[2004/05/29]

→ i have no idea what i would use this for (and i've been trying to think of something) but asterisk, the "Open Source Linux PBX" is geeky-exciting. i'm still a bit fuzzy on how it interfaces with POTs lines, but looks like it's something to do with digium. | comment 0

[2004/05/25]

→ from pete, and article on cicadas in the nyt titled the orgy in your backyard. choice quote: "The cicadas will outweigh the population of the United States (even with our obesity problems) by a factor of nearly two. And consider the excrement that these insects are going to rain down in backyards and parks — enough liquid waste to fill 300 Olympic-sized swimming pools a day. A few weeks after their arrival, the cicadas will die, leaving piles of depleted corpses and more than 500 trillion eggs. In a single square mile of forest with the densest populations, there will be as many eggs as there are stars in the Milky Way."

→ short little article on what do macs and islam have in common? interesting take on both.

[2004/05/19]

→ i'm not convinced this is the right option for any of my sites, but just the idea of giving users' the results of a search instead of a 404 page is really great. there's gotta be something up on nelson's site about the user effects of this. | comment 1

→ ok, i like mt a lot. i've got my main sites running on it, but the new pricing scheme for 3 is making me think twice about the long-term. this article on moving from movable type to wordpress is one of a half dozen good places to start. undecided what my next move is. blogger is, ironically, looking a heck of a lot better now.

→ one of the main gaps in setting up a machine to act as a music server for a small office (either directly connected to the stereo or feeding a slimp3/squeezebox/roku) has been how to get music into the darn itunes library (since slimp3 takes it from there). well, a little searching today finally turned up a simple, elegant solution on a site called atmaspheric. the missing link, of course had been the Add to iTunes Folder Action which is from doug adam's site. what should still be added to this script, of course, is some housecleaning; after the file is added to itunes (and, assuming itunes prefs are set to do this, the file is copied to the library folder and filed), it should be moved to a "copied to itunes" folder (or to the trash). that i haven't looked at yet. | comment 0 | trackback 0

[2004/05/18]

→ i'm playing w pulpfiction and the feeds off of typepad are much more useful than those off generic mt installs. which i eventaully realized was because they were full atom feeds not just rss snippets. and so i found this article on atom for mt. at first glance doesn't look like i can upg to MT 2.65 anymore, so i just removed the MTIfNonEmpty tags and crossed my fingers. suspect the absence of the MTEntryModifiedDate tag is gonna mess me up, tho.

[2004/05/12]

→ so it sounds like maybe those hybrid gas/electric cars (like the honda prius) are not living up to their marketing. good ole /. has a post on how they don't live up to mileage claims. that sucks. for those of you who want to keep the geek quotient down, the story looks like it came from a pair of articles over at wired and consumer reports (link doesn't go to the actual article).

→ i'm excited about this app. the whole RSS, XML, Atom feed/syndication thing hasn't really caught my interest yet, but i think pulpfiction might change that. the fact that it keeps copies of posts and allows you to search old ones seems extremely handy. once this comes out (in a few days) i'm planning to try it out and see if i become an RSS convert.

→ looks like our soy-neighbor adult world has died and relaunched as rothko.

[2004/05/10]

→ trying out another tracker named reinvigorate. the name caught my eye first, then the very all grey and elegant/snappy design of the site kept it.

→ they seem to be having some intermittent php/sql probs (all those warnings at the top of the pages) but these powerbook fixit guide series looks like a great resource for all of those people without access to apple's take apart manuals.

[2004/05/08]

→ so all of you who read cryptonomicon, will already be familar with van eck phreaking (interested in a good article on it? the link is a PDF, btw), but how about the acoustic equivalent? dude. . . (yeah, from /. of course) | comment 1

[2004/05/07]

→ the read print site looks like a wonderful resource, especially for those who, ahem, are making their own reading lists for the summer and whose, ahem, preferences tend towards classics over newfangled texts. | comment 0

→ i asked my mom how one knows when to use that and when to use which. in case you were wondering which was correct: "It boils down to this: if you can tell which thing is being discussed without the which or that clause, use which; if you can't, use that."

[2004/05/06]

→ an interesting point for someone i know, is the point that today the United States has far more trees than in the 1920's

→ i've wondered about this for a while. recycling is one of things that sounds good, but does it actually have a net positive effect? according to an episode of the showtime penn & teller show on recycling, it sucks. is it overall good or bad? p&t obviouslyt think so, but their core argument seems to be that since recycling costs more than dumping in landfills, it is obviously a waste (except for aluminum cans; that they concede makes great sense). while the show is comedic in tone, it does make some grand ascertions, many of which it doesn't back up. for example, part of their argument is that it costs more energy (ie. electricity, fuel) to pickup, process, handle recyclables than it would to just get more of the raw materials (glass, paper), but they don't provide any real sources for this or any specifics. hm. | comment 1

→ it appears that graphite furnace has become two dishes but to one table, and had a bit of a template change while it was at it. . .

→ so they same riaa that wants to sue everyone it can find to "help the artists" also, oops, forgets to pay those same artists $50 million in royalties. ooh, sorry. maybe they were just distracted until spitzer sued 'em? or maybe they like courts more than music?

[2004/05/05]

→ calling these bent paperclips simply doesn't do them justice.

→ so we try to be clear to clients that yes OS X is slower on the same hardware than OS 9 was (this is from /. btw) and then bang, along comes something like this: Microsoft is expected to recommend that the 'average' Longhorn PC feature a dual-core CPU running at 4 to 6GHz; a minimum of 2 gigs of RAM; up to a terabyte of storage; a 1 Gbit, built-in, Ethernet-wired port and an 802.11g wireless link; and a graphics processor that runs three times faster than those on the market today.'" ok. that's a lot of hardware for an average machine. and, for all you normal people, Longhorn is to WindowsXP as OS X is to OS 9 (oversimplifying here; apologies to those who see i'm skipping some big differences). | comment 0

→ it seems almost too baldfaced, too conspiracy-theory-lover-esque to think that this disney forbidding miramax from distributing michael moore's new film could really be about florida: "Disney came under heavy criticism from conservatives last May after the disclosure that Miramax had agreed to finance the film when Icon Productions, Mel Gibson's company, backed out. Mr. Moore's agent, Ari Emanuel, said Michael D. Eisner, Disney's chief executive, asked him last spring to pull out of the deal with Miramax. Mr. Emanuel said Mr. Eisner expressed particular concern that it would endanger tax breaks Disney receives for its theme park, hotels and other ventures in Florida, where Mr. Bush's brother, Jeb, is governor." | comment 1

→ this one is so totally for rach (and from kottke; ok, from here on out, everything today is from him unless otherwise indicated) fantasy reading list for a "future" course.

→ this name statistics page (from kottke of course) tells us that around 808,500 US men are named jason, that noah is the #458 most common male name and a very rare femal name, and landow is pretty much unique (not literally, i presume, since i do have a family who share that name; statistically insignificant perhaps), that bennett is the #77 most common last name and rachel the #79 most common female name (earie, huh. nearly a perfect tie). and if we had been speaking of the anonyminity in the intermagoogleweb era, i'd mention that around 1,552,500 US last names are brown and around 2,894,675 US men are named david. that's a lot. | comment 0

→ headlines for this kind of link about implanting RFID tags subcutaneously to allow VIP access to a club usually make some mark of the beast reference. i'm going to skip over that aspect (and the privacy concerns bit) and just enjoy the use of beautiful men and women of the nightclub scene and implantee to refer to the same people: "All it takes is a syringe-injected microchip implant for the beautiful men and women of the nightclub scene to breeze past a 'reader' that recognizes their identity, credit balance and even automatically opens doors to exclusive areas of the club for them. . . 'By simply passing by our reader, the Baja Beach Club will know who you are and what your credit balance is,' Conrad K. Chase explains. Chase is director of the Baja Beach Club in Barcelona. 'From the moment of their implantation they will also have free entry and access to the VIP area,' he said." and "Applied Digital Solutions unveiled the original VeriChip immediately after the 9-11 tragedy. Similar to pet identification chips, the VeriChip is a syringe-injectable radio frequency identification microchip that can be read from a few feet away by either a hand-held scanner or by the implantee walking through a 'portal' scanner."

[2004/05/03]

→ this book called Core CSS sounds great. just what i've wanted to get up to speed and polish my teeth a bit on cascading style sheets. | comment 0

→ this has nothing to do with any of microsoft's multitude of antitrust court cases going on around the world. but apparently gates personally has bee fined $800,000 for antitrust violations. that is a stunningly large number. and seems like kind of an odd oversight to have made.