Monthly Archives: May 2005

Minnesota court takes dim view of encryption

Sigh. Things like this really depress me. Minnesota court takes dim view of encryption | CNET News.com

A Minnesota appeals court has ruled that the presence of encryption software on a computer may be viewed as evidence of criminal intent.

From the PGP FAQ:

Who uses PGP?
People who value privacy use PGP. Politicians running election campaigns, taxpayers storing IRS records, therapists protecting clients’ files, entrepreneurs guarding trade secrets, journalists protecting their sources, and people seeking romance are a few of the law abiding citizens who use PGP to keep their computer files and their e-mail confidential.

Businesses also use PGP. Suppose you’re a corporate manager and you need to e-mail an employee about his job performance. You may be required by law to keep this e-mail confidential. Suppose you’re a saleswoman, and you must communicate over public computer networks with a branch office about your customer list. You may be compelled by your company and the law to keep this list confidential. These are a few reasons why businesses use encryption to protect their customers, their employees, and themselves.

PGP also helps secure financial transactions. For example, the Electronic Frontier Foundation uses PGP to encrypt members’ charge account numbers, so that members can pay dues via e-mail.

Whether this individual is guilty or not, this seems incredibly ill-conceived.

Systm

Another fun link from the make blog: Systm, a video show produced by a couple of young geeks. In their first episode, they build a warspying setup into a modified cashbox and go in search of wireless video cameras. Despite the socially marginal justification, it’s pretty well done and worth a few minutes of bittorrent downloading.

Remote Control of the Nikon 4500?

Hey folks, I’ve passed some of my helpful technical tidbits on to you, it is time that some of you work for me. 🙂

I have a Nikon Coolpix 4500 that I want to control from, well, some bit of hardware that I have lying around. Ideally that would be Linux/FreeBSD/some Unix, but Windows would be okay too. I’ve tried using cPix, but while I have got it to connect via the serial cable, it seems very slow to initialize, and the instant I do anything meaningful, it seems to hang the camera badly enough to require pulling the battery to reset it.

I basically want to be able to control all the common controls on the camera to do some time lapse and automated capture. Source code and/or scripting would be a big plus.

Anyone?

Game Review: Katamari Damacy

I was in Fry’s last weekend, and was just browsing the cheap video game aisle’s with my wife, when I noticed that the quirky Japanese title Katamari Damacy was only $19.99. I think it was Tom who first told me about this rather odd little game, and when I explained what it was to my wife, she shocked me by tossing it into the basket along with all the other crap we were buying.

There is no mistaking this game is a Japanese import. It has a very quirky style, with very odd English titles which undoubtably are a bad translation from some equally quirky Japanese. The backdrop: the King of the Cosmos has destroyed all the stars, and they need replacing. You are the Prince, a strange little green guy who gets to push around a magnetic ball called the Katamari. When the Katamari rolls up against a small object, it will stick to it, and the ball gets bigger. The bigger the ball gets, the more stuff will stick to it. At first, you can only pick up tacks and dice. As the game progresses you can pick up dogs, humans, boulders, giant octopuses and supertankers. Upon completing each level, the Katamari is converted into stars.

It is very quirky.

And fun. The graphics are fairly simple, but incredibly varied. There are all sorts of things going on in the house, town and city in which you work. The sheer variety is very compelling. It reminds me vaguely of the experience I had when I played Zelda: Ocarina of Time for the first time: the town was the first town in a game that felt like people lived there. Similarly, there are all sorts of things going on in this town: dogs barking, elephants, schools, bears, sumo wrestlers, cranes, and a billion other objects. It’s really pretty staggering. And fun.

Did I mention it was fun?

If you are looking for a cute game, with unusually innovative game play, simple, non-violent, try checking out Katamari Damacy.

Fun with a digital camera, Gimp, and an action figure

Starcraft GruntI’ve got a lot of toys in my office. My friend Jeff and I used to play Starcraft online quite a bit, back when both of us were single guys living the high life. During that time I had just begun dating my wife, and so I have a number of toys that our son bought for me, including this cool Starcraft infantry guy. The action
figure is very cool and poseable. For whatever bored reason, I snapped a couple of quick shots, dragged them into gimp, removed the background, tweaked the color, improved the sharpness and converted it to an 8-bit png image. I think it looks pretty damned cool for 3 minutes of work.

I wonder if someone could do a complete comic strip using similar techniques. Beats drawing, at least the way I do it. 🙂

Experimental IRC on brainwagon

For grins I’ve set up a simple IRC daemon on brainwagon.org. Go ahead and try it out if you like, my nickname is likely to be markv and I’ll hang out in the channel named #brainwagon. If you don’t have an IRC client, but do have a Java enabled browser, you could try this Java applet and it should autoconnect you.

I don’t know why I set this up, but there it is.

Video Encoding Experiments

I did some quick experiments to check the compatibility of video files that I converted and my new Philips DVP 642 DVD player. I wanted to check and see if ffmpeg would generate files which were compatible and at which bitrates and resolutions.

The long and the short of it: everything sensible I tried worked.

Details:

I downloaded a Superman cartoon from archive.org. The mpeg was 506 seconds long, and was a 397 megabyte MPEG2 file. I first tried converting it to a QCIF sized image with very modest bitmap rate using the following command:

ffmpeg -i billion_dollar_limited.mpeg -f avi -vcodec mpeg4 -acodec mp3 -b 200 -ab 56 -s qcif billion1.avi

And then a more high quality one, at full frame sized…

ffmpeg -i billion_dollar_limited.mpeg -f avi -vcodec mpeg4 -acodec mp3 -b 1000 -ab 128 billion2.avi

and then finally a two-pass conversion at the same bitrate:

ffmpeg -i billion_dollar_limited.mpeg -f avi -vcodec mpeg4 -acodec mp3 -b 1000 -ab 128 -pass 1 billion3.avi
ffmpeg -i billion_dollar_limited.mpeg -f avi -vcodec mpeg4 -acodec mp3 -b 1000 -ab 128 -pass 2 billion3.avi

I burned them onto a CD-R blank, and they all worked, with the variation in quality that you might expect. The two-pass version was pretty darned nice. Fun stuff.