Who Are the Brain Police?

2013-01-29, 9:14 pm
Categories: Music

Video by, and uploaded by, Ed Seeman.

Ed adds:

You watched Zappa being shot through the whiskey bottle he was drinking from while doing a foot performance with his toes. You saw Zappa's groupie for the night whose close up lips have embraced your favorite musician's parts. You sae a meeting in a hotel room attended by Herb Cohn their manager, THE ORIGINAL "SUZIE CREAMCHEESE "PAM, as Frank decides to eat alone as Herb is discussing DONAVAN with his manager. You Saw ZAPPA Meets ARTHUR BROWN. Albert Hall opening, & Fans dressed in 60's clothes.

and you heard a great rendition of WHO ARE THE BRAIN POLICE. You also saw some 60's improvised 16mm shooting with no lights and crew. The dark footage is the result of this .jpg video suffering from too much duping from my original footage that rests in much better quality in Frank's Vault along with the rest of my 14 hours of film shot over a period of almost two years. No budget and available light was all I could afford.

DES Fixes It

2013-01-29, 9:44 am
Categories: Stream of Consciousness, Work

Worth getting up a little early for: today I got a call from DES telling me that I would finally be getting my unemployment check for the week of January 5. (I'll have to take his word for it since I can't log into the website this morning, but...well, if that keeps up I guess I'll have more to tell later.)

To recap: I've been doing some freelance work which paid no money upfront and which will pay an unpredictable amount of royalties in the future. I asked how to report this on my weekly unemployment claim, and a nice but incorrect lady told me on the phone that I should say Yes I worked and my earnings for the week were $0.00. This resulted in DES paying me nothing for the week, and I've spent most of the month trying to get it corrected -- I've posted about it previously on 01-09 and 01-17.

Well, after the failed phone call of the 17th, I submitted an E-Mail asking for help. A week later, I got a call back. I missed it; I noticed it late the next day and, since it was Friday by then, I didn't get a chance to call back (at last! a phone number for a real person!) until yesterday.

It wasn't what you'd call a productive conversation. We talked in circles; she said I should estimate my earnings and correct them later if the estimate was wrong, I said there was no way for a reliable estimate, she said I should just estimate $240 (a week's unemployment pay) then, I pointed out that well then I'd be SOL if the thing never made that much money, this repeated for awhile until she offered to put me through to her supervisor. I got his voicemail and left a message.

And he got back to me this morning. He told me that, while the lady I'd talked to yesterday was right for the general case (like if, say, I'd built some furniture with intent to sell it), in rare cases like mine where there's no reliable estimate, I shouldn't report the work when I do it, I should only report it when I get the income from it. Which, you know, I'd figured out three weeks ago, but I guess it's nice to get it from an official source after only two letters, two E-Mails, and seven phone calls.

He added -- and I already knew this, too, but it bears mentioning in case any other poor soul winds up in the same predicament -- that the important thing is to make sure I keep looking for work and logging my search, even if I'm working on a freelance job in the meantime.

So, if you're in Arizona and face the same issue I did -- producing work on a royalties-only basis -- that's the official response from DES: don't report the initial work, report the money as it comes in, and don't stop looking for other work while you're doing it.

I can't vouch for other states. If you're not in Arizona...well, typically I'd say "You should ask your state's DES," but to be perfectly honest asking is what got me into this mess in the first damn place. So if I were offering a recommendation, it'd be do it the same way: keep looking for a day job, don't report the royalty gig until the money comes in. (Obviously if you're getting money upfront, as most people working for royalties do, do report that; I'm only speaking of cases where you get just royalties with no stipend/advance/etc.) If it turns out that's not the way it works in your state, I think you're better off apologizing and correcting it later.

It should go without saying that this isn't legal advice, it's advice from an out-of-work computer scientist who just spent most of a month trying to get an unemployment check. Like most of what's on this site, it's worth exactly what you paid for it.

You Are What You Eat

2013-01-28, 10:59 pm
Categories: Movies, Music

Via uploader br1tag:

You Are What You Eat (1968) is a strange, psychedelic and convoluted film as incoherent as its hippy brethren 200 Motels (1971) and Rainbow Bridge (1972). It belongs with that small collection of movies in which more people own the soundtrack than have actually seen the film. The soundtrack is phenomenal. The bright yellow cover is as eccentric as the vinyl itself that features audio cut-ups, squealing Moog synthesizers, relentless psychedelic improvisations, lounge music, Tiny Tim oddities, and the final appearance of The Hawks before they changed their name to The Band.

The list of those involved with the film is an incredible roster of counter culture heroes and weirdos. Tiny Tim, The Electric Flag, Frank Zappa, Peter Yarrow, Paul Butterfield, Super Spade, David Crosby, Hamsa El Din, Barry McGuire, the radio personality Rosko and several others.

Backing Up Wii Data -- All of It

2013-01-28, 11:56 am
Categories: Games, Stream of Consciousness, Tech

So I've been having problems with my Wii. It's stopped running discs entirely -- I put one in, it spits it right back out. I suspect the spindle motor, and I'm going to try fixing it myself with a little help from the guides and parts at Console Zombie -- but before I go taking my Wii apart and poking around in its innards, I figure I should probably back all my shit up.

Course, as you may know, the Wii doesn't allow you to back up everything onto an SD card. Certain downloads and save files are copy-protected. This is what is known, amongst technical people such as myself, as a bunch of stupid fucking bullshit.

See, the way I see it, I should be able to back up my saves in case my console gives up the ghost. Or, say, go over to my brother-in-law's house and have access to every course on Mario Kart without having to unlock them all again in fucking single-player mode.

So I did a bit of reading up and found a utility called Savegame Extractor. It requires installation of the Homebrew Channel.

I have an old Wii and the latest version of the Wii System Menu (4.3U). After some reading, I found that the appropriate utility for my system was LetterBomb, and there are installation instructions at wiibrew.org.

It was about as simple and painless as root tools come. Select your firmware version and input your MAC address, then download the LetterBomb zipfile. Rename the private folder on your SD card, copy the boot.elf file and private directory from the zip to the root. Put it in the Wii, power it up, open up the messageboard, and click on the LetterBomb icon. From there I installed the Homebrew Channel, and installed BootMii as boot2 (apparently on recent Wii revisions you can only install as IOS, ie overwriting the Wii firmware).

Once you boot up again, you'll need to use either a GameCube controller or the buttons on the Wii face (Power to move the cursor, Reset to select an option) on the bootscreen. You should back up your NAND memory (provided you've got 512MB free on the card; it's under the gears icon, then the icon with the arrow pointing from the chip to the SD card).

Next thing: install the Homebrew Browser.

Create an apps directory on the root of your SD card. Download the Homebrew Browser, extract it, and copy the homebrew_browser subdirectory to apps. Once it's on the SD card, you can load it from the Homebrew Channel; from there -- well, from there I got a stack dump and had to reload it. But I reloaded it, and from there you can download all sorts of useful apps -- including Savegame Extractor.

In fact, there are a few variations on it -- there's Savegame Manager, which combines Savegame Extractor with Savegame Installer, and which also just flat-out stack-dumped every time I tried to use it -- but there's a fork called SaveGame Manager EX, which works great, comes with a GUI that mimics the Wii's, and has a nice batch option to extract everything from the Wii at one go, eliminating all that tedious clicking on each individual file and then selecting Copy. (And, okay, also copying over some other shit that you don't really need to expend the space on backing up, like the Netflix Channel. But hey, still.)

Soapbox time: I'm not doing this to play pirated games. I'm not doing this to cheat at online games. (I'm not doing it to cheat at offline games, either, but if I were, that would be none of anybody's goddamn business but my own.)

I'm doing this to access my data, the games I bought and paid for (and, all right, one that Brent got me for my birthday), the saves I slogged through hours of stupid bullshit single-player Mario Kart to get.

And I shouldn't fucking have to install a bunch of hacks to do this.

I like my Wii. Rather a lot. I mean, Jesus Christ, look at how much effort I've gone to to keep all the stuff I've got on it, and that's before I've even started taking it apart.

But Nintendo is completely fucking ass-backwards in its approach to modern technology in general and network play in particular. Its "safeguards" are asinine and poorly-thought-out. They won't stop some guy with an Action Replay from unlocking all the karts on Mario Kart or all the fighters on Smash Bros and then going online (and hey, Nintendo? Maybe if you didn't make it impossible to unlock anything on multiplayer in Mario Kart, and a pain in the ass to unlock everything on multiplayer in Smash Bros, people wouldn't be tempted to cheat to do it?). They just put up barriers to prevent people with broken consoles from getting their data off. Which, again, includes games they paid for.

...and frankly they're not very good barriers. This was really a breeze. I'd like to thank the developers of all the various tools I've mentioned, and the writers of the walkthroughs on how to set them up. Because this was pretty damn painless, and to be frank I enjoyed doing it.

Tune in next time to see how I do at taking my Wii apart and seeing if I can fix it.

If I even get that far. I don't have a tri-wing screwdriver onhand, so I'm going to see if I can get the screws out with a small flathead. If not, well, tri-wings are like $5 on Amazon.

You Didn't Try to Call Me

2013-01-26, 11:01 pm
Categories: Music

Per uploader vinzer72frie:

Frank Zappa
June 18, 1970
Uddel, Netherlands
Live at the "Piknik" show, VPRO, Dutch Television.

Not great sound quality, but a neat bit of history.

Today's Barrier to Productivity

2013-01-25, 8:29 pm
Categories: Stream of Consciousness, Work

I was recording today and the damn power started flickering.

One of those weird little things where the lights go down for a little bit and then come back up, and some stuff goes off and some doesn't. The clock on the oven got reset; the one on the microwave didn't. The Mac Mini I was using stayed up; the external hard drive I was recording to (plugged into a different surge protector) did. Pro Tools hung; fortunately I didn't lose any recording but some of it wasn't stored in the .ptf file and I had to drag-and-drop the WAVs from the Audio Files directory.

So I got started and it happened again. This time I didn't lose anything but it started throwing permission errors. So I restored from an earlier .ptf and then I managed to finish.

Always something new and exciting to impede progress. But ultimately I got two good auditions recorded. Fingers crossed...

ownCloud

2013-01-24, 10:52 pm
Categories: Games, Stream of Consciousness, Tech

My post on Unison remains one of the most popular things on this site. (The FF7 Trilogy remain my most popular posts, the ROM Collection Browser post is far and away the most popular hit on the site this month, and a number of people seem confused, as I was, by Netflix's reorganization of Doctor Who -- but Unison's still way up there.)

Well, I rebuilt my computer a few months ago, and I've opted not to go back to Unison. The main reason is that I don't just have Windows/Linux/OSX machines in the house now -- I've got a phone and a tablet both running Android now, and I'd very much like to be able to sync to them, too.

(Yes, okay, so Android is also Linux; good observation, gold star. It is technically possible to run Unison on Android. It is also, as far as I can discern, as big a pain in the ass as you would expect.)

I've decided to take a crack at ownCloud, and set my overworked G4 Mac Mini up as a server. It was a quick, easy setup, and a lot less fiddly than Unison (though it took a little bit of fucking around on the command line to enable SSL), but it's got its tradeoffs -- oddly, near as I can tell the desktop client can only set directories to sync, not individual files, while the Android client can only set individual files to sync, not entire directories.

And speaking of syncing with the Android app, it took me a day to figure out how to get it to sync in the first damn place. The sync toggle is under the system Settings menu, not, for some reason, anywhere in the app's interface, and it turns out that in order to set a file to sync, you have to upload or download it first, and then tap it in the ownCloud browser, and then there's a "Keep file up to date" checkbox. It's not exactly what you'd call discoverable, and the closest thing I can find to documentation is a damn YouTube video. (Can we talk for a minute about tutorials that are only available as videos? For my money, that trend fucking sucks. I mean, videos are great for some things, like showing you how to take apart a piece of equipment, or shave, or otherwise do something that's easier to watch than read about -- but much of the time, step-by-step instructions with the occasional illustration is a far superior method of walking someone through how to do a thing.)

So, not quite perfect. And there are some other pitfalls -- the filebrowser in the Android app can't seem to access the directory with my World of Goo save to sync it, SNESoid save files use a different extension than desktop SNES9X...plenty of rough edges that aren't actually ownCloud's fault but the fault of developers who didn't consider that users would want to sync save files across multiple systems. (It looks like you might be able to sync a file under a different name on the Android client than on the server; I'll look into that but I'm also thinking of switching from SNESoid to SNES9X EX on my phone and EX+ on my tablet. So far it looks like it's a lot more flexible than SNESoid, and while EX+ is too burly for my phone, EX runs all right once I turn off graphics filters, set scaling to integer-only, and turn on the GPU Sync Hack. Save states aren't compatible between versions, but of course save RAM is. As for World of Goo...maybe I can whip something up with symlinks or something; I'll look into it.)

And it's a pity there's no way to set up an automated wireless sync with my PSP.