Are We Addicted?

I'm home from school for a week since the semester just finished and I don't move into my next place until this weekend. As per usual my mother complains about the amount of time I spend on my laptop or playing games on the Dell they have here and says she thinks I might be addicted and that it "bothers her." I mean, its not like I'm on them for hours at a time, but rather that I am constantly on and off...like a smoker stepping out for a break, checking slashdot, email, etc. Good thing my linux box is being stored at a friend's place right now, otherwise no one knows what I would get up to with all this free time....

This is not going to turn into a rant about home life or anything like that, I promise.

But rather, I have to ask when does one decide if this is an addiction? Sure, I can go on vacation or whatever and intentionally not bring my laptop with me (although I will check email for work/school/important stuff at cafes) and enjoy myself, without experiencing any "withdrawals." Is this just a huge part of our lives? Would people question us if we were out in the garage working on the car all day? Probably not. Keep in mind I am not playing games all the time, I do think there is ground for calling that an addiction with some people. While we are on that subject, I have *never* played World of Warcraft or any other MMO for that matter.

Is it a generation gap? Perhaps. Like I stated before, there would be less of an issue if this were a car for an actual highway and not the "information superhighway." I will be the first to say that a lot of kids these days should be outside instead of playing videogames all the time, ESPECIALLY on consoles. Kids learn nothing from that whatsoever. Hell, having to do DirectX and driver updates as a kid to get games to work properly and all that was where a lot of my interest started. Then I decided it was time for us to get another hard disk because of all my stuff, and getting that installed was quite an adventure at the time. So because of my computer nerdiness as a kid, I now get to work in a lab in the psych department (my major) doing lots of work with equipment and hardware because of my technical ability and aptitude.

But I digress.

When mental disorders are being formulated, the scientists ask if the ailments are: Deviant, Distressful, Dysfunctional, and Dangerous. So lets look that over:

Deviant: Some might call what we do eccentric, but this is probably the weakest of the four categories with regard to any problem, since it merely implies eccentricity. Perhaps being a computer nerd is "deviant." Having said this, the connotation of deviance is quite strong and not to be confused with the denotation.

Distressful: Nope, the only "distress" this has ever caused is the odd bit of social alienation being labeled as a kid, but really that doesn't bother me now since I'm quite functional. And then of course the aforementioned parental complaints.

Dysfunctional: Nope, these skills are why I can work for the University IT department and why I am getting more research opportunities in psychology.

Dangerous: Well, I am developing carpal tunnel...but I guess thats why I have an ergonomic keyboard. In all seriousness, this is actually a problem for me. That and I have some back problems. I do work out and go running, so I am not at threat of gaining weight or anything like that, but I know I will have some major joint issues when I am older. All of me can be cracked or popped.

So thats 1.5 categories...not really enough to qualify as a true disorder or addiction.

When asked the classic "would you rather be blind or deaf?" question, I respond blind in a heartbeat. I would never be able to *really* use a computer again like I do now. But if given the choice between a human voice and music or the glow of the monitor, the monitor would have to go, no doubt about it.

The BoobTube (part 1)

So recently I discovered that an old family computer my roommate gave me to toy with wasn't broken from being knocked over last semester, but that the ram had just come loose and that was why it was beeping incessantly. So I started thinking: what can I do with it?

Build a computer solely for watching youtube and movies to plug into my TV? Yep, sounds like a good idea!

Unfortunately, the things CD rom drive has vanished, and I was using a DVD burner that is now in my main Linux box right now back when this thing was a xubuntu test box. I took an old 8 gig HD and threw it in the main linux box (HAL 9000), unplugged the other hard disks to prevent their MBRs and grub from being messed with, and installed Fluxbuntu on it. I chose fluxbuntu because I think fluxbox is pretty cool, but still has a long way to go if I am going to use it on a main box. Also, since you have to basically write the GUI configs yourself in fluxbox, it means I can make an interface to look more like a media center (like AppleTV or TiVo) than just a PC plugged into a TV.

So I take out the fluxbuntu HD and throw it in the other box, along with a 60gig HD I plan to use for media storage. Then I hit a hitch. It would not recognize the hard disks. Turned out this was a matter or rearranging cables and jumpers, and then it could see the 8 gig. No matter what I did, it REFUSED to see the 60 gig! This makes no sense since I know the thing works perfectly fine and used it just the other day to copy my music library from my ibook to HAL 9000. Anyway, so Fluxbuntu starts to boot and I get Grub error 5, which is a bad error to get since it has to do with MBR failure. Turns out more rearranging things in the case alleviated this.

So finally Fluxbuntu starts to boot....and it cannot access the root filesystem and I'm stuck at a command line. At this point it was 4am and I decided it was time for bed. Once I can get my paws on a working drive, I will reinstall fluxbuntu from there and see what happens. Here are the system specs:

PII MMX 266mhz
384 megs PC133 Ram
An assortment of HDs
GeForce 4 MX 400 64mb (S video out to TV)
2x Lan cards (we have to daisy chain sometimes in the dorms)

Anyway, I hate working on a TV screen, so thanks to the CLI intensive nature of setting up fluxbox and all that I will probably treat the box as being essentially headless and do the work on it via ssh.

I don't have any plans for buying a capture card since this is something I'm doing for fun with spare parts without spending money, and because I don't watch enough TV to justify it. That and I don't have enough HDs laying around to give me enough space to make it worthwhile.

And so slashdot links me...sort of.

I submitted something to /. and got on.

The case in Texas here is quite disturbing. It goes without saying that millions of Americans have open WAPs and are apparently vulnerable to the whims of others. Having said this, there was a lot of evidence against this guy and he is getting what he deserves, but the precedent here is very disturbing.

EDIT: Oh, google analytics told me that I hadn't been getting any hits for a while, so I didn't bother checking for comments and apologize about the lack of response to comments on previous posts.

Things Going On

So in light of all those carpal tunnel and joint type pains I have I decided to try to convert a keyboard to the Dvorak system. Dvorak, for those of you who don't know, is named after Psychologist August Dvorak who created a keyboard layout as an alternative to QWERTY which puts the most commonly used keys on the home row to reduce the amount of travel ones fingers have to do when typing. Some studies have shown that it can cut it in half.

I didn't feel like buying a new keyboard, I bought a black Belkin ergonomic keyboard (the only plain, noncheesey black keyboard I've ever seen) a few years back which has served me well. I dismantled an IBM keyboard I have (the black and blue kind you see often at public terminals and in the control room in Reno 911! Miami) but as I was putting the keys in their place I discovered that some of the keys would become stuck when reinserted and not spring up. Odd, I wondered if I had damaged them. Upon examining the keys and keyboard interior I couldn't see damage or any differences in the connectors. But then it hit me. On some tiny level invisible to the naked eye, *something* was different about the way the home row keys and other keys connect. I then got out the ergo keyboard but discovered the central keys were of a different size.

I will figure something out to try this new format. I might find a junk keyboard that is being thrown out by the university and reassemble it to the Dvorak standard or something.

Oh, and I have an HP Vista Home Premium upgrade disk a friend gave me he didn't want. I have no idea what I'm going to do with it, and how much work it would take to trick it into thinking my custom box is an HP machine. Will post if/when I get that going.

Linux Rant

So Sabayon Linux wasn't all I had hoped for. Having all the fancy AIGLX and Beryl running off the bat was sweet and looked really cool, but Gnome refused to accept me having dual monitors and KDE was buggy as hell with Gtk apps. And I hate KDE anyway. I could have given fluxbox another go, but it kind of defeated the point of Sabayon to do that.

So I decided to go back to Ubuntu, and while I was at it to upgrade from 6.06 (Dapper Drake) to 6.10 (Edgy Eft). The only complaint I have about installation is that it insisted on putting Grub into this old 16gb disk I have in there instead of the SATA disk where my operating systems are stored. The 16 gig HD in there is blank right now and I typically use it to test OSes, so hopefully whatever I put on there next will use grub so I don't have to reinstall grub.

My MAJOR complaint about Edgy Eft is this: sound. The fact that the OS does not support my card (Sound Blaster Live 5.1) is obnoxious, considering that it worked before and is a really popular card. While writing drivers is not the responsibility of Canonical (Ubuntu development), keeping a feature that is so important to so many is.

Looking around the internet and forums there are solutions that are quite complicated. I have no problem with doing some compiling, unfortunately some of the directions say I must uninstall Gnome-metapackage in the process! That is unacceptable. I wish Linux developers would come off of this "lets put out a new version every few months to be bleeding edge" thing and actually get their OSes working like they are supposed to.

...And I return

I've been in personal crisis mode for the last few weeks and I think it has finally dwindled down. Since that happened, I've been behind in school. So this weekend will be catch-up, and then I'll have some stuff hopefully next week.

The Future Is Now, and by Now I mean 2008?

A company by the name of Emotiv Systems has developed a device called "Project Epoc" which can "read your thoughts and emotions" to control a video or computer game, and is being demonstrated at the 2007 Game Developers Conference.

Quite a fascinating device, I would love to see a video of it in action. But I would like to make a few points clear: We really do not know all that much about brain functioning. This thing is not really reading your thoughts per se, it just relies on perceived brain activity to control whatever it is doing on screen.

It will be interesting to see how this develops and if it ever catches on. One poster on the slashdot thread which brought the article to my attention mentioned that a good neuro input device should be able to produce a high correlation between what the user wants and what actually occurs on screen.

I would love to get an opportunity to use this product or discuss with the developers exactly how it works. Something tells me it isn't quite all it claims.