updated my flickr stream with some holiday photos, if you're into that sort of thing. yay christmas!

Like Catherine, I worry that musical lameness is overtaking me. And, also like Catherine, I think that this is Catherine's fault. This whole move-to-Chicago business has wreaked havoc with my capacity for indie rock snobbery. For years now I've been relying on my lovely girlfriend for news of the Hot New Thing in music. In return I stood ready to update her on the most important developments in first person shooters, should she ask. It was a good arrangement.

But now I'm hopelessly behind the times. In fact, it was only yesterday that I started listening to Stylus's fifty best singles of 2005 (despite having already inflicted it on our party guests). To my surprise, a lot of it is surprisingly blah. Some of the tracks are embarassingly awful (that Juelz Santana track has a nice sample, but the rapping makes me think K-Fed's got a future). Some tracks (Helen Love) feel like placeholders, waiting for the arrival of the real subgenre smash that they represent. And I still don't understand the heaps of praise that LCD Soundsystem receives — it's all very proficient, but the hooks just don't hook me. It wasn't that great a year for singles, I guess (Since U Been Gone and Backstreet Boys' triumphantly melodramatic return notwithstanding).

But there are a few things on the list that are worth checking out that I hadn't heard before. All of which is my circuitous way of saying that Imogen Heap's Hide And Seek is pretty astounding, the first virtuoso vocoder performance that I've ever heard. You can listen to it here.

I can never share the gospel of Attack of the Show with anyone besides Charles because a) Comcast doesn't carry G4 and b) there aren't enough colossal dorks around here. But if you've got DirecTV and a computer, you really ought to watch. Parts may be completely incomprehensible to those not yet beyond redemption, but the cast has enough charm and wit to keep everything moving. Right now I'm watching their year-end Best Of The Cons show, and it's pretty entertaining. But then, I'm the kind of guy who geeks out when he sees Scott Moschella or Phillip Torrone on camera.

Speaking of cons, here's something Defcon-y: TEMPEST phreaking. Remote viewing of television screens by detection of the radio frequency noise they emit was just a rumor back in the bad old BBS days, when I and scores of other antisocial geeks spent their evenings debating whether ymodem or zmodem was the superior protocol for transferring copies of the Anarchist's Cookbook amongst ourselves. Later on I heard mutterings about the government's standards for RF shielding in secret facilities; and it was hard to miss those signs in various defense contractor conference rooms explaining which TVs could be used to display secret material and which could not. Now, a real-world example: download this program, stick a radio in front of your monitor, and point the app at an mp3. It'll display patterns on the screen that are designed to produce waste noise that'll be picked up by the radio. You're playing an mp3 out of your monitor! If you can do this with the junk you've got hanging around your house, it seems like a safe bet that dedicated hackers can see what's on your television from behind a wall or across a street.

Unfortunately I haven't got any computer CRTs hanging around — and although televisions have the same vulnerability, the odds of this working with a laptop-to-TV setup seems unlikely anough that I'm not prepared to expend the effort hooking everything up (North American (NTSC) TVs are interlaced and have different refresh rates than monitors — the noise they produce would be very different). So I haven't given it a shot myself. Still, it looks pretty cool.

Sean "Puffy" Combs on the Proactiv acne-fighting system:

"I didn't want no bumps on my face. I'ma be straight up with you."

...

"It moisturizes my situation; preserves my sexy; an then I'm off to doin' what I need to do."

To be fair, that joint was thoroughly moisturized. Double tru.