I spent an hour or so writing RuFF-iTunes over the weekend.
It’s a bunch of AppleScript and Ruby that will help you import information from freedb.org, and fix the id3 information for your music. It only works on complete albums, requires Firefox, and only works on Macs.
If you are as nerdy as I am, maybe you’ll find these scripts useful.
Last time, I wrote about a workaround for funky mplayer output with Ubuntu Edgy on an Asus Pundit-R box. That workaround made mplayer work, but didn’t fix the fact that mythtv kept on crashing with a floating point exception on startup.
Looks like the problem is some weirdo interaction with the fglrx driver and qt.
The workaround is to manually set the DPI information. I did this in my xorg.conf file in the Monitor section. You need to add the following line:
DisplaySize xxx yyy
To calculate xxx, multiply the horizontal resolution of your display by 25.4 and then divide that answer by 96.
To calculate yyy, do the same with your vertical resolution.
For my 800×600 setup, I used the following line:
DisplaySize 211 158
Restart X and then rerun xdpyinfo | grep resolution to verify that you successfully changed the DPI setting. I got mythtv working again using this.
Of course, Democracy player is still broken (sigh). Let’s hope that Feisty is better.
The CSM had an article a few days ago about using nuclear energy to prevent global warming. The article is focused on Europe, and it turns out that most people still are resistant to the idea of using nukes.
The first relevant quote is:
A survey of 1,000 people in each of the 27 EU member countries recently found only 37 percent of those interviewed favored nuclear power, while 55 percent said its risks outweighed the advantages.
While those questioned were less concerned than in the past about the safety of reactors, but were still worried about what to do with stockpiles of nuclear waste, says Ms. Blohm-Hieber.
It’s good to see that people are finally starting to recognize that using modern nuclear technology, such as pebble bed reactors is quite safe, and aren’t as susceptible to nuclear boogeyman scare tactics as they used to be. Simply put, a modern day Chernobyl can’t happen with a pebble bed reactor — technology has improved significantly in the past 30 years.
The second relevant quote is:
“Communication is bad,” said Mr. Clerici, a leader of the World Energy Council, at a Brussels conference on nuclear energy in Europe. “Final users of electricity are not using their brains but their emotions.”
And that is where I feel that I can offer something to the world. Since we’ve already agreed that nuclear power is safe, the only other concern is, what do we do with the waste? The answer is simple: rail guns, a weapon popularized in the archetypal 3D first person shooter game, Doom.
Since producing safe nuclear power isn’t exactly rocket science anymore, we have an abundance of rocket scientists with nothing to do. Obviously, the logical conclusion is to use them to figure out how to launch spent nuclear waste into the sun where it won’t bother anyone.
Here’s the idea: humanity builds a gigantic rail gun somewhere on the equator. (You build it on the equator to take full advantage of the earth’s rotational energy so that you don’t need to supply as much energy to launch stuff, see how thrifty I am?) When we produce nuclear waste, we ship it to the rail gun site, and then from there, we launch it into the sun.
Why rail guns? Because you can launch stuff into the sun from Earth, without having to first load dangerous nuclear waste onto pesky, failure-prone technology, like rockets, which then aim themselves into the sun. I don’t know about you, but I don’t trust NASA much these days. Have you seen the jokers they’re employing these days? Rail guns are conceptually and mechanically simple to build. The only moving part would be a disposable metal sled that would hold the waste material; every launch would consist of shooting the sled containing the waste into outer space.
The rocket scientists would come into play by figuring out how to build the gun and the trajectory and where we should aim it and stuff. However, if worse comes to worse, we don’t really need them, since our margin of error is pretty huge. I mean, we don’t have to get the nuclear waste to exactly hit the sun. Anywhere off our planet into the universe will do…
Bonus points since we could use this idea for our conventional waste, and stop creating landfills or dumping our trash into the ocean. Additional bonus points since we could also use this technology to protect our planet from alien invasion, since we’d be firing nuclear projectiles at them (assuming we’re invaded by stupid aliens whose flight paths will exactly coincide with the exit trajectory of our waste).
We use 28% of all our energy for transportation and of that 28%, about half of it comes from oil. Clearly not sustainable.
We don’t need to roll out an entirely new infrastructure to solve this energy problem. I’m sure you’ve heard lots and lots about the up and coming hydrogen economy. Poppycock. Do you know how much money we’ll need to spend to roll out hydrogen cars and make sure that hydrogen gas stations are available on every corner? I sure don’t, and I’m sure no one else does either. Probably “a lot”. And besides, that only fixes the transportation problem — we still need a way to power and heat our houses and the internets.
Instead, we just use our existing electrical grid. The major change would be developing good battery powered cars, but that technology exists today. No need to dream up crazy car engines that run off of water or whatever.
I can only think of two possible drawbacks to my plan. First, much like peak oil, there’s probably a peak uranium or peak plutonium point in our future. However, my firm belief is that point is far enough into the future that by the time that it’ll be a problem, we’ll have colonized other planets or maybe we’ll be like Ray Kurzweil and just evolve into pure energy.
The other problem is al Qaeda. You just know they’re going to raise a big stink since we won’t be using any of their oil anymore. Maybe they’ll all get some sort of weird post-partum depression once western civilization unilaterally disengages and says, “enjoy your crappy culture, we’re outta here, kthxbai!” and then they’ll all just start committing non-harmful-to-third-parties-suicide rather than the more annoying type of suicide they’re presently engaged in. If they try and attack the rail gun site to get the waste for their own dirty bombs, a combination of Navy SEALs, strategically positioned lasers, and prototype killer robots will quickly dispatch them.
It turns out that most of the uranium mined in the world comes from Canada, Australia, and Kazakhstan, in that order. Now considering the other exports those countries are known for consist of poutine, koala bears, and Borat, I don’t think we have anything to worry about. What could be more friendly than Borat eating a plate of poutine while 20 or 30 koala bears are clinging to him? Niiiiiice!
So there you have it. My plan for solving the world’s energy crisis and terrorism in one shot, and it involves rail guns, laser beams, and robots. What more could you ask for? Take that, Guy Kawasaki!