Month: May 2007

Do it yourself air conditioning zone controls

Hack-a-day recently had a link to a project for doing your own zoning and computerizing your air conditioning system.

servo-zone-damper-had.jpgI’ve been planning to computerize my A/C once I buy a house. I stumbled across this simple vent mod. A $10 servo was added and controlled with some off the shelf computer servo controllers. Personally, I have visions of doing this along with several 1-wire temperature sensors. Check out the DIY zoning project for more ideas along these lines.


I’d love to have the time, energy, and drive to do something like this. I’m a huge computer geek, which contributes to my desire to computerize and/or automate everything, but automated or computer controlled home climate conditioning would just be so damn handy. (via Hack-a-Day)

[tags]Do it yourself home climate zone controls[/tags]

More signs of PATRIOT act abuse

It seems like I’m the only one who cares about this, but I keep posting it to remind people how much our government has been abusing unnecessary powers granted by a bad law in response the the September 11th attack. As the subject title indicates, I’m talking about PATRIOT act abuse here. In particular, here’s the details on a news program which reviews some specific instances of illegal monitoring, data mining, and spying on American citizens.

“So many people in America think this does not affect them. They’ve been convinced that these programs are only targeted at suspected terrorists. … I think that’s wrong. … Our programs are not perfect, and it is inevitable that totally innocent Americans are going to be affected by these programs,” former CIA senior attorney Suzanne Spaulding tells FRONTLINE correspondent Hedrick Smith in Spying on the Home Front, airing Tuesday, May 15, 2007, at 9 P.M. ET on PBS (check local listings) and available for viewing after broadcast at www.pbs.org/frontline .

. . .

President Bush described his anti-terrorist measures as narrow and targeted, but a FRONTLINE investigation has found that the National Security Agency (NSA) has engaged in wiretapping and sifting Internet communications of millions of Americans: The FBI conducted a data sweep on 250,000 Las Vegas vacationers, and along with more than 50 other agencies, they are mining commercial-sector data banks to an unprecedented degree, and they have even been assigning suspicion ratings to anyone who travels across a U.S. border.

. . .

Although the president told the nation that his NSA eavesdropping program was limited to known Al Qaeda agents or supporters abroad making calls into the U.S., comments of other administration officials and intelligence veterans indicate that the NSA cast its net far more widely. AT&T technician Mark Klein inadvertently discovered that the whole flow of Internet traffic in several AT&T operations centers was being regularly diverted to the NSA, a charge indirectly substantiated by John Yoo, the Justice Department lawyer who wrote the official legal memos legitimizing the president’s warrantless wiretapping program. Yoo told FRONTLINE: “The government needs to have access to international communications so that it can try to find communications that are coming into the country where Al Qaeda’s trying to send messages to cell members in the country. In order to do that, it does have to have access to communication networks.”

Spying on the Home Front also looks at a massive FBI data sweep in December 2003. On a tip that Al Qaeda “might have an interest in Las Vegas” around New Year’s 2004, the FBI demanded records from all hotels, airlines, rental car agencies, casinos and other businesses on every person who visited Las Vegas in the run-up to the holiday. Stephen Sprouse and Kristin Douglas of Kansas City, Missouri, object to being caught in the FBI dragnet in Las Vegas just because they happened to get married there at the wrong moment. Says Douglas, “I’m sure that the government does a lot of things that I don’t know about, and I’ve always been OK with that–until I found out that I was included.”

And there is a lot more to the article. I will not be home to watch or record the program (and my wife has filled the DVR with Star Trek episodes…), but thanks to the great wonder that is the Internet, I’ll be downloading it and watching it later. (via Tingilinde)

[tags]Reviewing more PATRIOT act abuse, Looking inside government agency’s abuses of the PATRIOT act[/tags]

The truth of Truthiness

I’ve been using the term Truthiness for years now. I’m not sure where I picked up the term, but I’ve always used it as a word indicating something full of absolute truths. It turns out that a couple of years back, Stephen Colbert started using the word in a different context. Since Colbert has a few more viewers than I have readers, I suppose I’ll have to switch over to his meaning of Truthiness and come up with a new word for my now out of date meaning of Truthiness.

“Truthiness is what you want the facts to be, as opposed to what the facts are. What feels like the right answer as opposed to what reality will support.” – Stephen Colbert

So Colbert wins this round.

[tags]Colbert steals Truthiness from me, The real meaning of Truthiness[/tags]

Recording industry presses Congress to raise royalty rates for standard radio

Very recently, I wrote about the announced spike in royalty rates for Internet-based radio stations. After Congress stepped in to delay or even prevent this, the Recording Industry came back with a solution that is clearly designed only to insure evenness in application of the proposed new royalty rates.

As a means of eliminating the appearance of disparity between the performance royalties about to be charged to US Internet streaming music providers such as AOL Radio and Pandora, and what terrestrial broadcasters pay for the same privilege – which, for that category, is currently zero – lobbyists representing the recording industry, according to Billboard magazine, are pressuring Congress to resolve this problem by extending essentially the same sharply higher performance royalty rates imposed on Internet radio to all broadcasters.

If such a measure were to become law, an industry which once had the problem of overcoming the appearance of paying off radio broadcasters to increase the airplay for their songs — a practice known as “payola” — would begin charging broadcasters in all media for the privilege of having their songs played.

I can think of no more effective way to reduce your consumer audience, eliminate as many redistributors as possible, and alienate the vast majority of your customer base than to not only overcharge the providers for the online audience but to also raise your rates to existing terrestrial providers by two orders of magnitude. It appears that Recording Industry executives really are trying to eliminate their industry and make themselves irrelevant even more quickly than the Internet is already doing.

[tags]Recording Industry presses Congress to raise terrestrial broadcast royalty rates 100 fold[/tags]

More humor from cow-orkers

Sometimes, I like it when my cow-orkers send me jokes. True, most of the time, they are inane (the jokes, not the cow-orkers – they are almost always inane). However, one particular cow-orker (let’s call him J.W.) almost always shares good stuff. This is one of his.

Two boys in Boston were playing baseball when one of them was attacked by a vicious Rottweiler. The dog had already locked his jaws on the Boy’s legs.

Thinking quickly, the other boy ripped a board off of a nearby fence, wedged it into the dog’s collar and twisted it, breaking the dog’s neck.

A newspaper reporter from the Boston Globe witnessed the incident and rushed over to interview the boy. The reporter began entering data into his laptop, beginning with the headline, “Brave Boston Red Sox Fan Saves Friend From Jaws Of Vicious Animal.”

“But I’m not a Boston Red Sox fan,&rdquot; the little hero interjected.

“Sorry” replied the reporter. “But since we’re in Boston, I just assumed you were.”

Hitting the delete key, the reporter began again, “John Kerry Fan Rescues Friend From Horrific Dog Attack.”

“But I’m not a John Kerry fan either,” the boy protested.

The reporter replied, “I assumed everybody in this state was either for The Red Sox, John Kerry, or Ted Kennedy. What team or person do you Like?”

“Well, I’m a Texas Ranger fan, and I really like President Bush,” the Boy answered.

Hitting the delete key, the reporter began yet again: “Arrogant Little Republican Bastard Kills Beloved Family Pet.”

So true, the twist people put on those who disagree with them.

[tags]Arrogant republican kills, Political commentary humor[/tags]