djehuti.com – The Armory

Amendment 4.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Amendment 5.

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Amendment 6.

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

I guess some people just don’t get it.

This is not the country in which I grew up and was taught that we were a free country, with principles, that stood for something.

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You can’t make this shit up: Richard Stallman thinks that smartphones are “Stalin’s Dream”. But:

“There’s a version of Android called Replicant that can run on the HTC Dream phone without proprietary software, except in the U.S. In the U.S., as of a few weeks ago there was still a problem in some dialing library, although it worked in Europe. By now, maybe it works. Maybe it doesn’t. I don’t know.”

And later:

Over the course of 38 minutes, our connection was lost five times, including just after Stallman’s comments about electronic eavesdropping and free software for phones. We tried to connect again several hours later but were unable to complete the interview via phone.

Note: I do not speak for my employer, who happens to make some pretty nice smartphones.

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If you were not a member of the A/V club in school, you can skip this post now.

So. Until yesterday, I had the following A/V setup. Our receiver was a Sony STR-DG910. It does video switching, and has 3xHDMI 1.2 inputs, plus some component and composite inputs.

Our monitor was a Westinghouse LVM-37w1 (RIP). We had the receiver connected to it by exactly one cable; an HDMI-DVI cable. (The Westinghouse has no HDMI inputs; only DVI+HDCP.) The only other cable connected to the LVM-37w1 was power. We liked it that way; it meant we didn’t have a lot of spaghetti on the wall (the monitor was wall-mounted).

The spaghetti was behind the A/V rack (really a coffee table), which had a PS3, a Wii, a TiVo HD XL, an Apple TV, the receiver, and a Pioneer DVD changer.

We had the PS3 and the TiVo connected to the receiver via HDMI. The AppleTV wouldn’t output HDMI to the receiver, for reasons unknown to me, so we had it connected via component. Ditto for the Pioneer. The Wii only supports composite or component. The receiver upconverts SD (or component HD) signals to HDMI.

Last night a storm ate the TV (monitor). (And yes, it was plugged into a hot-shit A/V power distribution center, which is apparently worth approximately the same as the contents of our guinea pig cage.) Today I bought a Vizio E470VA to replace it. It has 4xHDMI 1.3 inputs. I intended to connect it the same way as the previous one was: just hook an HDMI cable up from the receiver to the TV.

When I do this, it will not display a picture. It works fine if I connect the various devices (TiVo, PS3, etc.) directly to it. But it will not display a picture sent from the receiver.

So it looks like I’m going to have to connect each device directly to the TV, and switch the video there (instead of in the receiver), and either handle audio separately or connect still another cable from the TV back to the receiver to get the right audio signal to come up.

Instead of two cables (power and HDMI) running up my wall to the TV, I will now have at least 7: Power, TiVo, PS3, AppleTV, DVD, Wii, and audio. This is progress indeed.

Is there an explanation for this that won’t make me want to take a baseball bat to the collective heads of the HDMI standards forum?

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I don’t know that I need to add anything to this:

Becky found a shark on the beach.

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Each year, as we gather with family at Yuletide with a tree in the house and we exchange gifts and think about togetherness at year end, and about snow and cocoa and sleigh rides and jingle bells and about talking snowmen and and jolly old fat elves who whose bellies are like bowls full of jelly, and flying reindeer with glowing noses and Heat Misers and Yukon Cornelius and his Bouncing Bumbles and we sing traditional songs and we eat traditional meals and stuff that’s bad for us and we maybe have a drink or two, we don’t tend to think very much about a kid who wasn’t actually born in December, but we have a joyful time anyway, and we tend to think we’re just as entitled to our joyful season as Garrison Keillor is.

So I think maybe GK could maybe ease off a bit, and not push us to think too hard about who is co-opting what holiday, because I don’t really think that comes out very well for him. Mmkay?

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Seen in Google Reader:

Oopsie

I think better proofreading might be in order.

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I sold my D70 and upgraded to a D90 and got the Nikkor 18-55 f/2.8 lens. Here are a couple of the shots I took around the house to try it out. (Click the images for the full-size versions.)

A Bee

A Flower

It’ll do, I think.

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