we should be friends...

Yes. That we should.

Of course, I'd need to know who you were.

Ask me anything

The Internet: A quick Primer for Parents

The internet is a harmless place, full of wonder and opportunity for your children. Amongst its many alleys and corners, your own little bundle of joy can learn the majesties and beauty of our world.

Right?

WRONG.

Inspired by this saga, I feel that the internet should get a fair, non biased review by me (three time Internet Adventurer awardee, 2007-2009, experienced Tubes Specialist)

1. The internet is full of viruses and dirty communist hackers

Viruses are everywhere. Always keep a guard out for their expanse, as well as the ever-present pestilence of hackers, the perverted and twisted shepherds of the great virus herds.

In order to understand how to stop viruses, you must first know how viruses are created.

--In a cyberlab, the hacker grows a virus to completion, often relying on illegal softwares known as “warez” to accomplish this.

--As soon as the virus has reached maturity, he unleashes it on a web site. As soon as you visit the website, the viewer will be attacked by a virus.

Beware so-called “freeware” or “open-source”, these are key words for dirty communist virus scams.

Hackers often speak in “L33tsp34k” (pronounced “computer language”). Through this “l33tsp34k”, hackers pass along coded messages, often contained in rap music and forums.

In order to defend against hackers and viruses, it is important that you watch your child at all times while he/she is on the computer. At any point they could inadvertently (or advertently) unleash a virus on your home computer.

Sites to watch out for:

lifehacker.org (never ever visit this site ever)

google.com (this site is unsafe, please use yahoo or AOL search instead)

youtube.com (this site is full of hackers and viruses)

2. Persuade your children to use safe alternatives

Now that we know the dangers of the internet, we need to know the ways to prevent harm to your computer or your child.

First, only use trusted websites. Always look over the websites that your children visit. If possible, block anything and everything that you have not scoured with your own eyes for dirty communist hackers and viruses.

Here are some examples of safe sites:

Facebook.com: This site has a really good watch on things. In fact, everything your child posts on Facebook is completely available for you to view, at any time, without even being logged in! Isn’t that wonderful?

AOL.com: For years, AOL has proven to be the safest and most user-friendly internet website on the whole internet. There is no reason to ever use another, ever, for really any reason.

StickyDrama.com: Truly a wonderful site. Just teens talking to teens about teen issues. I’ve never personally seen the site but my 11 year old daughter swears that it is fantastic, and since she swore on GOD, I knew she wasn’t lying.

3. Take control of their life

They’re your kids, not some random person’s children. It’s perfectly normal to take extreme measures to stop them from viewing the internet.

The internet is addictive, pestilence-ridden, and full of evil. Believe me, I’m a doctor.

If your computer has been compromised by a hacker or a virus, unplug the computer. This will trap the virus/hacker inside your computer. Then, taking pains to not open the computer, take it outside and smash it to bits.

This will cause the virus/hacker to become trapped in the dying computer, and eventually starve to death. Just to be safe, you should probably burn the computer.

-Dr. Robert Livingstone, Esq.

what's your view on dating?

Long and complicated. Okay. I'm down with dating, for the most part. I don't see an issue with it.

I think High School is a time to be stupid and do stupid things, and mainly to LEARN. I'm not seeing an issue with that. What bugs me is when people take dating too far, or insist on being in ridiculous relationships or something. At that point, they're stupid.

You're in HIGH SCHOOL ffs. You're not finding your goddamn soulmate. Just forget about the stupid formalities and do what you want to do. If that's dating, cool. Whatever rocks your trolley. If it's not, that's cool too.

Personally, I don't know if I could date someone for a long period of time. Granted, I'm really only saying that because I HAVEN'T in the past, and there's always a hope for a new experience I guess.

All I really care about is finding someone fun to hang out with, and if I deem it possible/probable, also- how do I put this- fucking them.

Ask me anything

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.