Hey, I found this ol' thing, just in time for 2016 campaigning to start. 2008 didn't go my way but I have a good feeling about this one. Edit from 2018: You all thought I was joking, and look how that turned out.

Together, we too can be stung by swarms of hungry angry bees. [audio m4a="http://www.junipermonkeys.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Africa.m4a"][/audio]

I found a copy of Red Star OS, the official OS of the DPRK, online here. Due to the complex way in which the Monkeyses of two generations past partied, my Korean is passable, so I thought it would be funny to try using only Red Star for a week. This proved impossible. But it's still sort of interesting. The Kim Family Seal of Quality! Installation is super-easy. I installed it on R. Monkeys' old laptop (so I hope she doesn't read this website). The installer is basically a rip-off of Mac OS X, so if you're familiar with that you can pretty much guess what goes where. I'm going to skip a bunch of screenshots, so if you're interested in seeing all the steps, just grab the torrent. It's free, Virtual Box is free. That is how life is in the DPRK. It feels just like Mangyongdae People's Comforting Home Combine #332! Creating your account happens right away. Some stuff happens. This took about 15 minutes because R. Monkeys' old laptop has a slow HDD. I sung that "evvvvery rooooose has its thorn" song until I was asked to stop. Hackin' the Gibson. When you get to the desktop it's pretty clear that Kim Somebody uses a Mac and yelled at someone to make Red Star 3 look like OS X. Red Stars 1 and 2 were just super Linux-ey. But in 3, everything is pretty familiar if you're a Mac user. The only real difference is the character input pane in the upper right, as well as the non-clickable red flag to remind you to be self-reliant. The Finder is familiar. You also get the same "View Options" controls for desktop icon sizes, spacing, and so on... ...thus catering to those "Labels on the right" freaks. System Preferences are familiar... ...right down to Spaces, and OS X's meagre "colored or grey dots" customization options. You can also customize the Dock in the exact same ways. When you pin it to the sides, it goes 2D just as OS X's does. Several charming desktops are included. I couldn't find sources for the couple I tried. A couple of them have DPRK stuff crudely photoshopped in. ...like so. Basically it's like OS X from a parallel universe. You get a browser, media player, calendar, address book, PDF viewer, PDF creator, calculator, image viewer, text editor, Font Book, and a few utilities, including a Disk Utility ripoff, a Terminal ripoff, and a Network Utilities ripoff. The most charming addition was some handy sheet music software. I assume this is open source from somewhere. It's good for writing revolutionary operas, or tributes to King Sejong. The reason I abandoned my plan to use it for a week, though, is that the browser — bastardized Mozilla called Naenara — seems to only be able to access the DPRK intranet, also called Naenara. No outside internet. Probably should have seen that one coming. So if you can't look at the internet, what's left to do? Watch imperialist media. So I stuck my USB stick in ... which was formatted in unrecognized ExFAT. DPRK Disk Utilities offered to initialize it for me. I said "Okay", which resulted in five minutes of beachballing (yeah, they replicated the beachball) and then a hard crash. But when I restarted, I found myself with a new EXT3 stick. Macs can't read EXT3, which I had forgotten. Eventually we all agreed upon FAT, and I watched a video about American imperialists and the failure of capitalism. The file is actually quite nice; DPRK Video helpfully adds what appears to be horrible artifacting, but is in fact just a trendy 16-bit effect to get the kids into Red Star. That was really the end of anything interesting to do. If my Korean were better and I was smarter about Linux, I'm sure there would be more fun things to try, but as it stood, all the puke-colored icons were starting to wear on me. If you could unlock Naenara, Red Star would be totally useable, though. I am happily using the Red Star laptop to view DCS plane manuals while my iPad is charging. Edit: Someone did get root — unlocked Naenara etc.

Ah, to be young again, and also an MP3 player.

Usually I draw all the dumb crap that appears here and elsewhere with the big version of the older Wacom Bamboo, which I think was called the Wacom Bamboo Create. It does everything I need and I didn't really want a fancy Intuos or anything, because I'm pretty lousy at drawing so crayons would work just as well. I did want a Cintiq, but $1000 is a lot of money for digimal crayons. I got an original-model refurb Surface Pro for $280 though, and I actually like it a lot. I still wouldn't wanna use anything but a Mac for real life stuff, but the Surface Pro is a great "SketchBook Pro terminal" in the same way that my gaming PC is a great "Steam terminal".   The hardware feels really nice, the pen aside (I got a Wcom Bamboo Feel stylus to replace the bad pack-in). It's not as nice as modern Apple stuff, but it is almost as nice. Generally, it's pretty much exactly what I'd hoped it'd be. Cheap way to get a Wacom pen on a screen. There are a couple problems. When drawing for a while it becomes apparent that a) it gets pretty hot (although the fans are barely audible), and b) even after calibration, the digitizer accuracy in the corners — say within 1 cm from the edges — isn’t great. Both of these issues are things the Surface Pro 2 goes a long way toward fixing, with Haswell and the newer digitzer… but considering this thing was $280, and the cheapest Pro 2 I could find was that $490 one, I don’t think that either is necessarily a problem serious enough that I’d pay $200 to fix (the Pro 2 also gets solidly better battery life, of course). As far as the CPU goes, it doesn’t actually exhibit stylus lag — that’d be awful (apparently the SP3 with the N-Trig digitizer does) — it just gets pretty warm. SketchBook Pro hits the CPU a lot, and certainly makes my 2013 MacBook Air heat up and spin its fan to at least 60%, so the Surface isn’t alone.

I haven’t done a lot of research, so there may be some trick to calibrating the stylus for the edges that improves things. I did the Wacom driver’s built-in calibration routine, but I’m never really sure about those. It’s the ol’ “tap the target” deal that would be familiar to any Palm III/V user, and I’m always worried that I didn’t hit the target properly, or was holding the stylus funny, or something. Looks like you can at least brute-force Windows into taking more calibration data — the Wacom driver has just four points in regular mode, or 24 in its special “edge calibration” mode. So I'll be screwing around more with that when I have time, but it's not super-crucial, since it's only the edges where the calibration is iffy anyway.

Pretty cool, on the whole, especially considering it’s 2.5 years old and counting. It kind of makes me regret that I'm not a Windows person, at least until the point I have to jump out of SketchBook and use Windows. Anyway, highly recommended if you too are looking for a ghetto Cintiq.

Eyyy it's this ol' guy, from the first junipermonkeys.com in 2002. Pixel fonts all over the damn place.

I have a business idea on which the ground floor has available space: smartwatches for ennui. It uses advanced motion detection and all that junk to measure the user's listlessness and dissatisfaction with the state of their life. Like the Apple Health thing, or Fitbit, but for people that are into more than all that jumping and leaping and running about business. So it records all this data, and — the word "gamify" having been run solidly into the ground at this point — it rewards your sadness with a series of achievements. Using Bluetooth it can sync with the wearer's phone to collect enhanced statistics like "Quantity of Cup-of-Soup Bought" and "Hours Spent Driving Aimlessly". I think this device can revolutionize the sort of modern emptiness that epitomizes modern Quebec. And it can revolutionize your emptiness too, American investor. Let's aggregate our co-marketing strengths to do the stuff. Ennui Watch. www.partybutts.club, my tree fort, eight o'clock. Bring a Chinese OEM and a copy of AutoCAD. Together, we can own and operate the dream of every human, which is to have a data center inside an old missile silo, and have lots of blinking lights in there.

Norwegian Forest cats were prized for their hunting prowess, even serving as mousers on Viking ships. Given natural skill like this, it comes as no surprise to me that yesterday Ollie managed to successfully stalk and catch his very first gummy worm — natural enemy of the hunting cat. He then forgot where the gummy worm was and retired for an evening of prideful cleaning of his own ass. Truly, a credit to his ancestors.

"Dare we endear ourselves to these modern tunes?" “Sirrah! There is no choice, for we have already become Modern. Do tell sir, by what other means would thine hairstyle have so deftly reconfigured itself before my very eyes?" “Gads and damn! Tell me, spirit, tell me how my hair has done this to itself. By what power — I say — what is this hair now called.” “Sir, your hairstyle is now a ‘faux-hawke’.” "Damn that modern music, and damn the Associates Jonas! Tell them... tell them... I love them."

It is the age of SOUND!