The Puppet Master — I don’t know about anyone else, but that’s the best theory I’ve read on the iPhone price drop yet. Honest, straightforward…and it smells right to me. Also validates the fact that I don’t own a single piece of Apple hardware; no matter how sexy the toy, I don’t like being jerked around like a puppet.
But hey, at least the man is straightforward!
iPod Touch looks nice…for someone who doesn’t mind the Apple lock-in, it looks like a pretty sweet and cheaper alternative to the iPhone (though the cheaper cost on that will help too). I want a different toy, though…or rather, I want one I already have fixed
…
See, I got a Zune for free at a conference I attended..and I haven’t spent more than an hour with the thing since I got it months ago. And most of that was just setting it up and seeing how bad it sucked. Because it sucks….at least mine’s not poop brown, though. *grin*
It sucks, and that sucks, because it’s nice hardware. When the Zune first dropped, there was scuttlebutt on a Linux install via hack…but AFAIK, it hasn’t gone anywhere. Can you imagine how cool that would be? A 30GB wifi-enabled portable storage and sharing device; adhoc AP access to let me store and access data, share music, and automated syncing to the cloud when a hot spot was available. Suh-weet! And for me, cheap…since I already have one. In a closet, I think. Somewhere.
I hack a lot of things, but closed hardware isn’t one of my fortes. Somebody, hack my Zune!
The Decider Still Doesn’t Know Who Disbanded Iraq’s Military — *sigh* I don’t even really know why I continue to track these things, other than to just make myself cranky.
UPDATE: Heh…I’m a little behind this week (still catching up from DragonCon), but I do like this story: Envoy’s Letter Counters Bush on Dismantling of Iraq Army. Apparently even Bremer is tired of this crap.
Wolbachia cronenbergium — Wolbachia’s code isn’t just hanging out in the cell, it’s been incorporated into the nuclear DNA of the host itself. […] This is assimilation: the dicks of Borg drones everywhere should be shriveling with collective performance anxiety.
Great overview, Peter…thanks! And keep swinging for the rafters, btw…I have my copy of Blindsight out for pimpage…er, I mean reading. Your loyal minions keep the flames alive…
Yay! Good ending to what could have been REALLY sad. On our way out to run this evening, my wife and I walked down the sidewalk, and I saw what at first appeared to be a squished dead bird or something out of the corner of my eye, right in the curbside edge of the busy street we were walking down. Sometimes that happens, of course…and I don’t usually point it out. But as we continued walking, my brain started thinking about what it had seen; no wings, I think no visible damage…and had it moved a bit just as I passed?
I finally stopped about 50 feet along, turned around, and went back to check. It was indeed alive, and not visibly hurt…and in fact, the animal was flailing further into the street! Only about 18 inches from total squishdom. It was definitely a very baby…something. No fur, eyes closed, tiny…not a kitten, I didn’t think. But what? And what to do?
So I went back to the house, got a box and some tissues, and we scooped it in. No way I’m letting a baby anything just roll out into traffic! We looked about (without much hope) for a mother animal trying to get to it, but no luck. I tracked down a local 24 hour vet, though, that accepted wild animals for rehabilitation…so even if it wasn’t a baby pet, it wouldn’t just get killed.
On our way to the vet, we decided it was almost certainly a baby squirrel, and the vet confirmed it. They took the little guy and assured us that it would go to rehab first thing…they have a wildlife rehab specialist on staff that specializes in infants, in fact!
I tossed some money in the Wildlife Fund
for the little guy’s future nut stash, and we headed home for a late run. Thanks very much to Cobb Emergency Veterinary Clinic for taking in the little fella!
Court Strikes Down Key Patriot Act Power Again — Huh-zah. Indefinite gag orders and prior restraint on speech don’t strike me as legal attributes that anyone in the US should be proud of.
Secrecy is not strength, folks; it’s a big facet of the corrupting nature of power. It’s much, much harder to do wrong when you’re standing in the light…but it’s still easy to protect those that need protecting. Our government agencies know this, believe it or not; they’ve just had a bit of a memory lapse. Thanks to Judge Marrero for helping remind them.
Rolling Stone: The Great Iraq Swindle — Not everyone who reads this blog will like this story, and guess what…I don’t fucking care. I’m not mad at most of you individually; but I am mad. And people with their heads in the sand aren’t helping things. *sigh*
As podcast recommendation systems florish, we start to subscribe to a given
MP3 podcast in many different ways: shared playlists, del.icio.us feeds, aggregation sites like Scouta, etc. Within the actual RSS feed, the enclosure URL (and sometimes the guid) give us a means of distinguishing uniquely between podcasts, which works even in blended
feeds.
Unfortunately, that’s not always enough. Lots of us non-iPodders use players that are just USB mass storage devices when plugged in, and URIs disappear once the file hits that dumb drive. (bonus for iTunes library here!) What that means is that, in addition to good RSS feed info, I need the actual media file (MP3, etc.) to be well-named. Ideally, this should be in a way that’s
hopefully close to unique, to keep namespace collision from occurring. At
the same time, a name that is TOO long is hard to manage, so it’s always a balancing act.
Things that help: showname (short), short description, timestamp (at least
to day) YYYY-MM-DD rocks, as it helps in sorting. Dashes, too.
Good examples from ITconversations — ITC.INNO-GregElin-2007.08.18.mp3 — and G’Day world — tpn_gdayworld_20070823_281_Twitter.mp3.
Another interesting thing to watch is filename evolution…both Jon Udell (Interviews with Innovators above), and Cameron Reilly (G’Day World) have tweaked and improved their naming conventions over
time…fun to watch.
Wow! Many thanks to Jon Udell for his recent writeup on his conversation with Greg Elin about the Sunlight Foundation. I’m subscribed to his podcast feed, so I’ll hear the actual interview soon enough, but the overview was enough to send me scrambling over to OpenCongress. It’s amazing! I frequently use THOMAS at the LIbrary of Congress to track legislative information, but OpenCongress has far more flexible tools. Each bill’s information page (example) includes RSS feeds, aggregation of news and blogger coverage, and appears well maintained.
There are also fun geek toys like the bill status widget generator, which let’s you build a javascript widget to stick on your homepage that updates with the status information for some bill you’re interested in. (Stick it right next to your last.fm favorite artists widget, perhaps). All in all, I’m very impressed with OpenCongress, and looking forward to using this effective monitoring framework once our legislators return to Washington next month.UPDATE: Heh…turns out I’ve had OpenCongress as a del.icio.us bookmark since 2005. I vaguely remember the old site…they’ve come a LONG way.
UPDATE: Ugh…I have NO memory. I already blogged these guys!! This cracks me up.
