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First Amendment

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first_amendmentI am going to digress a bit from my usual posts to cover something that has been bugging me.

As many will know, I work for a University. Specifically in the Journalism School. As such, the First Amendment to the US Constitution is rather important to us. For those that don’t have it handy, it says:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Okay. So, what’s that first word? Congress. Got it? You sure? Good. So, tell me, when companies censor comments, or suspend actors for spewing hate… How is that a First Amendment issue? If they contacted the FBI and they the busted down your door, yes, that COULD qualify, since the government was then involved.

Don’t get me wrong: free speech is a good thing. Many countries do not have anything like this. So organizing and/or speaking against your government may result in serious penalty. Heck, the UK doesn’t even have a right to free speech! And if a company was founded on some promise of free speech, and proceeded to censor comments, or employees, then they are certainly breaking that promise and should reconsider (though, I can’t imagine a corporation being founded on something like this). But the First Amendment is there to prevent the to government from stepping on free speech. And the more we hear people spew the First Amendment defense, the more we all just roll out eyes, and miss the times when it truly is an issue.

That is all. We now return to our previously nerdy content.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

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the-hobbit-the-desolation-of-smaug-posterPeter Jackson earned a fair amount of ire when it was announced he had taken a book that has all of 320 pages, and broken it up into the same number of movies as The “Lord of the Rings” which comes in at almost 3x the size (nearly 1200 pages). How could he possibly take 9 hours to tell a story? To answer, it would seem he has used the opposite of what he did with LoTR, in that he’s expanded areas previously only touched on in the book, unlike in LoTR where entire sections were cut (Tom Bombadil, for example). (Un)fortunately he’s also added characters from LoTR that were unmentioned in “The Hobbit”, which we’ll get to.

The movie starts out pretty much exactly where the previous one left off… which was expected. Obviously it would behoove the viewer to re-watch the first movie a few days/hours before viewing this installment, as otherwise a year has passed, and some information may have been forgotten. The movies were all filmed at the same time, so there are no instances of the actors looking different between the movies, which is quite pleasant. What was a bit disconcerting is how much Orlando Bloom aged between LoTR and this movie. In LoTR he was in his 20’s. In this movie, his face had filled out and he looked very different. So maybe Elves age and then de-age. =)

Special Effects and video quality looked much improved from the first movie. There was one specific scene in the first movie (in the goblin mines) where everything looked very soft. I think this was due to the convertion from 48fps to 24fps. They seem to have fixed that in both the DVD/Blu-ray release, as well as this new movie where this didn’t ever seem to be the case. Everything looked quite sharp.

Much like “Two Towers”, this movie had a lot of action in it, but unlike many action oriented movies, it had few instances where the action seemed to drag, unlike “Two Towers”. The only overly long action scene was unique enough that is stayed interesting. Smaug himself was introduced in the movie, and is voiced and played (motion capture) by Benedict Cumberbatch (Sherlock (which also has Martin Freeman as Watson), “Star Trek Into Darkness“). Smaug was, extremely well done, and extremely well acted.

All and all, the continuation of “The Hobbit” from Peter Jackson is a worthy sequel, and by all accounts, a better movie than it’s predecessor. The movie lacks the incessant gross-out humor of the first movie, and also feels much more rounded with a clear goal ahead. There were no points in the movie where I felt the plot strayed enough from the book to be a bother, and it felt like a better movie than the first, which I couldn’t say about “Two Towers” vs. “Fellowship of the Ring”. I would recommend seeing it.

[xrr rating=5/5]

Retrieving steps data from Fitbit API

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phpI recently got a FitBit One (review forthcoming), and one of the big reasons I got it was their open API. Basically, the FitBit will sync over Bluetooth 4.0 (Lower Power) when it sees it’s Dongle, or if you have an iPhone/Android phone, it can sync to that in the background. That data syncs up to the FitBit website, at which point you can pull the data back down using their API… at least, that was my hope.

After playing with things for a few days, I finally got this working, and my steps information will now dynamically update. I still am not sure how I’ll correct for issues like being out of town, etc… but I’ll figure something out.

Anyway, since no one seems to have detailed how to do this with PHP, I thought I would here. This is all assuming you’ll only be grabbing your own info.

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