First of all, you’ll need an SD card and an SD card reader. The larger the capacity of the SD card, the better, but I think the maximum that the Wii can use is 2 GB. Once you’ve got your SD card and SD card reader, you’ll need to download WinFF, a GUI for FFmpeg.

After downloading and installing WinFF, you’ll also need the preset for the Wii. First, download the preset. Then simply click Edit -> Presets -> Import and import the preset file you just downloaded.

After adding the preset, click Add in WinFF and locate the video you wish to play on your Wii. Once you’ve done that, click Convert and wait until the conversion has finished. Keep in mind I’ve only tested this once so far and only on Photo Channel 1.0 (as of December, 2007, new Wiis use Photo Channel 1.1 and you can “upgrade” if you choose to, but there is no MP3 support in 1.1). It worked pretty much flawlessly on my first try, but feel free to give me feedback.

• I don’t want to think of females as being different from males. Sure, in some ways they are different. However, what I’m referring to is things not determined by their sex, but by rather by social norms. Females do not like pink, they do not wear dresses or skirts, they do not like dolls, they are not unintelligent, and they do not have other stereotypically “girlie” qualities. The same goes for males; their actions are not merely the result of the sex they were born with. That isn’t to say there aren’t males or females who adhere to various stereotypes, but instead that being male or female does not necessarily mean one will act a certain way.
• You may be thinking I could just be bi/pansexual then. I am heterosexual, and I can’t exactly choose to be attracted to males. Just the idea makes me cringe. Aside from that, there are other reasons I’m opposed to sexuality. Namely, I don’t want to let my body’s desire to reproduce control how I treat or think of others.

There are a few more reasons, and I’ll probably expand it later. For now, this should be enough.
If you wish to contest what I think, please leave a comment as to why you disagree. It’s much easier to explain my view if someone is arguing against me than it is for me to just provide a list of reasons when I’m not aware of what objections people might have.

Update, 2008-06-28: I wasn’t clear at all when I wrote this originally, so I’ll try to be more clear now. I might add more to it later… again. We’ll see.

• The only use pleasure has is to cause unintelligent beings to do things such as eating and making babies. Now that we are intelligent enough to know why we feel the way we do, we shouldn’t let our feelings control us. People should eat to keep themselves alive and reproduce to have children. We shouldn’t need primitive urges that cause us to act without regard to reason. That’s why overeating and sexual harassment exist in our society, for example.
• Human sexuality leads to people treating and thinking of other people differently based on the sex they happened to be born with, i.e., sexism. As stated above, I don’t want to treat males any differently than females or females any differently than males. As far as I’m concerned, the sex I just happened to be born with isn’t a part of “me”.

Note, 2008-07-30: I will, hopefully, turn this into a coherent post in the near future. I’m planning on using the comments from here and elsewhere to write the new post, so thanks for all the critiques everyone!

Wordpress 2.5.1 comes with built-in support for gravatars—globally recognized avatars. Since the last time I visited that website, they’ve been acquired by Automattic, the company that maintains Wordpress, which was a bit of a surprise to me. It used to be really slow and unreliable, but thanks to Automattic that’s no longer the case, at least relatively speaking. As the theme I’m currently using, Rustyfied, is a fairly old theme, I had to modify it to add gravatar support. After quite a bit of trial and error with the site’s CSS, it works perfectly. Just go to Gravatar’s website and sign up, then use the same e-mail you register with there when making comments here, and your avatar will show up. Do the same on other blogs or websites that have Gravatar support, and the same avatar will show up there. If you ever want to change your avatar, you can do so on the Gravatar website, and the changes will be reflected on all of the websites you’ve posted on using that e-mail address. You can even add multiple e-mail addresses to the same Gravatar account.

Remember to rate all of your gravatars the same (hopefully G) because, for example, if you set a PG rated avatar to blahblahblah@example.com, then you change that avatar to a G rated one, all the websites that you posted on with the PG rated avatar won’t reflect that change and will still display your old avatar. This is because Gravatar attaches “r=RATING” to the end of the URL for the image you use, so “r=PG” will result in your old PG-rated image being displayed, while r=”G” will result in your new G-rated image being displayed. Thus the sites won’t update your avatar when you change it if your avatars have different ratings, and by default only G-rated avatars are displayed on Wordpress blogs so it’s a good idea to only use G-rated avatars.

• Information on upgrading from 7.10 to 8.04 from Ubuntu’s website.
• From FOSSwire, there’s a nice Ubuntu cheat sheet that you may find useful. (Found through Lifehacker.)
• A review of Ubuntu 8.04 on InfoWorld and another review on Lifehacker.
• A guide from the Ubuntu Community Documentation on adding software repositories and another tutorial from Psychocats.net’s Ubuntu Tutorials on adding extra repositories. Don’t forget to go into Updates under Software sources and check “Important security updates” and “Recommended updates” if they aren’t already checked. I also recommend checking Main, Universe, Restricted, and Multiverse repositories for easy access to software you might want in the future.
• Last, but not least, a post on UbuntuCat entitled Linux for home users - stop the hype! which warns against overhyping Ubuntu or Linux in general. My view is that Ubuntu is an overall better operating system than Windows, and that people should give the Live CD a try. However, there are many issues you might encounter when beginning to use it. For me, it was mainly connecting to the Internet and getting the sound to work, which took a week or two to deal with after getting my first computer a few months ago. Once I *finally* got pretty much everything working I was very satisfied with Ubuntu. Right now my outstanding problems are getting BitPim to work with my LG Chocolate phone, which I was able to accomplish on Windows XP, and getting Ubuntu to play 3G2 files. Neither are a huge deal, but both are an annoyance that I don’t have on Windows. My point: Unless you’re willing to deal with problems every now and then, don’t use Ubuntu. Not that you won’t have a bunch of problems with Windows either, which has also been the case for me as well.

Update, 2008-04-25: Here’s another good article from Lifehacker on Hardy Heron entitled Hardy Heron Makes Linux Worth Another Look.

The book isn’t really anything special; it’s the typical Creationist nonsense. They try to make Creationism seem as credible as they can by attempting to associate it with science, which is ironic given the skeptical, naturalistic, and empirical nature of science. Some examples of this on the first two pages include Tracker John, who informs us that the Institute for Creation “Research” is “one of the most interesting places in the world” and that “special scientists,” known as “creation scientists,” work at the ICR. They also state that if we keep reading we can find out “some of the many things that ICR scientists have learned about one of God’s mightiest creations – the dinosaurs.” I love how they pretend their “scientists” have actually discovered something about dinosaurs when some people like my grandmother claimed dinosaurs were a conspiracy by the evil, secular scientists. I also had a relative who believed the moon landing was a hoax. I feel so special to have so many critical thinkers in my family.

What’s really disturbing about this book isn’t the contents, but rather the fact that this book is aimed at children who don’t know any better. In the dedication it states that they hope “each of you, at an early age, place your faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, our great Creator and Savior.” Of course they want you to at an early age. If not then, they might actually have to provide valid, thoughtful reasons for their beliefs in order to get you to side with them, and we all know how bad Creationists are at that. Needless to say, I’m glad I rejected those blatant lies.

Apparently there’s been an edit war between people who support one of the two websites going on, but it’s calmed down a bit now. Perhaps because one of Camenker’s accounts has been permanently banned and he’s received multiple warnings.
On another note, MassResistance Watch has a post on this.

However, choosing to believe something simply because you want to believe it doesn’t have to be as extreme as believing God created the Universe in 6 days and rested on the 7th (even God needs a rest every now and then!) and ignoring overwhelming evidence to the contrary. For example, today I was doing my U.S. history homework in my high school’s library, while sitting next to my friend who is a Mormon. I was doing the homework when I noticed it mentioned the Mormons moving Westward, so I showed it to my friend. Her class is a bit behind ours, so she said she can’t wait until her class gets to where we are so she can point out where the history teacher is wrong. I wasn’t sure what she would correct the teacher on exactly, but I guessed it would some sort of historical revisionism based on the dogma of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

I found out one example of what she might “correct” the teacher on when I asked her to look at the passage on the Mormons to see if she saw anything wrong with it when I was done reading the section and answering the questions at the end. Her criticisms were that Joseph Smith was not the founder of the LDS church, but merely reorganized it and that the section skipped over some things, but was accurate for the most part. For a second or two I had no idea who the founder was if not Joseph Smith, but then I realized it. Jesus, of course, was the founder! I asked her and she said I was right. This was only obvious to me because I remember reading that many Christian groups—notably the Catholic Church—claim Jesus to be their founder. With a little bit of critical thinking, that claim is easy to see through. Why would a Christian group claim Christ as their founder? Hm… I wonder. Perhaps to make other churches with different doctrines look illegitimate? It’s surprising (and disturbing) how smart people can’t see through what are obviously falsehoods simply because they happened to be raised with a particular belief system.

On an unrelated note, this article from Catholic Answers, “The Gods of the Mormon Church,” is very ironic. I only looked at it for about ten seconds, and I noticed perhaps two of the most stupid things I’ve seen in the past few days:

• The article says George Orwell did Catholic apologists a “great favor” by coining the term doublethink in the book 1984 (Popularizing the concept of doublethink a favor for those who seek to defend Catholicism? Hahahah!)
• Their criticism of Mormons for having multiple gods, while this has been something Trinitarians have been criticized for time and time again by other monotheists.

I’ve got to get back to my homework; see if you can spot anymore!

I completely agree that religious adherents should not be given exceptions to the law for religious reasons. If I can’t kill an animal just because I feel like it, a follower of Santería shouldn’t be able to kill one either. The person mentioned in the article on the First Amendment Center’s website, however, appears to disagree. He gave the police who arrested him a copy of a 1993 ruling by the Supreme Court, Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah, in which the Supreme Court ruled the law that prevented members of the Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye from sacrificing animals was unconstitutional. This Supreme Court decision does not necessarily let the Santería adherent off the hook, however. In that case, if in fact the City of Hialeah created the law in an attempt to stifle the ability of this religious group to practice their faith, the Supreme Court did the right thing as the law would be a violation of the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause. However, if, in this newer case, the law exists for merely secular reasons and was not created to prevent Santería adherents from sacrificing animals, then, even if it does limit the group’s ability to sacrifice animals, the person who was arrested for violating the law should lose if the case.

If the government unduly gives people the right to violate laws just because the laws prevent them from their religious practices, they are essentially giving people the right to do anything they want under the condition that they claim it’s for religious reasons. I could go torture random non-human animals I find around town and say it’s because my religion commands me to torture them, and then claim the government can’t punish me or else they would be violating my right to exercise my religious beliefs. As long as the government isn’t targeting me for doing that (not that I actually do that; it’s just an example ) because the religion I made up on the spot says I need to, I shouldn’t be justified in breaking the law.

Please list a few reasons as to why you do not respond to “blog memes,” and “tag” at least as many blogs as reasons you list, excluding the blog that tagged you or blogs they tagged and the number of blogs you tag has to be a natural number (i.e., an integer greater than zero).

Reasons:

• They’re a waste of time.
• I try not to make entirely useless posts on my blog.

Blogs:

• Cranial Hyperossification
• Kids of Queers
• …and lastly, Redhead Ranting. Revenge is mine.

Girls inherently have less stamina than boys, and therefore should have lower expectations.
Girls do not inherently have less stamina than boys or else all the girls would be out before any of the boys. There may be reasons as to why, on average, girls cannot or at least do not run as long as boys, but this isn’t necessarily the case.
If girls have, on average, less stamina than boys and this is not just a coincidence, shouldn’t they not be expected to run for as long as boys?
Then why not give lower expectations to people based on weight, how much they exercise, their height, etc.? The more factors that are taken into account, the less meaningful the test becomes.
Unlike when it comes to weight, females can’t simply exercise and become more fit to get rid of their inherent handicap, or, if they do, it requires more exercise than it would require a male to be their equal.
What about males with asthma or other conditions? In the end, all giving boys and girls different standards does, as I just stated, is make the test less meaningful. It also may lower the self-esteem of the girls and it treats the boys unfairly because they’re being held to a higher standard when individual boys don’t necessarily have as much stamina as the girls.
If they’re expected to run as much as boys, it might hurt their self-esteem when they aren’t able to do as well.
If all of the girls are given expectations lower than the expectations of the boys, is that supposed to somehow help their self-esteem to think that they are, by their very nature, lesser than boys athletically?
The test is meant to test how fit one is. A girl who is fit won’t do as well as boy who is fit.
The same goes for boys with asthma or other conditions. Aside from that, it still has the negative effects on both girls and boys I just mentioned. Also, if girls have more of a tendency to do well in certain academic subjects than boys, why shouldn’t girls have to take separate academic tests? It just complicates things and creates sexism when people are held to a different standard based on their sex.

Most of these also apply to the possible arguments as to why people should be held to different standards based on sight differences in age.

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