More Signal, Less Noise
Monday, March 07, 2005
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NETSURFER DIGEST
More Signal, Less Noise |
Volume 11, Issue 09 Monday, March 07, 2005
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NETSURFER LINKS
 BREAKING SURF
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BREAKING SURF NY Public Library Places Massive Treasure Trove of Images Online This week, the New York Public Library placed a major portion of their visual holdings online. The initially available collection includes some 275,000 images in categories like the arts, history, and nature. The collection is not limited to photos and paintings but includes other visual material such as maps, postcards, cigarette cards, and Japanese prints. It's all free for personal use, but if you want to use it commercially, you'll need to get a license from the library. This is an immense and immensely valuable treasure trove of documents but there's more to come: "Within the next several months, we expect that the quantity of materials available will double to 500,000 items." The images include metadata, which makes them reasonably easy to search. Demand has been overwhelming and at press time the site was offline for redesign to handle the load.http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/index.cfm "A Company of Soldiers" is a remarkable documentary. It follows Dog Company of the US Army's 1st Battalion 8th Calvary Regiment during November 2004 in Iraq. The documentary team had unfettered access to the soldiers and their activities, with the exception of a single meeting. The film was first broadcast on PBS's Frontline in February, but because some PBS stations feared that the FCC would fine them if they broadcast the unexpurgated documentary containing often foul language used by soldiers, they showed an edited version. You can watch the original unedited version in its entirety online. PBS's thoughtful Web site also has a great deal of useful additional information and suggested reading. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/company/ The most prestigious around-the-world solo sailing race is winding down to a finish as competitors continue to arrive in Port Olona, France. The men's winner, Vincent Riou, crossed the line with a record time of 87 days, 10 hours, 47 minutes, 55 seconds, a time five days faster than last year's record, set by Michel Desjoyeaux in the same boat. This year's race is also notable for Bruce Schwab, who with his ninth-place finish became the first American to complete the race. The Vendee Globe is one of the world's most grueling events, where competitors must endure some of the roughest seas on Earth, alone and without assistance for three months. The Vendee Globe site has many details, including a worthwhile Newswire archive (in the News menu) that chronicles the whole race. The Multimedia section also includes many good photos and videos of the race, which fans of yachting will not want to miss. If history is any guide, we should see a TV special about the race in the near future. http://www.vendeeglobe.org/uk/ GlobalFlyer: Steve Fossett Breaks Another Record Steve Fossett, the first man to circumnavigate the globe solo in a balloon, made history again by being the first to solo around the world in a jet without refueling. The flight was plagued by mysterious fuel evaporation but cooperative winds brought Fossett's GlobalFlyer aircraft safely to Salina, Kans. in a round-the-world time of 67 hours, 2 minutes, 38 seconds. The project was mounted by an aviation dream team. Fossett himself holds a large number of air and sailing records. Burt Rutan, who designed GlobalFlyer, also designed Voyager in which his brother Dick and Jeanna Yeager fly around the world. Virgin billionaire Richard Branson provided the money, and is himself a record-holding pilot and sailor. Note that the front page of the Global Flyer web site has a couple of photos of Branson but none of Fossett or Rutan, which seems an uncharitable choice by somebody associated with the project. Nevertheless, if anything is the star of the project, it is surely the beautiful GlobalFlyer itself, a graceful machine with thirteen fuel tanks, a 34-meter wingspan, and an astonishing 37:1 glide ratio.http://www.virginatlanticglobalflyer.com/ Engineers designed the Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, for 90 days of Martian exploration, but the intrepid robots have powered through more than 400 days. The two seem particularly well named, Opportunity especially so as it has encountered both an alien meteorite and a chunk of ejecta from an impact zone. The iron meteorite likely hit when Mars had a thicker atmosphere. Had it penetrated Mars's present atmosphere, it would have buried itself in a crater, but it seems to have made a relatively soft landing. The ejecta is composed of sulfate-rich rock of local origin. Spirit encountered similar material when it scrambled up the Columbia Slope. Did water bring the sulfate salts to the surface? Scientists expect to continue learning more. Space.com has details. Mars Exploration Rover Mission: http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html Space.com: http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/mars_meteor_050119.html John Gilmore Challenges ID Requirement for Travel We bet you don't give a second thought to flashing your photo ID in order to board an airliner. John Gilmore - millionaire, advocate of free software, and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation - did more than wonder about it; he asked to see the law that required him to show photo ID as he tried to board a plane. He discovered that the law is deemed so sensitive by the US Transportation Security Agency that neither he nor his lawyers are allowed to actually read it. In a pre-orchestrated move, he has filed a lawsuit to challenge the regulations. A Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article makes it clear that Gilmore's challenge is not simply the work of a wealthy eccentric. Gilmore seriously wants to uncover how the US became a nation that requires an internal passport, even an informal one, for travel. Whatever happens to Gilmore's suit, the questions he raises about the US are troubling and well worth discussing. Besides a personal site, Gilmore with his team also have a Web site dedicated to the case, Gilmore v. Ashcroft.Gilmore: http://www.toad.com/gnu/ Post-Gazette: http://www.postgazette.com/pg/05058/462446.stm Gilmore v. Ashcroft: http://papersplease.org/gilmore/ Researchers Use Clocks to Track Individual Computers Online Researchers have discovered an almost foolproof method for tracking individual computers anywhere online by identifying how their internal clocks keep time. Due to subtle differences in hardware, every computer clock keeps time that's slightly skewed from true time, even if it uses standard protocols like NTP to synchronize with standard time. Researchers can determine the clock skew of a particular computer by analyzing the TCP/IP packets it sends. The researchers discovered that they can identify an individual machine with this fingerprint, regardless of where on the Net the machine is connected or which operating system it runs. In practical terms, anonymity has just become that much harder - any computer can now be more reliably tracked online by anybody who can record TCP/IP traffic, even if efforts are made to obscure the machine's network location. All is not hopeless for anonymity lovers, however. The technology could eventually be defeated by a slight redesign in the core TCP/IP stacks in modern operating systems. We bet somebody is already working on a Linux patch. The paper has technical details.http://www.caida.org/outreach/papers/2005/fingerprinting/ Yahoo turned ten years old this week and to commemorate the occasion the company put up an interactive mosaic of its history, inspired by the work of digital artist Jonathan Harris. Read the About link for more information on Harris's creative information displays. The mosaic shows major milestones in Yahoo history, starting with its incorporation in 1995. Of course, Yahoo existed long before then as a large directory of Web links run from Stanford computers by founders David Filo and Jerry Yang. NSD first mentioned Yahoo in issue 00.23, September 1994, when we said they had "a richer and fresher variety of links under just about every category. They earn a place near the top of our Hotlist." Incidentally, the former home of Yahoo, akebono.stanford.edu, is still going strong, though we bet not on the original machines. Yahoo: http://birthday.yahoo.com/netrospective/ NSD 00.23: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v00/nsd.94.09.23.html#SS1 Akebono.stanford.edu: http://akebono.stanford.edu/ New Game Journalism: It Doesn't Suck NSD 11.08 brought you an item on a rant/essay on the sorry state of game journalism. All is not lost in the land of game reporting - a new literary movement christened New Game Journalism (NGJ) is being born. A movement does not earn a name without examples to point at, and by now several first-rate literary pieces have come to the fore as representative of the genera. If they have anything in common it is a certain spirit of gonzo journalism and a personal, often idiosyncratic approach to the games they write about. Probably the best known example of NGJ is Ian Shanahan's seminal "Bow Nigger", a gripping and sometimes disturbing account of a duel in Jedi Knight II. The Guardian's Gamesblog has links to "Bow Nigger" and nine other outstanding examples of NGJ. All are worth reading from a literary point of view, even if you're not much of a gamer. Another Gamesblog entry has a good essay on the movement in "State of Play".NSD 11.08: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v11/nsd.11.08.html#BS12 Gamesblog 1: http://tinyurl.com/56avv Gamesblog 2: http://tinyurl.com/47e73 iPod U2 vs. Negativland Special Edition, Round 2 Last December, Francis Hwang wanted to make a point about ownership and copyrights. He purchased an iPod U2 Special Edition and transformed it into what he called the Unauthorized iPod U2 vs. Negativland Special Edition, in reference to a famous copyright case in 1991 in which U2's record label sued the band Negativland for using unauthorized samples from U2's music. Having legally bought the original iPod and the Negativland CDs, Hwang wanted to make the point that he was at liberty to install the Negativland music on the iPod and sell it and the CDs in accordance with the legal principle of first sale. He tried to auction the modified iPod on eBay, but the site pulled his auction, apparently due to objections from Apple. The situation garnered a lot of publicity and now became an issue of free speech for Hwang. Accordingly, he is again auctioning the now famous iPod and accessories on his own Web site. The bidding is open until Mar. 14. At press time, the leading bid stood at $500. Hwang says he will donate proceeds to the non-profit Downhill Battle.NSD 10.48: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v10/nsd.10.48.html#OC2 Wired: http://wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,66725,00.html Hwang: http://fhwang.net/art/uiuvnse/ Blog Sponsorships, Swag, and Influence Generally, when you peruse a blog, you expect that you're just reading somebody's musings. Generally, you're right. But as blogging has hit the mainstream, capital investment has followed it. We mentioned this tangentially in NSD 11.07, and here's more. A company called Marqui paid a select group of bloggers to mention it once per week. One payee, Jack Bogdanski, does it like so: "It's time for our weekly Marqui post. Marqui is the software company that's paying me and some others to mention them and link to their product demo once a week on our blogs. For that, they pay us good money. And we can say whatever we want about them." Some pundits call into question the ethics of the arrangement while the bloggers bristle at the suggestion of paid influence as they pocket the $800 a month. Online Journalism review (OJR) looks at bloggers, influence, and ethics.NSD 11.07: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v11/nsd.11.07.html#BS5 Bogdanski: http://bojack.org/ OJR: http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/050217lasica/ The Business Impact of Podcasting and Satellite Radio Despite being a new technology, podcasting is already attracting the attention of the business world. While revenues for the big players in the radio market are shrinking, it's premature to speculate that either podcasting or satellite radio are having an impact on it, although Business Week notes that the traditional radio industry is worried. Radio audiences and listening hours are shrinking. At the same time, podcasting, for all its rapid growth, has yet to see a business model, while satellite radio is engaged in a fierce battle for audience share and is not expected to turn a profit for years. All this upheaval is driving innovation in the market, with traditional radio players increasing their online presences and betting on new technologies like high-definition radio. Business Week tosses in some good industry financial figures.http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2005/tc2005033_0336_tc024.htm What makes Google Google? Read this behind the scenes account in GQ of Google's rise and IPO and you learn that the key feature of the firm is the founders' refusal to compromise their vision without compelling evidence. The account of Sergey Brin and Larry Page's manipulation of venture capitalists is remarkable, as is the story of how Eric Schmidt became CEO. Whether or not you buy the argument that Google's founders have never grown up is irrelevant to this remarkable story of how a corporate vision animates the firm. http://men.style.com/gq/features/full?id=content_422 It's pretty simple. Type "weather" and the name of a city or state, or a zip code, for example, "weather Sunnyvale". Google will insert a short graphical weather forecast for that location at the top of the search results. It only works for US locations. We tried "weather South Pole" and "weather London" without luck. http://www.google.com/ Virtual Immortality in a Funeral Urn The Ego Machine is all about putting the fun back into funeral, writes Wired. The machine is a cross between a funereal urn and an iMac. It contains your cremation ashes, but it's also connected to the net and scans Google for mentions of your name. If the search returns many hits, the Ego Machine screen will display a youthful version of your former self. As mentions decrease over time, the displayed image ages, then finally fades away altogether. If you have a common name, you might last a lot longer than you deserve, but who's to say that you lose any points for riding somebody else's coattails into virtual immortality?Ego Machine: http://www.swampmonster.org/new/egoMachine.htm Wired: http://wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,66599,00.html The Daily Grind Ironman Cartoon Tontine Who is the strongest cartoonist of them all? This simple contest plans to find out. Each participating cartoonist has put $20 into a pot. Each updates their cartoon every Monday to Friday. The artist who manages to maintain this kind of punishing output longer than all the others wins the pot, which amounts to $1,120. That's 56 artists, all grinding out cartoons and comic strips. Among the content, it's not hard at all to find something you like. Can this thing go on for years? We sure wouldn't bet against stubborn pride, or cartoonist poverty for that matter.http://crowncommission.com/dailygrind/ Do you wonder what is going on at the UN? UN Dispatch is a new blog that tracks activities performed by and indirectly related to the UN. It has especially useful links to some issues in the public eye, such as to Oil-for-Food Facts, which discusses that program and the investigation into its problems. UN Dispatch receives funding from the UN Foundation, although it has editorial independence under the administration of Peter Daou, the man behind Salon's Daou Report. UN Dispatch: http://undispatch.com/ Daou Report: http://daoureport.salon.com/default.aspx The Ten Biggest Myths in Rock 'n' Roll It's not exactly breaking news, but it is time to disabuse yourself of some cherished notions. Rotund crooner Mama Cass did not choke to death on a sandwich. According to the coroner's report, she died of massive heart failure. There may well have been a big ol' sandwich found nearby, but she wasn't eating it. She didn't have time to. The Beatles didn't smoke a joint in Buckingham Palace, Stevie Nicks denies having taken cocaine by bum, and Led Zeppelin didn't really stuff a groupie with shark meat (but their road manager did stuff a groupie with red snapper). These, and other news flashes, await you at the Observer.http://observer.guardian.co.uk/omm/story/0,13887,1415153,00.html Flash Player Download Adds Yahoo Toolbar, Developers Pissed Web developers who deliver fancy, if often annoying, Flash applications to customers are steamed at Macromedia because the company is now bundling a third party application, the Yahoo Toolbar, with the download of its ubiquitous Flash player. The complaints center on two main objections, first that experienced users are conditioned to reject downloading any plug-in that bundles third-party software after being swarmed by all the spyware out there, and second that if Macromedia gets away with this, what's to stop the company from bundling real spyware with Flash at some point? How do you tell your customer's customers that they have to download software that they did not choose to install? It smells bad. Some people have noted that you can avoid installing Yahoo Toolbar with Flash, albeit by using a rather, shall we say, de-emphasized installer button. Slashdot hosts a debate with all those points and more.Macromedia: http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/ Slashdot: http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/03/2343207 ONLINE CULTURE Beaming Your Craigslist Ad Into Space Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster won a wacky eBay auction for the "first private communication transmission into deep space." (Let's ignore the fact that every TV and radio broadcast, and all our cell-phone calls are already inadvertently winging their way to Andromeda.) A private outfit called the Deep Space Communications Network (DSCN) held the auction. The DSCN got $1,225 from Buckmaster, who is negotiating with them to beam at least 10,000 Craigslist ads into deep space on May 15. Now, when you post an ad on Craigslist, you can flag it for inclusion in the transmission. In addition to the ads, the transmission will include a personal video message from founder Craig Newmark and a clip from the documentary "24 Hours on Craigslist". We think Jim overpaid for the publicity this stunt has generated, but we admire the creative thinking of the DSCN team for getting the cash out of him. (DSCN seems to be only a front for a small audiovisual-production company (CCI) with a satellite uplink truck and a high-powered klystron amplifier.) So, who's going to write the first "casual encounters" ad seeking an alien hook-up?Ads in Space: http://www.craigslist.org/about/space.html DSCN: http://www.deepspacecom.net/ CCI: http://cciflorida.com/ Tales of the "Numa Numa Dance" We who have our rulers on the pulse of the Internet passed on the "Numa Numa Dance" video when we first saw it a few months ago, but like old gum it has stuck around to be rediscovered, with even the New York Times taking note. Video star Gary Brolsma joins wannabe Jedi Ghyslain Raza as one of the few Net sensations to be outed by name, and like fellow teen Raza, the 19-year-old Brolsma's sudden fame is not entirely to his liking. In the video, Brolsma sings and bops along to a Romanian pop tune. According to his family, he is distraught and embarrassed and wants it all to end. Sorry, kid, you belong to the world now. Newgrounds hosts the amusing video as well as a large collection of amusing take-offs. As Crooked Timber points out, what has been lost in the phenomenon is Brolsma's intentionally expressive performance. This, unlike Raza'a escapade, has to have been intentional - so why is Brolsma moping? We know people who are talented but held back by fear, of failure or of success. We suspect Brolsma has achieved fame in spite of himself, and is incapable of enjoying it.Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/26/nyregion/26video.html Newgrounds: http://www.newgrounds.com/collections/numanuma.html Crooked Timber: http://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003283.html While Gmail is beginning to roll out to the general public, many users have been working with the beta version for many months. A couple of Perl hackers with the HBX Networks Unix group were testing ways to use Gmail to dispatch batches of newsletters for a Unix shell service last month when they stumbled upon an anomaly: shooting a batch of ten newsletters to their Gmail accounts resulted in delivery of message content belonging to other users as well as the newsletters. They discovered that this was the result of their hastily cranked-out Perl script's failure to transmit the "From" header correctly - one character was missing - and the omission forced Gmail to append content of other peoples' messages to the newsletter headers. In some cases, usernames and passwords found their way into the newsletter headers, so this bug had the potential to be more than a mere annoyance. The folks at Gmail fixed the problem within hours of notification, but the circumstance may give pause, anyway - how many other simple exploits can be carried off? A healthy dose of paranoia is a good thing. No matter what you choose for e-mail, it's never dangerous to assume that the content is unsecure. http://dump.hbx.us/gmail_bug_hack/ The Browser Speed Comparisons pages are going to surprise you. The site probably won't change your mind, as browser choice seems to be religious in nature. There are conversions, but they're not the rule. The site presents much excellent discussion of the tests selected and used and the subsequent wealth of data. What sometimes seems obvious to users may not be supported by the numbers here. Readers may be inspired to stick more firmly with their browser, or may be inspired to try a new browser that appears to do what they do most faster and better. The site is strictly nondenominational - it covers most Linux, Windows, and Mac browsers. http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html ONLINE TRAVEL Virtual Tours of Europe's Bunkers Military history's most lasting physical monuments are fortifications. Massive and sturdy by design, these constructions are meant to be hard to destroy, even if someone is really trying. While we still gaze in awe at lofty medieval castles, modern forts tend to squat low to the ground. With advances in artillery technology in the 19th and 20th centuries, these forts evolved into iceberg-like bunkers: mostly below the surface. The parts above ground, minimal when new, are now often nearly invisible reminders of their existence. The nuclear era created a whole new use for underground military structures. Dan MacKenzie has a passion for old forts and bunkers, and his Bunkertours site is a virtual tour of many of Europe's old strongpoints, including Cold War-era US Air Force bases in the UK and bunkers belonging to the former East Germany. Should you want to view them yourselves, he provides helpful tour diaries of his own trips to visit these places, with driving directions to the forts of the Maginot Line. The site is a must for enthusiasts of military architecture and history.http://www.bunkertours.co.uk/ Marco Kluber is gifted with a camera, which is especially impressive considering it seems to be his hobby and not his occupation, according to the Babelfish translation of his About Me page. (German speaking readers may feel free to correct us.) When you take a gifted photographer, give him technology to work with, and set him down in sublime environments, you come up with art like his montane panoramas, which are just stunning. Looking at the ones that are greater than 360 degrees hurts your brain if you think about it too much, not to mention the neck. http://www.m-klueber.de/Fotografie/Panorama/navi-Panorama.htm ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT The folks at Sequential Pictures present a hilarious spoof trailer called "Star Wars Episode III: A Lost Hope". Using cutting edge green-screen technology, the producers of this latest Lucas-inspired bit of fun have created a well polished piece. The video is just over six and half minutes long and is available in QuickTime or Windows Media Player format. You can also get a behind-the-scenes look at the production through some additional features available here, such as production photos and the production journal. Hungry enthusiasts can also find desktop images and the emperor's office stationary to download.http://www.sequentialpictures.com/moviestarwarsepisode3.html Digitally Teasing out the Effect of Advertising Imagine a world devoid of signs and advertising. We bet you can't. For his "The Untitled Project", photographer/digital artist Matt Siber took photos of intersections, stadiums, and streets. He digitally manipulated the photos to remove all text from the image, and placed all the text in a sidebar image. It's remarkable to see how much calmer and less chaotic the altered images are without all those words screaming at you. You expect stadiums to be filled with signs and ads, but even the most mundane commercial street will surprise you. Another Siber project available to view is "Floating Logos" and it too explores the advertising age. In this project, Siber snaps photos of commercial signage, then digitally removes the signposts. The results are eerie insignia, hovering like ad UFOs in cityscapes. Siber's projects are innovative and stunning to view. Now if he could just clean up Times Square.http://www.siberart.com/home%20pages/home.html Instead of beating swords into ploughshares, the Peace Art Project Cambodia in that previously war-ravaged country is turning decommissioned weapons such as guns, ammunition, and mines into objects of great beauty. This noble concept has been running for five years now and if the project's online display is anything to go by, it has been a huge success. The sculptures range from the slightly clumsy early efforts of these young Cambodian artists through to more delicate evocative pieces. Many feature real or mythical animal forms, as though nature is the only resolution possible for the warrior weapons of humanity. The artists, students from the Royal University of Fine Art Phnom Penh, have exhibited their transformative sculptures all over the country in a quest to promote peace. Visitors who want to get involved can commission work via the Web site. We can't think of a better way to remove dangerous metal objects from the world. http://www.peaceartprojectcambodia.org/ BOOKS & E-ZINES
http://www.fantasticmetropolis.com/i/50socialist/full/ With tech consumer goods, you'll find either on the packaging or in the manual a series of little pictures meant to illustrate how or how not to use the product. These graphics are likely provided for the benefit of those too illiterate or too foreign to read the standard warnings against being stupid (Warning! Product will be HOT! Do not pour into lap!). Four humble illustrations on the back of a chainsaw box, however, have transcended the usual bindings of idiocy and illiteracy. They've been incorporated as iconic illustrations in a bewildering array of blessedly brief short stories. Some take idiocy to new heights. Others take Stephen King to dark, new depths. There are many stories here. Take your time. http://www.monochrom.at/micro-graphic-novel/ For those annoyed that corporate executives are being put away for frittering away company assets but not for frittering away the English language, you have a kindred soul. Brian Schreurs has put together the Tech Writer's Style Guide, a walkthrough of the uses and abuses of language in the corporate world. Especially noteworthy is his version of "Little Red Riding Hood", written as if it came through on an executive briefing memo. http://neptune.spacebears.com/opine/style.html SURFING SCIENCE The threat to destroy the Earth has traditionally been rather casually tossed about by supervillains and assorted alien menaces from time immemorial - including in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", by the Vogon Consructor Fleet. Well, it turns out that destroying Earth is not quite as easy to do as all that, and you may be forgiven for thinking that all of these evil entities frequently overreach. So, what exactly would it take to destroy Earth? This handy guide provides information on what you'll be facing should you decide to try. After a brief outline of the mission statement ("by any means necessary, to render the Earth into a form in which it may no longer be considered a planet.") and a few impressive planetary facts ("Know your enemy"), the guide goes on to summarize the myriad ways in which Earth can be destroyed. We think this long overdue technical analysis should find its way into all reputable references on the subject of ultimate planetary destruction.http://ned.ucam.org/~sdh31/misc/destroy.html The ARKive is primarily an album containing material related to one of two categories, at present: globally endangered species or species in the UK. It's amazingly comprehensive, including not only animals but a wide range of plant, alga, and fungus species. In addition to cool photos, the entries present information that is uncannily accurate - a feature that's rare in many online references. Another cool feature is that data and images can be accessed via your mobile phone - perfect for those treks away from the desktop. The content is free, and includes a section devoted to resources for educators. How good is the site? The resident zoologist here at NSD HQ has it bookmarked. http://www.arkive.org/ Move over, Segway, there's a new kid on the block. The two-wheeled scooter is a fine first step, and Trevor Blackwell built one for a lot less than the cost of a Segway, but now he's moved on to a single-wheeled model dubbed the eunicycle. Before attempting to build and ride the scooting one-wheeler, learn to ride a regular unicycle. You'll still bust your buns - or parts forward, maybe, considering the contraption's unfortunate name - a few times, but it's a lot easier than starting from scratch. You can build one for around $1,500, and Blackwell links to the software you'll need to run the thing. http://tlb.org/eunicycle.html Johns Hopkins University's Department of Near Eastern Studies has an online space on which it shares its faculty's studies in Egypt. This year, however, the site is highlighting the work of four different archaeologists, each working on something unique, instead of focusing on the excavation of the Temple of Mut. By reading the entries (all in the past at this point), you get to see what archaeology is really like instead of just the "great reveal" we're all familiar with. http://www.jhu.edu/~neareast/egypttoday.html SOFTWARE Apple's Music Codec Unlocked, Airfoil Frees Airport Express In a recent revision of iTunes, Apple released support for Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) files, a proprietary music encoding format. Apple reportedly had to create its own format because the major lossless format, FLAC, is too CPU-intensive for the iPod's processor. Until now, users could only play ALAC files on iTunes for OS X and Windows, but David Hammerton has released his ALAC Decoder program, which lets users listen to ALAC files on Linux. The program itself is your basic, functional proof-of-concept, with some features - multiple channels beyond stereo, 16-bit sample sizes - absent. Hackers, users, and industry watchers are waiting to see if Apple will release its lawyers, although this seems to be a straightforward case of legal reverse engineering. Hammerton, a university student, says he needs donations of Airport Express hardware to continue his hackery and development of open-source music-streaming software. In the same vein, a new program called Airfoil now lets you stream any sort of audio over Airport Express - Apple prefers to limit your Airport Express-ion to whatever is contained in your iTunes database.ALAC Decoder: http://craz.net/programs/itunes/alac.html Airfoil: http://www.rogueamoeba.com/airfoil/ |
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The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry
DisneyWar
The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe
Apple I Replica Creation: Back to the Garage (with CD-ROM)