Vichy France, the FCC, and the Internet

I just wrote a message to the FCC regarding Net Neutrality, at the urging of the Save the Internet coalition. You can do the same at: http://www.savetheinternet.com/fcc-comments

I've included my message below, if anyone wants to use it as a model of articulate civic engagement.

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Dear FCC,

Look, we all know that the Internet should be a plain, old common carrier just like the telephone system. That will work best for consumers, for content innovators and providers, and it will actually work out pretty damned handsomely for the wireline companies just as it has up until now. Making certain that the Internet remains a common carrier would be the highest achievement you could reach as public officials and citizens.

We all know this. So don't, don't, don't, give in to the lobbyist pressure and compromise Net Neutrality. You have the legal authority to reimpose Title II, and once you do that then the wirelines will have that much higher of a barrier to get over in terms of removing Net Neutrality and exploiting the public. Sure, they may buy the next election and then proceed to buy Congress, but that isn't your worry. Your job is to do the right thing, right now, while you have the power to do it. We'll fight tomorrow's battle tomorrow, and we might lose tomorrow, but we lose for sure if you surrender today. Do you really want to go down in history as the FCC that created an Internet version of Vichy France? We all know know what the right action is here. Just do it.

Cutting out hair in GIMP

Here is another great Gimp tutorial from the GIMPtricks series on YouTube. I had been assuming that bad hair selection was just something you had to live with in Gimp. I was wrong.

Freemind

The farther we get into the Millenium, the harder it gets to keep all of the information organized. One strategy for coping would be to follow Thoreau's advice and simplify my life in order to reduce the information flow to a manageable level. But what's the fun of that?

The other strategy is to fight fire with fire, using technology to fight the info-flood that technology has brought us. And that's where Freemind comes in. It was created as a mind-mapping tool, useful for organizing a stream of ideas and seeing how to fit the ideas together. But as the following video by JerryTonneman on YouTube shows, Freemind can be used to sort all kinds of information, including your daily schedule.

Firefox Spellchecking

I owe a thank you to Rick Broida at PC World for publishing his tip about adding words to Firefox's spell checker. I use TiddlyWiki for taking notes about economics, and Firefox's dictionary doesn't include many terms from economics, so as I make my notes I'm sometimes swimming in red squiggles. But Rick pointed out that simply right-clicking the terms will bring up an option to add them to my personal Firefox dictionary file.

Again, thanks Rick!

Youtube Fixed

I noticed awhile ago that my video player controls in Youtube weren't  working. The videos will start playing, but I cannot then pause them, adjust the volume, or anything else involving the mouse.

So, having a moment this morning, I finally went up to the Ubuntu Forums and the forums came through for me once again. More specifically, poster lovinglinux came through for me with a Firefox flash troubleshooting guide that included my problem, and the simple, command line solution.

One thing troubled me. The solution that lovinglinux provides involves adding the line "GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1" to a configuration file, and I have a knee-jerk suspicious reaction whenever I see WINDOWS. Happily, Dax at Dax's Blog (http://blogs.gurulabs.com/dax/2009/10/what-gdk-native.html) came through with a post titled "What GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1 means". Thanks Dax, my mind is set at ease.

And, now, for your viewing pleasure, is a screen capture of Oren Lavie's Her Morning Elegance, taken while the video was conveniently paused.

Inkscape Graphs with Backgrounds

A simple step forward: putting a bitmap illustration behind a graph in Inkscape. I started with a graph that I had already built. Then I opened the Layers menu and added a new layer, which I then placed at the bottom of my layer stack. With that layer active, I imported my jackelope png file that I had taken with my webcam yesterday, and set the opacity to around 45% to gray the picture out. Then came a brief period of resizing the jackelope bitmap using Inkscape's Transform -> Scale widget. And that was it, an illustrated graph.

That Was Easy: Webcam Edition

Was also pleased to find that Ubuntu accessed the webcam on my Dell Studio 1557 without a problem. I downloaded Cheese and was instantly able to take the following self-portrait, which saved itself politely into a folder named "Webcam" within my Pictures folder. Video was painless as well.