Damn. This is cool. — Fixing two additional light sensors to a normal CD or DVD drive can transform it into a highly accurate scanner for chemical or medical tests, Spanish researchers have shown. The team has developed a modified CD drive that detected tiny quantities of pesticide in samples placed on top of an ordinary compact disk.

Thanks to Hack A Day for the link!

So, it’s open. Amazon MP3 Downloads looks like it’s going to start a bit of a price war, as their most popular songs are actually cheaper, rather than more expensive (as proposed by several of the labels). And all DRM-free…here we go! I think the prediction by Gerd Leonhard on fora.tv that all the majors would go DRM-less this year is looking quite prescient.

Cory Doctorow gave a great rant on privacy at OSCON 2007, entitled Privacy Isn’t Dead — Let’s Not Kill It”. He talks about the dangers of letting software control us (and the attendant privacy issues), rather than controlling the software ourselves. Cory is a visionary in this space; listening to him exhort on this subject is eye-opening, if you’re not completely up to date on it.

I’ve long thought that David Brin’s Transparent Society was (and is) a great treatise on the dangers of asymmetric control. in fact, I try to re-read it every couple of years (it’s almost 10 years old now), just to keep all the memes hot. Cory is another great, great mind writing about this. He has a new book coming out next spring, Little Brother, that I expect will be a wonderful (fiction) entry into this space. Much like his recent short-short Scroogled, I expect this book will weave a realistic, gripping story out of the consequences of the technological, political, and cultural choices we’ve made so far this century…hopefully giving us a chance to learn from our mistakes without actually making ALL of them. Can’t wait. And Little Brother is targeted as young adult fiction (though I know I’ll be buying it regardless), so maybe it’ll make an impact in the younger generations as well.

Arrggh….don’t forget it’s International Talk Like A Pirate Day, ye scallywags! Shiver me timbers…

UPDATE: Huzzah! Some WoW pirate videos for yer viewin’ pleasure…don’t thank me, mateys, thank WoW Insider!

Sweeeeetttt…. HAMMER myshare 2TB Network Hard Drive — $830.99 as of this writing. This is so freaky crazy cool, it’s almost beyond cool. Drives half this size were more than this (1 TB for ~$900) less than a year ago!

Thanks to Kevin for the link!

Just READ the damn thing; it’ll make you think: Scroogled, by Cory Doctorow. Afterwards, if you don’t have a little better appreciation of the dangers of wars on abstract nouns, try this: Human Evil and Muddled Thinking. If you’re still unconvinced…I’d say the heck with ye…but I’ve been re-energized by those guys. Come on by; we’ll chat. I’ll even try to be nice!

I’ve solved a nagging blog issue that’s been floating around in the back of head, thanks to an incredibly generous blogpost by Jon Udell yesterday, in which he clarifies the process he uses to tag and categorize his blog postings. Many people do this, and many blog platforms (WordPress, Blogger, etc.) have facilities for tagging a post as you’re posting it. I’ve found Django apps that plug tagging facilities into my db schema, making it almost seamless…yet I’ve wrestled with setting this up for some time. I haven’t quite been able to put my finger on why, but I’ve resisted. It seemed somehow like too much work for not enough reward, but I couldn’t quite explain why, even to myself.

Jon’s approach makes it clear to me, though…once I saw his workflow, I was on board. He uses del.icio.us to tag his OWN stuff! I use the heck out of del.icio.us, but it never occurred to me to point it back at myself…*smack*. This closes the loop; I can use tags to personally organize my posts, yet also push metadata about my posts and their tags into the rich cloud soup that is del.icio.us. Brilliant. Simply brilliant. Thanks, Jon!

So expect my del.icio.us feed to look rather self-indulgent for a bit, whilst I catch up…

The C-SPAN Podcast of the Week often has good content, and I just finished listening to a great discussion: Brookings Institute preview of the fall session of Congress. Very good dialogue, and the panel included two Brookings Fellows (a center-left think tank) as well as a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (a center-right think tank); so there’s a least a tendency toward the center, rather than either party’s extreme wings. Each panelist gave an overview on the first 7 months of the 110th Congress, and then thoughts on how the fall could go…then Q&A. For policy wonks, this is good stuff!

Here’s a working (for now) direct link to the mp3. I don’t know how long that will last, but it may hang around longer than the link in the podcast feed (which drops stuff off pretty quickly).

More False Optimism on Iraq: How many mulligans should we let Iraq war boosters take? — Yowch. Strong words, but dead on.

With the annoucement of Public Search Listings on Facebook, I’ve been trying to decide whether or not to turn off public access to my record (it’s on by default for everyone, so it’s opt-out, not opt-in). I certainly don’t mind being findable; heck, I work at it. The question is one of ownership…that is, do I want what is potentially one of the highest-ranking search links of my name to be something NOT on my site?

I’d say no…except for the fact that none of the highest-ranks links for that search point to my site right now, because they aren’t even to me! With a famous wrestler and a recently deceased computer science pioneer sharing my name (deliberately no links there…*grin*), I sometimes barely make it onto the front page of that search. I do much better with kenzoid; part of the reason I took (and defend) that as my online identity. So, in a sense, any Google juice that I personally get from the Facebook query is good, since my Facebook record points back to here; the center for all that is Ken!

So, I expect I’ll probably leave it public, for the reasons listed above. That being said, it may not matter much…Facebook is timing out so much right now that it may be they have to back away from this change while they work on scalability issues.