2084

Yes, that's a cheesy title for a blog post, but I'm gonna go with it.

Like generations of parents before me, I find that I worry about the world that my children will live in as adults. I know a lot of people who worry about global warming, or nuclear war, or antibiotic-resistant flu. But I'm worried about the government.

I should clarify that I and my family are all legal residents of the United States of America. Which is, as countries go, a pretty good one. We live better than 99.9% of all humans who've ever lived: hot showers, meat 7 days a week if we want it, air conditioning - we daily take for granted thousands of comforts that simply weren't available to even the most powerful of 18th century kings. Even today, living in the USA, we have stuff that you'd need to be stinking rich to have in many parts of the world (cars, computers, plentiful food, etc). An old friend of mine from high school and college used to proclaim "I already won the lottery: I'm a white American male!" It may not be politically correct, but there's a fair amount of truth to that.

But I worry about my country, and the way things appear to be moving. A funny thing about the way laws are made in this country: someone proposes a law, it gets voted on, and it either becomes law or not. That's grossly simplified, I know, but what I see happening is that "bad" laws -- laws that undermine our basic civil liberties, laws that unfairly benefit special interests, laws that take away our privacy -- more and more of these things are becoming law. It's just a consequence of how The System works: a bad law is proposed by someone. With luck it gets voted down. But then the same law or a varient is proposed again. And again. And again. Until it finally passes. It's considered a truism in American politics that if you have enough money and time, you can get a law made.

And the kinds of laws that are being made are just plain scary. Here's a Wall Street Journal article on the growing number of federal criminal laws. What's especially disturbing is that many of these laws don't require the government to prove criminal intent:

Last September, retired race-car champion Bobby Unser told a congressional hearing about his 1996 misdemeanor conviction for accidentally driving a snowmobile onto protected federal land, violating the Wilderness Act, while lost in a snowstorm. Though the judge gave him only a $75 fine, the 77-year-old racing legend got a criminal record.
...
Eddie Leroy Anderson of Craigmont, Idaho, is a retired logger, a former science teacher and now a federal criminal thanks to his arrowhead-collecting hobby.
...
In 2009, Mr. Anderson loaned his son some tools to dig for arrowheads near a favorite campground of theirs. Unfortunately, they were on federal land. Authorities "notified me to get a lawyer and a damn good one," Mr. Anderson recalls.
...
There is no evidence the Andersons intended to break the law, or even knew the law existed, according to court records and interviews. But the law, the Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979, doesn't require criminal intent and makes it a felony punishable by up to two years in prison to attempt to take artifacts off federal land without a permit.

And so we are effectively caught in an ever-tightening skein of bad -- sometimes downright insane -- laws that are progressively limiting or removing our basic liberties and civil rights. It's all done in the name of "anti-terrorism" or "save the children" or "the war against drugs" or whatever. So yeah, here's the part where I quote Benjamin Franklin: "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Sadly, I foresee a future America that is a lot more totalitarian than Communist Russia ever was. One that really does bear more than a passing resemblence to Orwell's 1984.

I can see the future, and it's grim. The time will come when:

• Use of cash will be illegal. All financial transactions will be electronic and recorded.
  
  
• Every citizen will have a National ID Card. You'll be required to produce it upon demand by any law enforcement officer or agency.
  
  
• A national database of everyone's DNA, fingerprints, and other biometric information will be online.
  
  
• All public areas will be under camera surveillance.
  
  
• All computers / internet usage is monitored and tied to one's National ID Card.
  
  
• There will be a publicly-accessible national criminal and arrest database containing information on everyone who has had any kind of brush with the law.
  
  
• National databases containing all medical and financial information on everyone will be online.
  
  
• All of the data and databases above will be accessible by any government agency without any requirement for a warrant. And this will (of course) be widely abused.
  
  
• All computers and encryption schemes must legally provide a government-accessible "back door".
  
  
• Criticism of politicians or their policies is criminal libel. Ie, the First Amendment is simply ignored.
  
  
• Possession of hand-guns by private citizens will be illegal.
  
  
• Everyone will technically be a criminal -- and thus subject to arrest and all that comes with it -- all the time.
  
  
• "One strike and you're out": all it takes is a single "incident" with authority and you lose your job, your medical insurance, your home, your money -- your life.
  
  

Like I said: grim. In short, it's an America where Order comes before Justice and Freedom.

Is it possible to live in such a state and be happy?

I hope I'm wrong. It's been said that American civil rights law has always been a "pendulum", slowly swinging left and right and back again. I hope so. But I'm not sure how we can avoid the seemingly inevitable accretion of bad laws that will occur over the years and the decades. Kids: if you're reading this sometime in the indefinite future, I want you to know that I'm doing what I can, writing to congress about bad laws etc. I don't want you to live in the future I envision -- and I sincerely hope you don't.

iPad Synthesizers: The Next Generation

As mentioned earlier, I obtained a Korg nanoKEY2 controller and (combined with the iPad Camera Kit USB converter) it's a blast. I confess I was more than a bit nervous about doing it -- going around an plugging random USB devices into an iPad seems like it might lead to heartbreak -- but it seems that almost any controller device that is CoreMIDI Compliant can plug into an iPad via USB. Note the "almost": here's a nice list of devices that are known to work -- or not work with the iPad.

Anyhow, I know I've said before that I wasn't too interested in software synthesizers that run on the iPad -- but this CoreMIDI stuff changes that. It means I can hook my iPad up to my DAW, hook a keyboard up to my iPad -- and then blissfully tickle away at the "ivories", switching between any number of different synthesizer apps.

Addictive Synth ($5.99US) -- A dynamic wavetable synthesizer with a ton of fun real-time control options.

Sunrizer Synth ($4.99US) -- A virtual analog synthesizer that sounds really good.

It's hard to put my finger on it exactly but these two apps seem representative of a new, 2nd generation of iOS synthesizer apps. They seem more solid, extremely responsive, and the sounds they generate are very rich and clean. Other things I've noticed are

• An emphasis on tricking out the arpeggiator -- I'm still trying to figure out all of the options, and
• Creation of new presets via "morphing", ie, pick a Mommy preset and a Daddy preset and then listen to see how Junior turned out. Repeat as necessary. (and here's a shout-out to Crystal Synth, which I think was one of the early apps to promote this (extremely useful) feature).

Long story short: Do you remember a couple of weeks ago when you and a friend had a late lunch at 2:30pm at McDonalds, and you somehow choked down a quarter-pounder with cheese and fries that had been congealing under the heat lamps since noon? And there was something wrong with the drink machine so it tasted "off"? And you gallantly picked up the check, which came to $11+? You, my friend, need to restore your faith in humanity and the American economy by spending $10.98US on these two apps and reassure yourself that yes, even in these trying economic conditions, you can still buy something Unbelievably Freakin' Cool for $11.

My New MyBook Live 3TB NAS Device / WD 2go

So I guess I'm kind've a nut about the MyBook Live. As reported earlier, I recently acquired another one, this one being 3TB, and I'm going to use it to back up my 2TB drive.

I kinda got off to a rough start with this new drive: without going into details, it gets hot. Real hot. Make sure you've got lots of free air-space around it.

I didn't realize it when I bought the device, but there are a couple of iOS / Android apps that will work with it: the WD Photo (a photo viewer that I don't have much use for) and WD 2go (which is pretty nifty). WD 2go allows you to access one or more of your MyBook Live devices from inside and outside of your local network. It's a little rusty: the interface could use some polish, I had problems with the PDF viewer, a few other minor things. But it's a good start and also it's free. Using WD 2go requires a firmware upgrade that wipes out the previous MioNet access method, so if you like MioNet (I never used it), it looks like you're stuck at the 1.05.07 firmware level forever. But I like WD 2go and I'm hoping WD will continue to improve it (and, for better or for worse, one of their people wrote that there might be a for-pay version with enhanced capabilities in the near future).

Anyhow -- WD 2go supports a fair number of filetypes: it will stream .MP3, .M4V, .MP4, .MOV, and it'll take a shot at displaying PDF, HTML, MS WORD, PPT, Apple Keynote, and just plain .TXT files. Oh, and the usual image formats. I wasn't crazy about the PDF support; maybe they'll integrate with GoodReader in a future release. The audio and video streaming worked flawlessly at home on my local network. When I tested at the local Tea Lounge, I could still stream MP3s but smooth video just wasn't happening. Natch, this is the kind of thing that depends a lot on one's home ISP connection, the wifi connection at the external location, general Internet topology, and just random luck in general.

I installed the firmware upgrade to both of my MyBook Lives, and doing so wiped out all of the changes I'd made to TwonkyServer. To some extent this is no great loss, since I've got the whole family set up with WD 2go and they can watch video on their iPads without Twonky. But whatever the WD people are using to stream video, it isn't the DLNA protocol, so we still need Twonky to stream to our XBOX 360 and onto the bigscreen teevee. So I'll have to make those mods again.

One (kind've annoying) thing I discovered about the MyBook Live (both versions) is that it continuously runs a little process called "miocrawler", which looks for photos and pre-reduces them in size for mobile device display. I've got less than no need for such a thing, so I (rather inelegantly) disabled it: ssh in and find the file 'miocrawlerd' and make the first two lines read

#!/bin/sh
exit 1

And then reboot the drive. Problem solved! (note that the process is different if you haven't upgraded to the 2.00.* version of firmware). (Also, note that miocrawler may be necessary if you want to use the WD Photo app -- I don't know if it's a requirement or not, but it's something to be aware of).

One other thing that comes with the 2.00.* firmware is an auto-backup feature that allows one to backup one MyBook Live to another. I looked at the process tree and yes, this is based on rsync as you might expect, but it has a nice control panel interface. Seems to work okay, although it's not especially fast -- it claims it will take 2+ days to backup my approx 1.2TB of data. It will also automatically keep the backup up-to-date, and I'll give that a try once I get an initial full backup.

All in all, I give it a pretty solid thumbs-up. I'll sleep somewhat better at night knowing that I've got a nice full backup of all of our audio/photo/video data. And did I mention that this 3TB NAS cost less than the 2TB NAS? How low can these prices go?

Christmas In July!

Numero Uno Son's birthday is in August, so in addition to finding gifts for him, I also took the time to snag a few "un-birthday presents" for his sister and his mom and (of course) his dad.

Since his birthday hasn't arrived yet, I can really only discuss the stuff that I'm getting, namely:

• Korg nanoKEY2 Slimline USB keyboard - a "small is beautiful" itty bitty controller for my music rig. I can grab this and my MacBook and some earbuds and head off to The Tea Lounge and get totally wired and make hours and hours of music that no-one will ever want to listen to.
• Logitech THX-Certified Speaker System Z623 - a not-so-portable music rig component. I don't really care about the "THX Certification" -- but the 200W bass cube should give me some of that wonderful "the mothership is hovering over the kitchen" deep bass experience I've been lacking.
• Western Digital MyBook Live 3TB NAS device - Yes, another one. Well, actually, this one's a bit bigger (3TB). But it'll be a nice backup for our current 2TB unit ("The Big Disk")(I guess we'll have to call this one "The Bigger Disk"). It'll be interesting to see how (more likely "if") two Twonky DLNA media servers work simultaneously on the same network.
  
  This is, BTW, part of my overall vast scheme that I call The Family Darknet. As the years go by, my family's information assets will continue to grow. The kids will leave home for school, and they'll each take a copy of everything with them. We'll set up some kind of system that automagically keeps everyone's copy up-to-date over an encrypted Internet channel, and over time devices will wear out and be replaced, but the data will live on. As other branches of the family become more technically sophisticated, they'll be invited in to participate. It'll be cool: a huge, highly redundant distributed data repository that will hold all manner of data about our family. An "inheritance", if you will, not of money but of information. At first it'll just be videos and audio and photos, but if it lasts 100 years? Who knows what kinds of goodies will be in there? It could be a genealogical dream. It could also have pragmatic benefits, as well -- in the same way that college fraternities will keep files of old exams and papers, it might be nice to have a family repository of wills, deeds, and other documents and contracts that we could benefit from.

Alas, it's important to pay for these goodies, so .. time to get back on my head!

A "Sandman Slim" movie?

Wikipedia says "The Dino De Laurentiis Company is currently developing Sandman Slim as a feature film." That's all I know, and I don't even know how current that tidbit is. But I'd love to see this happen. I wanna see what a na'at looks like.

Also, the third Sandman Slim novel Aloha From Hell is due on 18 October 2011.

Google+

So Google+ is here at last! Seems to me it's their 4th generation social networking platform (the others being Orkut, Wave, and Buzz), and containing a little bit of each, plus also some pretty strong responses to Facebook.

g+ is currently undergoing some growing pains. What I'm mostly noticing now is that there are tons of people from Second Life or other MMOs who have established identities that have already crept out into the real world in many ways, and (unsurprisingly) the people behind these identities don't want to give them up. Not really a concern of mine, but I still have many many friends in SL who are very up-in-arms over this.

From my own personal and selfish viewpoint, g+ is something I've been waiting for: a simple scheme for sharing content with the rest of my family. g+ hits the target perfectly; all this other stuff about setting up "circles" for work and friends and etc, well ... I think the sad fact is that I'm simply not really a very social kinda guy. If I've got something I want to share with the world, I'll post it here on my blog. Otherwise, all I wanna do is tell the wife and kids that I just stuck the Back To The Future movies up on the /Shared Video/ drive.

It's surprising just how fast g+ has grown, though ... I'd imagine those guys over at Facebook are holding lots of meeting, trying to get a handle on things.

FWIW, I'm now gplus.to/craigbecker.

One last thing: the "Hangout" feature for video chat is pretty sweet. We were playing with it at work the other day, and if they can deliver multi-party video onto computers and mobile devices, it could really be a game-changer.

Science Fiction Movie Round-Up

I've seen a number of science fiction movies in the past month or so, and (amazingly) some of them have been quite good. And when it comes to SF movies, I'm really hard to please: there's a certain balance between "willing suspension of disbelief" and "good characters / plot / SFX / etc" that most movies can't manage. I mean, I even have serious issues with The Matrix, a movie that many people see as the epitome of SF film-dom (I almost walked out on that scene where *gag* Trinity's love brings Neo back to life). So if fate and Hollywood decide to hand me some material that even I like, I figure I owe it to the world to blog about it (no ego here! And, hopefully, no spoilers either):

Source Code - The worst thing about this movie is the title, which turned me off enough that I almost actively avoided seeing it. But luck was with me and I saw it and to my astonishment found that there is intelligent life in Hollywood. Or, at least, people in Hollywood who can write and film a science fiction movie that doesn't insult its viewers' intelligence. Since a lot of this movie's charm comes from trying to figure out WTF is going on, I won't / can't go into details, but a) I thought it was great and b) they managed to pull off an ending that didn't insult my 4+ decades of science fiction sensibilities. I mean, they really pulled the rabbit out of the hat. Did they drag Greg Egan in as a consultant? If this movie doesn't get at least a nomination for a Hugo award I'll be massively disappointed.

Limitless - Another intelligent SF movie -- is there something weird going on in Hollywood? -- this time about the ultimate nootropic drug. I enjoyed how the movie stuck to the topic and didn't phone in some Reagen-era message about the Evils Of Drug Use. If anything, it pushed the idea that Being Smart is the Ultimate High. The plot had a few holes in it -- it felt like maybe it went through substantial re-editing in post-production? The movie poster itself (above) is almost a metaphor for the movie: kinda chopped up, with no real cohesive center. But parts of this movie (ie, the law school student) were just pure, delightful wish-fulfillment candy. Not exactly a "message" movie, but part of the take-away is that Really Smart can still be Really Stupid. Another movie that deserves a Hugo nomination, losing out only because Source Code was better.

Next up, an "Alien Invasion" triple-feature:

Skyline - There has never been, nor will there ever be, a movie that has more blue lens-flare effects than this. There's an obvious resemblance to Battle Los Angeles (below), but they're both very different movies. I know it got slammed by reviewers, but I liked it anyway. The entire motivation for the alien invasion required considerable suspension of disbelief, but it led to an ending that was rather more imaginative (not to mention gruesome) than I expected. Not a life-changing experience, but the SFX were great and, overall, it was fun.

Battle Los Angeles - I noticed that Roger Ebert really didn't like this movie, and I think that I understand why, but I guess Roger and I have very different standards for this kind of thing. Admittedly, the movie was a bit like "what if the marines in Black Hawk Down were battling aliens instead of Somalians?", characterization was shallow-to-nonexistent, and there was this almost embarrassing "humans / marines uber alles" subtext (I'm positive that John W. Campbell, Jr. would have loved this movie). But for all that, I rather liked it. The SFX were well-done and the battle scenes really got the adrenaline pumping. The sound design was top-notch, too: I liked how the flying drones 'stuttered'. Not a movie that's gonna bowl 'em over at Cannes, but (like Skyline) it was fun.

Falling Skies - Not really a "movie", but TNT showed the first two episodes back-to-back so it was two hours long, so it's "movie-like". The last (and weakest) of the trio. I can imagine this being pitched as "alien invasion with a focus on the human element" or somesuch, but personally I could have done with a lot more alien SFX and a lot less warm Spielbergian fuzzies. The SFX were meh okay -- I'm sure there's some Maya-jockey out there who's made their career by character-rigging the excessively-jointed centaur alien bad-guys -- but, frankly, if I'd watched this in a dark theatre I'd have fallen asleep halfway through. I may continue to watch it just to see if they follow through some hinted-at exposition on the alien conquerors (someone just happened to notice that the aliens have four legs while their robots have two legs, what's up with that?)

Book plug: all of that alien invasion pushed me to re-read the best SF novel on the topic, namely William Barton's When Heaven Fell.

Also, an honorable mention for:

Devil - It seems like it's trendy to run down M. Night Shyamalan (who is only credited with "story", not "writing" or "direction"), but I won't because I found this was a fun way to spend 80 minutes. A simple tale, but well-told and well-acted. I've seen a number of people complain that Shyamalan's movies would be better suited to episodes of The Twilight Zone (and this movie is a case-in-point), but is that so bad?