Violence, but not sex? Society, you confuse me.

Would you trust Australia Post to open every letter and parcel; to remove pages at random; to finger cheques and money orders; to remove objects from your mail; and, for you to never know what went missing?

Would you trust the people who don’t believe adult Australians play video games to control the secret black list of what you read on the web?

Would you trust any government, once given the power to secretly censor, not to extend that power to choke its opponents and opposition?

Australia’s Federal Government, using powers from the last Government, is planning to impose the strictest and most complete internet censorship system in the world. Only we can stop them.

The government plans to slow the internet by 87% by opening every single exchange of information to look for “unwanted” and “illegal” content. Illegal internet content is so broadly defined at law that it covers everything from Facebook, to MySpace, to Wikipedia, to YouTube.

I’ll be attending tomorrow in Sydney. You should too, wherever you are. Saturday 14 December, 2008.

11am Brisbane Square: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=42526399601
11am Hobart Parliament Lawns: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=39329861995
11am Sydney Town Hall: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=49916537640
12pm Adelaide Parliament: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=39343300875
12pm Melbourne State Library: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=46838735931
12pm Perth Stirling Gardens: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=45738419714
12pm ACT/Canberra: City Walk (near the fountain outside of the Canberra Centre): http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=38717743533

Now, I’ll be honest. I haven’t bought much legitimate music lately, except for a couple albums I bought a few years back. I would buy LPs if I had a player that worked… But yes, shock, horror. I am a freeloader, to be fair.

Well, seeing as there was a multitude of songs that weren’t available on most P2P networks, I decided, hell, let’s at least have a look around and see if I could get songs elsewhere. Amazon’s MP3 downloads aren’t available in Australia, and iTunes is, well.. evil in so many different ways.

So, after looking around, I discovered Beatport (no, this isn’t one of those paid plugs, they’re just pretty cool). They provide a really large range of electronic music (incl. house, club, electro). The user interface is really nice, but it’s a bit annoying that they only provide Flash. But you can quickly go from song to song, artist to artist, finding songs you wouldn’t normally otherwise hear. It also provides 2-3 minute previews of songs (low quality of course). You can pay using PayPal or via credit card directly. What I did find annoying was that the songs are reasonably high priced to what I was expecting (something like from $1.49 for most tracks to $2.49 for newer ones), and that some tracks aren’t always available even though they’re in the catalogue, and some popular tracks they just don’t seem to have. Otherwise, I’ve been reasonably happy.

You can choose output formats of 320 Kbps CBR MP3, 192 Kbps VBR MP4 and 1141 Kbps WAV. They charge a WAV handling fee so that’s semi-lame, though, I can understand why.

If anybody has suggestions as to other similar websites, please comment and point me there. Also, anybody else used Beatport? What did you think of it?

Just touched down in Melbourne, and have checked into the hotel. Internet’s pretty expensive, so I guess I’ll have to limit myself to freeloading off the internet at the conference. Hopefully might be able to do some hacking offline.

On a related note, I think Silvia Pfeiffer was on my plane. Hello there if you were! =)

Edit: John kindly pointed out Silvia had been in Melbourne for the last week or so. For some reason my retarded brain wrote Silvia’s name instead of Mary Gardiner. Obviously, I need to get my head checked.

Attention those coming to LCA!

I’m considering having a BoF (Birds of a Feather) conference during the conference relating to Bongo and stuff. I’m asking here because, well, I honestly have no idea how many are going to come. If I don’t have enough numbers, there’s probably not all that much point in putting up a request for the room. Also, if you’d like to come, if you could optionally give me an idea of when you’d like the BoF to be held (ie which sessions), so that you don’t miss out on your favorite talks! :)

To quote the programme:

This year we have a dedicated Birds of a Feather room that is available during the main conference (Wednesday to Friday). More information on running or attending a BoF session will be available when the conference opens.

I guess I could always generalise it, and possibly get a few other speakers involved. I might email this idea to chat/mel8ourne list.

Also, if you want to catch me at LCA, PM/email me. Mobile number is 0401215248.

I will be traveling away to the null void for about a week until the 9th of January. You probably won’t be able to contact me during this time, since I won’t have ‘net access or anything; if you email me, it’ll stay in the backlog of mail and spam until I get back. Or, if you have my number, you could call me.

TTFN.

from a new Sony VAIO VGN-SZ56GN (aka SZ110 or something later, I’m sure). Very sexy, just installed Debian. Basically everything but wireless worked out of the box (had to install a kernel module, just a simple apt-get).

Edit: OK, so I lied. Not everything worked as well as I had hoped:

• Had to install the icky NVIDIA driver (and kernel-headers, etc..).
• Create an init script to switch between the Intel and NVIDIA xorg.conf files depending on what the switch was set to on boot.
• Update ALSA kernel modules, so that the PC speaker would mute itself when I plugged headphones in. Haven’t testing the microphone yet, but I suspect that’s been fixed too. Debian came with 1.0.14, and this was fixed in 1.0.15rc3 (which has been released). Also needed to force the vaio version of the driver. A newer version of ALSA has been uploaded by the Debian ALSA maintainers and is waiting to be accepted into sid.
• ACPI events via sony-pi are buggered - need to apply a patch so that the laptop gets detected correctly instead of falling back to an incorrect default. Either that, or use sony-laptop, I forget. (This appears to be patched in the latest kernel release - will get back to you on this one).
• A patch exists to make the Motioneye Camera on this machine appear at /dev/video0, so that other apps can access the webcam, but I haven’t tried nor bothered to get it working yet. I’m sure I’ll get around to it eventually, but it’s not really high priority for me at the moment. (Note: might be fixed by getting the above issue resolved)
• Cannot easily adjust backlight values. If I’m running on the Intel graphics adapter, I can jump into gnome-terminal/xterm/whatever, and run xbacklight -set 50; the NVIDIA card does not have an obviously apparent way to adjust the backlight brightness - it can adjust the screen brightness, but this does not equate to less power used. Using the screen brightness applet causes it to crash. (Related to sony-pi driver).
• Haven’t tried out the fingerprint reader, but I suspect I’ll need to install a driver or two to get that working properly too.

The amount of custom hardware on this machine makes the software issue worse than most other brands though; but the machine itself is pretty hard to beat - nice and light, long battery life, looks good, feature-full, and a full-sized keyboard.

I did also manage to remove the “Windows Vista(tm)” sticker; pretty damn hard mind you. :D

Edit x2: More detailed information will now live here forever.

Dear Sydney Buses,

You suck.

1. Having about four buses come all at the same time is not cool. Also, at least have the buses spread the load of passengers, instead of having everyone hopping onto the first bus, with the remaining three completely empty.
2. Drivers who don’t know where the bus stops are isn’t cool either, especially if they’re the second-most used on that route.
3. Is it hard to provide more buses to services which are obviously overcrowded? Closing an eye to the situation isn’t going to help.
4. Can’t you fucking respond to ‘good morning’? If I can be bothered to say it when I’m half-awake, you better be able to at least say something. This doesn’t apply to all bus drivers - there are some real champs out there - but most of them are just plain dickheads. In addition to being rude, some can’t even drive (including instances where drivers will drive into trees and smash the side mirror off, requiring passengers to get off the bus - it’s illegal to drive without a side-view mirror).

Also, to those who think that travel passes permit ‘free’ travel, it’s not free. It’s subsidised travel. Not free.

I honestly believe CityRail is doing a better job with their trains. I mean, morning peak hour is absolutely ridiculous, more so than buses, but the rest of the time they’re generally equal or better. At least you can get a damn seat and they come on time. Though, I do live pretty close to the city, so I’m not sure if it’d be the same if I were travelling from Hornsby or Granville.

State-government-provided transport in Sydney is an utter disgrace. Especially you, Sydney Buses. Actually, to be honest, infrastructure in Sydney is generally poor(er) of that of other states/cities. I refrains from inserting political views about the current (Mr. Iemma’s) state government.

Kind regards, Alex Hixon

Rock always wins.

I should probably mention that if you get a pony, it is indeed redeemable for a beer. :)

Doing what I do best, I’ve taken a good idea and stolen it. =) OK, actually I really did build upon it, honest!

Basically, I’ve come up with a system that lets you recognise the people who work on Bongo. You’re given ‘Pony power’ which allows you to either add or remove a Pony point from a Bongo contributer, say, for example, they’ve added some awesome new feature that you’ve been waiting years for, or they just screwed up an agent. After a certain period of time (possibly at the end of the year), I’ll get the top few contributers, and send them all their very own Little Pony - you too can be this happy.

So, without further ado, I present to you all: OMGPONIES. If you contribute to Bongo (yes, packagers and the like included), go on, sign up! To everyone else, give pony points where they’re deserved!

Edit: changed the way the entire post sounded.

Why has nobody told me about this movie?

It’s probably the coolest thing on the planet! Daft Punk’s best album IMHO (Discovery; however, Homework is still up there) as the soundtrack for a beautiful retro-looking anime. No speech, just awesome music and limited sound effects. Go on, watch it!

to me.