Apple Store - University Village



We went to the Apple store today!

Splicer got a Mac Mini:


And Wiggy got an iPod Photo:


Unfortunately now i need a 30" cinema display...

Dual Link DVI Switcher



$700 is what it will cost you for the privilege of sharing your $3000 30" apple cinema display with another computer.

Hamster



The kids who built this like to think of it "Borg v1.0".

Personally I think it's more along the lines of "teaching hamsters to use an overly-complicated remote controlled food dispenser"

Basically it works like this:
There are little hamster powered hamster-mobiles that are used to gather energy to power the food dispenser. As i understand it, the hamsters don't do any steering, they are simply providing the raw hamster power the little robot needs to position itself under the light source in order to charge its solar cells, then move to the other side of the environment where it uses the accumulated electricity to power the hamster pellet dispenser.

So it seems that everyone is happy. The little robots get to live up to their highest ideals (the noble pursuit of charging up a solar cell and then discharging said cell into a pellet dispenser) and the hamsters that power the robots locomotion are compensated by the dual reward of "getting to run in a little wheel" and "getting fed". Which pretty much sums up hamster heaven.

Where i come from we call that "Win/Win".

FCC Overstepped Authority on Digital TV

A U.S. appeals court on Tuesday said that regulators had overstepped their authority by imposing a rule designed to limit the copying of digital television programs.

"You crossed the line," Judge Harry Edwards told a lawyer for the Federal Communications Commission during arguments before a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

"Selling televisions is not what the FCC is in the business of," Edwards said, siding with critics who charge the rule dictates how computers and other devices should work.

This is suprising.

You can read more about the broadcast flag here.

Wikitravel



This is a sort of "the hitchhiker's guide to Earth"... I seriously dig this.

Ripping off Napster



Gizmodo said it best:

You know, if you sign up for Napster-to-Go and don't realize that your music is going to disappear when you stop paying them money, you're not a victim of the bloodsucking media barons—you're a tard. Once, I payed the cable company $50 a month, but then I stopped paying them, and they turned off my cable! Fortunately, I was smart enough to record all my favorite episodes of That's So Raven, which was against the rules of the contract that I signed up for, but hey! Tough shit.

So here's a way to record music you're getting from Napster-to-Go into WAV files, to be burned to CDs or re-encoded to your compressed music file of choice. But you're not asserting your rights to culture; you're ripping off Napster. I mean, I don't care, I steal plenty of music, but let's be legit about this: If you have a problem with copyright laws, don't think that breaking the rules of a company that's working with the RIAA is actually changing anything except the amount of money you're giving to artists (or at least scum-sucking middle men).

Napster is going to have a pretty hard time taking the moral high ground here since we're talking about a company that started with the businessmodel of "let's enable music piracy and hope that we can find a legal loop-hole that leaves us unaccountable!"

Dell 2405FPW - 24" Widescreen Monitor

24" Viewable Image Size Largest available viewable image size in Dell's Flat Panel Monitor Portfolio
1920x1200 Native Resolution Provides gamers and graphics professionals with best in class image detail.
12ms (typ) Response Time Enables crisp clear images when using the display for fast motion video such as gaming or video editing.
Dual input support Digital (DVI) or Analog connection allowing for max versatility.
CE Inputs S-video, composite and component inputs allow for CE connectivity.
P-I-P (Picture-in-Picture) Users can and view alternative source video from a CE device with a touch of single PiP (Picture-in-Picture) button. View both your PC content and alternative source video at the same time.
Easy to access 4 port USB Hub and 9-in-1 card reader allowing easy access for your favorite peripheral devices

This looks like it's gonna be a very nice monitor. Gizmodo is guessing $1000, i think it will list at something like $1399 and available for about $1000 with enough coupons.

Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai


Living by the samurai code is not easy. Evidently writing about the samurai code is not easy either:

It is not a book of philosophy as most would understand the word: it is a collection of thoughts and sayings recorded over a period of seven years, and as such covers a wide variety of subjects, often in no particular sequence.

A collection of structureless thoughts with no sequence? So basically its an anchient samurai blog. Cool.

Alliance touts holographic disc 'revolution'

According to Optware, an HVD is the same size as a single-layer DVD but holds 200 times as much data - more than 1TB. The information can be read at over 1Gbps - 40 times the speed of DVD, the company claimed. Optware is backed by Intel's venture capital operation.

TC44 hopes to have specifications drawn up by the end of 2006, a year after the hardware and content industries begin selling and promoting blue-laser optical disc systems to the public. In December 2006, the specs will be submitted to the ISO.

Between HD DVD, Blu-ray, and now this, it sure looks like there are a lot of good options for storing a lot of data on a standard sized disc. My real question is what format the content of that disc will be in...