BREAKING SURF
| The Inexplicable Mob Project |
| First International Love Hotel Moblogging Conference |
| Netsurfer Recommendations |
| A Simple Guide to A-List Bloggers |
| The Great Credit Card Signature Experiment |
| Captured Asses |
| AI 20 Questions |
| Operation Flashpoint Lego Mod |
| Inexpensive Funky Craft Projects |
| Low-Carb Recipes |
| Linux 2.4.21 Released |
| BOOK REVIEWS |
| LETTERS TO THE EDITOR |
| Contact and Subscription Information |
| Credits |
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BREAKING SURF
Spirit and Opportunity Go to Mars
Spirit and Opportunity are the twin rovers destined to land on Mars in January 2004 as part of the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission. Spirit is now on its way, launched June 10 aboard a Delta II rocket. The launch video shows the usual absorbing rocket shot. Opportunity is scheduled to lift off June 25. The wheeled explorers will land far apart and will seek out signs of ancient Martian water or its geological footprint. The rovers were named by nine-year-old Sofi Collis in an essay contest. Collis has an intriguing background. Born in Siberia, she was adopted and brought to the US at age two. Not surprisingly, she wants to be an astronaut when she grows up. While learning about the latest attempts to wrest secrets from Mars, you might also want to take a peek at NASA's brand new Web design. It's got a cheesy Flash intro that's suitable for selling Coke, maybe. Perhaps NASA should ask Sofi for a hand with that, too.MER: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mer/
Spirit launch: http://real.nasa-global.speedera.net/ramgen/real.nasa-global/launches/mera1.rm
NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/
The Planetary Society is sending toys to Mars. Attached to each Mars Exploration Rover vehicle is a DVD held in place with three Lego blocks and a picture of a Lego astrobot. In conjunction with Lego and NASA, the Planetary Society has created the Red Rover Goes to Mars Web site to interest children in the current Mars rover missions. Visitors can read "e-mail" from the fictional Lego astrobots, who tell how the mission is going. They can also drive one of several Lego rovers, found in mock Martian environments on Earth, over a Web interface. Although the Planetary Society's site could benefit from some design assistance, the site is sure to do at least two things: get kids and their parents interested in the Mars expeditions; and increase the sales of Lego robotics kits. The Wired article makes it clear that the rovers are a great deal of fun for many "older children".
Red Rover: http://redrovergoestomars.org/
Planetary Society: http://redrovergoestomars.org/pr20030607.html
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,59182,00.html
Geeks rule cyberspace, but they (we?) have eyes on outer space. As the staid NASA behemoth wonders what went wrong with its last manned orbital mission, the geeks are pushing forward with new designs, new strategies, and successful implementation. NASA's approach to orbital space is the Space Shuttle, which is 25-year-old technology, heavy, and possibly fatally flawed. The geeks develop new designs based on new technology and new concepts while competing for the X Prize, which is a $10 million award waiting for the first reusable vehicle capable of lifting three people 100 km high, twice in two weeks. Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites team has received a lot of press recently, and is on the July 2003 covers of both Wired and Popular Science. The team's comparatively inexpensive prototype is based on carbon fiber, flies like a bat out of hell, and was designed and developed in about two years. Looks like it may be time to drop NASA and turn space over to private enterprises. Whether you agree or not, it's an interesting premise.
X Prize: http://www.xprize.org/
Wired: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.07/space.html
Popular Science: http://www.popsci.com/popsci/aviation/article/0,12543,458498,00.html
The US government has declassified 11 boxes of material relating to the incident at Roswell Army Airfield in 1947, and Popular Mechanics sent some reporters to take a look. What they found is revealing. Although the conspiracy-minded will dismiss any contradicting evidence as planted, the Roswell files pretty clearly indicate that nothing unusual went on at the base the day an alien spacecraft allegedly crashed there. It was a normal day with normal levels of activity. The reporters even found remains from the high-altitude balloon that seems to have started the alien spacecraft story. Governments and armies leave paper trails, and this one seems to lead nowhere exciting.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/military/2003/6/roswell_declassified//index.phtml
The Scope of Cybercrime and You: You Break More Laws Than You Think
The mere act of sending e-mail to an AOL user or to Yahoo Groups makes you, by some legal definitions, guilty of cybercrime - specifically, unauthorized access to a computer. Since the 1980s all 50 states and the US government have quietly enacted cybercrime laws with loopholes big enough to drive an '80s mainframe through. Largely because the meanings of access, authorization, and unauthorized remain only loosely defined, it is technically possible to bring charges against some 120 million American netsurfers. In an illuminating example of how one can run afoul of the laws, Orin Kerr of the George Washington University Law School offers a scenario in a research paper that looks at the scope of cybercrime: a high-school girl uses her AOL account to search for information on the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). Kerr notes how she violates the AOL terms of use, the KKK Web site's terms of use, and other laws as well, all in a simple search for information. Chilling.http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=399740
Study Your Own Graph of the Web
Want to study how the Web is interconnected, but don't have the resources to crawl millions of Web sites and extract all the links? Italian researchers have already done all the hard work for you. They compiled datasets of billions of Web links, came up with an efficient compression algorithm specifically for Web connection graphs, and produced Java software, WebGraph, that lets you work with the data. Best of all, they make this treasure trove of info available to anyone who'd like to play around with it. The WebGraph site says that you can analyze large Web graphs with limited hardware, and that "using WebGraph is as easy as installing a few jar files and downloading a data set." This is fairly technical stuff, but if you want to do deep data analysis on Web-link data, you can probably deal with it.WebGraph: http://webgraph.dsi.unimi.it/
Data: http://wanda.usr.dsi.unimi.it/
TV Spurs Crime Wave in Bhutan, Maybe
Folks who think TV has been the ruin of polite society will find plenty of ammo for their arguments in the sad tale of what happened when TV came to Bhutan. The Guardian's riveting account of the clash between TV's crass commercialism and metaphysical Bhutanese values is sobering and almost surreal. The mountainous kingdom was founded in 1616 as a Buddhist sanctuary and for centuries, little changed - until the Chinese conquest of Tibet woke Bhutan from its self-imposed isolation. In June 1999, it became the last nation on Earth to adopt TV, spurred by a national thirst for soccer coverage. Now, a crime wave has broken out among the 700,000 Bhutanese; corruption, murder, theft, and many the other nasties have apparently appeared en masse for the first time. Although technology has helped Bhutan digitize ancient religious texts, any technological benefit seems to be swamped by an inundation of consumerism and crime, causing much hand-wringing over how to cope. Instead of calm contemplation, the population instead turns to Star TV. Perhaps in time, the Bhutanese will return to more contemplative pursuits, but in the meantime, the country is a living laboratory.http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,975769,00.html
Nineteen-year-old Suzy Gonzales was depressed, and thought of committing suicide. However, unlike the many depressives who also think of suicide but don't follow through, Gonzales visited a pro-choice suicide newsgroup where she learned how to poison herself and how to set up her e-mail client to notify her family and friends after the fact. Gonzales even told the police where they would find her body. This San Francisco Chronicle story coyly avoids mentioning the newsgroup in question, but we have no such qualms: it's alt.suicide.holiday (ASH; there's also a Web-based archive). The article makes it clear that Gonzales's messages to ASH might have been cries for help rather than a call for explicit directions on how to die. Decide for yourself after reading her posts at the link below. The group's morality is also rather problematic - one poster believes that telling the police about Gonzales would have been a betrayal, but we wonder how that poster would have responded to his own 18-year-old son's request for information on how to mix a cyanide cocktail such as the one Gonzales so calmly swallowed.
Chronicle: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/06/08/MN114902.DTL
ASH archive: http://ash.spaink.com/
Gonzales's posts: http://tinyurl.com/er3c
The Real People behind Virtual Lives
Thedeacon is a respected mutant, popular and renowned in Rubi-Ka, a virtual world in Anarchy Online that thousands pay $13 a month to access. The man behind Thedeacon is Rick Stenlund, a computer technician in Wisconsin. While online gameplay takes place in virtual worlds, the worlds often impact reality as they foster real friendships, real hatred, and real saleable virtual properties. The New York Times recently took a look at the confluence of the real and the virtual with a focus on Stenlund/thedeacon. Is virtual glory a sufficient or even a desired escape from real-life drudgery? Opinions abound.http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/12/technology/circuits/12play.html
Larry Lessig is a brilliant intellectual property lawyer from Stanford who is working to preserve the public domain. Matt Oppenheim is the senior vice-president for business and legal affairs of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which is into suing file-sharers. Online NewsHour hosted a debate between Lessig and Oppenheim in which they answered questions posed by the general public. The answers make clear the vast differences between the experts, particularly with respect to Oppenheim's general defensiveness.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/forum/june03/copyright.html
An online community is only what its participants make of it, tweaked by moderators. At the Fotolog photoblog site, not all the participants are pulling in the same direction. The Fotolog community is split into two factions: serious photographers and post-happy amateurs, mostly self-obsessed young Brazilians. The clash between cheesecake and art at Fotolog is lively and serious, and it's not yet clear which side will prevail. Fotolog's hook is that it allows users not only to post digital photos but also to link to and comment on other people's work, thus spawning a community of commentary and ideas. Last week, the site started charging users a monthly fee of $5 for all but the most basic service, and scores of mostly Brazilian users flooded the site with protest snaps. The folks who want to learn from others and improve their photo skills hope the community will gravitate towards the serious side of things. It remains to be seen whether there is room there for skin or whether the body-conscious will move elsewhere. Wired gives us the big picture.
Fotolog: http://www.fotolog.net/
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,59149,00.html
Part of Sex.com Saga Ends, Sort of
Talk about the wheels of justice grinding slowly! Ever since we first noted that the sex.com domain name was hijacked by Michael Cohen, we've been dying to find out how it would turn out. In 1994, Gary Kremen registered sex.com with Network Solutions Inc. (NSI, now VeriSign) but didn't exploit it. A year later, ex-con Michael Cohen sent NSI a forged document that asked it to transfer ownership of sex.com to him, which it promptly did. Cohen then established a porn operation using the name. When Kremen complained, the company refused to reverse the transfer without a court order. Kremen sued Cohen, who has dragged the legal battle out as long as he could using every legal pretext imaginable. Finally, on June 12, the US Supreme Court delivered the last, uncontestable verdict in the long legal wrangle. Cohen is guilty, and the $65 million award that Kremen had previously won in a lower court stands. Whether Kremen will ever see any of the money is another story, as Cohen is said to have fled to Mexico. Kremen's suit against VeriSign, which charges the company with failure to safeguard his property and with transferring the domain name without his permission, has yet to be decided. Internetnews.com has more.http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/2221341
A new scam is making its way around the Net: the hijacking of large tracts of unused or dormant IP address space. Los Angeles County fell victim to such a hijack. IP addresses that used to belong to the county were used to host porn sites, generate hacking activity, and mail out spam. Four non-profit registries parcel out IP address blocks, and the scammers are using forged letters, ephemeral domain names, and false corporate fronts to trick those registries into changing the address registration records. It seems that an underground black market exists among spammers who traffic in such stolen space. Network operators are getting savvy to the scam and are cooperating to clamp down on such activity but are worried about the obvious weaknesses in managing IP space ownership.
http://www.securityfocus.com/news/5654
As a savvy modern system administrator, you've probably done all the right things concerning security. You've installed firewalls and the latest security fixes, deployed anti-virus software, and maybe even built an intrusion-detection framework. Sadly, all of this layered protection can be bypassed with backdoors, programs surreptitiously introduced into the system to facilitate stealthy entry despite all the foregoing precautions. This SecurityFocus article, an overview of modern backdoor techniques, discusses how they can be used to bypass the usual security infrastructure. The article gives some examples of such backdoors and includes a list of links to related resources.
http://securityfocus.com/infocus/1701
Microsoft Puts Mac Internet Explorer in Suspended Animation
Microsoft has announced that it will cease development of Internet Explorer for the Macintosh operating systems, stating that Apple's own Safari browser is a more logical choice for Mac users. Microsoft will proceed with plans to release two minor upgrades to Internet Explorer 5 for the Mac platform, but that's it. Microsoft says that Apple is more capable of creating a browser with a better feel and feature set because it has access to functionality in its own OS that Microsoft doesn't. We can't help feeling that Microsoft is projecting what it wishes its opponents would have done when fighting privileged access to system technology instead of taking it to court for anti-trust violations. While ceding the browser battle, Microsoft isn't abandoning the Mac platform completely. CNET has the story.http://news.com.com/2100-1045-1017126.html
EU Set to Tax Foreign Online Sales
The only two certainties in life are death and taxes, except online. On the Net, death isn't final and taxes on e-commerce are unheard of - er, were unheard of. As of July 1, the EU will begin to levy a value-added tax (VAT) on online transactions from countries outside the EU (inter-EU sales are already VATed). American companies that sell downloadable software, for example, will have to pay VAT whenever they sell to an EU-based customer. The VAT rate varies from country to country within the EU; foreign companies must either accommodate the EU members' 15 different rates or have an office in the EU and collect only the host country's VAT. While many businesses are confused by the new regulation and others dismiss it, if the EU is able to make this work, can other governments be far behind? The Washington Post takes a look.http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36150-2003Jun9.html
The 25 Dumbest Moments in Gaming History
If you've made any bad decisions or bone-headed moves, keep in mind that in the history of gaming, someone with even more money and resources has made you look like Einstein. In GameSpy's list of the 25 dumbest moments in gaming history, you can revel in Atari's suicidal abandonment of Nintendo Entertainment System and MCA's ill-fated lawsuit against Nintendo over Donkey Kong. MCA believed that Donkey Kong was a shameless rip-off of King Kong, which MCA claimed was its own intellectual property. Alas, MCA didn't own the rights to King Kong and even argued in another case that those rights were in the public domain. Don't you feel better already?http://www.gamespy.com/articles/june03/dumbestmoments/
ONLINE CULTURE
It would be a pretty good prank if somebody were to just organizes a random flash mob via e-mail and mobile phone, but the Mob Project's inexplicable mobs go further than that, incorporating an element of situational art into the experience. The Mob Project organizes a flash mob which descends on an unsuspecting store and mills around debating whether to buy some specific item. After ten minutes, the mob votes on the purchase and disperses before anybody can figure out what's going on. Meanwhile, the Japanese have their own take on weird mobs, filling the streets with swarms of Agents Smith from "The Matrix". Wired has an article on the Mob Project, and mob coolness is infiltrating the blogosphere courtesy of sites like Cheesebikini. We predict a huge rash of flash mobs all over the place, followed rapidly by hysterical legislation outlawing them.Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,59297,00.html
Cheesebikini: http://www.cheesebikini.com/blog/archives/000261.html
Matrix mob: http://www.cheesebikini.com/blog/archives/000267.html
First International Love Hotel Moblogging Conference
To participate in the first International Love Hotel Moblogging Conference (ILHMC), simply bring your camera-enabled mobile phone to any love hotel on the evening of July 3, 2003 and post photos and commentary to the shared public blog for the event. You don't need to already own a blog or have any previous blogging experience. Great idea? Well, yes, but the organizers ruin the fun by asking, "Please keep the photos tasteful.... The emphasis of your blog postings should be mostly on the cuteness and creativty (sic) of the hotel." This is kind of like having Hello Kitty sex without the sex. Obviously, this is a Japanese thing, but you may be able to participate in the West by visiting your favorite love nest - as long as it features "cuteness and creativty" (sic), of course.ILHMC: http://www.tokyotidbits.com/~dav/lovehotelconf/
Love hotels: http://www.links.net/vita/trip/japan/lodging/lovehotel/
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Items our staff likes and you might too. Click on the image or title to order at a hefty discount from our affiliate Amazon.com, and send a few pennies our way as well.
I'm standing here, doing something. And I think, "What in the world am I doing here?" It's a big surprise.
For more selections, check out: Netsurfer Books: http://www.netsurf.com/nsb/ Netsurfer Library: http://www.netsurf.com/nsl/ |
Pieces of Intelligence: The Existential Poetry of Donald H. Rumsfeld
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Strangers With Candy - Season One (1999)
Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann & the Greatest Unsolved ProblemSURFING SITES
Chronicle of Consumer Consumption
Meet Kate Bingaman, a second-year graduate student in design at the University of Nebraska. In early 2002, Bingaman embarked on a peculiar journey that would ask the question, "Are we what we buy?" Photographing and documenting every purchase she makes, Bingaman's Obsessive Consumption site is a consumer experiment that is a corporate marketer's dream. Detailing her spending habits, Bingaman photographs and retains the receipt for even her smallest purchases, such as the daily coffees from the corner store. Although you may not agree with how this self-proclaimed "financially indebted" student spends her money, you may re-evaluate your own spending habits after viewing Bingaman's impulsive purchasing. If, after viewing this Web site, you find that your money is burning a hole in your pocket, try visiting the Obsessive Consumption online store to support Bingaman in her quest for self-consumed domination.http://www.obsessiveconsumption.com/
What's Your Big Fat Geek Heading?
Are you a geek? How much of one? Take the Geek Test and you'll have a much better idea than you would by watching dopey movies or sitcoms. In the first place, only a geek is likely to answer all the detailed multiple-choice questions. One question has 55 choices! You can't help but smile. In the end, the site will assign you a ranking from Geekish Tendencies to Dysfunctional Geek. Answer just a few questions and you're a Poser. We can imagine a progressive dotcom using the Geek Test as an adjunctive employment screen for would-be programmers and administrators. The bottom line, though, is that geekiness is more than affinity for computers. Some questions may make you feel uncomfortable, or even protest that, say, wearing glasses, knowing the names of more than five Star Trek characters, or helping people with their finances is an unfair criterion. Who ever said geekdom is fair?http://www.innergeek.us/geek.html
The Apex of Japanese E-Commerce
There is a degree of consensus among the marketing pundits about the factors that make for successful e-tailing. Keeping Web sites simple, easy to find, fast to load, and easy to navigate are musts, but there is more to it than this. To sell things over the Net, you have to know your customers and be adaptable in servicing their requirements - in some cases you have to personalize the e-commerce experience for them. Yet all of this amounts to little if you don't have a strong product to sell. This is not rocket science, right? So why is there such a high failure rate among e-commerce sites? This is not an easy question to answer, and perhaps it's more instructive to simply look at the businesses that do things well - Amazon, FreshDirect, and Pet Daisuki. Most definitely Pet Daisuki. Especially the cat goods page (see the Shopping category)....Pet Daisuki: http://www.petoffice.co.jp/
Pet Daisuki (translated to English): http://tinyurl.com/es1r
The British know already that the UK is where decommissioned American TV shows come to die, but where is the Elephants' Graveyard of British TV? The answer is online at the TV Ark. Go there and see "Play Your Cards Right", or "The Dick Emery Show", preserved in Real format for posterity. There are video snippets of shows here, profiles of the greats like Fred Dineage, Frank Bough, and Hugh Skully, and even the bit players get a mention - it seems a brief stint on the weather-desk of a regional news and current affairs show is enough to get you a mention in the alphabetized list of presenters. There's fun to be had here for all, not just for the British surfer in search of a nostalgia trip. Those unacquainted with the delights of decommissioned British TV shows should treat the experience as an exercise in learning about another culture - "The Dick Emery Show", for example, was not a grueling Japanese-style endurance contest. But please don't judge a whole nation on the basis of a short clip of Jim Bowen in the 1984 Bullseye Christmas special.
http://www.tv-ark.co.uk/
Timeline Index of Culinary History
Have you ever wondered what they ate during the building of the pyramids, or how Shakespeare's cook would have tempted his palate? If so, this Web site by Morris County Library in New Jersey is for you. If your primary interest is historical culinary research, you'll appreciate the numerous links to papers such as the "History of US Army Rations" or "How Table Manners Became Polite". Alternatively, you can travel down the timeline of links and sample the flavors of prehistoric African cuisine or the sage fritters from Elizabethan England as you go. You can also, for example, find out about Thomas Jefferson's pasta machine and review the evolution of the ice-cream stand in 1930s America. Best of all are the links to ancient recipes, which have been altered to use modern ingredients and which provide the ideal challenge for a cook with time to spare and a hankering for history.http://www.gti.net/mocolib1/kid/food1.html
The World Rock Paper Scissors Society
The Netsurfer who wrote this article is notoriously gullible (at one point, her best friend convinced her that iocaine powder was real and came from oleander bushes, and she fell for the "gullible is not in the dictionary" trick not once but twice in college), but if the World Rock Paper Scissors (RPS) Society isn't real, the folks with the hoax have certainly spent a lot of time fabricating a past. Part of the point is the fabricated past - obviously, Lenin didn't pose for RPS Communist propaganda posters, did he? But we think there really is a World RPS Society that really does promote the game and hold tournaments on a grand scale. Membership in the society would be a great present for a friend. Hopefully, soon the site will let you go about purchasing a membership for someone else.http://www.worldrps.com/
Would you wager that at least one human alive in the year 2000 will still be alive in the year 2150? The Long Bets site provides predictors and challengers the opportunity to archive long-term bets. Think you know how the world will have changed or remained the same, ten, 20, even 1,000 years from now? Predicting the future has never been quite like this. For a $50 fee, you can publish your prediction in the permanent records of Long Bets. Betting against an existing prediction requires a minimum $200 stake from each side. The twist on the traditional, and often illegal form of gambling, is that all stakes are made as donations to the charity of your choice. The odds may be against you, but you likely won't live long enough to see the end results.
http://www.longbets.org/
Lawsuit Seeks to Reveal Movies' True Starting Times
Ah, the joys of cinematic escapism. You pay $8 or $10 for a ticket, then another $10 or so on popcorn and soda that might cost a dollar out in the real world. Then you enter the theater, ready to enjoy the film - and sit through 20 minutes of large, loud commercials. While most of us just grimace and bear it, film critic Roger Ebert recommends that we instead walk out and demand our money back. Others go even further. Miriam Fisch has filed a class-action lawsuit that charges theaters with fraud and breach of contract. The suit seeks not to eliminate ads, but to force cinemas to advertise the actual starting times of the films they show. If Fisch prevails, it could cost theater owners as much as $75 per customer. The giant Loews chain, the target of the suit, claims that the action is frivolous because the movie-going public has come to expect this practice. The attorneys handling the case, however, note that in-theater ad representatives tout their "captive audiences". As a member of that captive audience, your inflated admission prices are subsidizing a $250 million ad business.http://www.nomovieads.com/index.htm
When Hollywood needs customized cars and other vehicles, it has often called on George Barris, self-styled "King of Kustomizers". His kooky, kitschy online portfolio, Barris.com, reminds us with a Flash intro that he was the brains behind the DeLorean in "Back to the Future", the Beverly Hillbillies' jalopy, and other distinctive rides seen by millions. Our favorite section is his gallery, subtitled Best of Barris. Here we learned that Barris Kustom Industries produced TV's original Batmobile and the Munsters' Koach. Each masterpiece is illustrated with a photo, of course. Most are accompanied by a short history of the project that spawned it. There are biographies of Barris and his late wife, along with news (with a list of car shows to display work of his) and an online store that sells prints, most of which are not in the gallery. If you're drawn to the production side of film and TV, Barris.com will crank up your curiosity as it brings back memories of over-the-top automotive glitter.
http://barris.com/
At the Online Guide to Traditional Games, you'll discover trivia and history about some of your favorite games. Hosting information on pub games, board games, table games, and lawn games, this site primarily features games with a history prior to 1900. A virtual encyclopedia on traditional games waits to be explored by any avid player. Amaze your gaming friends with the history you will learn from a visit here. The site provides great reference material for the would-be traditional gamer in us all.
http://www.tradgames.org.uk/
Hoss thieves. You just know they're about the nastiest, low-downest scum around. Why, out in the Old West, we used to just string them varmints up to the nearest hangin' tree. Pardners, times have changed for the worse, and we don't get to string 'em up any more. Believe it or not, somewheres around 50,000 folks in the US are victimized by horse thieves every year nowadays. Stolen Horse International aims to do somethin' about it. The site has images and descriptions of missing horses and related gear, theft prevention tips, and links to offsite horse interest groups. The site takes advantage of what the Web is set up to do so well: distribute information far, wide, and fast.
http://www.netposse.com/index.html
FLOTSAM & JETSAM
A Simple Guide to A-List Bloggers
Robert Scoble makes it easy to recognize the A-list bloggers in the wild simply by their writing style. Examples are thoughtfully provided. Any resemblance to the actual blogs is positively uncanny.http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/blogparody.htm
The Great Credit Card Signature Experiment
Who exactly bothers to check the signature on your credit card receipts? Will they notice if you don't use your real name? Will they notice if you use stick figures? Egyptian hieroglyphics? The basic "X"? The experimental results are in.http://www.zug.com/pranks/credit/
The street has its own uses for technology. As cell phones with built-in cams grow in popularity, users need to find something to do with them. Some have decided to take photos of stranger's asses. The street also apparently likes women in tight pants. But you already knew that, didn't you?
http://www.mobileasses.com/
Most of us have probably played 20 Questions at one time or another. Here's the next generation. Fool the algorithm if you can. Trail tip to get you started: it knows about elephants, computers, cats, and cell phones. Don't waste processing time on these. It's a cool experiment in AI.
http://y.20q.net:8095/btest
What if Lego people didn't just sit quietly in their boxes after you finished playing with them? What if they didn't like being made redundant by newer versions of themselves and they decided to get even? That's just what happens in LegoWarz.
http://www.legawarz.com/
Inexpensive Funky Craft Projects
Want to create cool, custom wares for your home inexpensively? Visit ThriftDeluxe, a London-based do-it-yourself site with some clever ideas. Fair warning: if you visit it in Netscape, you're going to miss out on some of the images.http://www.thriftdeluxe.com/
Visit this site for some low-carb-friendly recipes. The recipes index includes breads, soups and stews, desserts and snacks, drinks, and several more. If you've found it difficult to locate flavorful, diet-wise meals, a look at this site will change how you've been eating.
http://lamsonadventures.com/recipes/atkins.html
SOFTWARE
This is the latest release of the stable branch of the Linux operating system, six months after the last such release. As you'd expect, there are numerous bug fixes and several performance boosts, in particular on systems which do heavy disk I/O. The new kernel also features an impressive number of hardware driver updates. If you want to run the latest stable kernel, you can download and install it yourself or, of course, you can wait for the major distributions (RedHat, Debian, SuSE, Mandrake, Slackware, etc.) to release it in the next round of Linux packages. All the kernels and their change logs are at the Linux Kernel Archives.http://www.kernel.org/