I already have a nicely constructed, if slightly cluttered, homepage. Copying it over would be a waste of time, and I have no desire to redesign it. (Well, I kinda do, but the basic look and feel has lasted me for over three years now.) Instead I will use this space to brag about various geeky things I have done recently.

Doing my duty as a responsible citizen, here is a tarball of the LiVid CVS tree, provided by OpenDVD. Copyright laws are there to serve us, and I want to play DVDs on my Linux boxen. The only thing this code does is allow people to play DVDs on their machines -- you have always been able to copy DVDs, with full encryption, just like you can copy a CD. Assuming you have the tres pricey equipment, anyway. (But Moore will be provide, as He always does.)

The fact is,there is no way to prevent people from cracking any such system. If they can play video on their machine, then the unencrypted video is available. Just a matter of time until someone cracks it.

And if this does eventually allow pirating, as DVD writers get cheaper, so what? I can copy VHS tapes easily. I do regularly. I even include the FBI warning. The video industry came to grips with this fact in the '80s, but now they think they can use fancy encryption to prevent it. Having just started to use DVDs, it annoys me that I can't easily copy rentals or record off of TV. The industry spends billions of dollars convincing me to watch their film, to accept it into my life, to give up two hours of my life, yet I can't actually make a copy. Well, screw that. They can't have it both ways. If they have made me want to watch something, they shouldn't be surprised if I decide to make a copy.

Wow, this turned into quite a little rant. Oh well. Enjoy or ignore or flame, my bit is said.

Geektoy My name for an easy to build parallel port toy. Here are the basic plans I originaly found, plus my mods and control code. BotBert I have been building a small robot for some time now. Here are details. Sonar Java App I got bored and decided to link the sonar module on the bot to my main machine Hesse. Here are the results, including screenshots and, of course, source code. Quickcam Arm During a very busy period immediately before finals, I decided to build a little robot arm for my quickcam. Go figure. UrbanSim This doesn't really belong here, but oh well. This is a research project I'm on. Transportation and land-use modeling. Interesting stuff -- and will actually take things like alternative transportation into account. Groovy. Some of the web design is mine, too. Lunarbot Project Pictures and inside jokes from the UW 2000 Lunarbot Competition trip to Albuquerque.

I don't have a cat. So here are pictures of my work desk and computer desk.
From left to right, the machines seen are a $10 dumbterminal, the Dedicated Stamp Development Workstation (XT laptop/DOS), my main machine Hesse (P200/Linux), another $10 dumbterminal (the Metatron) and hanta (486/Linux).
It is called hanta because I found mouse droppings in it when I finally got it out of storage.

Recently I switched to using Gnus for mail. This was not easy, given some odd constraints. I wrote this to describe how to send mail through multiple remote servers over a secure ssh link. And because I was so annoyed at introductory level Gnus documentation, I wrote this quick overview.

And look at this cute Tux penguin! A certain very special someone made it for me.