have a backup plan. I have a smaller blog called crash test. Crash test, is run by a lightweight CMS called snews. It uses a couple of kbs of bandwidth per page load which enables me to redirect people to a smaller less resource intensive version of an article if need be.

I probably could run an snews site with under 25mbs of bandwidth every month. It is that small. The other advantage is that it loads almost instantaneously. If you would like to check it out it can be found at quips.bshootz.com.

No matter what all the other hosting providers say unlimited is never truly unlimited. They know most sites use half a gigabyte of bandwidth or each month and count on you never fully trying out their limits. Because they tell you you are getting an unlimited account you are more inclined to pay more for something they really aren’t providing. I would rather now exactly what I am and am not paying for. I don’t want an excuse saying I would rather now exactly what I am and am not paying for. I don’t want an asterisk after my hosting conditions putting unknown limits on my usage. i say spell out your terms and conditions in clear print for everyone and stop hiding between unlimited* plans. Even though at first ASO’s hosting plan may sound restrictive it is actually quite the opposite. Even though at first ASO’s hosting plan may sound restrictive it is actually quite the opposite.

If you are looking to run a personal blog I say start with the smallest possible hosting account you can find and work your way up from there. I will keep my twenty-five dollar a year plan until I start using 4499mb of bandwidth a month or 149mb of drive space. With my host I know I can always add badwidth for a couple of dollars or switch plans at anytime. I am truly unrestricted.

1000 Pages in 5! Days

I officially finished under the dome at 4:33pm today. I conquered the beast at a breakneck pace a little over 200 pages per day.

I don’t want to spoil the ending, I was however, totally unprepared for it. Overall I found the book very interesting and a great summer read. Like all of Stephen King’s word it was a page turner that never backed down. I will definitely recommend it to anyone. It is a long book and is on the expensive side, don’t even considering trying to read it if you haven’t read other Stephen King novels.

I still can’t believe I finished it so quickly.

There has been a long debate over which text editor is Really king. VI or EMACS. Both have their loyal fans that scoff at the other side’s text editor. No one really can prove that one text editor is better than the other one. Yet people will probably still be arguing about it ten years from now. In the computer nerd(i use that term in a good way) world text editors can be very important things.

Normal computer illiterate folk wouldn’t understand the holy war ongoing between the dueling text editors. Most people fire up Word and get done with it. Well we open source fanatics will have none of that if we have any say. We are obsessed with speed and being a quote UV quote “power user”. We want to tailor our text editing experience to fit us personally. We don’t want to conform to some Microsoft engineer who’s making all the UI decisions.

No one who wasn’t into computers would even know there is such a thing as a “EMACS” or a “VI”. Obviously anyone who cares enough to use a complicated non-word text editor is probably very passionate about computers and what software they use.

Both text editors go very far back and have been around longer than I. Emacs & VI have. Both have been around since 1976. They are still maintained and used by thousands of people each day, and have probably the most loyal fans after operating system fanboys.

There main difference between vi and Emacs is that vi inside the terminal and emacs is more like an individual application. Also vi is basically available on every Linux distribution and even OSX without needing to be installed and emacs is not. If a server is down and all you have is the command line you will be using vi to edit files.

In my opinion vi tends to be lightweight compared to Emacs. But Emacs seems to have a higher level of extensibility. It is basically a compiler form lisp. It even has its own tetris game. Emacs can made to do basically anything with lisp. I don’t know of anything comparable on Vi. Also too me the Emacs commands make some more sense. With Emacs you don’t have to worry about switching from insert to command mode. You can execute commands all the time not just in specified command mode.

I don’t know but vi seems a little less user friendly compared to Emacs. Emacs could be used by anyone you don’t technically need to know any commands because at least in v23 there is a GUI you can resort to if you don’t know a command or don’t feel like typing everything. Also Emacs allows you to use a mouse in addition to keyboard commands. This feature is especially nice for anyone not ready to learn a lot of new commands.

Overall I would say Emacs is generally easier to use without any command knowledge. It also is very extensible. With Lisp you can basically do anything. If a function for something in Emacs doesn’t exist you can make it exist.

Where Emacs is more user-friendly Vi tends to be a little bit harder to pick up as it is totally navigated with keyboard commands. Vi is also lightweight compared to Emacs. Where Emacs takes a second to load on my netbook Vi loads immediately. Vi is also highly configurable through its .vimrc file where basically any feature can be changed to fit a user’s preference. To me Vi seems a little too bare bones for what I do with text editors.

I admit I used to be one of those Microsoft Word minions and still to some extent still am. Emacs overall seems like a much smoother transition and seems to have a function to fill all of my needs. Where it lacks in speed and portability it makes up in pure potential. This is a real thing that happened to me today. I wanted to see how long this article would be. I had no clue if Emacs had a word count function so I Googled it. Emacs does not in fact have a word count command. It was no problem though because I was able to download a script and put it into my .emacs file and I was fine. I reloaded Emacs and hit alt-x word-count and I was on my way. As far as I know Vi doesn’t have that kind of easy process to allow you to add a command.

When it comes down to the text editor holy war I think it all depends on what you would rather have. A jack or all trades (EMACS) or a master of one (VI/VIM). They are two totally different text editors based on different design philosophies. I think that is why they clash together in this ongoing holy war. This is why this war will never end. This difference, the most important difference of all is why no one will ever win.

I am sure the Vi lovers will say I need to give it a chance. To take more time learning the commands, and that this wasn’t a fair article. The Emacs lovers will tell me I am making the right choice in sticking with EMACS. Honestly though does it really matter? People will use the right text editor for them and nothing else. If they want to write all of their C++ code in notepad so be it. If no one can win let us agree to drop it and get on with out lives.

I will admit I am neither from Maine nor a fan or ginger. But I did buy a bottle of Ginger brew at summer camp. I have to admit I was surprised the second I brought the bottle to my mouth. I was expecting a Canada Dry taste like ginger ale. Oh no this was real ginger. It was absolutely horrible. It had like a spicy aftertaste. It made my wish I hadn’t wasted my two dollars. I don’t know about you but ginger does nothing for me as a refreshment. Luckily there was someone who did like the taste of the horrible drink. It was so bad I just gave him the rest of the bottle. Maybe Ginger Brew is an acquired taste. I sure hope so, but I will never try it again.