Among the many other reasons I am grateful not to live in Philadelphia anymore is their new cash-grab attempt; a $300 tax on all potentially profitable speech made over the internet.

For the past three years, Marilyn Bess has operated MS Philly Organic, a small, low-traffic blog that features occasional posts about green living, out of her Manayunk home. Between her blog and infrequent contributions toehow.com, over the last few years she says she’s made about $50. To Bess, her website is a hobby. To the city of Philadelphia, it’s a potential moneymaker, and the city wants its cut.

In May, the city sent Bess a letter demanding that she pay $300, the price of a business privilege license. [0]

So a person who makes $11 in, say, Google Adsense revenue is now a “business” according to Philadelphia, and is required to pay $300 for the privilege of engaging in that commerce.

A Business Privilege License is required for all businesses operating in Philadelphia. This includes businesses that are located outside the city limits but do some or all of their business activities in the City. [1]

If I write a blog, and some of my readers are in Philadelphia, and maybe some of those readers click on an ad for which I receive a $0.10 bounty, am I now a business that is operating in Philadelphia? Where did the click take place?

Obviously, this is an absurd infringement on basic economic freedom. Taxes for the mere privilege of operating a business are wrong. The right to engage in commerce and trade at your own whim is absolute. Stop letting governments tell you with whom and under what conditions you may do so.

0. http://citypaper.net/articles/2010/08/19/blogging-business-privilege-tax-philadelphia

1. http://business.phila.gov/Pages/BusinessPrivilegeLicense.aspx?stage=Plan&type=All%20Business%20Types&section=City%20Registration&BSPContentListItem=Business%20Privilege%20License

“Plug the damn hole.”

Really, Obama? That’s your solution?

I suppose now that you’ve angrily chastised BP, they’ll magically find a way that works, because that’s what it really takes – a presidential missive to “plug the damn hole.”

Brilliant.

“If you could control an oil spill with lawyers and regulation-writers, and by signing papers and obtaining court injunctions . . . then maybe the U.S. government could do something,” said Byron W. King, an energy analyst at Agora Financial. “But really, Uncle Sam has almost no institutional ability to control the oil spill. For that, you need people with technical authority, technical skill and firms with industrial capabilities.”

Now that makes more sense. Yelling at people isn’t how you solve problems.

If the federal government thinks they can solve it, why don’t they just do so instead of complaining about how BP is handling things? Oh, that’s right, they don’t have a better solution, they just want to shout from the sidelines.

An anonymous source provided me with the following PDF, containing some fairly gripping photographs of the accident at Deepwater Horizon.

Horizon Accident

Interesting stuff. Quite tragic, in fact. But is it really a good reason to halt all new offshore drilling projects?

Seriously. This is how it works when you build with Lego.

Sorry if anyone had links to my old bblog installation. That software was too limited. WordPress is much, much nicer. Though for the amount of blogging I do, it’s probably super-mega overkill.

Oh well.

I have a 1998 Chevy Tahoe. It’s been a great truck. I bought it with around 90k miles, and it now has around 134k miles. I’ve driven it to Alaska, Minnesota, Colorado and other distant places. I love how capable it is off-road, while still being somewhat “luxurious” with its heated leather seats and cushy suspension.

However, there are times when I want to set the thing on fire and roll it off a cliff. Specifically, there have been two times.

The first time was in International Falls, MN, two summers ago. I was starting my journey home from a vacation, when the truck decided not to start. At first, I thought maybe the gas gauge had gone bad and I had foolishly run out of fuel. I got help from a kind stranger, who went to a gas station on his motorcycle and got me fuel and some Sea Foam to clean any residue from the bottom of the tank, if it was in fact a no-fuel situation.

No dice. The truck simply refused to start. So I called my roadside assistance program and they dragged the truck back to the Waschke Family GM Center in International Falls, MN. By this time it was late in the day and the service department was closed.

The next day, they diagnosed the problem as being rooted in the Passlock II system. This system is designed (ha) to prevent vehicle theft by making the ignition lock cylinder electronically tamper-proof. If you try to start the vehicle with a key it does not recognize, it will shut down the fuel injectors and disallow the vehicle to run. When this happens it is called “long tamper” mode.

The technicians at the GM shop ordered the parts from Minneapolis, which took a day and a half to arrive, and installed them the day after. The truck worked again, but had cost me around $500 in repairs, not to mention 2 additional unplanned nights in a hotel while waiting for the vehicle to be fixed. The total extra cost caused by this incident was probably close to $800.

Fast-forward to October 30, 2009. I am about to leave the grocery store, when the truck decides not to start again. This time, I recognize the tell-tale symptom, the dreaded flashing “Security” indicator on the dashboard.

!~)@(#&%$()!@#

!@)$*(&%!)*(@&#$)(!~@#$

!@#)*$&!)@#&%$)!@&#$)!&@#$&

I try the “10 minute relearn procedure” that the technicians at Waschke taught me, but to no avail. The truck stubbornly refuses to start even after several attempts. I give up and call my roadside assistance program again. They agree to tow my vehicle to my house, as I will be repairing it myself.

Tonight, I re-tried the 10 minute relearn procedure a few times, and finally, magically, wondrously, got the truck to start up. I also now have at my disposal some knowledge of this ridiculous system and how it works. I also know how to fool it into thinking it has failed so that it will never bother me again.

I have already torn apart the steering column so that the passlock wires are exposed. Once the truck is running, I cut the little yellow wire. As expected, the Security light on the instrument cluster comes on. The truck does not stop running.

I pause for a bit, thinking, “Maybe I should just leave the truck running and lock the door. I bet they make gasoline IV bags. I could just keep it out here running all the time, so I never have to worry about whether it will start.” I decide this is absurd, and it is time to test this “fix” I have done.

Slowly I turn off the truck, and am rewarded with silence. After a moment of silent prayer to the Dei Vehicularum, I turn the key and the engine roars to life.

Now I have a piece of black electrical tape in place to cloak the annoying Security malfunction indicator. I also have on order a bypass module which should cleanly make this whole situation go away forever. But for now, the truck is working and I am happy.

And to whomever was involved in the design and implementation of Passlock II: You may go straight to Hell. Your invention sucks and you are a moron. If I ever meet you in person, you will regret it forever.

I am one of the many unfortunate recipients of the American Community Survey.

I believe the questions in it to be invasive to the point of being unconstitutional.

The survey paperwork threatens fines and possible imprisonment if it is not answered.

I’ve written to my representative Robert Andrews for advice on the matter.

I do not plan to answer this survey. Will I end up in jail because of it? History seems to indicate that I will not, given the other blog posts I have seen on the issue, but who knows. Our current government seems to be getting more and more hostile towards its citizens.

When the Magellan Triton 2000 GPS came out, I was in the market for a new GPS unit, as my Garmin eTrex Vista had been stolen.

I was immediately frustrated with the lack of a useful base map on the unit, and with the cruddy TOPO Explorer software they provided. After some months National Geographic finally updated the software and made it usable. I downloaded some maps from their online map store, and though that was pretty cool. In fact, I was very impressed with the ability to get hybrid maps that included sattelite imagery as well. I used these on my recent trip to Colorado’s Flat Top Mountains.

What has vexed me with this device, as with so many other GPS units, is the inability to add custom maps that don’t come from Magellan, Garmin, National Geographic or some other costly source.

I recently became interested in trying it again, and found some tools which, when put together, provide a free, if technically cumbersome, way to put custom raster maps onto your Triton.

The first step is to get some digital map/chart content. Fortunately NOAA gives us that for free. You can download “BSB” files from them, which contain a combination of textual data and imagery, for use in a GIS. GIS, or Geographic Information System, is a piece of software that interacts with map and other data.

Once you select the area you are interested in, and download the charts you want, you can unzip them on your computer. Once unzipped, you will see a BSB_ROOT folder, which contains a numbered folder that corresponds to the number of the NOAA chart. In that numbered folder will be a .BSB file and one or more .KAP files. Each .KAP file contains a map image that we want to extract to a TIFF.

BSB files are a proprietery format, so it takes some doing to crack them open and get at their content. Fortunately, some people have already reverse-engineered the BSB/KAP format. You can download a set of BSB tools to convert the BSB files to TIFF format so they can be manipulated in normal image editor programs.

Run the following commandline to convert your KAP files to TIFF.
bsb2tif {input filename}.kap {output filename}.tif

You will then have high-resolution TIFF tiles which you can view in normal image tools.

The final step is to convert these TIFF files into a usable format for your GPS unit.

Once again, someone comes to the rescue with a very good free tool to generate the RMP (Raster MaP) files, which are Magellan’s proprietary format for raster maps. A raster map is simply a raster image (bmp, jpg, gif, etc) which has been calibrated to fit a given coordinate system. Triton Raster Map Maker is a tool that will generate RMP files.

At this point, you have already downloaded your NOAA charts, extracted the KAP files from the zip and converted the KAP files to TIFF. The next step is to import a KAP file into TritonRMP.

TritonRMP allows you to select spots on the map as reference points, which correspond to LAT/LON coordinates. Fortunately, the NOAA charts all have LAT/LON lines on them, so finding spots to use for calibration is easy.

After you have done the calibration, click on Generate RMP. You can name the file anything you like, as long as it is a valid Windows filename.

Copy the RMP file to the SD card you use in your Triton, in the MAP_DATA folder. When you re-insert the SD card, go to the Menu -> View -> Maps option, and select the named map you have added.

Sometimes, the maps won’t work correctly. I don’t know why. I have experimented with resizing the maps to a lower resolution, which seems to help. Unfortunately this process can take some trial and error, but it’s worth it to be able to put any kind of raster map you want on your GPS.

I extend a sincere thank-you to all of the people who developed the wonderful free tools that allow us to take full advantage of the Triton 2000 GPS’s raster map capability.

And as always, when navigating, remember that GPS is fallible, and should always be a back-up to your primary form of navigation. NOAA also states that the electronic charts are for reference only, not for navigation.

Happy trails!

I’m quite happy with my Fuze.

The only thing that has really frustrated me so far is the WiFi performance. It really just doesn’t seem to work right under some circumstances, so I’m going to have to do some reading over at xda-developers and see what’s up. I’ve heard a variety of rumors, like one that you have to turn off AT&T’s hidden proxy feature for WiFi to work at all.

Battery life is no problem. In fact, I’m pretty sure the battery is better than the one in the Tilt. Either that, or I’m better about putting this phone on the charger than I was with my Tilt.

The hard rubber case from AT&T is great. It sort of clips onto both halves of the phone, and feels very solid. It’s difficult to remove, and fits very snugly. It doesn’t even look too bad. Another big bonus of the case is that it gives the phone a nice amount of friction. I can set it on flat surfaces in my car and it won’t go sliding all over the place.

One more annoyance is AT&T’s customization of the keyboard. I would MUCH rather have the top row be dedicated numbers, like it was on the HTC Wizard. I have no idea why AT&T decided to make this change, but it was a stupid one. I need numbers way more frequently than I need symbols, and having to hit Fn to get numbers is a pain.

Finally, the accelerometer is cool. I’m actually planning to make a piece of software for it soon. Basically it will be a tamper sensor/alarm, so you can set your phone down on top of your laptop at Starbucks while you order your drink, and if some jackhole tries to move either, it sets off a loud noise.

The built-in game “teeter” is great fun while you’re sitting around in a doctor’s office or generally need to waste some time. However, I don’t recommend trying it while on the train – it’s nearly impossible to play, for reasons which should be obvious.

This is all based on initial impressions. Some of this may change as I get to know the device a little better.

The Good

The graphics are awesome. Once you go VGA, you’ll never go back. The sharpness and smoothness makes reading so much easier. Graphic performance on the Fuze also seems quite excellent compared to the Tilt. As some may know, the Tilt is well known as having crap video drivers, so apparently HTC finally got their act together for this newer series of devices.

TouchFlo is very nice. This TouchFlo is not like the old version, which had a 3D Cube that rotated in space, but is a series of “tabs” on the home screen.

The on-screen keyboard by HTC is very similar to the iPhone one. It’s way better than the standard WinMo on-screen keyboard. And by way better, I mean “usable”.

The camera seems to make nice images. It has true mechanical autofocus, which allows it to take very good close-up images of things, as well as distance/landscape shots.

The UI of all the HTC software is gesture-based. You can sweep across the screen to navigate and scroll.

The main round physical button on the device is “touch” sensitive like the click-wheel of the iPod, and the area surrounding the button also acts like a click-wheel, in that you can move your finger in a circle to zoom or scroll. In camera mode, merely touching the button will focus, and then you press the button fully to take a picture.

So far the radio performance seems on-par with the Tilt, but again this will take some time to learn more.

The Bad

The Fuze is a super ultra fingerprint magnet. OMG, WTF. There is just no way to keep the surface of this device clean, other than to put it in a protective case. I actually prefer the rubberized surface of the Tilt.

Compared to the Tilt, this thing has almost no buttons on it anywhere. I’m used to having about 5 different ways to click “OK” on the Tilt, where on the Fuze I basically always have to click the OK on the screen, or if I have the keyboard open, there is a dedicated OK key.

It’s damn expensive. I paid the non-contract price of $500. For me this is not a concern, because the cost will be reimbursed by my employer, but even if you want a contract, it’s not a cheap phone.

Unknowns

Battery life, I expect to be poor. But I won’t know for a while yet.

WiFi works, but I got some strange results where I had 54Mbps Tx and 1Mb Rx speed, which made no sense. I will have to experiment more with that and see if it has to do with my home network or if it’s something else.