eBooks.

I never was a huge fan of eBooks. I read them now, yes, but to be honest there’s just something about having a real, physical tome of writing in front of you.

But my issue with eBooks is pretty small, really. I like them as far as portability (one screen vs. 500 individual books or whatever) and they have some fun features that are hard to replicate in paper books (searching, indexing, etc).

My main issue with eBooks is similar to one I have with everything else digital. And it goes like this:
If you made something good, and you put it online, it will be pirated.

I’m tired of people whining about shit getting pirated. Deal with it. It’s gonna happen, you can’t stop it. Adapt or be killed off. I fucking hate whiners about your fucking ‘intellectual property’.

If you want some control over your shit, GPL it. The GPL works for the internet. Traditional copyright does not work in the internet. Too many loopholes, too many people.

Information wants to be free. By that I mean if something is ‘out there’- in the internet- you can’t stop it from circulating. You can make it difficult, but so what. It’ll be cracked eventually, and your million-dollar securities are always going to be cracked by a kid with time on his hands.

tl;dr stop fucking whining about your shit being pirated

Penelope Gets Surgery Part Deux

I got the screen! EXDEEDEEDEEDEEDEEDEEDEE

I just installed it (there were only two screws involved) to the bezeled portion, it looks all nice and neat now. That’s the hardest part done with.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. So, where I was when I ended the last post was those goddamn bezels.

In retrospect, I probably didn’t need to completely dismantle the body of the netbook to get to the screen. However, at the time, it was the best choice. So I first got all the screws out of the back of the ‘book (pretty easy, just basic screw setups) and remove this

and this

which are the HDD and RAM, respectively. You’ll see that the top of the case is actually off in these pictures, but in reality I took it off later.

Okay, I then turned the netbook back onto the ‘regular’ side and removed the keyboard via some tabs in the board, as well as those silver things on the top right and left of the body.

Then you pull out the keyboard and gently remove the ribbon cable from the mainboard.

then you can just remove the 5 screws on here (marked), unhook the wires (also marked), and pry apart the board from the casing with a flathead screwdriver.

Now here’s some gadget pr0n of the motherboard and blah.

From here you can do whatever with the motherboard.

See, this is where I’m dumb. I didn’t need to dissassemble the entire motherboard… but I did… and then I figured out the bezels thing… So I’m dumb. That’s the main point of this.

On the plus side, I can now take apart a laptop and be pretty sure on how it works. I did get the screen out, all you needed to do is get those bezels out and unscrew the screws, the rest is fairly self-explanatory, there’s one cable and some other blah that you don’t need to mess with.

So yeah, here’s Penny post-operation:

pretty snazzy, eh? The only issue I found is with the brightness, but it’s not a major issue because the brightness with the old screen was wonky too. No biggie. Pretty good for a first dissection.

Dante Goes on a Dumpster Adventure

I feel bad that this post will have no pictures. Just saying.

So, around this time (the beginning of summer) all of the college kids of U of O are moving out. You know what that means? It means they’re throwing away all their stuff.

Now, most people see that previous sentence and think “yeah, they are, so what?” and, I’ll admit, I was one of that group.

Until today.

My friend K-lub called me up this morning (well, I say morning, but really it was about 2, because I got up at about 1:30 WHAT CAN I SAY) and he casually informed me that he was going to raid some dumpsters.

I’ve always shied away from dumpster diving, not because of any “moral” or “ethical” reason, but rather because I have an aversion to gross things. BUT my thought processes were still kind of delirious on the possible findings of a FREE LAPTOP OMFG OMFG OMFG (spoiler: I didn’t find a free laptop)

So we hop on our man-powered all-terrain automatons (you may know them as ‘bikes’) and hauled ass towards the UO dorms, because, as you obviously know, we were somewhat late to the party. Most people hit up the dumpsters during finals week or even before, as K-lub told me. K-lub knows this sort of thing.

First we stopped by the Lorax, which is this big hippie dorm, where we saw our good buddy and camp counselor Max Smoot (he’s a bro fer sher) and then promptly started to ransack every dumpster we could find.

One of the first things I learned is that dumpsters aren’t actually that gross. I mean, yeah, there’s the occasional dumpster that’s full of like, old food or something, but most of them are just boxes of junk. And bags of food. But hey, at least they’re in BAGS.

So we went from dumpster to dumpster on our MPATAs, throwing the occasional goodie in my backpack or bike saddlebag, and honestly, it was pretty cool. You wouldn’t believe what some kids throw away. A lot of it was big furniture stuff, which was in perfect shape but too big/impractical for me to carry.

MAN I WISH I TOOK PICTURES. I mean, there was a fucking futon just out on the road. For free. A fucking legit futon, with like, varnish and shit. Seriously. I didn’t take it, but then again, I didn’t have a truck.

So we went badenturing for a good couple hours, and it was fun. And kind of addicting. You don’t look at dumpsters in the same way anymore.

Final haul-

* Three binders

* A notebook (empty)

* 5 ft of ethernet cable

* A clean hat

Okay, so it wasn’t THAT much. But still, for free? Pretty good deal. I did pass up some other stuff. Like the bottom half of a g4 PowerBook 17inch. It was missing quite a few peripherals, so it wasn’t really worth it.

According to some random bum-type guys we talked to, the best time to come and grab shit was earlier, because “You can grab TVs and Laptops and shit” just from the dumpsters.

In conclusion A+++ WOULD BUY AGAIN

Penelope Gets Surgery part 1.5

So, good news is I found a way to get those goddamn bezels off.

Bad news is I made a weird error with my camera reasoning.

See, I got my camera, and took a bunch of pics of the teardown (which I’ll post, but bear with me) but I forgot that I don’t have a cord for my camera (go me) and I normally obtain the pics from my camera’s SD card…

Which is naturally only accessible from my netbook…

Which I’m fixing.

:/

So unless I can get another cardreader between now and when I fix the screen (which will be soon) there won’t be pics. But there will be pics soon. When Penelope is stitched up.

Just an update.

Penelope Gets Surgery, and Dante Fails

So, I don’t know if everyone knows this, but I got a netbook a while back. It’s bright red and it’s an Acer Aspire One d250 (1.6ghz Atom, 1gb RAM, 160gb HDD) so I named it Penelope thanks to Hannah, who suggested it be called Penny, but I thought that was informal so DUH I named it Penelope.
Anyway, she’s served me well for a good three months or so. But yesterday night I dropped it.
On the screen.
I am sad.
So she looks like this when you turn her on (THATS WHAT SHE SAID LOLOLOL):

Please forgive the shitty quality, I only have a phone right now. I’ll be getting a camera once my sister decides to give it back to me.
I might mention that I don’t HAVE a replacement screen as of yet, but seeing this monstrosity is not good. I also have no dinero to buy a new screen, because I need a job. Or a fountain of money. Whichever comes first, really.
So I first decided to remove all these fuckers from the front of the screen. They hide screws, so I need to get to them.

In this particular pic, I’ve already taken out the screw. Eh.
Also, to update, the camera is now charging. Higher quality pics will come soon.
So now that I have all THOSE FUCKERS out, I’ll begin to crack apart the plastic. I’m using a teeny tiny flathead to go between the screen with this, so that we end up with this effect:

You can see my fingers prying apart the casing in this pic. I think you get the idea.
Aaaaaaaaaand now I’m stuck. The goddamn casing can’t open past these other fuckers right here:

and I have no idea how to take them out.
This is a fail post.

EDIT: Go to here for the rest of the story. And how I get those goddamn bezels off.

Mandatory Bloog Pasta

Ugh. So school is almost over, thank the gods. I figure that a FUN FILLED RECAP is in order.

CUE THE MUSIC, LARRY

So this is my school day.

Period 1. Chemistry.

Or as I like to call it, ‘Dante Yawns Too Much In The Goddamn Morning Jesus Fucking Christ’.

Yawning kind of pisses me off. I mean, you can’t really control it and all it does is make your eyes water. Which is really bad if you’re trying to learn chemistry at the same time. Really really really annoying, to be precise.

It’s also kind of like drugs, in that the more you do it the more you want to do it. Fuck yawning.

So yeah, that’s period 1. Also, we do chemistry and stuff.

Period 2. Drama.

I like this class, even if half of it is just dicking around. Drama is fun. My teacher is Patrick Avery, who is just a fountain of good knowledge. Case in point- ‘Teamwork is good for you. Like broccoli’.

Period 3. Spanish.

HOO BOY IS THIS A FUN CLASS.

It’s AP spanish, so the first 4/5 of the year was spent preparing for the AP test. For the rest of the year, we had this fun-filled schedule.

Days 1-5: Read a book.

Days 5-7: Salsa Dance.

Days 7-10: Watch a movie.

And then school got out. Honestly, I didn’t like this class. This isn’t the fault of the teacher, because I liked her for the most part, rather it was the subject matter.

Here’s an example. For the AP test, one portion of it involves talking into a recorder and responding to prompts. So every now and then in class, we got out these tape recorders and pretended to pretend to have a conversation.

Good times.

Period 4. Math.

Wow. I left this class like 15 minutes early every day. I never got marked absent. I don’t know why.

I think I’m developing invisibility.

LUNCH BREAK.

TUNE IN NEXT WEEK FOR MORE FUN FILLED ACTION ADVENTURES