Aux armes, citoyens!

Briefly: French government proposes a law to ban from internet all those who download pirated material, following a "three-strike" rule.
The law blows up at the very last step needed to be confirmed.

Freedom 1 - Stupid laws 0.

Graphjam

Graphjam, probably one of the most funny sites on the net.

Join / Merge pdf files in Linux

Linux does a lot of things out-of-the-box, just like a Mac. Essentially, unlike a Mac, Linux isn't boxed, and viceversa does a lot of things more than a Mac. It just lacks the sheer semplicity of Mac.

To join pdf use GhostScript. I tried successfully on my Ubuntu 8.10 machine.

(citation from linux.com)

gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=finished.pdf file1.pdf file2.pdf

Unless you're very familiar with Ghostscript, that string of commands won't mean much to you. Here's a quick breakdown:

• gs -- starts the Ghostscript program
• -dBATCH -- once Ghostscript processes the PDF files, it should exit. If you don't include this option, Ghostscript will just keep running
• -dNOPAUSE -- forces Ghostscript to process each page without pausing for user interaction
• -q -- stops Ghostscript from displaying messages while it works
• -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -- tells Ghostscript to use its built-in PDF writer to process the files
• -sOutputFile=finished.pdf -- tells Ghostscript to save the combined PDF file with the name that you specified

Obviously the operation is not limited to two files. I merged 12 files in a matter of seconds with a single command line. Yes, it supports wildcards.

gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=finished.pdf *.pdf

Australian do it worst

A land where is born the great Clinton Forbes cannot be so bad.

But Australia government pissed me twice recently:
1) Forcing the ISPs to implement a sort of Internet filtering that simply isn't going to work.
2) Refusing atheist's ads on their buses.

This isn't free speech. This is not even in the neighborhood of the free speech. You are insulting humanity as a whole.

Ok, Australians, let's make a deal: you don't insult me because of the government of my State, and I promise to do the same.

Words you may not know (I didn't)

Freeganism: portmanteau of "Free" and "Veganism", describe looting dumpsters as lifestyle. Done mainly for environmental purposes, the concept is very far from the homeless lifestyle.
Felching: the act of [censored] the mix of [censored], [censored], and [censored] after a [censored] in [censored] consequent to a [censored][censored] or [censored].

Please refer to Urban Dictionary for more detailed explanation.

Sarko meets Dalai Lama

Yesterday Sarkozy met Dalai Lama in Gdansk. Finally, in a scenario populated by governments without balls, someone show off his stones.

No more snoring nights

Your neighbor is going to hate you, but your best bet to get rid of snoring is buying a Didgeridoo.

Didgeridoo Playing Helps Sleep Apnea

Maybe get a blister on your little finger

This is great. MTV posts every music video ever. I mean it. Really. Really really.

Hurricanes

From the pictures, the ISS seems the only sure place on above Earth.

Hurricanes, as seen from orbit - The Big Picture - Boston.com

Alignment motivational posters

First, came motivational posters, with sad middle management putting them all over the office.
Second, came Despair.com, with some kick-ass series of (un)motivational posters. (Read them, they are far more mind-tickling than your usual MP).
Finally, came the rest of the world, with fake motivational poster about almost everything. After the jump you'll find some poster modeled on roleplaying games alignements. Lovely.

Mightygodking.com » Blog Archive » From The Slushpile

Remembering eclipses

Tomorrow a total eclipse of Sun will be visible from Canada to China. I just put my story about the 1999 eclipse I saw in Salzburg as a comment on Boingboing.

I was longing for this eclipse since twenty years. I remember I was roughly nine, reading on a book the Total Eclipses agenda.

1981 Siberia, 1999 Austria.

I thought it was impractical for a 10 years old boy travel toward Siberia to see the nearest one. So I asked to my parents: "May I go in Austria during 1999?" - "Of course you can: you will be 29, and you will decide by yourself whether you should go or not."

Back then I didn't understood this anticipation, but I haven't miss my rendez-vous with the eclipse.

RIP: Randy Pausch

Goodbye, Randy.

45 ways to play Mario music

Super Mario Bros., level 1 music (main theme), played with a lot of instrument, ranging from the usual voice, piano, and guitar, to the less usual sousaphone, jaw harp, ruler, and tesla coil.

11 strings Bass
2 Guitars
Accordion
Bagpipe
Balalaika
Banjo
Bass Clarinet
Bassoon (@3'05'')
Beatboxing flute
Bells
Bottles (blowing)
Cello
Chorus
Church Organ
Clarinet
Clarinet and Flute
Clarinet Quartet
Drums and Bass
Flute
Guitar
Hand (by a manualist)
Harmonica
Horn
Jaw Harp
Marimba
Mini Bagpipe
Mouth Clapping
Oboe
Ocarina
Orchestra
Piano
RC Car and Bottles
Ruler
Saxophone
Slap Bass
Sousaphone
Throat (à la Animal House)
Tesla Coil (you HAVE to see it)
Trumpet
Tuba
Ukulele
Violin
Voice
Whistle
Xylophone

P.S.: my son's name is Mario. This fact is totally unrelated (giggle).

Inconvenient Truths: Get Ready to Rethink What It Means to Be Green

This Wired column debunks some environmentalists' myths, may be very interesting if you're concerned. If you're not yet, you will be soon, so go on and RTFA.

Here you will find my comments to the cited article (in italian, no offense intended for Patagonia Dwarf Owls).

Safari pwnz Firefox!

Or: I am so boringly safe that I can't stop crying.

Firefox have had me. At first it came as the only true alternative to IE. I loved it very much. I installed some useful extension (Forecastfox for the weather, NoScript for security, Scribefire (formerly Performancing) for blogging, and DownThemAll for pr0n): they helped me to enjoy Firefox ever more.

But FF is a memory hog, and is slow, slower than IE? Sure is slower than Safari, today also in Windows flavor, which is pretty safe, pretty usable, and - damn - is definitely fast.

What I am about to miss: FF has a great way to handle rss feed as dropdown menu that is missing in Safari. Neither you can close tabs with the middle mouse button. Nobody's perfect.  

tIpNo: unsalted rice cakes

After reading my nutella posts, a colleague of mine told me about his experience with unsalted rice cakes (well-known for the flatline effect on your taste). He suggested Nutella is good enough to give a sense even to this ailment. Actually, I learned the meaning of "eating cardboard" after the first bite of my first rice cake (w/out nutella).

Needless to say, I have to try it myself.

1. Get a pack of unsalted rice cakes

2. Get a Nutella jar. The more, the better. Here we have a family-size one.

3. Extract a cake from the pack.

4. Spread Nutella on cake. A fairly good amount, please.

5. Have it.

That's true: even the filthiest rice cake becomes very good with the reasonable amount of Nutella; and dietetically, due to the EPS structure, the rice cakes have very few calories. (Thank you, MArco!)

Divided we fall

Q: What if you need a kidney transplant but your available donors are incompatible with you?
A: You find other people with the same problem, and exchange your donor with another, until you find one suitable for you.

From the article:
Five patients had a willing donor whose kidney was incompatible with theirs, but it did match another in the group.
[...]an altruistic donor - neither a friend nor relative of any of the six patients - was found to match one of them.
[...]suddenly, there were six people who could receive an organ.

This is civilization.

BBC NEWS | Health | 'Six-way' kidney transplant first

tIpNo: Digestive

Following a suggestion posted by anonymous, I tried eventually Nutella on Digestive.

Get a Digestive pack, the first in my life (but not the least, I hope).



Hold firmly a biscuit. You will be tempted to gnaw it. I resisted the urge for scientifical sake :-)



Get Nutella. The more, the better. Here we have a family-size one.



Spread Nutella on biscuit. As you can see, I never limit myself to the stoichometric quantitative.



Yes: have it. The firm structure of the Digestive becomes brittle when hits your tongue, unleashing a Nutella tornado with a crisp cereal note. Actually I think it's one of the best way to taste Nutella. Not to mention the biscuit itself is a masterpiece. After the jump you will find the Digestive entry on Wikipedia.

Digestive biscuit - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

About surveillance

The linked article from Bruce Schneier demonstrates that sharing personal information between two people is not a fair trade, because gives the more powerful even more power on the weaker.

Someone, in Italy, is thinking about a law to avoid wiretapping: I hope this law will be equally applied to everyone. Besides, it doesn't satisfies the Ten Immutable Laws of Security, so is flawed since its birth.

Bruce Schneier's Security Matters: The Myth of the 'Transparent Society'

Censorship: what?

Read from Slashdot, through il Corriere: the Mayor of Florence sued Wikipedia about a (possible) defamation, about which I care not at all.

This allows to demonstrate once more how censorship on Internet is useless; in the worst case, attracts unwanted attention on the news you are trying to erase. Actually, the questionable phrase has been removed from the page (2008-03-01 17:31 CET), but due to the structure of Wikipedia, the old one is visible here. Or if you prefer, here is the cached Google version.

Besides, someone tagged a version of the Domenici english page on WP as "LGBT people from Italy", where LGBT is "Lesbo Gay Bisexual Transgender". The tag has been already removed.