More Signal, Less Noise
Tuesday, June 21, 2005
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NETSURFER DIGEST
More Signal, Less Noise |
Volume 11, Issue 24 Tuesday, June 21, 2005
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NETSURFER LINKS
 BREAKING SURF
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BREAKING SURF Lost Dispatches from Nagasaki Discovered Chicago Daily News reporter George Weller was the first foreign correspondent to enter Nagasaki, Japan after the US atomic attack on Aug. 9, 1945. His dispatches were submitted to General Douglas MacArthur's headquarters for routine censorship and were denied. For nearly 60 years, they had been lost to history, but Weller's son discovered carbon copies of the reports after his father's death two years ago. After astonishingly failing to find a US publisher for the material, he agreed to sell a limited set of the articles to the Japanese daily Mainichi Daily News, which published them this week. The Pulitzer Prize-winning Weller recounted the devastation he witnessed in Nagasaki and reported on his later visits to former POW camps where some prisoners described seeing the bomb go off. He also provided the first civilian account of radiation sickness, dubbed "Disease X", which the Japanese doctors did not know how to treat. The material is a treasure trove of important historical information and we can only hope somebody has the good sense to publish it all soon. The Mainichi Daily News has the four initial parts, while Editor & Publisher (E&P) tells the story of the dispatches' discovery.Mainichi Daily News: http://mdn.mainichi.co.jp/specials/0506/0617weller.html E&P: http://tinyurl.com/aouco Astronomers Discover Most Earth-Like Extrasolar Planet It's not another Earth, exactly, but a newly discovered planet is the smallest extrasolar planet yet detected. Orbiting only two million miles from the surface of Gliese 876, a Type M red-dwarf star in the constellation Aquarius, the planet is 7.5 times more massive than Earth, and is undoubtedly hot, hellish, and probably lacking in aliens. The astronomers responsible credit upgraded detectors in the high-resolution spectrometer of the Kech telescope in Hawaii and novel observational techniques for their ability to spot the planet's gravitational influence on two much larger gas giants previously discovered in the system. They hope the improvements will let them measure Doppler velocities of stars finely enough to allow them to detect potential Earth-like planets in other nearby star systems. The Carnegie Institution provides a press release of the discovery and Extrasolar Visions offers a VRML tour of the Gliese 876 system.Carnegie: http://www.carnegieinstitution.org/news_releases/news_0506_13.html Extrasolar Visions: http://www.extrasolar.net/startour.asp?StarID=2 2,000-Year-Old Date Germinates A seedling that has sprung from a 2,000-year-old date pit is about 14 inches tall and goes by the fitting name of "Methuselah". The ancient date-palm seed that produced the plant is now the oldest seed known to have germinated, a record previously held by lotus seeds around half its age. An archeological dig excavated the date-palm seed about 30 years ago at Masada, the Jewish fortress besieged by the Romans in 72-73 CE and famous for the mass suicide of its defenders. The seed was germinated by Elaine Solowey, an expert in the cultivation of ancient and exotic seeds who works on a kibbutz in Israel. Genetic analysis should reveal what has changed in the last 2,000 years of date-palm evolution. The San Francisco Chronicle relates the work that led up to the plant, with pictures. The New Farm site offers an entertaining account of a visit to Solowey's experimental farm and links to some of her other research.Chronicle: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/06/12/MNGJND7G5T1.DTL New Farm: http://www.newfarm.org/international/israel/sept/index.shtml The 46th International Paris Air Show closed Sunday. This air show is the largest and most prestigious event of its kind, a showcase where the entire aviation industry demonstrates the latest technologies and products. The show's official Web site is a Flash and frame-ridden mess, but fortunately Aviation Week & Space Technology (AW&ST) provides first-rate coverage. The magazine is a hard-core source of aviation and space industry news and its coverage reflects this. If you love aircraft and just want eye candy, head straight to the photo gallery at India-Defence. Paris Air Show: http://www.paris-air-show.com/ AW&ST: http://www.aviationnow.com/shownews/05paris/index.htm India-Defence: http://srirangan.net/india-defence/node/279 Terry Schiavo's husband Michael Schiavo argued that she should be allowed to die while her parents fought unsuccessfully in court to stop that action. US Senator Bill Frist, a surgeon, watched her for an hour of videotape and claimed she was not in a persistent vegetative state. Florida Governor Jeb Bush had legislation crafted to impede Michael Schiavo's wishes. Columnists and talking heads argued that the judiciary had overstepped its bounds and that the police should insure that Terry's feeding tube remain connected. It was a circus with consequences that are still being played out. Well, the autopsy results are in and the Smoking Gun has a copy. CNN has a fine article explaining it. With only half a brain left, Terry had no hope for any therapy that might improve her condition. Her eye movements were simply a reflex; she was essentially blind. Her parents don't accept the autopsy and Governor Bush now wants a commission to investigate Michael and the exact circumstances surrounding Terry's still mysterious initial collapse. Thank goodness Michael Jackson's verdict came in this week as well. Smoking Gun: http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0615051terri1.html CNN: http://www.cnn.com/2005/HEALTH/06/15/schiavo.autopsy.ap/index.html Cosmos 1 Solar-Sail Mission to Launch On June 21, the Cosmos 1 mission will launch from a submerged Russian submarine in the Barents Sea. Cosmos 1 is a joint project of the non-profit Planetary Society, the Space Research Institute in Russia, and other organizations. Its goal is to test the design of a solar sail, the first time this will be tried. The Cosmos 1 craft will deploy an array of eight triangular 15-meter sails as it orbits 800 kilometers above Earth. The test is designed to demonstrate that the sails can gradually raise the craft to a higher orbit. Keep an eye on the Cosmos 1 site for the latest news of the launch and mission.http://www.planetary.org/solarsail/ Dropping spacebound rockets out of airplanes is nothing new. Both the military and some private companies have used the method for years to loft satellites into orbit. Typically, the aircraft drops the rocket, the rocket lights up, and while the aircraft maneuvers to avoid a collision, the rocket uses wings to get into the vertical - it's not an ideal configuration. Two companies, Transformational Space (t/Space) and Scaled Composites, have teamed up to add a nifty wrinkle to the method. Instead having a launched rocket zip ahead of the plane, the neatly named trapeze-lanyard air drop releases and pivots the rocket so that the missile slowly rotates to vertical as it drops behind the plane. This method increases safety and reduces the mass of the rocket, which now does not need wings to fly upward. The new system was tested with an inert rocket model, but nothing seems likely to prevent the real thing from working. t/Space has pictures and and a press release that make the whole thing clear. Photographs: http://tinyurl.com/djghj Press release: http://tinyurl.com/dfs5n Death by Tech Support: Testing Laptop Support Helplines Woe to the poor user whose laptop breaks, for if they choose to navigate the dungeons of manufacturer phone support, they are doomed. Well, in most cases, they are doomed to waste a lot of time on the phone - but doomed nonetheless! Mobile magazine's annual survey of laptop manufacturer's support lines led to often amusing reviews under the title "Death by Tech Support". Mobile intentionally broke laptops in three different ways, representing the typical software problems a user might encounter, and called each manufacturer to see if their help techs could figure out what was wrong and fix it. After spending over 13 hours on the phone, Mobile's testers found that of the ten manufacturers they called only Dell and Toshiba tech-support reps managed to fix all three problems. Mobile also tested three third-party support organizations, which fared equally poorly. This is a must read if stories of tech-support Hell rock your boat.http://www.mobilemagazine.com/archives/2005/06/death_by_tech_s.html A long time ago, in an online world far, far different from today's, bulletin board systems (BBSes) ruled. If thinking about that time well before the Web, instant messaging, and blogs gets you all weak-kneed and nostalgic, a new DVD documentary of what BBS culture was like will surely turn on your faucet. Sure, BBSes were slow and clunky, but at the time they were the cutting edge of communication, the leading edge of geekdom. Remember 300 baud, the perfect definition of slow? We do - and tears come to our eyes! Come to think of it, tears came to our eyes then, too. With 5.5 hours of video in eight episodes, scores of interviews with such luminaries as Vinton Cerf, and thousands of photos and additional audio interviews in a DVD-ROM, the documentary is a treasure trove of facts and opinions about the technology that got us started down the road to the information superhighway. Wired has the story and the documentary site offers video and sound samples, descriptions, and an order form. BBS: http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/ Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,67776,00.html Yahoo Searches Subscription Sites Yahoo has begun testing a search service that lets you search within subscription-based Web sites. One of the hot topics among media companies is what to do with content hidden behind subscription gateways. Such content is typically invisible to search engines, which limits the exposure and hurts the Web sites that use that model. Yahoo is taking the lead in tackling this problem in partnership with several major subscription sites. At the moment, Yahoo is indexing the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, Consumer Reports, TheStreet.com, the New England Journal of Medicine, Forrester Research, and publications from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Users can freely search the content of these sites, but will only be able to view it with a valid subscription. The beta test, at least, does not feature ads on the result page.http://search.yahoo.com/subscriptions/ The Less Than Perfect Google Scholar If you've tried using Google Scholar, you must read Peter Jacso's review of the entire project. Anyone who has tried to work with Google's search engine for academic journals has probably noticed some odd search behavior, which this article explains in detail. Jacso helps you understand how to frame your searches and just what Google Scholar can do for you. Alas, it's not a panacea for the independent scholar.Jacso: http://www.galegroup.com/free_resources/reference/peter/current.htm Google Scholar: http://scholar.google.com/ The Live 8 megaconcert is full of good intentions: the concerts around the world aim to raise awareness of African poverty. Live 8 does not intend to raise funds, but to push the G8 group of industrialized nations to address poverty in Africa through a combination of loan forgiveness and increased aid. Tickets for the London Live 8 concert were free and dispensed by lottery. Some ticket winners, however, appeared more eager to pocket a few pounds than to cherish memories of the event and offered their tickets to the highest bidder on eBay. Amid accusations that ticket sellers are simply profiting from human misery, eBay has banned the sale of Live 8 tickets. This potato became too hot to handle, apparently. Wired has more. Live 8: http://www.live8live.com/ Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,67857,00.html Asafa Powell of Jamaica is now the fastest man on the planet, running 100 meters in 9.77 seconds. He set the record at the Athens Super Grand Prix Tsiklitiria track meet in Greece. Powell was fifth in the 100 meters at the Olympic Games last summer with a time of 9.94. The IAAF announces the feat. Wikipedia has a neat graph of the progression of world records in the 100 meters since 1900. If the curve holds, in the year 2100 the world record could stand at 9.52. IAAF: http://www.iaaf.org/GP05/news/Kind=2/newsId=29772.html Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Record_progression_100_m_men Jobs Tells Grads to Follow Their Bliss "Tune in, turn on, drop out" is advice you'd expect from Timothy Leary but not Steve Jobs, who focused on the last portion of that triad in a commencement speech he gave recently at Stanford University. Jobs noted that dropping out of Reed College turned out to be one of a series of good moves for him. Jobs wasn't advising his audience to drop out - and it was too late for most of them, anyway - but his thrust was that people should find what they love and go with it. The message of Jobs's short but inspirational address is all too familiar: you have choices in life. You can go to work for the Man, or you can pursue your own love - and the latter course often yields greater rewards.http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html A Defamation Primer for Bloggers The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has posted a guide for bloggers that addresses issues of legal liability. This is a good thing because, let's face it, many bloggers just write whatever they feel like writing - and that can get them into trouble should somebody take offense. And offense, in these times, means a victim, pain and suffering, and a lawsuit. As a blogger, then, you owe it to yourself, your readership, and your wallet to gain some understanding of the issues involved. This guide is a great place to start. Delving into issues such as defamation and intellectual property rights, you can get a good feel for the way your views may be interpreted in American courts. It's a twisted world we live in, and you really need to get a feeling for just how twisted it can get.http://www.eff.org/bloggers/lg/faq-defamation.php Chinese MSN Spaces Censors Politically Sensitive Phrases Microsoft recently opened a Chinese version of MSN Spaces, its blog-hosting service. Users immediately noticed that the Chinese MSN Spaces was censoring blog content. The Chinese MSN Spaces appears to ban words such as "democracy" and phrases like "Taiwan independence". Microsoft is the first major international ISP to offer Net services in China and as part of its deal the company must comply with Chinese censorship regulations. However, China has no laws that ban the expression of words such as "democracy". Rebecca MacKinnon of the Global Voices law blog at Harvard ran a test and found that she could not set up a blog on the Chinese MSN Spaces called "I love freedom of speech, human rights, and democracy". Further research revealed that not only were blog titles censored, but content was too. This appears to be typical of the hit-or-miss Chinese efforts to suppress free speech online. MSN has a reprint of a Financial Times article.Chinese MSN Spaces: http://spaces.msn.com/?mkt=zh-cn MSN: http://tinyurl.com/ahc5o Global Voices: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/globalvoices/?p=238 The CBC is airing episodes of the new "Doctor Who" series in Canada. We know - we watch it. While it's pretty cheesy stuff, for true fanatics it's good to see the franchise alive and kicking. And for anyone unfamiliar with the Dalek phenomenon - well, it's a great way to catch up with what you've been missing. To celebrate the new series, the CBC has a video-intense (dial-up users, just move along now please) six-part Web documentary about the history of "Doctor Who", which has spawned several series and movies over the years. There's even a contest to win a trip to the set of the series in the UK. The documentary is a wonderful and informative look at how, perhaps unknown to most of us, "Doctor Who" has strongly influenced popular culture and seeped into "Star Wars", "The Matrix", and the "Star Trek" franchises. The BBC, proud parent of the new and old series, explains it all online, with teasers of current episodes and some neat sound effects. Daleks or the Tardis anyone? CBC: http://www.cbc.ca/planetofthedoctor BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho Expanded Del.icio.us Tags Target Multimedia The popular bookmark-sharing Del.icio.us site has introduced several new ways to tag your shared bookmarks. For example, with tags like "system:media:audio" and "system:media:video", you can share bookmarks to audio and video content, respectively. More specific tags like "system:filetype:mpg" allow you to tag specific file types. Conversely, using these tags with Del.icio.us RSS feeds lets you get listings of all the items in the Del.icio.us database that match your choice. This immediately becomes a great resource for tons of free music and video on the Web. Del.icio.us has details.http://blog.del.icio.us/blog/2005/06/casting_the_net.html Creative Commons is Internet ubermensch and superlawyer Larry Lessig's attempt to create a new form of copyright that grants users varying degrees of control over the material they view and use online. In this thoughtful round table discussion, Lessig and several others, including Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing fame, discuss the role of the Creative Commons License with respect to Web comics. As one comment from the peanut gallery observes, they don't really address Web comics so much as licensing issues, but the discussion is nevertheless a good introduction to the Creative Commons project and something you should know about. http://comixpedia.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=2535 Adware and Spyware Found in BitTorrent Client Until recently, the BitTorrent file-trading has been relatively free of malicious files, mostly because users have been quick to purge such files from the major BitTorrent sites. Now, however, comes word of a major campaign to spread adware embedded in a BitTorrent client (btdownloadgui.exe). Note that this is an adware package in the BiTTorrent software, not in the media files themselves - distinctly different from the standard of misleading files that masquerade as media in name but which install adware on Windows. Chris Boyd, who runs security site Vitalsecurity.org, noticed that many sites were reporting problems with adware pollution and tracked the problem down to a popular BitTorrent user interface program that is infested with software from Marketing Metrix Group (MMG), a well known distributor of adware. Read the eWeek story for an overview, and Boyd's details at Vitalsecurity.org.Vitalsecurity.org: http://tinyurl.com/dl2kc MMG: http://www.marketingmetrixgroup.com/ eWeek: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1828633,00.asp The ZombieMeter, a new online tool, tracks the number of zombie computers - those infested with viruses and worms that force them to spew spam and participate in denial-of-service attacks. CipherTrust, ZombieMeter's overlord, states that it identified an average of 172,009 new zombies each day in May. Approximately 20% of the new zombies originated in the US and 15% were in China. The ZombieMeter page breaks down the numbers by country and time period. CipherTrust: ZombieMeter: http://www.ciphertrust.com/resources/statistics/zombie.php http://www.ciphertrust.com/company/press_and_events/article.php?id=0000474 ONLINE CULTURE The Rise and Fall of the LA Times Wikitorial The editors of the Los Angeles Times had a great idea. Let readers not only respond to their editorials online, but actually edit the content. The idea was certainly inspired by the success of Wikipedia, where a vibrant user community continues to collaboratively produce a high-quality encyclopedia. Why not apply the same concept to editorial content, we guess the newspaper's staff asked themselves. Alas, it appears that the paper's editors, although progressive, are still somewhat unclear on how the whole Internet thing works. Two days after it opened, the paper's Wikitorial closed: "Unfortunately, we have had to remove this feature, at least temporarily, because a few readers were flooding the site with inappropriate material." The editors fail to grasp that Wikipedia's strength is its extremely active, almost fanatical users, who manage to keep inappropriate material under control. The LA Times editors seem to lack fanatics and appear unaware that public Net resources tend to be abused. The original Wikitorial announcement is now but a shattered dream.Wikitorial: http://latimes.com/wiki Announcement: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-wiki17jun17,0,6698799.story Britney Spears tops the list of the top 10 celebrities virus and worm writers use in their victimizing spams, or so says antivirus company Panda Software. The company's press release also describes the complex chain of infections used by one recent e-mail that featured Michael Jackson. The spam e-mail in question contained a link to a Web page, which exploits a flaw in Internet Explorer as it installs a script. The script, in turn, installs a downloader on the user's computer, and the downloader then retrieves and installs a worm or Trojan program that hackers use to control the machine. It all happens because the poor user wanted to read Michael Jackson's (fake, of course) suicide note. http://www.pandasoftware.com/about/press/viewNews.aspx?noticia=6323
SURFING SITES Google Maps and Chicago Crime Data If you live in Chicago and you worry about your personal safety amid the plague of personal and property crimes that fuels TV news, this is the site for you. Make it your home page and check out all known (to the Chicago police, anyway) crime in the Windy City. The crimes are not only described in dry police-speak, but the location of each is precisely shown on detailed maps, thanks to Google Maps. Even if you don't live in the Windy City or are so protected or well armed that crime is an afterthought, Chicagocrime.org remains a brilliant example of the merging of a text database with Google Maps technology. The ways you can use and search this site are essentially limitless. If you can't see other applications for this sort of technology, please go see your optometrist. However, if you live in Chicago, first check your optometrist's address at the site to see if anything bad has gone down in the area recently.http://www.chicagocrime.org/ Why Smart People Cling to Bad Ideas How hard is it to avoid bad ideas? Even worse, why would anyone defend them? Scott Berkun, a self-styled "recovering smart person", attempts to explain how really bad ideas defy all logic to find diehard supporters. Believe it or not, smart people can get their egos wrapped around their ideas and then refuse to be dissuaded by the facts. He explains how they get backed into these corners and suggests this simple admission for leading them back out to join the rest of the group: just because we're too dumb to prove you wrong doesn't mean that you're right. He also covers "death by homogeny", worrying about the wrong details at the wrong times, and short-term planning. Your challenge is to slow down the smart-person's light-speed logic long enough to focus a critical eye on the assumptions and their predications. You'll also have to calmly endure withering criticism while avoiding direct conflict and persuading others that you're not just another smart person yourself. You may want to read some of Berkun's other essays, as well.http://www.scottberkun.com/essays/essay40.htm A Year in Treblinka is a personal account by Holocaust survivor Yankel Wiernik. It is an eyewitness report of life in Treblinka, a concentration camp in Poland. Wiernik had the good fortune to escape after one year of captivity. In 1945, he wrote his account of that year in a matter-of-fact, unvarnished voice. The atrocities witnessed by this man are stomach-turning, are so far removed from decent behavior that you can only despair at your own human origin. We suspect that some folks hear the cry of "Never again!" and chalk it up to melodrama or egotism. Those people need to visit this site. We also specifically recommend this site to anyone who gives any credence to those who deny the truth of the Holocaust. http://www.zchor.org/treblink/wiernik.htm Pvt. Art Pranger's Letters Home Modern soldiers compile blogs, ancient soldiers sent word by animal or rider, but all fighting men have always had the urge to communicate with home and family. Plenty of Web sites let you sample collections of letters by various combatants. This one, Private Art, is a collection of letters from one private, Arthur Pranger, who fought in World War II. He was an ordinary young man who signed up after Pearl Harbor and ended up in England, France, Belgium, and Germany. The letters the site offers include those he received from his family and friends, and are enhanced with his recollections of those times. We loved the clever layout of the site, with its dog-tag menus and 1940s-style graphics. Other memorabilia Pranger saved include weekly war headlines, his little brown book of stories about army buddies, valentines, photos he snapped, and advice handbooks he received during training.http://www.private-art.com/ Certainly the most bizarre episodes fostered by the radical New Left during the '60s and '70s were the kidnapping of teenage newspaper heiress Patty Hearst by the group known as the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), her subsequent conversion to the SLA cause, and her participation in its criminal and terrorist activities. With nicknames taken from history, SLA members robbed banks and shops and killed people. You can relive the whole sordid episode with Robert Stone's fine film "Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst", which appeared on PBS or, if you missed it, through the Web site. Aside from reading the film's transcript, you can peruse primary source material, view a timeline and a gallery of the events, and take advantage of a bibliography of online and offline materials. Best of all may be the 1975 Rolling Stone account of the last months of Patty Hearst in the SLA. It happened a long time ago, and while it's worth arguing whether the current political and intellectual climate in the US is so different from what it was then, it's still hard to deny the fact that these people were idiotic goons. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/guerrilla/ Cessna Once Tried a Helicopter... It's been over 50 years since Cessna sold light helicopters, but you don't have to be an aircraft buff to enjoy this story by Steve Remington, who joined the Cessna company in 1952 to help shepherd this early record-setter through design and production. His Web site is packed with previously unpublished photos, collector's magazine covers, and engineering drawings that depict the golden era of personal aircraft. While engineers will appreciate the occasional technical detail, the rest of us can enjoy Remington's memories and fascinating glimpses of early personal aviation as the helicopter took shape. When the media in the 1950s predicted that Americans would commute to work in their own helicopters, the Cessna CH-1 Skyhook was the vehicle most had in mind. One of the last piston-engine helos, it was designed to look like and to be as easy to maintain as a car. By 1955, it was setting speed and altitude records, but high costs and slow sales doomed the project when turbines became the helicopter engine of choice.http://www.commercemarketplace.com/home/CollectAir/cessna.html Take a good, hard look in your fridge. We bet you've got at least one container of leftovers in there. It could be anything from half an onion in Saran Wrap to steamed rice from last night's takeaway - but do you ever really get around to doing anything with those ingredients? We thought not - but help is at hand. Mark and Robin Kamensek are on a mission to help us to eat leftovers before they eat us. Recipes range from Boston Baked Beans to the worryingly named Garbage Soup, which upon closer inspection does in fact sound quite tasty. You can list what you have, and the site will spit out an appropriate recipe. Sadly, some of their leftover recipe categories are sparsely populated, but for a new site, and one that is easily searchable by ingredient, this should be corrected swiftly by penny-conscious, recipe-donating visitors. Now, go blitz those leftovers into a feast. http://www.leftoverchef.com/ An odd little bit of Flash, complete with a PowerPoint presentation by a tentative young lady, starts your visit. Mail Order Chickens offers to match you up with your ideal chicken. If you're especially fond of chickens, you may wish to adopt one from Mrs. Yumbia's unsuccessful farm in Ghana. It's satire of course, but satire with an issue. The site comes from Christian Aid, which campaigns to get poorer countries a better deal in international trade. Operating from the premise that free trade is antithetic to trade justice, and that in the absence of trade justice the poor will always be poor, Christian Aid offers a petition that you can find and sign if you'd like to support the cause. http://www.mailorderchickens.org/ What the TSA Does with Seized Items When they took away someone's explosives before boarding a plane, we didn't speak up. When they took away someone's small knife, we didn't speak up. When they took away fingernail clippers, we kept silent. But when they took our 100th-anniversary Harley-Davidson Zippo lighter at the metal detector, why would no one speak up for us? Maybe it was because they knew that the swag that the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) folks confiscate at airports somehow mysteriously ends up in bulk lots on eBay. Seriously, what is anyone other than a terrorist Boy Scout troop going to do with 50 pounds of silver-toned pocket knives? Or 23 assorted Leatherman tools? Once that question is answered, perhaps we'll know why these tools, knives, swords, and lighters that were confiscated by TSA are being sold by the state of Pennsylvania. Wait a minute! What state was Tom Ridge, former head of the Office of Homeland Security, from? Two things to note: 1) that the eBay auctions use the wrong abbreviation "NTSA" and 2) that many private sellers have hopped on the bandwagon and used "NTSA" in their listings to feature in this popular search.http://search.ebay.com/NTSA The Best Little Armory in Texas Akin in some respects to a virtual museum, Thaden Armory presents the armor and jewelry Patrick Thaden designs and builds with his masterful craftsmanship. He also makes weapons. While you may not think there's really all that much call for armor in these days of depleted-uranium projectile weaponry, it seems that there's more than enough to keep the highly-skilled Thaden as gainfully employed as he wants to be. This is worth a visit for the photos, even if you have no inclination to order a helmet. From the lack of prices on the site, we suspect that if you have to ask, you can't afford it.http://www.thadenarmory.com/ The one thing that unites personal ads worldwide is the fact that they are rarely completely truthful. And by rarely, we mean never. Plain Joes and Janes who like country walks describe themselves as social divas with looks to match. Nobody is perfect, but to sell yourself with a personal ad, you've got to at least portray yourself as close to ideal. Esquire magazine, however, introduces Brutally Honest Personals. Esquire offers free ad-space to singles who are overweight, poor, living with parents, and/or afraid of commitment, but they've all got one thing going for them: they're honest. If these are even real, that is. The ads tell it like it is and it is refreshing. We'd like to think this could be a new beginning for personals, this time with integrity, humor, and some chance of success. Can dating ever be the same again or do we all prefer the Land of Make-Believe? http://www.esquire.com/brutal/ Adobe on Acquisition of Macromedia, Translated to English Earlier this year, Adobe bought Macromedia, a company that happened to be a major competitor in several fields. And they did so for purely altruistic motives. You doubt that? Cynic! Why, just read Adobe's own FAQ on the acquisition. You'll find selected and highly relevant portions of that FAQ on John Gruber's Daring Fireball blog. Gruber has endeavored to translate some of Adobe's public-relations phrases into ordinary American human English. His success is quite evident, and after reading his explanations you'll not only know why Adobe did you such a service by buying Macromedia, but why your next Web-graphics app will cost a whole lot more than this generation put you back.http://daringfireball.net/2005/04/adobe_translation FLOTSAM & JETSAM Under the guise of an art project, the GWEI web site generates money with Google Ads. With that money, the owners buy shares in Google. Thus the name of the site, which stands for Google Will Eat Itself, and if things go well, really well, the site's owners will own Google outright. Clever.http://www.gwei.org/gwei/ Crappy Site, Nifty Optical Illusions Our headline says it all. SubliminalMessages.com is a site that would fit on many "worst of the Web" lists. Check out the flaming lettering and the lame tiled background. Still, the content is first-rate. There's enough optical illusions, puzzles, and stuff to fill an entire rainy day with diversion.http://www.subliminalmessages.com/ The list is from PC World, so you probably already have an idea of what's on it - not just any products, but tech, hardware, and software gizmos. Top billing goes to Mozilla Firefox. It's a useful starting point if you're in the market for some utilitarian or fun gadget or code. http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,120763,pg,12,00.asp A Kuro5hin poster presents this catalogue of useful Web applications. It has search engines, content-generation tools, HTML and Web design programs, and more. You're sure to find something neat and useful for your netsurfing toolkit in here. Many reader comments add to the list. http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/5/21/03045/5568 Those we tried of these seven free basic CSS templates were both simple to use and quite nice. If their basic structure fits your needs, they can save you a huge amount of time. Customization is easy. http://webhost.bridgew.edu/etribou/layouts/index.html SOFTWARE If you have one of the third-generation iPods, you can run Linux on it with surprising ease. Beyond the sheer geeky thrill of hacking your iPod, there are some practical reasons to want to do this, such as to make higher-quality recordings than Apple allows, to view black-and-white images on the screen, and to play games. Cyrus Farivar at MacWorld has a short write-up that walks you through the simple Linux installation and gives examples of the kind of applications you can use. You should also take a look at the iPodLinux Project wiki. Once you've installed Linux, you can easily switch back and forth between Linux and iTunes. Before you try this, make sure your iPod model is supported. Note that fourth-generation click-wheel iPods or the iPod Shuffle are not yet fully supported (they use a different chipset) although some hackers have booted Linux on them and run some programs. It's only a matter of time for these models.MacWorld: http://www.macworld.com/2005/05/secrets/julygeekfactor/index.php iPodLinux Project: http://www.ipodlinux.org/Main_Page |
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