The second funniest thing about this Onion article is that it's almost sort of true. If you include Japanese wrestlers, anyway.
It'd be the funniest thing if not for the graphic of the luchadores doing planchas over the fence.
ALSO: Has it really been a year since Wrestlemania? Apparently so, 'cuz this year's is happening on Sunday. Anyone interested/know what the hell is going on in the WWE these days? A quick glance reveals that Rey Mysterio is competing for the heavyweight championship. Times (and steroid regimens) have changed, apparently.
Remember how Sony's UMD format for the PSP was unexpectedly taking off? And everyone was surprised at the sudden success of a proprietary format with nothing to offer anyone who wasn't a Sony shareholder?
Yeah, turns out that was bullshit. Walmart is dropping the format following poor sales, and studios are beginning to cease production of UMD movies.
So how's the proprietary-format scorecard looking, Sony? Betamax? MiniDisc? And how's Blu-Ray shaping up? The only reason Memory Stick is sold at all is because Sony devices require it. Nobody else uses it; its price and performance characteristics make it a loser.
I know, I know: Sony helped invent the Compact Disc standard, then successfully licensed it. But Phillips handled the licensing (and much of the technology) for that, did it intelligently, and consequently avoided dooming the format to proprietary obscurity.
It's a beautiful dream, locking people into a format you own and then squeezing money out of them. But it doesn't work anymore. It'd be nice if the Sonys (and Apples) of the world would knock it off, rather than stranding their customers with useless devices every half decade.
Oh, Howie, Howie, Howie. First you post a picture of Turkey and claim that it's peaceful, kite-flyin', tube-top-wearin' Baghdad. But sadly, people recognize subtle, seemingly impossible-to-notice inconsistencies — things like, oh, say, Turkish writing. Suspicions are raised. And then bloggers find a different photo of the same street corner, taken from another perspective, on PhotosOfTurkeyNotIraq.com (or something similar). The jig is utterly up.
What to do? Damage control. Blame an intern, put up a shot from your REAL Baghdad vacation, and apologize for the misunderstanding. It's a not-very-convincing aerial shot, but hey, it's something.
Except whoops! Looks like you didn't scrub the metadata from the new shot. Turns out the photo was taken on July 13, 2005. Which, it seems safe to say, probably doesn't qualify as occurring during your "recent" trip.
Also, now your website is down. Not the greatest example of an effective online political strategy, I'm afraid.
sometimes, random news articles brighten may day just a little bit. this piece about lewis, the crazy cat, is one of them.
FAIRFIELD, Conn. (AP) -- Residents of the neighborhood of Sunset Circle say they have been terrorized by a crazy cat named Lewis. Lewis for his part has been uniquely cited, personally issued a restraining order by the town's animal control officer.
"He looks like Felix the Cat and has six toes on each foot, each with a long claw," Janet Kettman, a neighbor said Monday. "They are formidable weapons."
The neighbors said those weapons, along with catlike stealth, have allowed Lewis to attack at least a half dozen people and ambush the Avon lady as she was getting out of her car.
i love the part about "the Avon lady." like, they don't even name her. she's just The one and only avon lady. who cats hate. awesome.
It's pretty disappointing to see BoingBoing post about "electrosensitivity", an imagined allergy to electrical noise. People have been looking for a connection between electromagnetic fields and cancer for ages without much luck. Now I guess the kooks are retreating to claims that these mysterious (and therefore evil) rays are causing vague and difficult-to-quantify declines in quality of life and, I don't know, aura color, maybe?
All of that would be fine if it didn't seem so likely to be embraced, extended, and eventually put on the cover of Time with a big headline ending in a question mark. We've already got every nerd with a Perl book and a twin bed going around explaining to the world how he has Asperger's. I really, really don't need hypochondriacs seated next to me on airplanes to start asking me to shut off my laptop for the flight's duration.
None of this is to deny that some people might get headaches from the omnipresent 60 Hz hum that surrounds North American electricity users. But that's something different entirely from the high-tech animism that motivates this disease-of-the-week nonsense. Bah! Remember, BoingBoing: electricity good, patent regime bad...
Justin reports that cops are handing out jaywalking tickets in the Golden Triangle this morning. Beware! Also, as always please bear in mind that your downtown business district may be haunted. Take appropriate precautions.
oh my god. can we make any more lame-o stereotypical nicknames involving some retardation of yuppie? we've got the yupster, and now new york magazine gives us the grups.
...oh cripes. just reading into the article, i have discovered, though i am a 26-year-old female, i am apparently a grupster:
Let's start with a question. A few questions, actually: When did it become normal for your average 35-year-old New Yorker to (a) walk around with an iPod plugged into his ears at all times, listening to the latest from Bloc Party; (b) regularly buy his clothes at Urban Outfitters; (c) take her toddler to a Mommy's Happy Hour at a Brooklyn bar; (d) stay out till 4 A.M. because he just cant miss the latest New Pornographers show, because who knows when Neko Case will decide to stop touring with them, and everyone knows shes the heart of the band;...
except for the having of a toddler part. i have not hidden a toddler away in my shoe closet of doom, nor am i with toddler, but i totally will subject my toddler one day to the stylings of radiohead. and lo, he will be a moody adolescent.
UPDATE: oh my god. reading even more into the article, i find out that "grups" is actually a star trek reference. arghghahahahgghh! did i tell you, about the saturday night, that i spent with tommy last week, where he was flipping between star trek and anime on tv and, when those were on commercials, watching battlestar gallactica on his computer's dvd player? nothing to do with this post, really, just wanted to tell you that. although i have to admit that the anime was princess mononoke and i liked it, and BG actually seemed really good.
i have gotten some questions about these black leather strappy boots, and as a service to humanity, i'm letting you know they're made by seychelles. but, i cannot find them online anymore. i bought them last fall from olive & bettes when i saw them noted in, of all places, US weekly. as a result of that placement, they were pretty much sold out, and my order was placed on backorder for like two months. i almost forgot i had bought them until they showed up on my doorstep. like a present from the shoe god...anyway, i searched ebay and some other sources, but couldn't find them, so if you want to buy them, i think you might be outta luck. which might be okay, as people might be terrified of you if you wear them with a miniskirt.
UPDATE: i found them! (in brown) yes, i know, expensive. so sue me.
so here's the thing. i'm thinking about doing me some yoga.
this is very out-of-character for me. i'm a hit-the-treadmill, lift-a-few-weights, leave-the-gym sort of gal. my normal workout routine consists of 4-5 miles, stretching, and some arm weights if i'm feeling enterprising. i avoid with a passion all other machines (except when i'm on a spinning streak). i think the elliptical is the pussiest machine alive and i've never had a good workout on it (though i do appreciate that it is a good alternative for people whose joints, knees, etc won't allow them to run).
but i'm getting bored with the just running. spinning in the darkness just became too much for me, and there is no way in hell i am every taking anything resembling a step aerobic class, because i have witnessed the coordination needed for those things first-hand, and since i cannot so much do the laundry without tripping on my face, i am having none of it.
and most of all: let's face, i'm getting old. i could use some release for my stiff joints and tight muscles, and i think yoga might be just the ticket, as well as being a good complement to my running routine.
but it is scary. and foreign. and, like, omg, am i going to be a granola-eating pussy forever if i do it? i mean i can't even get a handle on the kinds of yoga out there. my gym offers ashtanga yoga? hatha yoga? forrest yoga? iyengar yoga, which "features use of props such as blocks and straps." PROPS? or heated yoga? heat? or the ever-popular offering of Yoga With Balls? do i need to buy a mat? do i need special clothes (the one part of the whole enterprise that i might not mind dealing with?) do i need to be super-bendy? yogabloggers, help!
Wow. What a spectacularly unproductive evening. I got sidetracked helping a new acquaintance set up a VNC/SSH setup, and even that didn't work.
So it's now 1AM, because god dammit I was determined to get something productive accomplished. So, here: the promised GreaseMonkey script. If you use Movable Type (and configure the include path to point at the URL for your installation(s)), this will autosave your work every five seconds, guarding against the browser crashes that we could avoid by responsibly writing entries in text editors, but don't. To restore your work, just bring up a MT entry editing screen and press the button that will magically appear near the top of the screen.
It ought to keep separate drafts for each individual MT weblog you work on, but that functionality hasn't really been tested. I'd doublecheck before relying on it.
This is for MT only, I'm afraid — it's what this site and DCist both use. It should be pretty trivial to adapt to other blogging platforms, though, if anyone's so inclined. Also, it's written for MT version 3.2 — I have no idea if it'll work with other versions, but it might be worth a shot.
UPDATE: Whoops! Found a major bug wherein a new, blank entry would overwrite your saved draft within a few seconds of bringing it up. That'd make this pretty useless, huh? Well, it's fixed now. Your in-memory draft will only be erased if you type something into one of the blank fields on a new entry form.
Seriously now: I'm on cell phone number 2 and cell phone cable number 3, and I STILL can't get Gammu working. Right now I'm trying to work off of these instructions, but it's not even clear that the thread's participants had success. And, to be honest, I'm not following all the instructions — compiling custom kernel modules seems a little advanced, but I suppose I'll give it a shot eventually.
Anyway, I'm officially running crying back to mommy, aka the project listserv. They haven't been able to help me out yet, but the current batch of Nokia crap was bought on their recommendation, so I'm doing my best to maintain my trademark childlike optimism.
i got a little carried away with the note feature noting my shoes, so click through if you care. about shoes. and my reorganizing of them. and really, why wouldn't you?
Scientists have run a complete simulation of a virus, down to the atomic level, for 50 ns. This seems like a pretty big deal. Admittedly, we already do really sophisticated modeling of the interplay between cell receptors and viruses. Without a complete model of a cell, a viral model doesn't seem likely to do you a whole lot of good, and cells are waaay more complicated than viruses. Still, it's encouraging just to know that this kind of thing can be done. It's going to be an amazing breakthrough when a complete viral lifecycle can be simulated on an atomic level.
And hey, maybe it wouldn't be that hard to build a complete model of a ribosome (here's where we overstep my knowledge of cell biology). That seems likely to do a lot of good in and of itself (although I have no idea if it'd let you sidestep the computation necessary to solve protein-folding problems or not — if not, you'd be headed from one supercomputing problem straight into another).
This looks pretty cool, and at prices ranging from $35-100 per wheel (depending on quality of the effect), seems to offer an excellent return on girlfriend-embarrassment per dollar. Sadly, I'm not man enough for this project: the shame and theft risk means I'd only undertake it if I put it on a dedicated, removable front wheel, which seems likely to (at least) double the cost of the project. Not out of the question, but I'd have to have something really important/stupid to say via magic bike wheel in order to spend that kind of money. Also on the neat-but-impractical-for-my-self-conscious-renter-self LED project tip: this.
The latest in my ongoing procession of disappointing SMS cables has arrived. Spirits are high, but a part of me knows it's just going to break my heart all over again.
Firefox crashed while I was composing this entry. It no longer surprises me when this happens, not even a little. I've gotten over most of the annoyances related to my switch to OS X, but the utter suckiness of Mac Firefox continues to disappoint. Safari seems stable, but its tabbed browsing is non-obvious (or not available by default?) and the stupidity of enforced Aqua-style HTML form elements cannot be overstated (why do you think you're better than CSS, you goddamn hippies?). Anyway, a GreaseMonkey script to do Gmail-style Movable Type draft-saving would take approximately five minutes to write, and probably solve much of this losing-blog-posts problem. I'll try to hammer that out tonight, if I can find the time. I've got a lead on fixing my Gmail Colorizer script to work properly, too — might be a GreaseMonkey-heavy evening.
So many projects! This is the catch-22 of Catherine's visits: they make me happy, which puts me in a hyper-productive/inspired state, which then can't be satisfied because I'm spending all of my time being happy with my girlfriend. The trick, I think, is to get the projects started, then grind them out when ennui sets back in. Let's call it the long-distance relationship software development methodology.
how to be an awesome guest: even when your host-in-absence gives you the ENTIRELY WRONG SET OF KEYS to her apartment while she's in d.c., and you don't really have anywhere else to stay, or a hotel reservation, and don't necessarily know the city very well, and end up having to deal with your host-in-absence's weirdo russian building supervisor to extract a set of extra keys from him, you still leave your fully-panicked-and-embarrassed host-in-absence this loveliness:
thanks, emily. after a 6:30 am flight this morning back to chi-town and three hours of class in the new quarter today, i feel pretty certain that this evening will call for one-to-four mojitos.
scene: tommy and catherine sitting on the couch, sipping coffee and internet surfing while michael chiarello makes some sort of antipasti plate on the tv in the background.
catherine (being stupidly lovey-dovey to tommy): i love you!
tommy: i love you.
michael chiarello: i LOVE pickles.
Apparently someone has a problem with the comments left on this post. Because I do feel sort of badly for the complainant, I'll refrain from repeating his/her name here (perceptive readers can probably figure it out). But a cursory glance at our archives would have revealed to them that my EFF-loving ass probably wouldn't react very well to this kind of thing. To wit, here's what I sent back:
I think there may be some confusion here. The comments to which you refer seem to me to express a personal opinion, which does not constitute libel or slander. Nor were the postings "in your name" -- no one in the thread purported to be you, they simply referred to you.
Our site is a personal blog written for our and our friends' amusement. Comments are open, unmoderated, and unpoliced except for spam removal. I'm sorry, but we have no interest in mediating a tedious spat between children from New York who we've never heard of.
Finally, please also note that, contrary to what is implied by your email footer, neither Catherine nor I have entered into a contract with you or agreed to keep our correspondence confidential. You are, of course, protected by copyright. But please be aware that we reserve the right to legally protected fair use of that material, including use for purposes of commentary.
Isn't it cute when two jerks on the internet pretend to be lawyers? I think it is, anyway.
The funniest thing about the whole incident is how it started. The letter-writer wasn't mentioned in the entry at all! It appears that someone just googled for "socialite", dropped in and started talking shit. And then — this is the kicker — someone else arriving from Google stopped by to note how shallow Americans are for being obsessed with socialites. Presumably they found the thread by searching for the thing they find so shallow! Too fantastic. The only way it could be better is if they signed their comment with some dumbass name like, say, "dropsofjupiter1". Oh wait! They did!
tommy and i spent saturday eating lunch at pizzeria paradiso, taking in the dada exhibit at the national gallery and making fun of kids who can't fly kites good at the smithsonian kite festival. photos!
it's friday night, i've stayed in all evening and i'm feeling a little loopy, a sentiment only encouraged by brandon's captioning of ready.gov nuclear disaster images. i've seriously been giggling for, like, half an hour over here. terrorists make ninjas cry. bwahahahaha.
i know when i talk about the george ryan trial, to anyone living outside of illinois it sounds like this "BLAH BLAH BORING BLAH." and you're a little right. if you ever sat in on the testimony during the trial, you might have fallen into a deep REM sleep caused by the hour-long discussions of license plates and real estate contracts. totes boring.
but now! look! shit has gone and gotten all totally hysterically bad ass in the form of a group of petulant, immature jurors!
The potentially explosive development came on the heels of earlier signs the Ryan jury was close to exploding.
They come and go together, but during the day reporters have seen the Ryan jury gathering in smaller groups. The judge told them to cut it out Thursday.
"You have at least two factions in this case that apparently aren't speaking to each other," said CBS 2 Legal Consultant Irv Miller. "They're deliberating in different rooms, in different places."
In a hallway Wednesday, CBS 2 heard one juror say to several others, "We've got to stop with all this name calling."
"I expect you to treat your fellow jurors with dignity and respect," Pallmeyer said in a stern, three-paragraph note sent in response to two notes received from the jurors in recent days.
they've got cliques! the judge is sending them notes to express her concern! they call each other names. it's JUST. LIKE. HIGH SCHOOL. except, um, these are a bunch of middle-aged illinoisians who should be discussing oh, only, the MOST IMPORTANT TRIAL THE STATE HAS EVER SEEN. get it together, fools.
i like to think of myself as a general averter of fashion trends. i like to follow what's in, and i love to shop, but most of the time i know whatever is hot in a particular summer will come crashing down on its purchasers' heads in two years or less. never bought into the prairie skirt look. metallics? hell to the no. i've never owned a pair of skinny jeans in my life, because i don't care to create the illusion that my thighs are actually two enormous bags of sand, thank you very much. and you'll sure as hell never catch me in a pair of leggings worn under a miniskirt. i am happiest in a pair of jeans, a tank top, and flip flops or flats.
but, woe is me, it appears that i have fallen victim, am 100% totally and truly obsessed with one of this season's spring shoe trends, and i just can't help myself. ladies and gentlemen, meet catherine's new friends: the platform wedge.
argh!(#(@(@! I KNOW! what am i doing to myself? these shoes are decidedly 70ish, decidedly difficult to walk in, and, even i admit it, sort of decidedly ridiculous looking. but I LOVE THEM. it all started last spring, when i bought a pair of these over at urban outfitters. i thought that pair of shoes would satiate my wedge needs. BUT NO. as i discovered when i hit up the marshall's on route 7 this morning. (as an aside: when the hell did the shoe department at marshall's get so incredibly kick-ass? it's like DSW's little sister in there.)
first i had to have these (in black, not brown as shown):
I KNOW! i know, i know. except for the color, they look eerily similar to the wedge sandals purchased last spring. not to mention they literally make me about 6'1". it's all amazonia up in here when i'm prancing around in those things. i'm going to terrify children. and maybe unknowingly step on them.
"well, don't THESE look practical," i trilled to myself as i clomped through the store aisles. "they're a must-buy!"
all i can ask for now is your help in preventing me from throwing away even more money on this ridiculous style of shoes. if we walk into a store together, please steer me towards the pumas and ballet flats. if that DSW commercial featuring several adorable styles of wedge heels comes on, cover my eyes. and if i fall on you while wearing these monstrosities out in public, will you give a girl a hand and pick me back up?
I'm outta here in just a few short hours, and allegedly landing at National around 9:30. As you might guess from the whirlwind nature of this tour, I didn't get to see much of the city — and even skipped the salesforce.com-sponsored party at the space needle. But from what little I saw, I like Seattle. There's a monorail track outside my window, and although monorails never actually run on it, it seems like an important moral victory. Also, they've got what I'm told is called "liquid sunshine" going on outside, and it's not as horrifying as it sounds.
But this is the real kicker: I woke up every morning with KEXP blaring over my shitty hotel clock radio. Mountain Goats! Elvis Costello! Arcade Fire rarities! Ted Leo just did a promo for the morning guy! And, most importantly, lots of good music that I hadn't heard before. Yeah, there's an internet stream. But there really is something to be said for FM ubiquity. Your life and my life would be better if this station was on the air in DC. Seriously.
Alright, so they're both already well on their way to conquering the art and online worlds, but there's still something cool about seeing your friends show up in dead-tree format on every streetcorner in a city. So go check out the item by Kriston and the piece about Molly in this week's CityPaper.
I'm sure I'm irrationally drawing attention to what they consider to be a minor blip in their respective campaigns for multimedia domination — but this is the first time the struggle has made its way to a publication lowbrow enough for me to read.
I'm safe and sound and in Seattle for the N-TEN conference. Trenchant observations about the city follow:
It's rainy
The coffee is good
The space needle seems, from a distance, pretty much like you'd expect
The SEATAC parking lot reminds me a LOT of the buildings in the movie Aliens. Perhaps that's just because it seems like dropping a nuke on it might be a good idea.
I know, I know: I'm totally turning your Seattle preconceptions upside down. More to come! Possibly! But first: a shower and free booze.
The quote Catherine excerpted below about 80,000 blogs launching per week reminded me of a story I read yesterday: the Register totalled up the societal costs claimed by various pop-economic doomsayers (e.g. the NCAA tournament costs $X billion in lost productivity; failing to recycle bottle caps costs us $Y billion every week). And guess what? It turns out that the sum is more than the total amount of money in the world.
To be fair, I don't think there's any solid economic reason why that can't be true — but it certainly seems doubtful. To think that spending half an hour watching an NCAA tournament game actually introduces real costs to an individual's employer requires a childlike naivete, wherein every workday contains exactly 8 hours of work, all of which must be completed and all of which is relevant to the company's bottom line. I can understand why one would think such aggregate measures are necessary and plausible at a large scale. But realistically, most of these cost estimates probably ignore a lot of naturally-occurring elasticity in order to make their advocates' pet causes seem more important than they actually are.
the post's city guide just added a somewhat cool feature to their establishments' info - you can now send the name, location and phone number of a bar, restaurant, etc to your cellphone. that's neat, but it would be better if they would do a couple of things: actually publicize this in a venue beyond their post.blog, which is a neat blog but not widely-read by the kind of people who would actually be using the cellphone feature (maybe a post on the GOGblog as well? or a note on the front page of the city guide). second, and maybe this is in the works as far as i know, it would be cool if they had a google-ish text message feature, where you could SMS a particular number with a zip code and a description of what you're looking for - beer, chinese, whatever - and the city guide would send you back what's available in that area along with a brief descriptive blurb from the city guide's review. i'd hit it.
this has to be one of the stupidest opinion pieces i've ever read: this woman claims that the reason we traipsed so happily into the iraq war was that not enough people were reading newspapers. i'm sorry, was she even reading newspaper articles and columns around that time?
Think a little further. If more Americans had had a comprehensive view of the world -- the kind that is irrevocably blurred by the 80,000 new blogging sites launched every week -- it would have been barely possible for the 30 people who in essence started the Iraq war to have acted without the accord of the American people.
yes. the iraq war is the fault of bloggers and their dastardly plan to have readers read them. shite newspaper reporting had nothing to do with it.
that's the first ridiculous point. the second ridiculous point is basically that the reason for circulation declines is the readers' fault (with a healthy dose of blogs, of course). god forbid anyone ever think that maybe people don't read newspapers as much anymore because maybe newspapers aren't delivering what they need. the condescending view that only newspapers can properly educate people and the reason they're failing nowadays is the fault of the idiotic american public is one of the things that is sure to rile me up into a frenzy.
"My theory is that we Americans have so picked and chosen our news that we have lost that comprehensive view of the world that only a newspaper gives."
huh. if only we could do something about this...something like not allowing people to pick and choose what they want to read...perhaps a government-licensed newspaper that everybody is forced to read? that sounds like just the ticket!
for what it's worth, my chicago friends, i had a very accurately-detailed dream last night that george ryan, the former illinois governor charged with racketeering and mail fround, was found guilty of about half of the 22 counts. (the jury is in their sixth day of deliberation right now after a five-month trial.) seeing as i have previously proven myself to be a political oracle, i think we should assume that ryan will be spending at least part of the end of his life (the dude's nearly 80) sitting on his bum in jail.
anyway. sorry for the lack of posting up until now. i'm sick and miserable, tommy leaves for seattle tomorrow for a few days (bah!) and i have all these things i'd promise myself i'd do during break not getting done (i HAVE done well at drinking tea and watching the food network, though; how i miss cable!). so, i'm a lazy git. hopefully i'll be inspired later on.
It's strange, but I think we may be running out of internet. It might just be me — but I don't think so. Catherine's been complaining of the same thing. I now frequently find my RSS reader empty, forlorn. Oh sure, Wonkette can be reliably counted on to fill up a feed with entries I've already read, since its authors are now pathologically incapable of leaving a post unrevised. And sites like TUAW and Gizmodo reliably spam me with totally uninteresting posts, thanks to the Dentons and Dobkins of the world deciding that they earn their pay with quantity rather than quality. But post volume seems to be down on the good blogs — by which I mean my friends' sites.
Certainly, I'm guilty as well. Although the site's traffic has mostly levelled off, I feel a lot more pressure to tone down the bloggy self-indulgence here than I used to. I know that people who are professionally, personally or just plain old important to me stop by here with some regularity, and that makes me think twice before rattling off a thousand-word screed about how such-and-such or so-and-so ought to be publicly euthanized for society's benefit.
There are other reasons, too. In the last year or two, many of my friends' online lives have taken on a more professional character. By and large, this is fantastic — I'm incredibly glad that Kriston is getting paid to blog, that Catherine is writing papers on RSS, and that I can claim "blog reading" on my timesheet. But it does sort of change the way the whole thing feels. The days of pretending to work in a Crystal City cubicle, furiously penning Wonkette-bait are over.
It's pretty stupid, in retrospect — approaching the internet like a private clubhouse for you and your buddies. But I'm still sort of sad to feel the thing become complicated. I don't think there's a solution, short of fleeing to MySpace. And I'm not prepared to debase myself like that.
For what it's worth, I'll do my best to be a little less self-conscious about writing here. There's no reason we can't reclaim the heights of lowly self-involvement we once reached.
POSTSCRIPT: Aaand before even hitting publish, I've already violated my new resolution. There's an entertainingly passive-aggressive anonymous note plastered all over the men's room. I doubt it's from a coworker — but this is a shared office space, so there's no telling. So: no putting it on the internet. Drat. But just between you and me, anonymous bathroom-note-author, I'm not the one who's been peeing on the seats.
Transpodder — when combined with a podcatching setup — will download your favorite shows via Bittorrent, transcode them to an iPod Video-friendly format, and provide an RSS feed so that iTunes can keep your iPod synched up. Slick.
co.mments has an awful, awful web 2.0 (stoopd) name, but a good idea. Sign up, subscribe to a personalized RSS feed, and add a bookmarklet to your web browser. Then when you next find yourself leaving a comment somewhere, hit the bookmarklet button. The conversation will be marked and periodically checked by co.mments, which will let you know about new entries via RSS. Unfortunately, co.mments seems kind of slow about checking up on conversations — and using the personal RSS feed via Bloglines makes it really, REALLY slow. But if you use a desktop newsreader, you might find it useful.
It looks like the Xbox 360 has been cracked. Check out the video:
It's true that another 360 could be plugged into the back of the TV. But word on the forums is that the video's author has a good reputation and the technical chops to have pulled this off. Plus, much of the work leading up to the breakthrough occurred in a public online forum. As of right now the verdict of the usually-dubious Xbox hacking scene is that this is probably the real deal.
The exploit is a little different from those that were used on the original Xbox. Instead of the BIOS being subverted, the DVD-ROM's firmware was modified to prevent it from telling the difference between a burned and pressed disc. MS beefed up the security on the parts of the system that had been attacked on the XB1; that console's DVD firmware was cracked, but very late in the system's lifecycle. By all appearances, MS didn't see this class of attack coming.
The downside: because the rest of the system remains secure, unsigned code still can't be run. So this hack is really only useful for playing backups — aka pirated games. Cool apps like emulators and media players are still out of reach.
The other fly in the ointment: the hack hasn't been publicly released. "TheSpecialist" and the rest of the developers might legitimately not want to foster piracy — or they may just fear Microsoft. But either way, their notes are available for all the world to see. Given that, I doubt it'll be very long until we see a mass-market mod of some sort for the 360.
Don't get me wrong: the new Macbook Pros look pretty sweet. Yglesias bought one after his Powerbook got pinched, and it's a beautiful machine. But most of the new features don't thrill me. Matt reports that the integrated iSight is tough to aim. And Apple has long ago spent all their credibility when it comes to the relative merits of different processor architectures.
No, the one feature that really got me excited was the new magnetic power connector. And now Gizmodo has a report of one of them catching on fire. Sigh. Here's hoping this is just a weird aberration.
Unlike more diplomatic people, I'm not afraid to say it: I don't really like St. Patrick's Day.
Maybe it's inherited. My Anglo roots go back to England, not the Emerald Isle. St. Patrick's day just isn't in my blood. I'm genetically predisposed to spending March 17th brewing a nice pot of darjeeling and discussing what new taxes to levy against the Papist Menace.
But there's another class of reasons why I don't really like the holiday. Reasons like the one I happened upon last weekend:
