Kobe Wuyts

The PirateBay PRESS RELEASE concerning SOPA

2012-01-19T17:51:00.000+01:00

Republished here because the content is blocked by most countries.

INTERNETS, 18th of January 2012. PRESS RELEASE, FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE.
Over a century ago Thomas Edison got the patent for a device which would "do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear". He called it the Kinetoscope. He was not only amongst the first to record video, he was also the first person to own the copyright to a motion picture.
Because of Edisons patents for the motion pictures it was close to financially impossible to create motion pictures in the North american east coast. The movie studios therefor relocated to California, and founded what we today call Hollywood. The reason was mostly because there was no patent. There was also no copyright to speak of, so the studios could copy old stories and make movies out of them - like Fantasia, one of Disneys biggest hits ever.
So, the whole basis of this industry, that today is screaming about losing control over immaterial rights, is that they circumvented immaterial rights. They copied (or put in their terminology: "stole") other peoples creative works, without paying for it. They did it in order to make a huge profit. Today, they're all successful and most of the studios are on the Fortune 500 list of the richest companies in the world. Congratulations - it's all based on being able to re-use other peoples creative works. And today they hold the rights to what other people create. If you want to get something released, you have to abide to their rules. The ones they created after circumventing other peoples rules.
The reason they are always complainting about "pirates" today is simple. We've done what they did. We circumvented the rules they created and created our own. We crushed their monopoly by giving people something more efficient. We allow people to have direct communication between eachother, circumventing the profitable middle man, that in some cases take over 107% of the profits (yes, you pay to work for them). It's all based on the fact that we're competition. We've proven that their existance in their current form is no longer needed. We're just better than they are.
And the funny part is that our rules are very similar to the founding ideas of the USA. We fight for freedom of speech. We see all people as equal. We believe that the public, not the elite, should rule the nation. We believe that laws should be created to serve the public, not the rich corporations.
The Pirate Bay is truly an international community. The team is spread all over the globe - but we've stayed out of the USA. We have Swedish roots and a swedish friend said this: The word SOPA means "trash" in Swedish. The word PIPA means "a pipe" in Swedish. This is of course not a coincidence. They want to make the internet inte a one way pipe, with them at the top, shoving trash through the pipe down to the rest of us obedient consumers. The public opinion on this matter is clear. Ask anyone on the street and you'll learn that noone wants to be fed with trash. Why the US government want the american people to be fed with trash is beyond our imagination but we hope that you will stop them, before we all drown.
SOPA can't do anything to stop TPB. Worst case we'll change top level domain from our current .org to one of the hundreds of other names that we already also use. In countries where TPB is blocked, China and Saudi Arabia springs to mind, they block hundreds of our domain names. And did it work? Not really. To fix the "problem of piracy" one should go to the source of the problem. The entertainment industry say they're creating "culture" but what they really do is stuff like selling overpriced plushy dolls and making 11 year old girls become anorexic. Either from working in the factories that creates the dolls for basically no salary or by watching movies and tv shows that make them think that they're fat.
In the great Sid Meiers computer game Civilization you can build Wonders of the world. One of the most powerful ones is Hollywood. With that you control all culture and media in the world. Rupert Murdoch was happy with MySpace and had no problems with their own piracy until it failed. Now he's complainting that Google is the biggest source of piracy in the world - because he's jealous. He wants to retain his mind control over people and clearly you'd get a more honest view of things on Wikipedia and Google than on Fox News.
Some facts (years, dates) are probably wrong in this press release. The reason is that we can't access this information when Wikipedia is blacked out. Because of pressure from our failing competitors. We're sorry for that.
THE PIRATE BAY, (K)2012

$25 ARM GNU/Linux box. Piece of cake?

2012-01-11T14:46:00.001+01:00

So cake might have been a lie, the Pi definitely isn't. Raspberry flavoured and priced at $25 (€19.7) for the A-model, $35 (€27.6) for the B-model, this is without doubt the cheapest computer one could buy. And probably the smallest at that (85.60mm x 53.98mm).
I've been following the development of the Rasberry Pi for quite some time now (I think since it was first announced) and it's not without a certain relief I can state they've officially announced to have started manufacturing. First batch (of B-models only) is to be shipped at the end of January.

For more technical details, I'll gladly refer you to the Rasberry Pi FAQ.

And if anyone has decided to pick one up, drop me a comment or something of the likes to tell me about it. I'm curious.

GLaDOS is my copilot!

2012-01-09T13:43:00.000+01:00

Some people are awesome. Some people do boring stuff, like let's say.... compile audio for GPSs. And there's this rather narrow intersection of both, which is what we call "cool". I guess that what I'm trying to say, is... someone on reddit packed GLaDOS voice for Garmin GPSs. And someone else did so for TomTom.

Links:

download Garmin GLaDOS pack (and a megaupload mirror)
TomTom GLaDOS voice pack (mediafire) (or megaupload or dropbox)

And a small video for your entertainement:

Erudite Phone?

2012-01-06T12:38:00.000+01:00

What use is a smartphone without some erudition? Exactly, none. With the exception of having a fancy toy. So for all you know-it-all-s in need of some technical assistance, or all you open-information knowledge-geeks in countries with crappy mobile internet services(*ahum* Belgium *ahum*), there's the alternative of the offline wikipedia.com! A 7.3GB download, 31.0GB of uncompressed database. So find yourself a suitable (micro-)SD card and carry the world's knowledge in your pocket. (That's actually a pretty scary thought, the fact that it's even possible to do so).

Enjoy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download

To build a Holodeck

2012-01-02T16:33:00.002+01:00

A look inside Microsoft's Edison Lab

source: http://www.theverge.com/2011/12/28/2665794/microsoft-edison-lab-holodeck-tour

Flying robots, the builders of the tomorrow

2011-12-11T13:14:00.001+01:00

Wallpapercycle

2011-12-02T15:00:00.001+01:00

Just figured I'd share my wallpapercycle. I use this series both in windows (7) and Linux. I know they're not all sized optimally for my laptop. But the auto-resize option provided by most desktop-mangers works just fine.

Enjoy.

Oh, and if anyone knows of a way to get different cycles for a primary and secondary monitor, please enlighten me.

Realistically insert synthetic objects into existing photographs

2011-10-28T22:46:00.000+02:00

Rendering Synthetic Objects into Legacy Photographs from Kevin Karsch on Vimeo.

This video is about a month old already, yet I just saw it earlier today and I must admit I was thoroughly impressed. So impressed I wanted to share it.

HelloWorld revisited(?)

2011-10-28T17:48:00.002+02:00

Welcome to this seemingly first blog post. Allow me to correct you: it is, in fact, the forty-second post to this blog and the somewhere in the one-hundred-and-thirty post I ever made on all my blogs, past and present (though mostly past).

You will probably already have noticed that, for the time being, this is the only visible post. That is because I have hidden the other ones. They were made in a very specific markup to fit in the previous layout/template of this blog. The recent (and less recent) changes in the blogger website made me reconsider that template however and I decided to stick with the default "dynamic" layout blogger provides. The forty-somewhat other posts look dreadful though in this new design and since I don't feel like altering them one little bit, they're going to remain hidden. You're not missing out on much, they were outdated anyway.

So that's all true and (bonus point if you got that reference...) I'm running out of stuff to tell. That will be all, thank you.