Setting up GeekTool on OS X
GeekTool is a pretty awesome little utility for OS X; it lets you display arbitrary data on your desktop. This could be the output of a shell command, the contents of a file, or even an image. I've been using it for a while now, so I thought I'd share my setup.
River Crabs and Mud Horses
I got bored a couple days ago and started reading random Wikipedia articles, something I find myself doing far too often. I ended up reading about China's censorship of the internet and its 30,000+ internet police. Basically, China has been censoring anything that might hurt the CPC, including the following:
- Inciting to resist or breaking the Constitution or laws or the implementation of administrative regulations;
- Inciting to overthrow the government or the socialist system;
- Inciting division of the country, harming national unification;
- Inciting hatred or discrimination among nationalities or harming the unity of the nationalities;
- Making falsehoods or distorting the truth, spreading rumors, destroying the order of society;
- Promoting feudal superstitions, sexually suggestive material, gambling, violence, murder;
- Terrorism or inciting others to criminal activity; openly insulting other people or distorting the truth to slander people;
- Injuring the reputation of state organs;
- Other activities against the Constitution, laws or administrative regulations.
My favorite recent example is what they did for the anniversary of the Tienanmen Square protests: they declared it "National Server Maintenance Day."
In your mouth, please see the gift of horses.
I found a new favorite toy: Translation Party. It's easy: enter an English phrase and Translation Party will translate it back and forth between English and Japanese until it reaches "Equilibrium."
I started taking proverbs from Wikiquote after a while and the results were pretty great. These are my favorites:
I Have Nothing to Say
No, really. I've been trying to come up with something to write about and it's just not happening.
Actually, never mind. I may have just figured out how to get out of the catholic church: have an abortion. Seriously. Apparently being involved in an abortion means automatic excommunication, which sounds just great. Actually, that story is pretty sad: 9-year-old Brazilian girl gets impregnated by her stepfather and has an abortion, so the girl's family and the doctors who performed the abortion were automatically excommunicated from the church. At the time, the Vatican was all "hey guys, let's not be too mean to the little pregnant girl," but they have since "clarified" their position, stating:
Disappointed
I got bored and decided to read about NASA a little today, and I must say I'm disappointed. So you're probably aware that NASA is required to retire the Space Shuttles in 2010, which means that we've got about eight more missions before they're done. I had assumed that there was some kind of replacement in the works, and there is, but it feels like a huge step backwards to me.
This is Orion, NASA's fancy new space vehicle. If it looks like the Apollo capsules, that's because they're almost the same. Granted, Orion is much larger than Apollo was (11m3 habitable volume in Orion vs 5.9m3 in Apollo) and will have fancier computers, but the design is much the same. It launches on top of a massive rocket (Ares instead of Saturn), orbits for a little while, and then lands in the sea (they were going to have it be able to land on land like Soyuz, but the system might be too heavy to implement). It's also supposed to be partially reusable; NASA says they can use each capsule up to ten times. Woo. I suppose the good news is that they're almost certainly going back to the moon with this vehicle in 2019, so that'll be exciting.
