Satellite TV for an RV with no contracts and no gimmicks

We got satellite TV simple and cheap, no contracts, no fine print, no "have to do this to get that", no lease/rent payments on equipment. Up front cost: $270 ($310 if you want DVR). That gets your own receiver and a free dish installed at your house.  Monthly cost starts at $35 ($45 with local channels).

What's the trick? Pretend that you have an RV with satellite already installed and that you want to move it into your house when you're home. (This is no longer necessary. The Flex Pack is now available to home customers directly from DISH.)

Step by step:

1. Go to DishForMyRV, Shop Now.
2. Buy a DISH receiver. At the time of this writing, you want the Wally (NOPE, Wally is obsolete already). It has many desirable features, such as:
1. Bluetooth headset support
2. Wifi so you can stream from Netflix, etc.
3. DVR support
3.  When the receiver arrives, go back to DishForMyRV to the TV Channels section. Decide on the channel package you want. Make note, especially, of the Flex Pack. You may be able to get just the channels you want without having to pay for the bigger packages. Also note that there are no credit checks or contracts and no fees to start or stop the service.
4. Call the number that's on the receiver to activate the service and set up an account with the channel pack(s) you decided on. The person you call will set up an account for you at DISH as part of the process. Do not call DISH network directly at this point!
5. For DVR (you must have done step 4 first so that you have a DISH account),
1. Attach a self-powered USB hard drive to your Wally receiver. Apparently DISH receivers don't supply power on their USB ports, so a flash drive won't work unless you put it into a self-powered USB card reader.
2. Call DISH at 800-333-3474 to activate DVR on the receiver. They'll charge your account a one-time fee of $40.
6. Now, call DISH. Tell them you have satellite TV in your RV already, but you want to use it in your house when you're not on the road. They'll send out an installer who, for a flat $147 fee, will install a free satellite dish and wire it into your receiver wherever you want to put it.

That's it. $120 for the receiver, $147 for the dish installation and $40 for DVR. Total cost $307. Start and stop the service any time you want. Change channel packs any time you want. No monthly equipment lease fees. No commitments. Satellite TV the way it should be: clean, simple and flexible. We pay only $45 a month for the "starter" and local channels.

As far as I know, DirecTV doesn't offer this kind of service.

DISH does package channels in some weird ways, though. For example, National Geographic Channel is only available in the Flex pack, not any of the higher channel count packs. Nat Geo Wild, which we would like to have, is only available in the 200 and 250 packages.

I hope many readers use this information to break out of the fine print prisons of conventional multi-year TV contracts.

Herding Cats

Thoughts on managing independent, smart people.

Q: How do you herd cats?
A: With a mouse.

Q: How do you confuse a cat?
A: With more than one mouse.

Large mouth bass in Maine

The original version of this essay was over the top. I apologize to those who read it. Hopefully this revised version is a little more accurate and well reasoned. jah 4/25/2016

Bass fisherman had no right to illegally introduce large mouth bass into Maine waters. In some places, these voracious fish have caused a collapse of other fisheries. If it were up to me, the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife (DIFW) would be doing research to find a way to destroy them. They're an invasive species and should be treated as such. At the very least, the law should require that the fish be killed after being caught.

On the other hand, one avid bash fisherman pointed out to me that in some places the water quality has deteriorated to the point that salmon and trout won't survive and reproduce, so large mouth bass aren't responsible for the collapse.

I would have no problem if the DIFW had done research and decided, for the right reasons, to introduce large mouth bass legally into former salmonid waters. But, private citizens introducing an invasive species of any kind anywhere is illegal and wrong.

Now public officials are embracing out of state bass fishermen. (Note recent efforts in Waterville that made the paper.) Who doesn't love a rich guy who throws his money around? Well, I'd rather they take their fast boats, money, publicity and attitude and go back where they came from. I only wish they could take their fish with them.

Report on my diy silent computer system 2 years on

This system has proved to be very reliable and exceeded my expectations for performance.

(Nov. 2017 update:  The USB board in the front burned out for the second time and the company no longer makes the part. Bummer. Fortunately the Mobo wasn't damaged and the case has a separate USB3 port on the front.)

System specifications

Case: NoFan CS-60 mATX Mobo: Gigabyte GA-B75M-D3H CPU: Intel Pentium G2120 Graphics: SAPPHIRE Ultimate Radeon HD 6670 RAM: Crucial Technology 8gb (2x4) Pc3-12800 1600mhz Ddr3 Ballistix Cl9 Drives: 120 gb OCZ Vertex, 128GB Samsung SM841, Super Writemaster SATA DVD/RW PSU: SeaSonic SS-400FL2 CPU Cooler: stock Intel with Scythe Slipstream 120 Other cards: Syba ieee1394a-b PCI-X

Performance

iPlane9 and Flightgear flight simulators: smooth and responsive at max frame rates

Will run 2 Windows VMs in VirtualBox both doing updates, Firefox with a dozen or more tabs, Chromium with multiple tabs, Libreoffice with multiple documents open, and Thunderbird: switching between applications, mouse movement and typing are instantaneous; opening additional applications, e.g. gthumb to import pictures, is as fast as if nothing else were running. In other words, it'll do more things at once than I can keep track of.

Boots Ubuntu 14.04: 6 seconds, timed
Load Firefox: 2 seconds
Load Gimp: 2 seconds
Load Libreoffice essentially instantaneously...less than a second
Extract a 640MB tar/gzip archive: <2 seconds

Some things it doesn't do so well:

Encode a 4GB mp4 to 1080p 60fps (same as the recording) using OpenShot Video Editor: 23 minutes
(I have no idea whether this software uses the GPU. It uses ffmpeg for encoding.)

Temperature data

Ambient temp. 20 deg. C
Stress test the CPU at 100% - max CPU core temp 56 deg. C
Flightgear for 1 hour - max GPU temp 68 deg. C, max CPU temp 57 deg. C
(Note: The CPU is above the graphics card so it will get hotter when the GPU gets hotter)

These temperatures were much higher with two different passive CPU coolers. The case is narrow so only short coolers will fit. Running a CPU stress test, the CPU cores were over 80 and still climbing. Under normal use, they were in the 60s, but running a flight simulator pushed them, again, to a level I wasn't comfortable with. So I gave up on totally fanless and installed the Scythe 120. The results speak for themselves.


Issues

1) The first OCZ SSD died within the 2-year warranty window and was replaced.
2) The firewire card has never worked...appears to be a hardware problem. I didn't care until recently and have ordered a new card.
3) When a USB2 device is plugged into the USB3 port in the back, it often locks up the USB bus. You have to power the machine down by holding the start button for 5 seconds, then start it up again. Very annoying so I don't use the port.
4) I started out with 4GB of RAM. At times it wasn't enough, especially when running VMs. Adding another 4GB eliminated the problem. As noted above, I can't run and keep track of enough tasks to overload the machine.

Summary

Many people have used the G2120 in their builds because the combination of performance, price and low power is hard to beat. SPCR has reviewed an actively cooled card with the 6670 GPU, but this particular card is passively cooled. That has proved to be sufficient in the Nofan case with no high-temp cards below it. Combining these two processing units with SATA III and an SSD yields a fast, responsive system for day-to-day tasks. To my ears it's totally silent, but I'm 65 years old and my hearing isn't what it used to be. For those who want hard numbers, SPCR has tested the version of this fan without PWM: http://www.silentpcreview.com/article83 ... .html#SS-M

Guns, Kids and Power

So much of the public rhetoric, both for and against firearms, confuses statistical correlation with cause and effect. For example, states that have both more firearms and more firearm deaths may have other correlative factors...perhaps more alcohol consumption or more children per household or more poverty or less education. Or something else, entirely. No one of those factors can be singled out as the cause.

Let's face it, if an area has more cars, there are more car accidents. Do we take cars away from people? No, we require more driver training and put more restrictions on use by minors.

Roughly 100 children are killed in bicycle accidents every year. Does anyone call for taking bikes away from kids?

People who don't grow up around firearms often view them as an unnecessary evil. For those who are used to them, they're just another tool; one to be handled with respect just like any tool or machine that can injure or kill.

What are the most dangerous things in our households? Electricity. Fire. Cars. 411 people died from electrocutions in the US in 2001.¹ Seven people died each day in U.S. home fires.² According to the CDC³, motor vehicles were the leading cause of death of children and young adults from ages 5 - 24 in 2013. That same year, accidental death by firearms was 10th in the 5-9 age group, 9th in the 10-14 group and didn't make the top 10 for teens. Homicide by firearm was near the top of the list in every age group, but that's surely a function of gang violence, which is a whole different problem.

I really wish we would focus our energies on violence in our culture and on the socio-economic disparity that drives it. Then we might get somewhere. People who are productive and have non-violent control over their lives don't, generally, commit crimes or kill others. Feelings of helplessness and hopelessness that become despair and rage...those are what we must deal with. Disparity in power is at the core of all of the violence in the world, not just the U.S.

Does there seem to be a theme here?


1. Seven people die each day in reported U.S. home fires
2. Deaths from Electrocution 
3. Ten Leading Causes of Death and Injury

Violence

Violence begets violence. Revenge begets revenge. Hate begets hate. Always have, always will.

Until the admonition "Love thy neighbor as thyself." becomes the global norm, humanity will continue to be plagued by violence in all its ugly forms.

We know this already. Story after story in books and movies relate it. Love conquering evil/hate. Is there any more common theme? Well, yes, I guess there is. "Good" beating "Bad" through the use of violence. "American Western" stories and movies. They are a lie. When, in real life, have we seen the Bad stop after the Good guys "win". Stories have an end. Life doesn't.

Love thy neighbor as thyself. No more "us and them", just us. It is the only answer.

It isn't just about war and crime, though. Even indifference is a form of violence. How can we have billionaires and people living on the street? Us and them.
Refugees from wars and genocide. Us and them.
Economic and racial prejudice that creates slums and gangs. Us and them.

As my blog title implies, disequilibrium of power is at the heart of most of society's ills. (Overpopulation is at the heart of all of humanity's ills, but that's another topic.)

Nothing creates violence faster than making someone helpless. You want to get at the core of why mass murderers act out? Look at helplessness and hopelessness. Why do people become radicalized? Because they feel helpless in the face of powers that are antithetical to their values.

Power. The thirst for it. The lack of it. The disparity of it. All the things that provide it: land, resources, money, beauty. Power is at the core.

The struggle between social bonds (love) and competition for the resources needed to survive have, undoubtedly, been with us since the earliest days of humanity. Nay, since our primate ancestors became social creatures and overpopulated their territory. Somehow being in small groups and competing for food must have been more successful than working as one large group.

So, we come by it rightly. But, we are, supposedly, intelligent beings. We should be able to see the damage caused by our thirst for power, right? We don't. In aggregate, we haven't evolved, emotionally, from our ancestors. As we overpopulate Earth and individually struggle to survive, in toto we're the most destructive creatures to ever inhabit the planet. And, we create enormous suffering in the process.

Our most beloved teachers, Buddha, Muhammad, Christ, Gandhi (and others), taught about the dark side of power and greed. They put forward the solution in various forms of the Golden Rule.

"The Golden Rule or ethic of reciprocity is a moral maxim or principle of altruism found in nearly every human culture and religion, suggesting it is related to fundamental human nature.^[1][2]" (Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule)

Muhammad and Islam:

From the hadith, the collected oral and written accounts of Muhammad and his teachings during his lifetime:

A Bedouin came to the prophet, grabbed the stirrup of his camel and said: O the messenger of God! Teach me something to go to heaven with it. Prophet said: "As you would have people do to you, do to them; and what you dislike to be done to you, don't do to them. Now let the stirrup go! [This maxim is enough for you; go and act in accordance with it!]"

— Kitab al-Kafi, vol. 2, p. 146

Ali ibn Abi Talib (4th Caliph in Sunni Islam, and first Imam in Shia Islam) says:

"O' my child, make yourself the measure (for dealings) between you and others. Thus, you should desire for others what you desire for yourself and hate for others what you hate for yourself. Do not oppress as you do not like to be oppressed. Do good to others as you would like good to be done to you. Regard bad for yourself whatever you regard bad for others. Accept that (treatment) from others which you would like others to accept from you... Do not say to others what you do not like to be said to you."

— Nahjul Balaghah, Letter 31 ^[35]

Judaism:

You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against your kinsfolk. Love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD.

— Leviticus 19:18

Gandhi:

“An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

"I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent."

Mahatma Gandhi

"Power is of two kinds. One is obtained by the fear of punishment and the other by acts of love. Power based on love is a thousand times more effective and permanent then the one derived from fear of punishment."

Mahatma Gandhi

"What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?"

Mahatma Gandhi

"There is a sufficiency in the world for man's need but not for man's greed."

Mahatma Gandhi

 

 Buddhism:

560 BC, From the Udanavarga 5:18- Hurt not others with that which pains yourself.

If you want others to be happy, practice compassion.
If you want to be happy, practice compassion
The Dalai Lama

Christianity:

"Do to others what you want them to do to you. This is the meaning of the law of Moses and the teaching of the prophets"^[29] (Matthew 7:12 NCV, see also Luke 6:31)

"A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; As I have loved you, that ye also love one another.  By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another." John 13:34

Love, compassion, sharing...these are the only antidotes for the greed and violence that are destroying us.

AI: Threat to the Human Race? (work in progress)

Sam Altman (@sama) writes, regarding Superhuman Machine Intelligence (SMI): "The first serious dangers from SMI are likely to involve humans and SMI working together."

With that, I agree. The human(s) provide the motive and purpose in such a partnership. The problem comes when we start to posit "emergent behavior".

It's true that we don't understand how our brains produce human behavior, but we can make some observations about that behavior.

• Action comes from motivation.
• Motivation comes from desire.
• Desire is an emotion or basic survival drive.
• Hunger
• Thirst
• Reproduction
• Fear
• Anger
• Greed
• Joy
• Pleasure

The drives that cause us to act are not high order, cerebral cortex functions. They are emotions. They come from the lower, "animal" part of our brains.

It isn't at all clear that hardware/software that thinks, no matter how powerful, will develop feelings, desires, motivation, purpose. Until it does, it has no reason to act independently. The danger, as Altman writes, comes from the human-SMI partnership, where the human, for good or ill, provides the motivation to act. Especially dangerous are the emotionally damaged, misanthropic, but brilliant, people who are working on SMI, the ones who think (and have stated) that machines are the next stage in evolution and should replace humans. If one or more of them succeeds in creating an SMI and sets fixed goals into it that are antithetical to human life, we will be in deep trouble. Those who want power won't purposely destroy all of humanity. They would have no one to have power over. It's the misanthropic, "mad scientist" who scares me. One of them was interviewed as part of a documentary on AI. I wish I could remember his name.

Now, if someone were to set out to replicate the animal part of the brain, that would be a new ballgame. So far, efforts seem to be focused only on thinking machines, not feeling ones.

1. Builders of AI who've been quoted and interviewed in magazines and on television have no concept of psychology. Computers with more power than the human brain won't spontaneously become self-directed, even if they become self-aware, which is debatable.
1. Action comes from motivation
2. Motivation comes from drives and emotions; you have to want something.
3. Instinctive drives, programmed in, will be the biggest danger:
1. Self-preservation
2. Reproduction
2. Inorganic machines put more demands on the Earth than organic beings. Individually and in natural form, everything about a human animal can be readily reused by nature and makes small demands compared to a synthetic equivalent.
3. Asimov's robotic laws. 

 Are the AI/android builders naive, sociopaths or misanthropes. If they think the Earth will be better off, they're mistaken.