Kapt Kaos The Cosmic Pirate

I have just finished setting up and testing OpenID as a means of logging in to this site.  What is OpenID you ask?  Here is the answer from OpenID

OpenID eliminates the need for multiple usernames across different websites, simplifying your online experience.

You get to choose the OpenID Provider that best meets your needs and most importantly that you trust. At the same time, your OpenID can stay with you, no matter which Provider you move to. And best of all, the OpenID technology is not proprietary and is completely free.

For businesses, this means a lower cost of password and account management, while drawing new web traffic. OpenID lowers user frustration by letting users have control of their login.

Read more about OpenID…

There may be a new level of accuracy in telling time. The Tokyo-based research indicates that a new clock built on the idea of measuring mercury atoms would create the most accurate clock in the world.

Current technology is over 50 years old and looses about 1 sec over 30 million years. The new technology is expected to loose only a fraction of a second over 14 billion years.

The technology has not been proven yet. The clock must run for a couple of weeks before they will know if it works as expected.

Current clocks are based on the oscillation of the metal cesium, a technology which is more than 50 years old, notes Andrei Derevianko, a professor of physics at the University of Reno and one of the new study’s authors.

The researchers propose what is called an optical lattice clock, where a set of lasers creates a wave that holds atoms of mercury at rest. Another set of lasers reads the atoms’ energy levels to determine the time.

Read the full article…

The FTC today released the list of top consumer fraud complaints received by the agency in 2007. The list, contained in the publication “Consumer Fraud and Identity Theft Complaint Data January-December 2007,” showed that for the seventh year in a row, identity theft is the number one consumer complaint category. Of 813,899 total complaints received in 2007, 258,427, or 32 percent, were related to identity theft.

The top 20 complaint categories were:

Rank Category Complaints %
1 Identity Theft 258,427 32
2 Shop-at-Home/Catalog Sales 62,811 8
3 Internet Services 42,266 5
4 Foreign Money Offers 32,868 4
5 Prizes/Sweepstakes and Lotteries 32,162 4
6 Computer Equipment and Software 27,036 3
7 Internet Auctions 24,376 3
8 Health Care Claims 16,097 2
9 Travel, Vacations, and Timeshares 14,903 2
10 Advance-Fee Loans and Credit Protection/Repair 14,342 2
11 Investments 13,705 2
12 Magazines and Buyers Clubs 12,970 2
13 Business Opportunities and Work-at-Home Plans 11,362 1
14 Real Estate ( Not Timeshares ) 9,475 1
15 Office Supplies and Services 9,211 1
16 Telephone Services 8,155 1
17 Employ. Agencies/Job Counsel/Overseas Work 5,932 1
18 Debt Management/Credit Counseling 3,442 <1
19 Multi-Level Mktg./Pyramids/Chain Letters 3,092 <1
20 Charitable Solicitations 1,843 <1

As I have recently started using AT&T’s U-verse service at the house this news could be good for me.

AT&T (NYSE: T) and Starbucks Corp. (NASDAQ: SBUX) is making the wireless Internet service free to all qualified AT&T broadband and U-verse Internet customers. AT&T officials say they have 12 million of these customers. The company also has another 5 million remote access service business customers that will be able to use the service.

AT&T now has more than 17,000 U.S. hot spots and more than 70,000 globally.

Starting this spring, Starbucks is also giving its card holders two free hours of free Wi-Fi service per day at participating locations.

I will have to see how this plays out as the service is really in my roommates name. I have the account number but not sure what else I will need to be able to connect at a Starbucks.

Found in a press release from Media-Newswire.

“We’ve all heard the stories: Someone’s great-uncle has smoked three packs of cigarettes since he was 14, and now, at the age of 88, he’s living a fine, healthy life,” said Arthur Moss, M.D., Director of the Heart Research Follow-up Program at the University of Rochester Medical Center. “Contrast that with the 52-year old neighbor, who also was a heavy smoker, and just last week, dropped dead from a heart attack. Why is it that some smokers seem unaffected by their habit and even outlive the healthiest individuals, while many other smokers suffer significant cardiac events at a relatively young age? We think we now know why.”

According to Moss, the answer lies is a common deviation of the gene CETP ( cholesteryl ester transfer protein ), a protein found in all people that controls cholesterol metabolism. Smokers with a common form of this gene are likely to suffer a heart attack 12 years earlier than a non-smoker, while smokers who do not carry this variant appear to be “protected” and have the same risk of heart attack as non-smokers.

Read the full press release…

I have just installed Ampache as my remote music playing interface. it was working great for playing m3u playlist streams on all the windows machines in the house. However, when I tried to use Firefox on Ubuntu to play something nothing would happen.

I did a lot of google searches but almost everything was wrong or had no answer. I find one reference to changing the default appliction within Ubuntu. I then found on my own where to make the changes in Firefox Below is what I did to make this work.

First start by setting xmms as your default within Ubuntu.

1. Click on System -> Preferences -> Preferred Applications.
2. Click on Multimedia.
3. Click the drop down and select XMMS from the menu. If it is not in the menu click on Custom and enter XMMS.
4. Click close.

Now from within Firefox.

1. Click Edit -> Preferences
2. Click the content button.
3. Click Manage under File Types section.
4. This will give you a list of files types. In the search field enter m3u.
5. Click the Change Action button.
6. Click the radio button for “Open with this application”
7. It will open a file manager window. XMMS should be located in /usr/bin/.

This should make XMMS your default m3u play list player.

THE SPOILED UNDER-30 CROWD!!!

If you are 30 or older you will think this is hilarious!!!!

When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were when they were growing up; what with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning … uphill BOTH ways.

Yadda, yadda, yadda!

And I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no way in hell I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that on kids about how hard I had it and how easy they’ve got it!

But now that…I’m over the ripe old age of thirty, I can’t help but look around and notice the youth of today.

You’ve got it so easy! I mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a damn Utopia!

And I hate to say it but you kids today you don’t know how good you’ve got it!

I mean, when I was a kid we didn’t have The Internet.

If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the damn library and look it up ourselves, in the card catalog!!

There was no email!! We had to actually write somebody a letter with a pen! Then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox and it would take like a week to get there!

There were no MP3’s or Napsters! You wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the damn record store and shoplift it yourself!

Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ’s usually talk over the beginning and @#*% it all up!
Read the rest of this entry »

Getting to Mexico may have just gotten a whole lot cheaper! Yeah, I have been reading the Austin-American Statesman business section a little today.

VivaAerobus is a Mexico-based airline. They clam to be planning on offering daily flights to Monterrey and Cancun. This could really make for a cheap vacation. Currently flights are running almost five hundred dollars for round trip ticket for one. VivaAerobus should begin service by May 1.

“A May 1 service launch date will allow us to be in a terminal that is configured exclusively for carriers such as VivaAerobus, as well as serve Austin in time for the summer travel season,” says CEO Mike Szucs.

Read the full story here…

They want us to be afraid, very afraid. Here is a news article from the Austin-American Statesman:

The Homeland Security Department has added Austin and Round Rock to its list of cities at high risk of a terrorist attack, making the region eligible for funding from the Urban Area Security Initiative grant program.

Read the full story…