Frogman's Photoblog

Internet Without Borders + HowTo

In my not so humble opinion, the Internet is an open, international medium. It shouldn’t matter where you come from – once you’re online, you should be able to access all public information and services. Yet it tends to happen increasingly often that some resource just tells you something like [Access denied. You are not in an approved area. Now please go have an intercourse with yourself.] which is a thing that irritates me.

It’s a long day at work and I wanted to refresh myself with some music. Blast, I had no music on my new laptop (ThinkPad T500, wee!) yet, so I tried to use Pandora, which I remember as a very clever, customizable and enjoyable streaming music service. To much disappointment, I was greeted with the message “We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for listeners located outside of the U.S.” I wonder who’s behind this – my guess is RIAA and their cronies… No matter; my patience was gone, and my cyber artillery armed and ready for a devastating barrage.

A simple message for everyone who would impose borders upon the Internet:
I fart in the general direction of your futile and annoying restriction attempts.
And I can teach everyone else and their granny how to do it, too.
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There is hope for men after all :-)

Who wouldn’t want a perfect partner with looks that could be envied by Maxim cover gils, mental stability of a rock, and house-keeping skills that could put your grandma to shame? And the best thing… she never ever nags. Meet Aiko, the first step on the way.

She would read you newsfeeds every morning after she fixed you a breakfast, she could read a map and navigate, and her daddy, Mr. Le Trung, even believes that she can even be “tweaked” to turn into a sexual partner, and one that’s blatantly easy to turn on, for that matter. ;-) Le gleefully explains that “her software could be redesigned to simulate her having an orgasm.”

Seriously now, I do hope she’s open source. :-D Here’s a toast to bright future, and stable relationships. At least now I know I won’t be sad and lonely when I’m sixty-four. ;-)

(Don’t) take your kids’ games away

A US teenager murdered his mother and shot his father in the head, in revenge after they took away his copy of Halo 3 video game, a judge has ruled.

Unfortunately, it seems somebody can claim that the game was a contributing factor; the judge who presided over this case said he believes that the 17-year-old defendant “had no idea at the time he hatched this plot that if he killed his parents, they would be dead forever.” Of course, it’s all video games’ fault.

Jolly. :-D I do hope parents have long respawn timers…

—-

However, on defense of video games, they are very educationary. A six year old kid stole a car, drove it around, and eventually crashed, claiming that he learned that stuff playing Grand Theft Auto.

Sweet. I can’t wait till I learn some cool swordsmanship and magic from Warhammer Online. :-D

Geek’s birthday

Every once in approximately 31 556 926 seconds the Earth completes its orbit around the only star around for almost 1.29 parsecs. Apparently, the fact that Earth is yet again located in the same relative angular position from the Sun as the day you were born, is a reason to celebrate. And there’s more. As Sheldon has eloquently put it, some people even participate in the mass cultural delusion that the sun’s apparent position relevant to arbitrarily defined constellations at the time of your birth somehow affects your personality.

Be that as it may, I’d like to share with you some of the greatest and most witty birthday wishes I ever got, and treasure them so much that it would be a pity for them not to be shared… I won’t be explaining the mechanics behind these in detail, because this could spoil the fun for the geeks reading this, and the rest of you don’t care, anyway, or probably have stopped reading by now. :-D

All of those were created two years ago, when Fox started this on our discussion forum, although his wish is so otherworldly, that I’ll keep it for the end. ZZ used unix shell to write a clever pipe of two commands, which looks very cryptic at the first glance, but is in fact very simple.

echo pTaalqbirtARTlqtoqloyhqATaalqbirtARTlqto\
qloyhqATaalqbirtARTlqRXTrqfXvXrXzRhqATaalqbir\
tARTlqtoqloy.qsqIonqxXqzTIqzXoDXr\!|tr fTaplb\
iqMthRtoyhDAmXsInxzr RapHybi\ rthdtou,zhDeAmcsnr

It translates into Happy Birthday song lyrics, along with a suggestion that I shouldn’t get too wasted partying that night. Nick immediately created a very smart contra in C programming language:

#include<stdio.h>
int main(void)
{
long long int L = 729987139091064141LL;
while (L) { putchar(L&0xFF); L >>= 8; }
return 0;
}

If compiled, this gem prints out nothing more than “Me too!”. And finally, Fox, who started all this, used Brainfuck language for this jewel of code:

>+++++++++[< ++++++++>-]< .>++++++[< ++++>-]< +.>+++[< +++++>-]< ..
>++[< ++++>-]< +.[-]>++++++++[< ++++>-]< .>+++++++[< +++++++++>-]< +++.
+++++++.>++[< ++++>-]< +.++.>+++[< ---->-]< .----.---.>++++++[< ++++>-]< .
[-]>++++++++[< ++++>- ]< +.[-]++++++++++.

Lovely. It even made me code a simple Brainfuck compiler, to sate the curiosity. One of my friends adorably described this piece of code as: a dead fish without a head, followed by a dead fish without head and a tail, followed by random chopped pieces of dead fish.

So that’s it. :-D Thanks a lot guys, it was a load of fun… Have any more clever geek birthday wishes to share?

Letting go…

Thanks for everything.

Stockholm at Night

The gamla stan (old town) of Stockholm is a very interesting place, especially at night. The old cobblestone streets are narrow, cold yet cosy, and deserted. A few confused backpackers like myself, some Swedes hard at work navigating to the right place to party, and… well, solitude. It was just me and my camera, and a whole lot of freedom, as I was sitting on a bench in front of the royal palace, pondering anything and everything, and smoking a fine cigar.

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Vigelandsparken

Sunday in Oslo was all you would expect from a day of such name, the weather was completely different from the boring clouds of the day before, and our first part of the day was spent on a beautiful autumn walk around Vigelandsparken, a lovely sculpture park, part of (my very own ;-)) Frognerparken, where all the famous and, admittedly, somewhat crazy statues (made) of naked people are. :-)

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Los Oslosos (HDR)

I haven’t been to Scandinavia for a month and, well, I missed that place enough to get back there. This time it was Oslo, made easier and cheaper by the fact that all it took to persuade Zdeněk to let us stay at his place, were twelve bottles of booze. The weather on Saturday was as Scandinavian as it gets, so all I could do to prevent my shots from being dull and boring was resorting to HDR yet again…

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Stockholm in HDR

The light was mostly so good there wasn’t much need for experimenting, but I still couldn’t resist firing off a few bracketed shots for HDR… I like a few, you judge for yourself. I admit the feel is somewhat unrealistic, which anyone may or may not appreciate.

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Weekend in Stockholm

It was late at night, months ago, me and my buddies were enjoying some quality male-only time and laughing our asses off at some distant place better left unspecified, when my phone rang. I grinned at the screen as it was my dearest, and ran out to answer it… “Tee hee,” she giggled, “we just had [censored amount of ;-)] tequila shots and decided that we wanted to go to Sweden!” All I managed was a general sound of amused surprise. “Seriously! RyanAir offers plane tickets for €10 including all the taxes. It’s ending tomorrow, you need to decide now.” Well, she needn’t say more, as I’m always all for any mischief like this.

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