User Blogs

Create victimless crimes, imprison people (ideally in privatized prisons from which the ruling class gets kickbacks, or which they own) and then demonize them when they are freed to increase recidivism, because incarcerating the same people over and over minimizes the chance that the voters will notice. This is the right hand of the devil.

This diatribe is a response to a discussion containing repeated assertations of "false equivalence" between the Democrats and Republicans. I don't believe that individual Democrats and Republicans are equivalent, and I don't even believe that left to their own devices, the people who make up these parties wouldn't go in different directions. I believe that we have a system that permits the corporations to juggle us between these two parties, reducing them to a distracting false front that distorts our view of the actual situation: corporate governance.

I recently became reinterested in pogoplug devices when they seemed to have come down to a fairly reliable ten to twenty dollars for the latest models, the kind with an SD slot. They're nice little ARM-based machines with a lovely case and pads for a 3.3 volt serial port. Now I wanted to add a little basic functionality to them when running Debian.

I picked up a Vertical Communications 7504-10 IP phone from a yard sale a little while ago on the assumption that since it was standards-based (SIP) that I'd be able to use it with Asterisk. Browsing around with google only revealed one thread where someone claimed that you could make the phones work, but said nothing about getting into the phone in the first place. But as it turns out, it's actually quite easy to configure these phones to work with an arbitrary SIP provider.

Once I bought a dockstar, and was mightily annoyed by it. Eventually new Pogoplugs came out, and I invested a whopping nine bucks in a used pogoplug mobile. After having it deregistered by support, I tried installing ArchLinuxARM on it. This produced a brick with a flashing green light, so do not try to install Arch for ARM on this device. It's probably possible to make it work, but the default install instructions don't work. Further, the revert process didn't work either! Seems like their u-boot is broken for this device.