Vedrørende spillvold

I sin kommentar “Trening til ondskap” (Norge i Dag, 9.8) tar Anita Apelthun Sæle til orde for at en av forklaringene til at det som skjedde på Utøya er at krigsspill (sic!) er “trening i ondskap” og en mal i hvordan utføre voldelige handlinger. Dette ligner veldig mye på forklaringer som også har kommet i etterkant av andre ufyselige episoder, spesielt skoleskytingene på Columbine High School i 1999 og Virginia Tech University i 2007. Det interessante er at man alltid også forsøker å finne andre ting som man kan legge skyld på, både subkulturer, musikk og filmer.

Christopher J. Ferguson, voldsforsker på universitetet i Texas, har tidligere skrevet at i ettertid av slike hendelser blir folk naturligvis redde. Folk som er redde trenger å “sette morderen i bås”, å kategorisere han/hun i et desperat forsøk på å få svar på “Hvorfor?” og å kunne forutse slike hendelser seinere. For det føler man fører til trygghet.
Men Ferguson skriver, og har fått bekreftet av Secret Service, at den eneste faktoren som hjelper til med å forutse slike hendelser i forkant er faktiske trusler om hendelsen før den utføres. Dermed er alle slike forsøk på forklaring og båssetting dermed fånyttes.

Vi mennesker søker etter forklaringer på at slike hendelser skjer, men det fører kun til at vi begynner å lete etter de enkle tingene som vi kan peke på (les: spill), og dermed er man med på å unngå å stille morderen til ansvar, og i stedet peke fingre mot de som lager spill. Jeg mener at vi heller bør fokusere på stille terroristen til ansvar og lete etter årsaker på de rette stedene. Kun terroristen selv kan forklare hvorfor han valgte å drepe. Spill kan ikke være en faktor stor nok til å bli brukt som hoggestabb i denne saken.

Apelthun Sæle skriver også at “barn og unge i store deler av verden har slike spill som (…) underholdning.” Begge spillene som terroristen har henvist til i sitt manifest (og som er de eneste spillene vi dermed med sikkerhet vet at han har kjennskap til) er “World of Warcraft” og “Call of Duty”. Begge disse har en såkalt PEGI-merking. Denne merkingen finnes på coveret til spillet og viser til anbefalt aldersgrense og hva spillet inneholder. WoW sin merking viser til at spillet inneholder “non-realistic looking violence towards human and non-human characters”. Hvis barn og unge spiller dette uten foreldres veiledning eller kjennskap, og vi for et øyeblikk følger Apelthun Sæles argument om at spill er trening i å drepe, så vil jeg heller be henne om å peke fingre på foreldrene og be de passe bedre på barna sine.

Apelthun Sæle viser også til at spillvold ikke påvirker alle, kun de få som blir hekta på spill, de som spiller mer enn andre. Og de praktiserer også volden i det virkelige liv. Samtidig ymtes det frampå at denne ligningen også kan videreføres til pornofilmer som ved overbruk fører til at man utøver voldtekt. Alt dette uten å vise til noen som helst fakta, verken med tanke på forskning eller statistikk som kan vise til at dette er tilfelle. Det synes jeg er svakt og i beste fall villedende.

Apelthun Sæle skriver at spill alene ikke er årsaken til Utøya-massakren og det er jeg glad for at hun skriver. Jeg ønsker å tro at hun mener det, men leser man mellom linjene finner man fortsatt kun søken etter enkle svar på vanskelige spørsmål.

Perhaps it was time

…I started writing stuff on my own blog as well. It’s been a while, but thankfully Geir has been around to tide you over. It’s been a pretty hectic few months, with a number of other projects taking up my time – some still not “public”, so it’s not stuff I could talk about freely here. Anyway, this post will be fairly demoscene-centric, so consider yourself warned up front. Since last we spoke, I travelled to the rather awesome Datastorm demo party in Gothenburg, and hung out with some fantastic people. Thanks to all who went with me, and all I met there. I got to shake hands with Blaizer.

Since then, most of my free time has been going into planning and ultimately holding the very first EasterGarden party in Hamar, Norway just a few days ago, at easter. This new party provides a service missed by many attendees of The Gathering (TG), providing a playground both for creative endeavours away from the noise and crowd of TG as well as facilities for enjoying a few adult beverages at the end of the party day. My crew did an outstanding job, and it is thanks to them more than anyone that it actually turned out pretty good. Despite a few hiccups along the way, and some last-minute cancellations, they all without fail rolled with the punches and made sure all our visitors had a good experience. You guys rock. As I always do when I attend or arrange demoparties, I also made a few new friends along the way – so hi to everyone I actually spoke with, especially the Swedish guys from Mr. Cheng. Also thanks to Bob, without whom no demoparty is complete.

I also want to have a small talk about my biggest project ever, and quite possibly even an important one for more people than me. But that’s in my next blog post. Now, if you’ll excuse me, apparently i “owe” some people a server, so I may try to get that looked at this evening. Before the Barcelona – Real Madrid match. Cause football is important too.

Inglorious Headset

Things have changed since my last review. Some people say I got to eager, with it being my first review and all, that I wrote “fuck” a lot, and “who wants some piece of shit for the iPhone bought on fucking eBay, which is probably made by a two-year-old chinese anyway?”¹ Well, haters gonna hate forever, so I just might as well make a new review!!!

For some time, when gaming on my Xbox, I’ve been using this generic wired headset connected to my tv. This proved to be hell when it’s late at night (usually 1/2 am) and I also wanted to use the Xbox Live Chat.

Why I don’t use two headsets at once, you say? Do I look like Zaphod Fucking Beeblebrox?²

So I did some googling to see if there were any headsets worth the money, and boy did I find what I was looking for: Logitech F540!

#DLD-innlegg i Romerikes Blad

Svar til Tor Øivind Antonsens innlegg “Sikre flertall for EU-direktivet”:

Tor Øivind Antonsen skrev innlegg til RB 16.12 hvor han fremmer de gode intensjonene for at Norge skal innføre Datalagringsdirektivet. Han skriver at dette “vil gi politiet et svært godt verktøy for å etterforske den alvorlige og organiserte kriminaliteten og skape et trygt samfunn for alle”. Samtidig påpeker han for skeptikere at “hovedendringen ved innføring av direktivet er at data som allerede finnes hos teletilbyderne, lagres lenger enn i dag”. Dette grenser mot unndragelse av fakta.

A farewell to physical audio media

Yesterday, I gave away all my physical cd’s. I gave them away to a good friend, who is building a bar in his basement, and it was far, far from a difficult decision. I have actually long since abandoned physical media for audio, and I can’t – apart from in the car – remember the last time I took out a physical cd to play it. DRM-free mp3 from online stores, as well as services like Spotify, has long since made it redundant. It was just its time. The cd’s had to go.

Having a 12-year old daughter and seeing her interest in music (though I reserve the right to use the term in the loosest possible sense for what she’s listening to) growing has been an interesting experience. As a young person today, she has no relation to physical media for music at all. For her, music is something you stream over the internet or download in the shape of files. She loves Spotify, and how it allows her to experience new music, and check out stuff her friends are talking about. It’s not that different from the tape swapping I did in the schoolyard when I was growing up, except for one very important thing: What we were doing was inherently illegal (yet close to risk free). Today, we have legal services that allow for the joy of discovering new music without breaking any laws (however little risk of prosecution they bring with them).

Moving forward, I am looking forward to moving into a new house in two days, and taking a large leap towards the comfort of digital living. I may well move all my audio files offsite, hosting them at an online service for easy access in the future. I’ll do my best to blog through the experience, detailing the interesting technical challenges I may encounter.

First of all: expect details on building an Entangle server. Just need to move in first.

– Glenn

Citizen Case

You might not know me. I’m Geir, Glenn’s buddy. I’ve gotten the chance to spam his blog now and then. See how polite I am? Introducing myself and all!

OK, so luck struck me about two weeks ago – I got my filthy hands on a used iPhone 3GS in exchange for an iPhone 2G and a handfull of Norwegian crazymoney.
“WTF?”, I now imagine you are thinking, “if you were getting an iPhone, why not get the iPhone 4, you god damn stupid piece of shit, I’ll break your neck and-” I’m going to stop myself digressing right there. Let me explain how things go down when buying iPhones in Norway:

Up until the releasedate, shiny new iPhones had only been sold accompanied with a 12 months involuntary mobile subscription, the cheapest ones for about 300-400 kr/month. At the moment I have a subscription with provider without iPhone 4, but where I only pay for what I use. As a result I usually have monthly bills for only 100-150 kr/month. I would be a dumbass to double my monthly bill just to get the iPhone 4. Only after I got the 3GS, news got around that Apple would be selling iPhone 4 without a subscription. No biggie, IMO.

Anyway, I’ve had my 3GS for a few weeks now, loving the thing (it’s white, you know). And I thought about the iPhone 4 and the flash it has for the camera – the one thing I reeaally envy it for. I sometimes take pictures in the dark. Drunk. Don’t ask. Fuck, I’m digressing again… ANYHWOOO!

I was lurking on eBay one day accompanied by a glass or two of whiskey and by pure luck and some fate I found an iPhonecase. And not just any case I might add: it can charge my iPhone and provide as a flash for the camera! That’s a BINGO!
The price? Only $1.25 when the auction ended. (The funny thing? The cost of the item is only 1/25th of the shipping charge. But I digress. Again. God damn my undiagnosed ADD and the devil that is parenthesis!)
I’ve looked at it and tried it for a couple of hours since yesterday, and being the technolusty impatient geek that I am, I’m already sitting here writing what seems to be a review about it. Yeah.

Scandinavian-only blu-rays?

I made two both happy and startling discoveries yesterday and today. First of all, a trip to my local grocery store showed me a new display, of bargain blu-rays. Being the hd enthusiast I am, I couldn’t help myself but pick up Romancing The Stone for the measly sum of 99 NOK. So, superb pricing on blu-rays in my local grocery shop? Yay. I’m already eyeing that Me, Myself And Irene for my monday shopping round, but that’s another story.

So, sitting down with it today, like I often do, I review the case and usually check what the usually great reviewers of blu-ray.com have to say on the matter of the quality of the disc. To my slight amazement, they don’t have the disc in their database. Curious. I google the UPC number, and get only scandinavian hits. Wait a minute… this release features only Norwegian, Finnish, Danish, and English for the hearing impaired subtitles. It is also region free.

So it seems, there is NO uk release of Romancing The Stone, but there is a Scandinavian-only one. I will further investigate (and secure pictures), dear faithful readers. Updates will follow.

Adventures with the AZBox Elite HD

I have for some time been in the market for a replacement for my ageing Dreambox DM7000-S satellite tuner. I’ve been eyeing the new small HD able ones from Dreambox, when by chance I came across an AZBox Elite HD for a bargain price. Some quick googling led me to believe that it could replace my existing tuner, and I came to an agreement with the nice chap who was selling it.

On the surface, the AZBox Elite HD is the equivalent of the Dreamboxes – an enthusiast’s tuner, built on linux, endlessly hackable and expandable. I got the tuner without any printed manuals or the like, so I was left to explore the device without such comforts. Not to worry, I carefully unplugged my existing tuner and in with the new. HDMI into the receiver, power in, ethernet in and the lnb’s connected. Power on.

In the week from my purchase to actually receiving the machine I had been reading up a bit on it, so I knew some of what to expect, and yet I struggled a little bit at first. The firmware obviously had some shortcomings and minor bugs. For one, it insisted that I was using the composite video outs, while I was clearly not. But the settings menu conveniently had an update firmware button. I pressed it, chose the highest version number, and quickly updated. This solved some of the problems, but not all. I later learned that the official update repository (that it downloads from) had seen some unwelcome attention, and for now was not active with the latest firmwares. For now, they are posted on the official AZBox forums, and mirrored here by a kind forum user. Now, updating does not work exactly as expected. I was thinking going to the settings menu and choosing usb as your update medium would do the trick, but no. Thanks to this informative forum post, I learned that the only way to update from usb is downloading a firmware to a fat32-formatted memory stick, renaming it to patch.bin, and rebooting the box with the stick in one of its ports. This gives you some options, and you choose to update from usb and off it goes.

So, on the latest firmware, I could proceed to explore the box in much greater detail, including getting it to decode channels. That story, and more, in the thrilling part 2 – coming RIGHT UP AFTER THE BREAK!

May 31st, I will quit Facebook, and this is why I think you should too

We live in extremely connected times. Most of my online activities can to some extent be deemed “social”, and most social of all is perhaps the social networks. Some bring me news and other items of interest, some connect me with interesting people, some make my life easier, some are just fun. I’m a pretty connected guy. I have a twitter account, I’m (still) on irc (and I’m never fucking leaving!), I have a blog (which should be apparent since, well, you’re reading it) and I have several email accounts. I have a cell phone (manufactured by a fruit-related technology company) which I am constantly being told I use too much by people near to me. Now, all of these things bring value to my life in one way or the other, and for the most part, I trust these services or devices. I have made a commitment to them based on their terms of service, what they offer to me, and we have an agreement of sorts.

For a long time now, I have been on the verge of discontinuing my relationship with a service that increasingly is violating our agreement more and more (by constantly changing their terms, and always for their benefit – never for mine), and which is bringing less and less value to me. At this point, the only thing that brings me any value on Facebook at all is being invited to events. And really, as outlined above, this is a piece of the service that can easily be replaced by any number of my other online services.

These thoughts have been brewing for a while now, as mentioned, but it was not until today – out walking and listening to episode #248 of This Week in Tech, that I made the decision. Leaving Facebook is the right thing to do at this point. Hearing the reflected discussion between Leo Laporte, Brian Brushwood, Jason Calicanis and Patrick Norton – all seasoned veterans of the tech world, and extremely knowledgable people – made me realize that the time is now. Quit Facebook Day is coming up on may 31st, and there is really no better time to take a stand against the rampant disregard to your privacy and your rights over your own uploaded media that FB has has been purveying for years now. I’m thinking, much like Leo said on the show, that I will not miss it.

But really, don’t take my puny imitated arguments for why quitting facebook is the right thing to do – listen to the podcast, hear the discussion tand make your own, informed decision. If you’re not interested in the other topics, it comes along around the middle of the show. Podcasts are great, aren’t they? :)

Ironically, Spotify recently rolled out an update that allows you to connect with your facebook friends to browse their playlists and share music, which is just AWESOME. If I will miss anything about FaceBook, it is this functionality. Let’s hope Spotify expands their social rollout to more platforms, like twitter, in the way for instance Gowalla does. The future is bright. Just not blue-on-white bright. I’m thinking, MORE, better, colors. Your colors. Your control.

See you around,

- Glenn

How I stopped worrying about Plex and started loving XBMC

I have been with XBMC for quite a while – I estimate for around 5 years. First, on a modded original Crystal XBOX I bought second-hand. I ran XBMC on it exclusively, in file-mode, streaming media files from my pc on the second floor. This worked, but the pc needed to remain switched on for the duration I was accessing its harddisk, and due to my insistence on keeping the media files in their original scene packaging, I was confined to filemode. Still, I kept a strict folder structure and this was perfectly bearable. I also had my first experiences with plugins, installing several interesting early applications to stream content from the internet. Quality was poor for the streaming, and I was connected to a 28 inch analog tv. Yet, I was content, and I loved the fact that I could watch media on my television this way without extra wiring and stuff to connect a laptop.

In 2007 I started a new job, and in march my work pc arrived – having had some experience with Macs in the year or so preceding this day, I opted for a MacBook 13-inch. Not long after I was fortunate enough to be given a 40″ 1080p television by my parents, and I was intrigued by the possibility of using the Mac hooked up to the television to watch hd content. I was aware that the XBMC team had started work porting the application to other platforms, and was keen to see if there was a mac port. Apparently a coder named Elan had started working on exactly that, and in his spare time had created the OSXBMC project. Not long into the development of this project, some differences arose between the OSXBMC team and the main XBMC project over policies on how to do things, and it was decided to fork OSXBMC from the rest of XBMC. The new project was given the name Plex. Meanwhile, I bought a DVI -> HDMI cable and enjoyed my first few 720p episodes. Everything seemed rosy green.

I was an early enthusiast of the Plex project, frequenting their forums, helping people out and learning a lot. I was mildly worried about the lack of insight into actual development, but chose to disregard it and focus on the good. Because at first, there was a lot of good. First of all, they quickly adopted a completely new and (in my eyes) more attractive skin than XBMC had, in MediaStream. The next big thing was the “App Store”, where you could stream video, audio and picture content from the internet, all beautifully skinned and integrated with the rest of the look of the skin. Yet, I increasingly – over time – started to feel there was “trouble in paradise”. At first, there were issues with Plex that was long since fixed in main XBMC (which by now had an active OSX port of its own), like the use of cpu in idle mode. Then, there was the ever-more-quiet blog (which is now reduced to just announcing new plugins once every month or so), which at first had been so inspiring and seemingly kept us up-to-date on progress in the development of the application.

Let me just break shortly here, and explain a little about how I like to approach supporting a piece of software. As a software user – more often than not a power-user – but not a programmer, I like to contribute in other ways. This may be by being active on the forums, by suggesting features, reporting bugs og even weighing in on other bug reports by attempting to duplicate and better document problems. Basically, if I use a free piece of software, I like to contribute something back to it – one way or the other. Especially if it is flawed. With Plex, it increasingly felt like this was just not an option. Elan and Isaac Ordonez – for the most part (but who knows, we have no documentation) – were seemingly the team leads, and answered questions happily on the forums. At first. Then less and less.

Over time, as I followed news (but not much else) from the XBMC community, I noticed their development really reaching its stride and felt Plex was slowly but surely falling behind. Then came the promise of the all-singing, all-dancing 0.9 series. It was promised this new edition would change EVERYTHING. It would be the end-all of media software on a Mac. And it would contain a revolutionary new media library solution that would be just awesome. Yet, the team was not at all forthcoming about specifics, leaving the forum open to random speculation which more times than not went unanswered. Now, almost a year after we first heard about this revolutionary piece of software, we are still waiting for information. Let alone anything binary. Or even a chance to contribute in any constructive way.

It was now november 2009, and team XBMC published this news post on their blog: XBMC 9.11 Beta 1: Introducing Confluence. I was blown away by the screenshots. I installed it on my Mac Mini (which I had meantime gotten), and played around with it for quite a while. I sat down and read the forums. A LOT. I connected to freenode and joined the #xbmc channel. And I was flabbergasted. A helpful irc user even solved one of my main gripes in all my years of using XBMC, I was finally able to scrape tv shows into my media library unchanged, and enjoy glorious fanart! Even the developers were super-forthcoming and helpful, and their irc channel’s SVN updates made following day-to-day development a breeze. I felt… home. XBMC 9.11 has since gone stable, and development on the next edition is well underway, featuring plenty of improvements – not least their own addons sections, finally a unified place to download plugins and skins and everything else.

XBMC has grown up, and I have found my home for living room theatre software. In my book, openness always wins.

I may revise this post later, as it is written in a half-lying down position on my couch with a Nintendo DS-playing 11-year old more or less on top of the left part of my body. In my experience, these are not ideal writing conditions..

– Glenn