Dakota Today

*** A couple interesting links from Prairie Progressive

The Prairie Progressive blog often has some interesting links even if it seems buried a bit deeper in bookishness than I might prefer.  The wonders of diversity in the blog world.  Unlike SDSU where they advertised "You can go anywhere from here.".. and South Dakota students left South Dakota in droves, with blogs, you can be anybody or write about nearly anything. From the very archane to the instantly irrelevant, the blog format can do it for nearly anyone who can write or type...even if they must use Dragon Naturally Speaking (a commercial Link)   to do it.

Enough of that.  Here is a link indicating the FBI is convinced that paying cash for coffee is a terrorism indicator.  Apparently cash customers only pay with cash to avoid having their purchases tracked.  That is interesting for two reasons.  It is a crazy assumption to begin with, but even scarier in implying that every other kind of purchase is being tracked by the Government.

Feed Your Paranoia...Fear cash payments

This shares elements of the absurdity that pisza sales should be tracked because the 9-11 madmen terrorists ate a lot of pizza.  Your taxes at work on things so silly they would not even make a science fiction movie or video game..or maybe that is where the FBI gets their ideas.  They sure did not take the South Dakota Pot Plane of a few years ago seriously enough however and that was reality right in front of their red, white, and blue noses.

And another for South Dakotans and others interested in the history of this place and past times in digital format.

South Dakota Digital Archives.

So, enjoy the work and results of Prairie Progressive in his search for better books and better links.

)))) Stay tuned even if I am still frustrated by the aggravation of mediocre instructions for mediocre designs in TV wall mounts..more on that some day--- Doug Wiken

*** Digital content for sale or free as sailboat fuel

Mildly amusing that as "Argus Leader Media" or some such is planning to put some variety of paywall, firewall on the papers digital content, KELO is adding a TV ad promoting their "FREE, FREE, FREE" digital online content.

I imagine if the digital content becomes only available to ARGUS subscribers, the actual newspaper will become even more of a shopper than a news source.  Those of us who buy it off newstands will have even less reason to buy it.

The internet and online data availability are causing many changes in traditional media...some good some bad, but the process and changes are interesting even if the papers aren't. 

KELO has been ahead of most South Dakota media of any kind in any media except printed snail mail versions for years.  This spitball war between the Sioux Falls media "giants" will be interesting.

*** Stay tuned even if that may have unsavory connotations in the current media contests--- Doug Wiken

 

** TT RIP, Long live DWS

As I may have indicated, Salon Online Magazine has had a good forum they called Table Talk since 1995, but are shutting it down June 10, 2011.  TT was often a source of laughs and insight and at times, of information collected in better ways than anyplace else.  We might never have gone to war in Iraq if US Senators actually checked the information found there prior to the invasion.  I will miss Table Talk and it is a loss for the whole country.

Anyway, a bunch of the Table Talkers are moving to a forum called "Drive We Said".  It appears hospitable and may gradually take the place of TT for many former posters there.  It will take me awhile to get used to the differences however.  Whatever else can be said about Table Talk, the forum software that evolved there is the best I have seen anyplace.

DWS rotates banners, and I hope the one I slopped together below, will show up there now and then giving SD a little publicity.  Certainly a lot of people drive to Mt. Rushmore.

The site can be found  here  DRIVE WE SAID HOMEPAGE

[[[ Note: May 22, 2011:I put a few more images in the continuation of this post .]]]

Unlike Table Talk, this is a free site..contributions welcome however.

** Stay tuned even if you never, ever read Salon Premium, and never darkened the doors of Table Talk --- Doug Wiken

** Pandigital "Novel" gets to Winner,SD

We haven't been out of Winner for a few months, so I have not seen any of the e-book readers like Kindle.  I was a little surprised to see a display for the Pandigital Novel at the local discount retailer PAMIDA.  I asked a clerk if it was possible to see the actual device.  Well, yes, but no really.  They brought one out in the box, but could not open the box saying that would violate warranty for anybody actually purchasing it.  The device still looked interesting from the info on the box.  When I got on the internet, I did some searching and found the links below.  They include a lot of comments from users.  The device uses Android, so there are apparently hacks available that make it more versatile and hints that the company may make it easier to install Android apps.  Anyway, the devices are now out in the boondocks.

IPad has real competitor

PC World: P. Novel hacked to run Kindle for Android

C-Net User reviews of Pandigital Novel

Engadget: Review of Pandigital Novel

The Gadgeteer: Review of Pandigital Novel

The Coolest Gadgets: Android hack for Pandigital Novel

A couple more links found September 27:

Pan Digital Novel Home Site

Ziff-Davis reviews 10 E-Book Readers

One commmenter on the ZD story wondered why ZD writer wasn't also reviewing the advantages of small, convenient to carry  paper books compared to the electronic versions. Something to still think about

Not sure what to think. Looks like if reading e-books is all you want to do and you have little interest in messing with do-it-yourself hacks, the Kindle may be a better option. I'm still waiting for the e-ink $50 flat flexible plastic reader that is about the size of the top (or bottom) half of a regular-sized newspaper so paper can come down automatically at night and be loaded like a morning paper on the doorstep.

*** Stay tuned even if your dreams are all more realistic --- Doug Wiken

** I don't remember looking quite that young

South Dakota has a digital library apparently.  Infamous Doug Wiken shows up with a notebook with "McCarthy" on it and standing next to Prof Robert Stone who was next to Jerry Hauck.  Can I possibly have looked that young in those days and so damn gray haired now?  Inquiring readers don't really give a damn, but here is the link anyway:

McCarthy Group at USD around 40 years ago

And who are those good-looking guys and gals on the steps?

The things that turn up in search engines.  This time it as in BING.

** Stay tuned for less offensive material coming around the Twelfth of Never --- Doug Wiken

**South Dakota again hyping a boneheaded intrusive e-biz sales tax

The South Dakota revenue department apparently has somebody hired to work on the idea of getting federal approval to allow a sales tax consortium to collect state and city sales taxes on distant transactions such as buying something on E-Bay or perhaps Amazon, etc.  In short, not brick and mortar business setting on the main streets of South Dakota.

This idea flies in the face of the US constitution "commerce" clause for starters, but more fundamentally necessarily includes a grotesque invasion of privacy for South Dakotans.  Buy something by internet or e-mail and South Dakota, your city if you live in a city, the state where the product is sold, etc. would all need to know.  Not only that, if the states intend to be honest about the application of those taxes, a huge continuously updated data base of precise locations of buyers and sellers would be required.

This is a revenue idea that should be rejected by both liberals and conservatives.  It is (pun intended) terminally stupid.

I am not opposed to sales tax on distant transactions, but only if the federal government does the collecting and then only if most of the revenue is returned to states not on the basis of location of buyer or seller, but only on the basis of population perhaps weighted toward school age and college aid students as well.  This removes any requirement that the location of the buyer or seller be known by 20 or 30 states nosy revenue bureaucrats.

Such a tax should be applied to all distant transactions including stocks and bonds, equipment, etc that is not purchased in a face to face manner whether or not the transaction is across state lines or solely within any state or city.

This would truly level the playing field and do away with the aburd "user taxes" which are a combination of personal property tax and sales tax running under another name.

The data from state revenue departments also seems a bit fishy.  The revenue the State of South Dakota claims they would miss according to Mitchell Daily Republic article today (not sure how long that link will remain good) would mean every South Dakotan must be buying around $500 of goods per year from the internet.  That seems aburdly high to me.  I just don't know any families of four buying anything like $2000 of goods or services via the internet.  My own guess would be more like $20 per person based on my own use of distant sales via the internet with a tax liability of around 80 cents being lost.

Your mileage may vary as they say, and you may be buying thousands of dollars of goods via the internet to make up for all the rest of us who buy next to nothing that way.

*** Stay tuned for more humbug and spin from your tax subsidized government employees --- Doug Wiken

**Some additions to the Dakota Today Blog Chain

If you check the horizontal menu just under the masthead, you will see some links to the Parts is Parts blog and a subsidiary blog to Parts is Parts with Repair Log Pages by vehicle.  So far just one vehicle in the list, but we have more junk to fix and there are a few mechanics pro and amateur we hope to entice into scribbling a bit for us.

Maybe with a few good hints and aids in those vehicle related blogs and some businesses might even find it useful to appear on one of our ad pages.  More to come, but setting up a new blog is a bit of a pain and then getting links around the chain of blogs correct can easily be fouled up.

*** Stay tuned even if you never have to suffer the joy of driving and repairing clunkers --- Doug Wiken

**Saving the past kills the present.. well sort of

Dakota Today has been short of posts in the last week or so.  I have been occupied learning to use a newer version of a program TomeRaider which I found years ago when I thought that would be a good name for something and found out somebody else thought that ...a couple years earlier.

Anyway, TomeRaider makes it relatively easy to make e-books that are well indexed and with a search engine that is fast.  The main problem with it is that readers of any book you or I make also has to have the program to read the e-book.  The good part however is that the current version is only around $20 US for the PC version.  There is cross-compatibility with a bunch of portable e-book devices however...but probably not a Kindle or Kindle DX.

To finally get to something of a point, I used TypePad's export option and have that text file in first stages of working in TomeRaider.  I have not gotten all the blank lines out of the 1700 posts made in about 5 years nor have I gotten the photos inserted yet and I have a couple of other problems that aren't that serious.  That means I haven't been posting a lot here which is kind of the irony indicated in the title.  The exported file of Dakota Today for five years had about 800,000 "words" in it, but many are not actual text I wrote...lot of "stuff" anyway.

If you can export your blog, and can use a text processor to insert a " <new> " at the beginning of every title of a post, you can then compile, and compress the file and have an e-book with a fast table of contents and and also a fast search possiblity...which can be even faster and more versatile if I can figure out a bit more of the category definition system.  The progam works, but the documentation really, really sucks.

Well, that may be more than you wanted to know, but if this interests you, let me know.

***Stay tuned for something about something...maybe photos of new kittens...ah, isn't that just so sweet..and Happy Mothers Day to all you mothers out there--- Doug Wiken

*** Dakota Today at KELOLAND Guest Blogs

Some posts in Dakota Today are showing up at the KELOLAND Guest blogs. Not sure if Dakota Today is in the main index yet or not, but apparently I did not completely screw up everything messing with a new (to me at least) blog interface used by KELOLAND.

 So Dakota Today may get a few more readers and I guess that means I may have to work a bit harder at this. Frankly, I don't know how PP at Dakota War College blog or Cory at Madville Times blog gets so many posts into their blogs or how Todd Epp fills something like 300 blogs..well maybe not quite that many. Anyway, the link to the KELO Guest Blog Aggregation site posted here yesterday and again below will give you an opportunity to view the latest 50 or so posts at a spectrum of SD Blogland.
Or if you just can't wait to see, check the link below:
 Dakota Today at KELOLAND
or the whole big show:  KELOLAND Blog Aggregator for Guest Blogs
 *** Stay tuned for more changes in the world of modern media ---Doug Wiken

**Scramble those passwords or else

Lately, those of us with passwords not containing numbers and both upper and lower case text have been getting irritable e-mail and brochures from our ISP. They will apparently allow passwords as short as eight characters. Mine right now has about 15 characters which are not random, but also not obvious.

 My son did a little rough calculating on odds of breaking a password, and there is probably probably not much difference between an eight character password with both upper and lower case characters and also numbers and a twice as long password with only lowercase. But enough of that. I decided to make a grid of letters and also a set of letters with both upper and lower case and numbers on one inch square cardboard so they could be drawn randomly out of a dish. I suppose this could all be done easily with a spreadsheet or database program, but there is something to be said for plain old text that doesn't need to reside on a computer. One of the grids this approach produced is copied below. Click on image for a larger size that will print well on an 8 1/2 by 11 page. Black text is upper and lower case alphabet in order and beneath are paired random characters. Uppercase random characters are in red. Random numbers are in yellow, and lowercase characters are in green in the grid.

 The example provided shows what you can get from an easily remembered block of text by substituting the colored random text. If the above were used to send "secret" messages, it would not be useful after being published. But, if you use it to convert plain text into random text for passwords unknown to the the unscrupulous anyway, it may not make much difference. Play with it and see what gibberish can be generated from an easily remembered block of text kept with the scrambled grid for future use if the scrambled password is lost. Hope this bit of humbug might be useful if you are getting bugged to use new odd passwords.

 

**Stay tuned even if your password is "Everythingisbeautifulinitsownway"--- Doug Wiken