(formerly)tangentmind.org

Nice.

This is nice too.

Edit(09-01-05): fixed link

So, my birthday has come and gone and now I'm 21 and can buy alcohol, hand guns, and rent vehicles to my hearts content. If there's anything else I can do now, and couldn't do before, let me know.

Here's the round up on birthday presents:
1.Money!: Thank you Grandma Chlorine, Leslie, Rachel*, and especially my Grandpa Art Martin.
2.A cell phone! from the parents. It was my dad's old one but it's still pretty good. I figured out how to copy all the content I want from the computer to the phone. I have one of Paul's midis set as a ring tone and a Dave Brubeck mp3 and some games and stuff. Ask me me for the number, if you know me and think I'll give it to you.
3. A nice air filter! from my Brother, his wife and co. It's a hepa filter with some ion stuff. It's right next to my bed.
4. A new computer! from my parents. Well, sort of a new computer. It's a barebones set up, but I can just put the video card I have now in it. It's still relatively fast. Also, my dad took the money my sister gave me to pay for the 160 gig hard drive.
5. A belt? Well....leslie gave me money for a belt but I haven't bought one yet.

I think that's it. If I forgot something, let me know.

I don't have a Sony Ericsson phone, but for those of you who do, there is some neat open source software at http://fma.sourceforge.net/index2.htm. If you have bluetooth or infrared you can use it to control winamp or power point...and probably some other things. Neat, eh?

Edit: I edited and moved this post to my birth date, just because I can.

It is true. As mentioned in my last post, I will be 21. I can drink, rent vehicles, buy hand guns. Probably some othet stuff too, like distill alcohol(uh...for fuel, not drinking...ok, maybe a sip.)

So, what do I want for my birthday? hmmm....
Here is a short list of things I can think of at the moment:

Sennheiser HD201 headphones
Or maybe some
Grado sr60s

The #1,3,4,5,7,9,16 $1 cartoon craze dvds

A new computer(AMD64,high powered NVidia, 1 gig memory preferred)
A midi cable with one midi(not usb) plug and two midi plugs for midi in and out.

Numerous games:
Advent Rising(pc)
Doom3(pc)
Second Sight(pc)
Total Annihilation
Lugaru
Edit(08-20)
Beyond Good and Evil(pc or gamecube)
Grand Theft Auto San Andreas(pc)
Metroid Prime 2(gamecube)

A nintendo DS(edit: Aug 23 - Now $20 less!)
A laptop(nvidia graphics chip preferred)

Money is always good too.


Other stuff
Dead Smokers are good for society says phillip morris
The Pill Brothers?

Sensitive teeth are caused by the wearing away of tooth enamel. Dentists say this is caused by things like acidic food, chewing ice, brushing too hard, and baking soda. While the former may be right, the baking soda part is incredibly wrong. It's possible that some baking soda toothpastes can cause this, but baking soda itself is relatively harmless. Whitening toothpastes are a different story however.

There is something called an "RDA" or Relative Dentin Abrasivity. This is an important number and I think the fact that it's not commonly advertised on packaging is just another example of industry misleading it's consumers. Toothpastes with a higher RDA are usually better at cleaning gunk and stains off the teeth and whitening the teeth, while they are also good at cleaning off the enamel. Lower RDA toothpaste can be just as good at cleaning the teeth, but maybe not as good at taking off any stains.

However, the irony of it is, whitening your teeth can't even help if you don't have any tooth enamel because the second layer of your teeth is dentin, which is naturally not white and virtually impossible to whiten. For more info on that, check here.

For a list of the RDA of some common toothpastes check here. However, the RDA of a toothpaste can be hard to get ahold of, especially with all the different varieties. The RDA of a gel or paste or a special variety or taste of toothpaste can be different than the normal. Different sources may show different RDA values for the same toothpaste as well(for example). Which one is right? Who knows? I think arm and hammer publishes the RDA of most, if not all of their toothpaste so those can be trusted. They are also some of the lowest. Baking soda itself has an RDA of 7. Only 3 above plain water. If you check both links the difference in the RDA of AIM toothpaste is enormous and I think that might be a difference in gel and paste. I'm guessing paste would be the lower one but one or both of them could just be plain wrong.
The rda value is especially important for someone who uses an electric toothbrush.

Also, make sure you get soft toothbrushes. If they fray, you're brushing too hard.
Carbonate beverages, fruit, fruit juice, lemonade, and sports drinks are some of the harshest foods. The sugar content doesn't help either. So, if you want healthy teeth drink water, use low RDA toothpaste, a soft toothbrush, and don't brush too hard.

http://www.realbeer.com/news/articles/news-002656.php

So wrong.

Speaking of beer, I will be able to drink it because my birthday is in a week.

It doesn't have any alcohol though, as you will read. However, there are some very good uses for alcohol. How about running your car on it? There was a book published in 1980 that explained how to convert your car to run on it. That can be found, free, in it's entirety here
Speaking of fuel. Fueleconomy.gov is a neat web site and it seems to get better every time I check. Now it has "Your MPG". "We've created 'Your MPG' to help you calculate and track your fuel economy and compare it with EPA test ratings. You can also share your MPG with other users. Once enough users share their MPG, you will be able to compare your MPG to others with the same vehicle." I encourage everyone to sign up.

I have placed a link to the archive of my old website before it went down. The web space that it's archived on has tons of stupid banners, though.

The anniversay of my last post to that sight will be the 21st. I think that's next Monday.

Also, my birthday will be the 26th.

http://tangentmind.250free.com/ is the link to it. It's over on the right though.

I'm not sure if the liberals of today are really liberals. However, the republicans of today are not really Republicans. They're not really christians either. So, if any of you reading this are voting for them on the premise that they are eithe Republicans or Christians, you might want to rethink your vote.

This link is for Leslie.

I have made my decision. This soundfont is the one I will use. It's not an sc55, but it sounds good, it's not too big(about 34 mb...not the target <32 that I would prefer for use in my SBLive but it's not too bad). The site is functional too so it's easy to get ahold of. My only complaint is that the archive is an EXE, but that's not a problem if you're in windows.

I don't know if none soundblaster users can use soundfonts. I think they can in Linux but I have no idea about windows.

http://otakuworld.com/data/voles/movies/aoki.mov < Aoki pizza commercial(Japanese) by the same guy who did Ren and Stimpy

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/Introduction_to_RSS-tut67.html

Here is an introduction to RSS. It should be the same for ATOM feeds.

Bleepingcomputer.com has a lot of good tutorials. You should check them out.

So, I set up this blog to have an atom feed when I made it but I didn't know I had to manually make a link for it. I've done that now.

For those of you unfamiliar with atom, it's an online news syndication format like RSS. Not familiar with RSS? It works like this: A site with news or a blog sets up the site feed. Then, every time there is news, the feed updates with the additions. If you are subscribed to that feed you can see that there is news and read it. That way, you never have to manually check on websites again because all the updates are right there in you feedreader(also called news aggregator).
Need a feedreader? Your e-mail program might already do it. Thunderbird does, anyway. You can get a Firefox extension that does it here and there is an open source stand alone program aptly called Feedreader.

Many sites have rss and atom feeds and it is very convenient to be able to know when there is news without having to check all the time. It also saves a lot of time and hassle for websites that update spiradically or hardly ever update.

I used to write stuff. This is a short article I wrote in flash back form for class:

Ouch
All I remembered was smashing into the concrete walkway, almost hitting my face against the concrete; my first thought was, “My bones better not have broken.” While I was sitting in my room, I heard my friend ride his bike onto my front lawn. Hoping to surprise him, I bolted out the back door of my house. The hour was late, and my lawn was thoroughly blanketed in darkness. Knowing where everything is, I flew around obstructions, jumped over low objects, and dodged sharp corners. I rounded the front porch and began to yell like a madman to frighten my friend. I jumped... I had forgotten about my friend's bicycle.

Thinking about getting an mp3 player? Well, there's some cheap ones here.

The refurbed iOPS plays ogg, I noticed.

This is a good article on keeping your windows machine safe on the internet. Programs in the Aurora network can install through activex controls on an unprotected Internet Explorer without your knowledge. You don't even have to click "ok".

That article is on http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/ which has quite a few good tutorials and a nice community forum. It's mostly for windows users but there's a few things for macosx or linux.

Did I mention that aurora is nasty? Aurora is malicious software that will install on a person's computer without them knowing it. It is made by ABI Network/a better internet/Direct Revenue. There are also many other websites and products inside the collective, but I'm not sure if they are all owned by the same company or are just partners. abetterinternet.com claims they have the "best free downloads" and "we have given millions of people access to great software in exchange for advertising." What they of course mean by that is that they let people download free software, but don't tell people that it's going to autamtically download and install all sorts of monitoring and hijacking and regenerating software. They have this large collective of adware and spyware programs and websites.

Worse than that, they have a lot of programs in the collective like winantivirus, popupguard, adwatcher(some info here) which basically ads it's own viruses to your computer and other pop up and anti virus software which does the opposite of what it's supposed to do. The "removal tool" for the aurora software, as well as other malicious software, removes the older maliciuos software and then ads newer software as well as forcing you to give them your e-mail.

Don't believe me? Read http://www.webhelper4u.com/tnewswritigs/mypctuneupmain.html

That website only tells a small fraction of the story though.

Also, the websites claim things like " Just as popular TV shows and magazines are made possible through advertising revenue, many of the world's leading content and application developers are able to offer their products free to consumers only because of the advertising supplied by Direct Revenue.

The free search, content and software offerings that we support are enjoyed by some 20 million Internet users all over the world.

Direct Revenue never collects identity-specific information. In fact, we favor industry regulations designed to protect privacy, we're a TRUSTe member in good standing, and we support HR 2929, the best known of the consumer protection measures now pending before Congress.

Direct Revenue also makes it easy to remove our ad targeting applications at any time, either through the Add/Remove function found on all PC's, or by using MyPCTuneup. And our live customer support service - the first in the industry - is available in case you need assistance."

Which is mostly a lie. If they're a member of the TRUSTe then I don't trust TRUSTe.

A lot of the software that harbors this evil filth are sitting on sites like download.com too.

The world isn't a safe place with evil people like this around. They probably use the software they put on people's computers to make a distributed super computer that they're using to plot to kill the jew or blacks or asians or babies or puppies or something. Evil bastards.

If you ever see a popup that says something about removing popups or tuning your pc or cleaning your pc or removing antiviruses or adware or spyware or anything like that it's a good indication that it's not software you should get. If it says "your not safe", that means you're not safe because you just received their ad and they're out to get you.

You can avoid all this of course, by using a Macintosh or Linux. Ubuntu is a pretty good all purpose linux distro. With linspire and clicknrun you might not ever have to touch the console(unless of course you want software that's not in the clicknrun warehouse). If you insist on using windows follow the instructions here and you might be able to sleep better at night.

Sound Font from Taiwan with love.

What?: Ok, so I figured out how to get 5.1 sound with alsa working. I just needed an asound file(I used .asoundrc) in my home directory. I'm still not totally sure it's working correctly...with dolby digital and I'm still incredibly confused about the mixer settings and I'm not sure any of my movie players are playing the dvd files right, but I'm much better off than I was, and being in Linux, I'm not infected with aurora, which is about the nastiest malware/adware/spyware ever. It's pure evil, because it doesn't just load it's own little annoying stuff it downloads and loads thousands of others, and the only software designed to remove it is made by the company that makes aurora. Words do not describe it's evil.

Back to ALSA. I'm curently working on getting midi to work. It was pretty easy because I found a howto thread for Hoary Hedgehog in the Ubuntu forums and all I needed to do was install a program, load some modules and install a sound font. I'm working on the sound font part right now because I was trying to find one that I liked best. The one above seems like a good one. I want to set up midi for use with scummvm and a lot of scummvm games were made using roland's midi instruments, specifically the sc55. This sound font is supposed to replicate those reasonably well and it's free. It can be found at hammersound.net but the servers that host the file seems to be a little overwhelmed so I found an alternate location and posted it here.

My sound seems to be getting some odd annoying crackley noises and I'm not sure why. It might have somethign to do with my sound blaster being corrupted or something. I dunno. Hopefully it will stop if I fiddle with the mixer controls. Oh well.

Edit: Well hell. Hours later and I still haven't gotten midi set up the way I want. All the good ones I could download are unpackable on linux(I should probably just boot into windows or install wine). Most of the good ones I can't download. I got one good one but it's so huge that I can't play music after it's loaded. Weird, I know. The other small one I got sounds very strange. I'm going to try this one. This time from tokyo with love.

More love from Russia This last link has the chaos sound drivers but I didn't link directly to them becaues it has some other neat stuff too and some info that's in english.

I think I'm going to use the Mega Sound Bank for a while.