Stuff: So C is a massive antiques nut, and got tickets for the Antiques Roadshow next month in LA. As a result, we’ve been shopping around for interesting stuff for her to bring along.
Here’s what I found at the antiques market last weekend:
Click on the pic to check out my multiplication skills!
Tags: click, month, multiplication, nut, result, roadshow, stuff, weekend
Weblogs: there’s been a few attempts to mine ‘trend’ data from del.icio.us:
However, none consider how many links a user generates. A user who links to every single page on the web would quickly gain a good ‘trendsetting’ rating, and would also skew the website trends upwards, without actually providing useful data to others.
A look at the hublog top posters does seem to indicate they’re linking prolifically to any old crap that looks likely to be popular, which is a more humanly-possible way to do that. ;)
However, populicious new links is quite cool — popular sites that are new in the last 24 hours. Especially handy to find out where one could download Daily Show torrents these days. ;)
There’s also the venerable Hot Links, which unfortunately tracks a very small population, but still gets interesting stuff.
Tags: hublog, icio, mine, month, popularity, service, trend, user, view, weblogs, website
Green: Wow — UC Berkeley’s Lab Notes newsletter this month includes an article noting the benefits to the environment of reading your news on a PDA instead of getting a delivered newspaper. Check this out:
In a new study, UC Berkeley researchers report that receiving your news wirelessly on a PDA instead of delivered to your door requires up to 140 times less carbon dioxide, several orders of magnitude less greenhouse gases, and the consumption of 26 to 67 times less water.
…
To tease out the truth, Horvath and graduate student Michael Toffel dissected nearly all of the environmentally-relevant processes involved in both wireless news delivery and teleconferencing. In the case of newspapers, the researchers focused on the environmental effects of reading the New York Times in Berkeley, California, from the manufacture of newsprint and ink to the delivery from a nearby printing press to disposal of the newspaper. This data was then compared to such factors as the energy used to manufacture a PDA, including its microprocessor and battery, and the electricity required by wireless and Internet service providers to deliver news content to the device.
Sitescooper is therefore a WorldChanging tool!
Tags: article, delivery, environment, green, lab, month, news, newsletter, newspaper, pda, study
Television: Tony Bowden: BBCtorrent? ‘Later this month, the BBC will launch a pilot project that could lead to all television programmes being made available on the internet.’ I have my fingers firmly crossed here. This could be really excellent news. Of course, not being located in the UK could make it not-so-easy to actually watch them from here, but the underlying thinking is really cool.
Tech: LayerOne. Weekend conf in LA, with Danny O’Brien — think I might just tag along!
Patents: Posting this here so I can find it in future. Here’s a /. comment saying ‘if it becomes impossible to safely develop software in the US and EU due to patents, innovation will move to India and China’. This isn’t quite true anymore — my response, noting the Brazil/Glaxo/AZT case.
Tags: bbc, bbctorrent, course, internet, month, news, pilot, project, television, thinking
Ireland: A while back, I posted ‘Room for an Irish Netflix’, which plugged the idea of opening a version of the Netflix concept for Ireland. Well, over on the taint.org QT forum, JCorbett says: ‘ DVDRentals.ie is what you’re looking for!’
Sure enough, it looks pretty good — 20 eurons a month, and a reasonable selection (considering they just started).
But it limits how many DVDs you can get out in a month to 8. IMO, that’s unnecessary — nobody can watch DVDs and turn them around through the postal system that quickly!
Also, the browsing interface is lousy — I’d suggest licensing some kind of metadata from IMDb or similar, so people can get third-party reviews, comments, ‘my favourite action movie’ lists, that kind of thing.
Can’t tell much more, as the FAQ page doesn’t work on Mozilla/Firebird for some damn reason.
Sick: Anger as contestants hungry for money go begging on TV (Irish Indo) (via forteana):
A reality television show in which 12 young Russian contestants have to scrounge, beg and even steal to win a pension for life, is being filmed in Berlin.
In a city already struggling with bankruptcy and large numbers of asylum-seekers, police and residents have been quick to condemn Golod, Russian for ‘hunger’. The contestants live in a container without money or food to survive; none of them speaks German. ‘Golod’ is proving a huge hit with Moscow television viewers, thousands of whom tune in at nine each evening to find out how Karina, Anastasia and 10 other photogenic contestants are faring on the mean streets of a foreign city.
Spam: Latest Pew Internet report on spam. Pew Internet surveys are very good. This one notes that ‘25% of America’s email users say they are using email less because of spam. Within that group, most say that spam has reduced their overall use of email in a big way.’
Mafia: A mafia hacker tells his story to Wired (Simson Garfinkel via FoRK).
Tags: city, dvds, email, golod, ireland, irish, kind, money, month, netflix, spam
Bits: BarbieOS, a cutdown version of Debian from Mattel. Really. ‘BarbieOS 1.0 is the result of almost a year’s worth of marketing research into what pre-adolescent girls want in a mobile Linux solution aimed at being a desktop replacement.’ (via Ben)
Great site — also has US.BLAST.D Worm Wreaks Havoc on US Post Office, Mail Delivery Halted (’Until a patch can be created by Microsoft and deployed by the MCSEs who maintain the nation’s critical infrastructure, President Bush has urged all Americans to lock in a safe or a drawer all of their pens, pencils, stamps, white paper and envelopes so that they cannot be exploited by the virus and used to write out more copies of itself.’
– and An Open Letter from RIAA President Hillary Rosen to Music Pirates Everywhere (’Currently an RIAA-backed online service known as Pressplay allows users to subscribe for $18.95 a month to a small library of popular works and listen to them via half-quality audio streams if they have broadband connections. Users may download 10 songs a month to burn to CDs if they wish. Pressplay exclusively supports the Windows Media Audio format, and therefore each song benefits from active scripting support, expiration dates, copy protection and proven Microsoft security. With embedded scripts, each song can also enhance the user experience by opening web pages featuring more music they might like to buy. After only 8 months online and a strategic partnership with AOL, Pressplay currently boasts more than 100 subscribers and is growing every day.’)
Spam: Bayesian comment filter for Movable Type, nifty. Pity it’s still using the Paul Graham method, which is not so hot. (thx Antoin!)
Tags: barbieos, bits, cutdown, debian, microsoft, month, music, online, pressplay, song, version
Spam:
Craig is publishing SPF records. Worth noting that I’ve been
publishing SPF records for jmason.org for a month or two,
even though the protocol hasn’t even stabilised yet — working on
the ‘if you build it, they will come’ approach ;)
Anubis looks great; I’ve been meaning to hack up something like that. Nifty!
Tags: anubis, approach, jmason, month, org, protocol, something, spam, spf, the, worth
Music: All good things must come to an end. EMusic has been bought out by some bunch called ‘Dimensional Associates’, and will no longer offer its excellent download service; instead you’re limited to a measly 40 MP3s per month. (For context — last time I downloaded some listening material was on Monday, and I picked up about 80 MP3s in a single sitting.)
They’ve shut down their message boards; third-party discussion groups are filled with wailing and gnashing of teeth; and worst of all, I can’t even download the remaining stuff on ‘My Stash’ (the downloads-to-do list) because they’re overrun with rats deserting the sinking ship. (no reflection on the rats — I’m one myself.) Either that, or they’ve just turned them off; which is annoying as I had lots of music lined up to download when I got a chance.
This is very bad news — Apple’s iTunes is full of crappy music, Mac-only, and DRM-crippled; Rhapsody is Windows-only and DRM-crippled; there’s really no other legal MP3-download option.
I guess I’ll just have to go back to buying 1 or 2 CDs every few months when I’m buying stuff from Amazon (which I do nowadays anyway, in addition to EMusic) and just listening to the radio in general instead.
Thanks anyway, EMusic, for introducing me, helping me get into, or helping me rebuild my collection of such great music as:
It was great while it lasted.
Ah well, I guess I’ll save a tenner a month, which I can put towards the GameFly subscription…
Tags: bunch, dimensional, download, drm-crippled, emusic, end, month, music, offer, stuff
Many non-US-based broadband systems impose a download cap – a limit on how much data a customer can download in one month. In some of the Irish ISPs’ cases, it’s 3Gb of data per month, with hefty per-Mb charges after that.
Well, here’s something. I filter my mail for viruses and spam on my server, and divert the viruses off to a side folder. I just checked, and that folder contains 1 gigabyte of virus data, received since SoBig.F started up last week.
Given that most users don’t have a colocated server to divert their viruses on, and therefore would have had to download that 1 gigabyte of virus mail before their virus scanner got to take a look — that’s a hefty third of the download cap gone, due to a virus.
I wonder if Eircom, Telstra down under, and the other capping ISPs, will be giving their customers refunds as a result?
(BTW, by contrast, I only received 10 megs of spam.)
Tags: cap, download, folder, gigabyte, isps, mail, month, server, spam, virus
current /. poll: what SpamAssassin setting do you use? Cool! (but who are the nutters voting ‘less than 0′?)
Tech: Danny blogs about fuel-cell vehicles, linking to the DrivingTheFuture site. I met Doug Korthof of DTF a month or two ago — a nice guy with a persuasive case, namely that electric vehicles work, and the current concentration on fuel-cell and hybrid vehicles is a diversionary tactic.
The facts of the matter really are quite wierd, as the OC Weekly interview notes:
When (Doug) first got the (GM) EV1, the lease allowed for unlimited mileage. But the car came with something else: a defective lead-acid Delco battery that took a couple of trips to the mechanic to get replaced. GM wound up replacing all the Delcos with Panasonic lead-acid batteries. But there was an unanticipated consequence: the Panasonics got such dramatically better range than the Delcos that GM took all its EV1s that had not been leased off the market and forced existing drivers into new leases that did limit mileage.
Korthof experienced even better mileage with a nickel-metal hydride battery that allowed his 1997 Honda EV-Plus to run for 140 miles without a recharge. Honda took the car back in 2002 and junked it. No subsequent electric cars had nickel batteries, and Chevron Texaco Corp. since acquired the worldwide patent to nickel-metal hydride batteries, which the company is partly using to satisfy the burgeoning hybrid-car market.
I took a look at the EV1 myself, and talked to Doug about the recharging system he uses. He recharges their 2 EVs directly from a plug socket in his garage, and with his house fitted with solar panels, it costs about 25 bucks a month to keep them charged. Of course, there’s a lot of up-front cost to install the solar panels and buy the EVs, but IMO it would be worth it.
A moot point anyway — most EVs (with the exception of the Toyota RAV4-EV) can no longer be bought, even second hand. Instead, there’s a recall in operation, and existing EVs are being recalled and dismantled. Even purely from a ‘cool tech’ POV, this is a shame.
Tags: battery, car, delcos, evs, honda, hydride, market, mileage, month, poll
BBC: Wartime role of Queen’s dressmaker. ‘Details have emerged about the wartime activities of the Queen’s dressmaker Sir Hardy Amies, who died last month aged 93.’
Apparently, he served with the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in Brussels, liaising with the Belgian resistance. During this time, he organised a photo-shoot for Vogue magazine featuring members of the resistance movement posing for photographs!
Seems he got away with it, though — another officer writes in his file:
‘However, it is not for me to reason why, but no doubt the profile of Lt.Col Amies in the next issue of the Vogue will cause a flutter in many feminine hearts when they realise that their handsome couturier is, after all, the Scarlet Pimpernel of this war.’
Tags: bbc, dressmaker, hardy, month, operations, resistance, role, sir, vogue, wartime
The Hugo Chavez documentary I enthused about last month will be repeated tomorrow on Irish TV, on Network 2, at 9:25 pm. Strongly recommend seeing this, if you can.
Thanks to Brian Greene for pointing this out…
Tags: documentary, month, network, tomorrow
Bitstream Vera released as a beta. The full release, sometime next month, will use an extremely open license. To quote the FAQ:
Are derivative works allowed?
Yes!
I want to sell a software package that uses these fonts: Can I do so?
Sure. Bundle the fonts with your software and sell your software with the fonts. That is the intent of the copyright.
Hey presto — open source fonts! Good work by Jim Gettys, Bitstream and GNOME in making these available.
Tags: beta, bitstream, bundle, faq, intent, license, month, package, release, software
a memorable mistranslation found in a guesthouse at Annapurna Base Camp :
Help! I’m being underclocked! ;) Perhaps that explained the shortness of breath and dizziness…
(I did some scanning of the hundreds of photos from last year’s trip about a month ago, but haven’t had a chance to fix ‘em all up yet. And I’m not uploading anything until I get to CA and some decent bandwidth.)
Tags: anything, breath, camp, chance, dizziness, guesthouse, mistranslation, month, trip, year
The weblog of Justin Mason; incoherent ramblings about Apache SpamAssassin, anti-spam, perl, software development, and the web, from an Irish software developer.
The opinions expressed on this web site are my personal opinions, and do not in any way represent those of my employer.
