Online maps of the Middle East....

Have you grown weary of the tiny, grayscale maps of Iraq and the Middle East accompanying most newspaper stories on the region? TomPaine.com went in search of better geographic tools, and found them at the University of Texas' Online Library, with links to dozens of maps—political, topographical, historical—of a region many Americans have never scrutinized geographically. [MetaFilter] [Ye Olde Phart]

 

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Doonesbury Does Weblogs

Garry Trudeau has been doing computer jokes since 1972, when he put Mark Slackmeyer to work on a mainframe. He spoofed the PC boom of the '80s, skewered the first generation of glitchy PDAs, and parodied the rise of online culture. During the 2000 presidential campaign, he ran a digital Uncle Duke who took questions in real time. Now he has his characters blogging.

[EdCone.com] [Ye Olde Phart] 

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Avoiding Probate. Save your grieving heirs from the legal headaches. [The Motley Fool] 

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Investing in Retirement. You should play it safe -- but not too safe. [The Motley Fool] 

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What Retirement Will Cost. The rule of thumb says you can retire on 70%-80% of your current income. Fact or fiction? [The Motley Fool] 

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New category: Design & usability guidelines. I've been stumbling across a number of excellent design & usability guidelines, both in the form of documents, and whole sites. I've now decided to group these together in their own category. This is by no means an exhaustive collection,... [Column Two] 

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Check out my new PQI 6 in 1 flash memory card reader. Very nice, about the size of a deck of cards, the USB cable folds into the reader case and then the reader slips into a nice travel cover. It included a 3 ft USB extension I haven't needed. I use the reader plugged into one of two USB ports on my Microsoft Internet Keyboard. $30 at Frys [dws.] 

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Mark Pilgrim has a new innovative use for RSS. He accumulates inbound pointers to specific articles on his site in an RSS 2.0 feed. It's so twisty it drives my mind crazy. In a few minutes this comment will appear in his feed. [Scripting News] 

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Yes, I'm an RSS bigot too. I confess. I'm an RSS bigot as well. I've discovered that Radio's news aggregator is at least as important as it's tools for editing and posting. I find that I can more than fill up my reading time with content in the aggregator. The first thing  I look for in a new site is whether there is an RSS feed available. Second choice is to figure out how to use RssDistiller (or equivalent) to generate a feed I can route into my news aggregator. [Seblogging News] 

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The Register has details on a new feature in Maxtor's new line of Personal Storage 5000 Family external hard drives called OneTouch. Maxtor's press release has some background on the new release. It's bundled with Dantz Retrospect Express and is available in 80/120/250 GB configurations. [lawrence's notebook] 

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Personal KM - I'm starting to think a lot more about how to manage my personal information.  So I figured I'd start a category for those thoughts and let others see them and give me feedback.  M oreof us find ourselves having always on (often wireless) access to the Internet.  How can we use that power to simplify our lives and organize our personal information?  That's what my Personal KM page will try to address. [Ernie the Attorney] 

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New Financial Tools for Fools. We have updated, and greatly expanded, our roster of financial calculators. [The Motley Fool] 

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Revisiting Your 401(k). Your retirement plan at work may not be the best place for all your savings. [The Motley Fool] 

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CSS and lists. Advanced CSS lists. Mark Newhouse: CSS Design: Taming Lists. "I'll demonstrate how to use CSS to bring unwieldy lists under control. It's time for you to tell lists how to behave, instead of letting them run wild on your web page." (41 words) [dive into mark] [McGee's Musings] 

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Regular Expressions. Data mining with regular expressions. [read more] [s l a m] 

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Understanding weblogs. I've been spending the past several weeks messing around with weblogs. Last week, the light bulb went on: I realized that a weblog could be a useful tool for personal knowledge management as well as for public communication. (published in tweney report, 2002-08-28) [tweney.com] 

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Compendium of weblog resources. The most useful thing in the aforementioned article was a link to Weblogs Compendium, another good central clearinghouse of blog information and resources, today featuring pointers to useful third-party services such as myMediaList (for adding lists of books, music, and other media to your blog or web page) and blogLinker (for managing a modular link list, much like blogrolling.com). Naturally, there is a Compediumblog as well. [Radio Free Blogistan] 

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Cool the thumbnail maker works great.  I just right clicked the photo on my desktop and selected resize.  I selected to fit it into a 45x45 screen.  It created thumbnail right next to it.  I then dropped it into my Radio images folder.  I check Radio's events page to see if it was upstreamed, it was and I clicked on the link.  I then right click cut and pasted it  into Radio's shortcuts area.  I created a new shortcut called Bush.  So now, if I ever want to include this photo in anything I write, all I need to do is put Bush in double quotes ("...").  See:

[John Robb's Radio Weblog]

 

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Powertoys for Windows XP.  Ones I downloaded:  an thumbnail maker and a power calculator (I haven't had a scientific calculator for a while). [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 

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Dan Gillmor responds to Jack Valenti. Dan Gillmor interviewed Jack Valenti last week in his column and did the impartial thing, representing Valenti's beliefs as fairly as possible. This week, Dan takes Valenti's arguments apart, looking at what Hollywood's agenda really entails:

So the movie and music companies are going back to Congress for another helping. They are asking for laws that would force technology innovators to restrict the capabilities of devices -- cripple PCs and other machines that communicate so they can't make copies the copyright holders don't explicitly allow. Amazingly, the entertainment industry also wants permission to hack into networks and machines they believe are being used to violate copyrights.

Here is what it all means. To protect a business model and thwart even the possibility of infringement, the cartel wants technology companies to ask permission before they can innovate. The media giants want to keep information flow centralized, to control the new medium as if it's nothing but a jazzed-up television. Instead of accepting, as they do today, that a certain amount of penny-ante infringement will occur and then going after the major-league pirates, they call every act of infringement -- and some things that aren't infringement at all -- an act of piracy or stealing. Saying it doesn't make it so.

Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog] 

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Seven Tricks Web Users Do Not Know.

Seven Tricks Web Users Do Not Know

From the excellent TopStyle vendor blog I found this: Seven Tricks That Web Users Don't Know.  Nothing here really surprised me but it does a great job of pointing out the difference between computer industry "experts" and Joe User who just wants to get the job done.  There is an excellent commentary on why you shouldn't use 2nd browser windows much if at all and she does a better job than others in describing the problems users have with it.  The one thing that I would be curious to know is if Mac users know more than PC users.  I have no evidence that this is true but I'd suspect so.

[The FuzzyBlog!] 

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Dan Gillmor's reply to Jack Valenti.

Gillmor provides a succinct response to Hollywood's view of intellectual property. The key point:

Here is what it all means. To protect a business model and thwart even the possibility of infringement, the cartel wants technology companies to ask permission before they can innovate. The media giants want to keep information flow centralized, to control the new medium as if it's nothing but a jazzed-up television. Instead of accepting, as they do today, that a certain amount of penny-ante infringement will occur and then going after the major-league pirates, they call every act of infringement -- and some things that aren't infringement at all -- an act of piracy or stealing. Saying it doesn't make it so.

[McGee's Musings] 

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Technology Review: Data Extinction.

On the plane this morning got caught up on some magazine reading. I absolutely love MIT's Technology Review - in its latest incarnation, it focuses on all things relating to innovation. The result is a magazine that is full of useful and intriguing information.

This month's cover story is on data extinction (available to subscribers only) - the challenge of preserving access to data as systems, applicaions and operating systems evolve. Some revealing statistics:

• volume of business-related e-mail will rise from 2.6 trillion messages in 2001 to 5.9 trillion messages in 2005 (source: IDC)
• JPEG is becoming outmoded by JPEG 2000; result: in five years it may be difficult for you to view photos taken today with digital cameras.
• Land use and natural resource inventories for the state of New York in the late 60s are no longer accessible - the customized software that produced the inventories no longer exists.
• NASA satellite data from the 70s is completely unreadable today.

Three different approaches to solving this problem:

• Migration: convert current data to future formats. Difficult and unwieldy especially when the volume of data grows. Not scalable, and inevitably some data is lost or modified in some way that may not be immediately apparent.
• Emulation: create an emulator to mimic the hardware/software environment that the data was designed for. Not really a long-term solution, because it puts off a comprehensive solution, and could result in unwieldy chains of emulators - which can become a house of cards.
• Encapsulation: a "way to group digital objects together with descriptive 'wrappers' containing instructions for decoding their bits in the future."

Then there's the long-shot, a "universal virtual computer" - which would simulate the basic functions of a computer, create a basic architecture (memory, registers, rules for exchanging data) and define it in a way that any application on any platform would be able to store two versions of a file - one in the proprietary format and one in the UVC format. The article includes some support for this concept, and early tests indicate it may be possible. The result would be that future applications would have access to data created today.

[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog] 

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Learned something interesting here.... Morbus Rides In.  Morbus has created an excellent resource of places to find RSS feeds.... [Content Syndication with XML and RSS]

A while back, there was some talk about why LiveJournal sites are ignored.  Someone had said on their blog that users' journals weren't available as RSS, which is incorrect.

LiveJournal is a free service that lets anyone keep an online journal, readable to anyone who happens by and updated whenever you deem necessary. Your journal can also be retrieved in RSS format, simply by adding /rss to the end of your journal's standard URL (like this)...

That's good to know... [jenett.radio] 

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Vintage Music Archive. Dismuke has a 24 hour radio station and RealAudio archive of '20s and '30s music. Some nice stuff in here. (Also check out my favorite music archive, Red Hot Jazz.) Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog] 

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Ten Things to Teach Kids About Money. Don't stop at the birds and the bees. Tell your kids about the bills and the fees. [The Motley Fool] 

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Retire Early Home Page. "Home schooling, private schooling, or public schooling: wherever the job is being done RIGHT, a "real workplace" exists." [The Motley Fool] 

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Yesterday, AT&T upgraded my cable box to a digital system.  To do that, they sent a cable guy to install it for me.  The installation went smoothly and I spent a little time last night reading up on the box they provided me.  It looked pretty snazzy.  Here it is:

Wow, I thought.  It really looks like a modern product (as opposed to the crappy analog boxes that have been around for a decade).  The picture was clearly superior to the old analog signal.  It also had dozens of new channels.  In fact, the box looked from a quick scan of the back to have lots of great hook-ups to get even better quality out of it (for instance: hooking it into an A/V system and my HDTV).

So, I decided to do a little research.  From the manual it looked good.  S-Video output.  Optical audio output.  Cool, I thought.  This is going to look and sound pretty good.  However, when I attempted to connect these outputs to my stereo system and TiVo, I found that the S-Video and digital optical audio connections weren't included in the system.  They were optioned out of the package.  The slots were there, but they were empty. 

Welcome to my multimedia hell.

It has been increasingly dawning on me that the media industry is caught in a massive quagmire that it cannot extract itself from.  Cable companies like AT&T, continue to roll-out, at great expense, equipment that is obsolete the moment it is installed.  This isn't a problem of snazzy interfaces and compelling interactive media experiences.  This is a problem of basic interoperability and functionality.  How would it be possible for AOL and others to innovate with interactive multimedia when the basic system for media delivery is broken? [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

 

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Cookie Monster Learns to Program.

Cookie Monster Learns to Program

No.  Really !  And the topic, cookies, makes perfect sense. 

Netscape extensions to CGI. The way cookie work is that webserver give "Set-Cookie:" header with information on cookie, and browser keep track of cookie. Then, when browser access page on same site, it send back list of all cookie for that site. It make me sad that W3 Consortium does not have good final Cookie spec. Me think it never really baked into HTTP standard and Netscape standard is only good definition me can find.

From Kuro5hin.

[The FuzzyBlog!] 

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Wow! mnoGoSearch Rocks!.

Wow!  mnoGoSearch Rocks!

Given my background in search and retrieval (like, oh, 15+ years), it's an absolutely travesty that my websites and my blog aren't searchable.  And, yes, I know it.  A real problem though, when you know a lot in an area, is that you become a perfectionist and are unwilling to not have perfection -- and that doesn't ever exist.  So, alone, unsearchable, my websites and blogs have wandered in the wilderness.  For the proverbial 40 days and 40 nights.  And then a shot rang out !  Well actually John smacked me on the head and basically shamed me into implementing a search engine.  He recommended mnoGoSearch so I ran with it.  After a few errors, wrong turns and some silliness on my part (and more than few difficulties with their "documentation"), I now have a searchable site and a searchable blog.  What's even better is that not only is mnoGoSearch hackable, I've been able to use its url spidering to implement a simple table of contents for my Radio stories on marketing (that url will go away in a few days when I make it better such as eliminating the stories which are still in draft stage).  In the future I'll use it to implement a link checker and other tools that rely on link spidering.  I am still fine tuning the indexing and making changes but the basics of search and retrieval are now quite functional.

Strongly recommended -- if you are willing to roll up your sleeves and grapple with poor documentation and a wee bit of bizarreness.

[The FuzzyBlog!] 

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WSJ.  The Pentagon is worried that a widely available $39.99, 4-watt, GPS jammer that can disrupt GPS signals for up to 100 miles will significantly impair our ability to use GPS munitions (bombs that can navigate to within 10 ft of targets autonomously).  Given that Baghdad's air defense network was basically untouched in the last war (it was considered too difficult to take out), this is bad news.  If we attack, an inability to use GPS munitions will require that pilots and/or rangers (on the ground) put themselves at significant risk in order to take out high value targets in or near Baghdad (in order to provide high quality terminal navigation to munitions). [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 

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Artists to labels: Get bent. The Recording Artists' Coalition are in open rebellion against the labels. The group, which includes Bruce Springsteen, Sting, R.E.M., Bonnie Raitt, Madonna, Eric Clapton, Dave Matthews, Billy Joel, Elton John, Linkin Park, Aimee Mann, No Doubt, Puddle of Mudd, Staind and Static-X are fighting for regulation of the music industry. They demand reform of:

• Contract lengths
• Accounting practices
• Health and pension benefits
• Copyright and ownership
• Payola

"The record companies are like cartels, like countries, for God's sake," singer/songwriter Tom Waits says. "It's a nightmare to be trapped in one. I'm on a good label (Epitaph) now that's not part of the plantation system. But all the old records I did for Island have been swallowed up and spit out in whatever form they choose. These corporations don't have feelings, and they don't see themselves as the stewards of the work. They are making shoes, and then they want to go to the Bahamas and get a suntan."

He advises new artists to "get a good lawyer and don't ever sign away your publishing rights. Most people are so anxious to record, they'll sign anything. It's like going across the river on the back of an alligator..."

"Artists really do need to communicate and organize," he says. "Don Henley is willing to get a haircut and go to Washington. I'm all for that."

Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog] 

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The new dailywebthing. One of my other websites, the dailywebthing, has been around since 1999.  It's original focus was syndicating excerpts daily from a number of popular weblogs (with their permission).  Until recently, content was scraped the old-fashioned Perl way and manually edited before publishing.  I recently decided to discontinue the "members' guide" which appeared on the main page and replace it with a new weblog powered by Radio.  With this change, I have over 100 sources (and growing) to choose from and publishing is considerably easier.  The new dailywebthing will deliver an assortment of miscellany you won't find on the main page of jenett.radio, so feel free to subscribe...

       jenett.radio: dailywebthing [jenett.radio] 

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SJ Mercury: Issues that will shape the Internet. Dan Gillmor. It took a series of smart decisions to create the Internet as an open network where innovation could thrive, as I noted in this space a week ago. Now let's look at some upcoming decisions that will shape communications for the next 50 years -- and ponder the consequences for openness and innovation if we make the wrong choices this time. [Tomalak's Realm] [dws.] 

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First smileys date back to time of Plato, apparently. Not really born in 1982 after all... [The Register] [Ye Olde Phart]

 

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Very Cool Networking Stuff (If You Are, Well, Geeky That Is).

Very Cool Networking Stuff (If You Are, Well, Geeky That Is)

Here are a couple of cool networking things.  Did you know that there are several, seemingly undocumented, private IP subnetwork ranges beyond 10. and 192..  My buddy www.apokalyptik.com found these over the weekend, did the research to confirm them, and they seem real.  Still he's NEVER seen these documented and neither have I.  Very bizarre. (The new ones are in bold).

• 192.168.X.Y
• 10.X.Y.Z
• 82.X.Y.Z
• 83.X.Y.Z
• 84.X.Y.Z
• 85.X.Y.Z
• 86.X.Y.Z
• 87.X.Y.Z
• 88.X.Y.Z
• 89.X.Y.Z
• 90.X.Y.Z
• 91.X.Y.Z
• 92.X.Y.Z
• 93.X.Y.Z
• 94.X.Y.Z
• 95.X.Y.Z

Note -- in case the above description of these doesn't make much sense here's the quick, albeit not perfect description.  Every machine on the Internet has an IP address such as 64.14.1.94; the address of the server where this blog is located.  When you have a computer on an internal local area network, you don't want to use an IP address of a machine located on the Internet since it could cause problems, particularly when you need to access that machine by IP address.  The addresses above are NOT routable and NOT used on the public internet meaning they are very, very safe for use on internal networks.

Also, I printed this a while ago but it's still cool: The domain name http://www.example.com/ (i.e. example.com) is NEVER in use and solely for use in technical documentation so you can write in a manual bob@example.com and know that poor Bob won't get yet another spam.  Thanks to my friend Guy Haas for this one.

 

[The FuzzyBlog!] 

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Understanding HTTP Cookie. Hello and welcome to Monsterpiece Theatre. I Alistair Cookie. As you know, many site use HTTP Cookie for keep track of browser session. Today we are seeing how HTTP Cookie work. [kuro5hin.org] 

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Your Company's Biggest Data Risk? It Might Just Be the Employees.. Most companies are diligent about backing up their servers and mainframes. But how much vital information are you leaving exposed on laptops and desktop PCs? (published in Business 2.0, 2002-09-06) [tweney.com] 

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Examples of Blogging. Here are some interesting blogging examples: Weblog models, sent to me by Barbara Ganley [Seblogging News] 

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"My god. We get to sit under our desks and eat cottage cheese.".

For me, Jon Stewart's return to the airwaves last year was among the most poignant and powerful responses to the September 11 attacks.

You can read the transcript of his monologue here. But if you have the bandwidth, be sure to watch it.

[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog] 

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"2002 Best of the Web Competition Results Announced" [The Virtual Acquisition Shelf & News Desk] 

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A Great International Relations Database [The Virtual Acquisition Shelf & News Desk] 

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Free: Convert Documents Into PDF and Other Format Via the Web [The Virtual Acquisition Shelf & News Desk] 

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Your Biggest Asset. Are you giving your No. 1 investment, your home, the attention it deserves? [The Motley Fool] 

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As time goes by.

Two years ago today: "What are the applications of P2P technology? Well believe it or not, I have the answer."

Three years ago today was 9/9/99. The world didn't melt.

And last year on this day we started tracking cumulative hits for this page. In 365 days, 2,497,292 hits.

[Scripting News] 

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Archive of answering machine greetings. There are some funny ones in here.

"Hi. I am probably home, I'm just avoiding someone I don't like. Leave me a message, and if I don't call back, it's you."

Link Discuss (Thanks, Kevin!) [Boing Boing Blog] 

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Taxes and Your New Home. Can closing costs lead to tax savings? Roy Lewis has the answer. [The Motley Fool] 

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Involve Kids in the Family Budget. If they know the electric bill costs as much as 50 comic books, they might turn off the lights. [The Motley Fool] 

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"limited Times". Congress has the power to promote the Progress of Science ... by securing for limited Times to Authors ... exclusive... [Lessig Blog] 

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Oops! I Forgot about this -- a Much, Much Better Ad Blocking File.

Oops!  I Forgot about this -- a Much, Much Better Ad Blocking File

Jirka added this as a comment back on the 29th and I forgot to blog it.  Sorry Jirka!  But thank you very, very much for the pointer.

Hi Scott,

there is already one very *professional* ad-blocking hosts-file list. You should look at it - and maybe just point to it instead of trying to compete with it. :-)

The site is http://remember.mine.nu/ (maintained by Andrew Short). His list is 1/2 MB long and frequently updated - http://remember.mine.nu/hosts. Strangely enough, the list is not that popular but I don't know any better one.

Jirka [OMITTED] • 8/29/02; 7:53:30 PM

[The FuzzyBlog!] 

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Here is a great newsletter on KM topics that I subscribe to:  David Gurteen's Knowledge-Letter.   PS. He is also into K-Logs. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 

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Not Gone, But Forgotten. Justin Hall established links.net in 1994.  His archives go back to January 10, 1996 and his latest post was on August 29, 2002.  It seems to me to be as much a "weblog" as any other I've seen, started long before the word "weblog" came into being and the craze to define the word became such a preoccupation on the part of so many "webloggers."  Some one has to give the guy some credit, so I will... [jenett.radio] 

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Better Stocks for Rule Breaker?. Never sell without a better alternative. That's why we haven't. But we're open to suggestion. [The Motley Fool] 

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Missile silo for sale. A $2,000,000+ missile silo in the Adirondacks is up for auction on eBay -- as the seller sez, "This could be your weapon against growing world terrorism." Or, it could be the swinginest, loneliest bachelor pad you can imagine.

ATLAS-F MISSILE SILO HOME FEATURES (above ground house) Open floor plan home w/ kitchen, island fireplace and wrap around covered porch, a large garage which has a secret escape hatch to the underground. The surface home doubles as an entrance to the Launch Control Center (LCC) and Silo below. See photo of keypad entry locking steel doors.

LAUNCH CONTROL CENTER (LCC) (below ground living quarters) Two story 3ft. thick epoxy resin formulated concrete reinforced walls with stainless steel mesh. Structure is 42 ft. diameter containing 2300 sf luxury home with full kitchen, dinning, entertainment center, with two private suites and exquisite marble baths with Jacuzzi. Contemporary fiber optic effect lighting along with natural sunlight rendition back lighting. Has escape hatch leading directly to surface home garage above. High circulation venting (two 18" vent tubes.)

Link Discuss (Thanks, Steve!) [Boing Boing Blog] 

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Paperwork to Keep for Tax Time. Yes, it's only August, but keeping the right documents will make next April easier. [The Motley Fool] 

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Stick a Fork in SatireWire.

Too bad. The site responsible for many of those e-mails that were too funny to have been written by your friend's friend? Most of them came from SatireWire. Some of my favorites:

• Remaining CEOs Make a Run for Mexico
• Supreme Court Rules Earnings To Be Protected as Art
• Foot and Mouth First Virus That Can't Spread Through Microsoft Outlook
• Interview with Jeeves of Ask Jeeves

And as far as I'm concerned, the all-time best:

• Should My Loved One Be Placed in an Assisted Computing Facility? Silicon Pines.

The site's creator and sole contributor is calling it quits. And no, it's apparently not a joke.

[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog] 

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Fortify Your Nest Egg!. Are you taking advantage of higher contribution limits to tax-friendly retirement accounts? [The Motley Fool] 

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How Kids Can Invest. Children can't have brokerage accounts of their own, but there are other options. [The Motley Fool] 

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Take Your Social Security and Run. Should you take a sooner, smaller Social Security benefit or wait for the fatter payout? [The Motley Fool] 

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Amazing, searchable archive of 4,000,000 newspaper pages. Paper of Record has nearly 4,000,000 old newspapers from all over the commonwealth and New York digitized and searchable as PDFs. Most of them cost (a fair bit of) money to get access to, but there are a ton of free pages, too. Link Discuss (Thanks, Pat!)
[Boing Boing Blog] 

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The Best Number of Stocks. What's too few or too many? The best number of stocks to own is... [The Motley Fool] 

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Brutally simple alternative to drive-cases. The SuperDriveDock is a brutally simple alternative to drive-cases. If you've got a naked drive and need to mount it in a hurry, just snap the dock on, plug in a FireWire cable and biff-bam, it's connected. Link Discuss
[Boing Boing Blog] 

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The British Museum has put together a beautiful interactive display system they call "Turning the Pages" for some of the rarest books in their collection, including the Sherborne Missal. The technology has been developed to realistically replicate the physical act of turning the pages of each individual book. [MetaFilter] [Ye Olde Phart]

 

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You may have seen the Newseum's collection of newspaper front page images from Sept. 12, 2001. Now you can view the front pages of over 119 newspapers from 23 countries, updated daily. [MetaFilter] [Ye Olde Phart]

 

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Personal Computer Milestones [Ye Olde Phart]

 

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MatchRockets.com--Experimental Science for Everyone [Ye Olde Phart]

 

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HubbleSite [Ye Olde Phart]

 

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Science Fiction and Fantasy Available in Electronic Form. Vonda McIntyre pointed out a list of SF & F, available online, maintained at the Science Fiction Writers of America website. Some are free, some are pay. In any case, it's a great way to keep the short story form, where modern SF started, going strong. [More Like This WebLog] [Ye Olde Phart]

 

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A List Apart Great advice by Mark Bernstein. To be read and reread often... [Ye Olde Phart]

 

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Your 401(k) Doesn't Need Fixing. It may need some tweaks, but mostly it needs your contributions. [The Motley Fool] 

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Gizmodo: New Blog Experiment. My agent told me yesterday that one of her other clients, Peter Rojas, was involved in a new blog called Gizmodo.com, a project of Nick Denton's. Because he's getting paid (or at least partly for that reason) this new blog is the talk of blogdom. Nick has rounded up some of the latest discussion at his own blog:

Take a look, in particular, at the Blogroots discussion. Meg Hourihan, Matt Haughey and Dave Winer, among others, argue whether premeditated blogs are possible.

I suspect it will appeal to overgrown girls as well [Meg Hourihan]

Will Gizmodo be profitable? [Blogroots discussion]

Gizmodo launch [Paul Boutin]

Love gadgets. Gotta love the blog. [Jeff Jarvis]

Breakeven, which for publishing ain't bad [Anil Dash]

Introducing Gizmodo, the first e-commerce blog [Rick Bruner]

It'll be an interesting experiment [601am.com]

... with a paid blogger! [Cory Doctorow]

[Radio Free Blogistan] 

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Five Steps to Certify Your Finances. In just 10 minutes a day you can SEC-proof your own finances. [The Motley Fool] 

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Save Money as a Family. Have fun while the dollars pile up. [The Motley Fool] 

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Scientific American: How to Build a Time Machine by Paul Davies [Ye Olde Phart]

 

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Make Cuts That Count. Living below your means reaps rewards later. [The Motley Fool] 

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Retire Early Home Page. "The usable history of REITS and high dividend stocks (in today's tax environment) is short..." [The Motley Fool] 

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Savings? Forgetaboutit!. Put your savings on autopilot and coast to your goals. [The Motley Fool] 

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Living Below Your Means. "I see a lot of money wasted by people in healthcare, money that could have been much better used..." [The Motley Fool] 

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Giant Jack Benny MP3 archive. Wonderful, enormous archive of Jack Benny radio programs from the 30s and 40s in MP3 format. Unfortunately, it's really weirdly organized; for some reason, the episode listings aren't linked to the MP3s; those are browsable as plain old directory listings. Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog] 

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The Long Decline of US Power. A bit of browsing near a previously submitted link brought me this unexpected gem. What is it I like so much about this article? The author sets aside illusions, reads the lessons of history, and tells it like it is. Have a read, if you will, and tell me if you agree. [kuro5hin.org] 

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Roll your own barcode. Encode any arbitrary string as a UPC with the barcode generator. Link Discuss (via Everything Isn't)
[Boing Boing Blog] 

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Tax Break for Teachers. Congress gives educators a new deduction for out-of-pocket expenses. [The Motley Fool] 

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Living Below Your Means. "This should be fun. Make sure it is. If it is not fun, re-examine why you are looking to buy a home..." [The Motley Fool] 

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Are We Screwed for 25 Years?. No. Tom Jacobs says time is your friend. It's not investing that ruins your finances -- it's fear. [The Motley Fool] 

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The Power of Dividend Growth. Don't underestimate how much you can make from dividends. [The Motley Fool] 

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Anime: A Primer. Despite the growing fan base for Japanese animation, or anime, in the U.S., Britain, and other Western countries, the medium is still misunderstood by the many individuals, even many who consider themselves fans. Many people consider anime simply as "tentacle porn." That does not do the justice to films like Tonari no Totoro, Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi , or the Rurouni Kenshin OAV. What follows is a short primer/history on the medium, including notable titles and important figures. [kuro5hin.org] 

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Digital Video Recorders - Changing the Way You Watch TV.

Interesting reports from today's NY Times about TiVo and ReplayTV:

TV Magic, Made More Magical Still. Imagine a gizmo so amazing that everyone who bought it turned into an evangelical fanatic, extolling its virtues to anyone within earshot. Such a machine exists. By David Pogue. [New York Times: Technology]

David reviews the new Replay 4500, which sounds like it's got some nice advantages over the current TiVo units. One of these features is ad skipping...

Skipping Commercials? Not So Fast.. TV executives are positively hysterical about the prospect of viewers skipping ads using digital video recorders, and they're contemplating solutions some of them are scary. By David Pogue. [New York Times: Technology]

Of course, TiVo does have a 30 second skip - a simple little hack that TechTV taught us (thanks again to Denise for the pointer a few months ago).

I still haven't seen mainstream press positioning TiVo (and Replay for that matter) as nirvana for young families. In our house, our 2 year-old is in love with Elmo and Blue's Clues. With our "season pass", we always have two episodes of Sesame Street and Blue's Clues available. Rather than be tied to the actual broadcast time of any of these shows, we are able to pull one up when it's needed. Very nice. (Of course, when we're visiting folks and we can't magically make Elmo appear, our two year-old gets upset...)

[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog] 

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Liquor Guide. You may be like many people who have had a very limited exposure to liquor.  Perhaps you have had mixed drinks, maybe even shot down cheap tequila in college, but shy away from the good stuff straight.   This guide should help you find the alcohol you like and direct you at what to buy.  Everyone's tastes and tolerances are unique, but some basic principles are the same for everyone. [kuro5hin.org] 

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New Paradigm Investing. "The economic capability - the wealth creating capability - left behind after technology bubbles is awesome." [The Motley Fool] 

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Backyard mech-warrior how-to. Great documentary site explaining the details of the construction of this mind-croggling backyard mech-warrior, built from old crates and spare parts. Link Discuss
[Boing Boing Blog] 

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The Economist.  An excellent overview of what Boeing has on the drawing boards.  I hope they pull it out.  [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 

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GRASP Exceeding Our Reach?.

Jane's Defense Weekly is not a publication noted for its levity, so it's probably true that Boeing is now experimenting with anti-gravity propulsion.

The Boeing drive to develop a collaborative relationship with the scientist in question, Dr Evgeny Podkletnov, has its own internal project name: ‘GRASP’ — Gravity Research for Advanced Space Propulsion.

A GRASP briefing document obtained by JDW sets out what Boeing believes to be at stake. "If gravity modification is real," it says, "it will alter the entire aerospace business."

Ya think?

The Russian government is apparently not facilitiating contact with Podkletnov, for what should be obvious reasons. There's more:

The GRASP paper focuses on Podkletnov’s claims that his high-power experiments, using a device called an ‘impulse gravity generator’, are capable of producing a beam of ‘gravity-like’ energy that can exert an instantaneous force of 1,000g on any object — enough, in principle, to vaporise it, especially if the object is moving at high speed.

Podkletnov maintains that a laboratory installation in Russia has already demonstrated the 4in (10cm) wide beam’s ability to repel objects a kilometre away and that it exhibits negligible power loss at distances of up to 200km.

The possibilities of weaponization are left as an exercise for the student. However,

The paper points out that Podkletnov is strongly anti-military and will only provide assistance if the research is carried out in the ‘white world’ of open development.

Nat Polish dug out this scientific abstract for a paper presented earlier this month regarding superconducting antigrav .

[Over the Edge] 

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Get Rich, Be Happy. No matter what your income, deciding to be content is your most important financial decision. [The Motley Fool] 

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Wow.  The FT wrote a very positive article on anti-gravity research.  I hadn't heard about the "gravity impulse" beam before (it can pass through objects and hit targets miles away).  [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 

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More on nuclear MEM batteries.  The objective:  batteries that last for a decade or more.  [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 

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CNN.  Micro RPVs.  Excellent.  This is really exciting stuff.  The Berkeley project is hoping to produce a flying bot that is 1/24th the weight of a penny.  Given that Moore's law has just pushed computing power beyond insect intelligence, this was inevitable.  Now, we need better power sources.  Some of the work on MEM turbines and fuel cells may fit the bill (engines that run on standard gas or kerosene).  [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 

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