Open letter to congress on the renewal of the Patriot Act

Good morning congresspeople,

I am writing to emphasize the serious concerns arising due to the upcoming renewal of the Patriot act (due for renewal on June 1). Specifically, I would like to emphasize concerns with section 215. I find it incredibly broadly worded, and am worried about the consequences - especially concerning the privacy of US citizens.

In the upcoming process to renew it, please work with your congressional colleagues to eliminate this section, and replace it with specific enumerated powers for the NSA with regards to data collection. I strongly feel that those powers should be minimal. Ideally this would mean that they could not collect data without a warrant for data pertaining to a specific individual.

Even if the surveillance powers need to be much broader, I still urge you to work to enumerate such powers specifically rather than leave a broadly worded statement in the law.

Thank you for your time,
Peter Solfest

How to make a slideshow background for Ubuntu (scripted)

I have finally gotten sick of the backgrounds that come stock with Ubuntu, and wanted a slideshow.
Unfortunately, Ubuntu (I'm using 14.04 with a Unity interface) does not provide an easy way of doing this. So below is a script you can run to add a slideshow of images as a background option.

There are many graphical apps to do this (e.g., see this blog post 3-awesome-ubuntu-apps-for-wallpaper-slideshow/), but I a) like to know what's going on, b) am not a big fan of installing more apps than I need and c) discovered that this is a fairly easy problem to script away.

So without further ado, here is the script: MakeBackground.sh

How to use it
1) fill up a directory (henceforth known as <PicDir>) with images to loop through in the slideshow
2) download MakeBackground.sh
3) run '. MakeBackground.sh <PicDir> <Name>' in a terminal, where <Name> is the name you wish to give this slideshow (no spaces in <PicDir> or <Name>.

Details/Thoughts
============
-This background will break if you remove images from the <PicDir>, so leave it somewhere where you are unlikely to move pictures out of it (or leave a reminder for yourself)

-This script in and of itself works and sets up 15 minutes between transitions which last 5 seconds.

-This is kind of a scriptified version of the information found on https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SlideshowWallpapers

How To Create a Minecraft Desktop Launcher in Unity (Ubuntu 12.04)

I had recently decided to install and play minecraft on my desktop running Ubuntu 12.04, and after a couple of times got sick of having to open it up from the terminal all the time - so I decided to make a desktop shortcut. I figured I would post how I did this to save others some time. This should also allow for the easy creation of desktop shortcuts for other programs as well.

To make this work make sure that you know where the minecraft.jar file is and download an image for the desktop icon. (You can download the jar at http://www.minecraft.net/download. I used the icon at the following link http://fav.me/d36xhh8)

The first thing you need to do is create a .desktop file on your desktop. Copy/paste the following into your favorite text editor:

[Desktop Entry]

Name=Minecraft

GenericName=mcLaunch

Comment=Launches Minecraft

Type=Application

Exec=java -jar <Directory>/minecraft.jar -Xms 4096M

Icon=<Directory>/minecraftIcon.png

Terminal=false

Categories=Game;

Name[en_US]=Minecraft

for a full explanation of what all this does see Anatomy of a .desktop File.

Make sure to replace the bolded values with the appropriate directory (in place of directory) and memory allocation (in place of 4096M - 4 GB of RAM dedicated). Furthermore, if your image name is different make sure to replace it.

Save this file in your ~/Desktop/ directory with the filename Minecraft.desktop

The next thing you need to do is make sure that the file is executable. The easiest way to do this is right click on the desktop icon, select properties -> Permissions and fill in the box next to "Allow executing file as program". Alternatively, open up a terminal, cd into the Desktop directory, and type the following comand:

sudo chmod +x Minecraft.desktop

When you do this the icon you selected should be visible on your desktop, and double clicking it will launch minecraft.