Wow. Sorry for the deluge of tech posts today, but this is too cool to ignore. Maybe you've already heard of it.

I knew that downhillbattle made cool t-shirts; I didn't know they also made cool software. But check out BlogTorrent — particularly their technical explanation. It lets you run a BitTorrent tracker on any website with PHP! Installation is as simple as uploading a directory! And users don't even have to have BT installed... it wraps downloaded .torrents in a BT executable that works on Windows or Mac!

Frankly, it's taking a lot of effort to keep myself from installing this right away, opening it to the world, and getting sued for millions of dollars. But it does seem likely to doom the RIAA's strategy of going after tracker sites — any jerk can anonymously obtain some PHP hosting (often for free), set this up, and become a mini Pirate Bay. For a few weeks, anyway.

Or maybe I'll just set up a private tracker to distribute important TV shows* to Catherine, Susan and the rest of the 05/06 DC blog diaspora. Either way: I badly wanna play with this toy.

* for which I have obtained legal distribution rights, of course

for those of you who were interested in the whole "art or not" aspect of the borf escapades, there's now streetsy, a blog covering street art and graffiti. (launched by gothamist guru jake dobkin)

check out these shots of the eye of hurricane katrina from a flickr user. it's such a shock that something so beautiful and peaceful from above could be causing such terror and devastation below. (cliche city, here i come.)

anyway, many more flickr shots of katrina and her aftermath can be found here.

Did someone say... HOLOGRAMS!?!

No? Hmm. I was probably just muttering it involuntarily, then. Happens all the time.

Seriously though, this is pretty cool. Sounds like their technology works by causing tiny droplets of water to condense out of the air, which are then used to diffract projected light. It essentially creates a screen of fog in midair, then paints an image onto it with light. Neat. With today's swamp-like DC air, I bet it'd work great here.

When last we left our hero — that'd be you — he had a functioning SSH server running on his Windows machine. You've poked a hole in your firewall and/or router, and maybe you've signed up for a dynamic DNS service. That, or you at least have an IP address. The bare minimum is the same: to proceed from here, you ought to be able to connect to your OpenSSH server with PuTTY when you're away from home.

The remaining tasks are pretty easy:

1. Install Privoxy on the server
2. Set up the SSH tunnel using PuTTY
3. Configure your web browser to use the SSH tunnel

i was planning on heading down to georgetown today for some window shopping and exorcist-stair-viewing (part of the d.c. to-do list). but upon checking weather.com, i'm not so sure anymore...check this out:

Variable clouds with scattered thunderstorms.

Storms could contain tornadoes.

....okay.

so, like, how does a storm contain a tornado? it seems like it should be the other way around.