Gadgetopia

Apple poised to release new products: Apple has scheduled a new product announcement for next Tuesday. And the world holds its breath. Munster added that it is possible that Apple could release new iPods at the event. But he thinks it is less likely that Apple will release a larger, ...

CNN.com presents a new homepage: CNN launched a new home page, which isn't so much news. But they included a handy guide which explains all the new features, where they are, and what they do. CNN.com has launched a new, expanded home page that allows easier, faster access to more ...

'Is HP the New Apple?': One reporter's impressions of HP's big rollout. "'Is HP the new Apple?' Omar Wasow leaned over and asked me during the company's massive product launch in New York Monday. He is NBC's tech impresario who advises Oprah and directs BlackPlanet.com. I told him I had ...

Two things I found in the last few days have got me thinking about online personas. Second Life The New York Times did a big article this week about the MMORPG Second Life and how many people are using that game as alternate versions of their own lives. From the ...

AskTog: It's Time We Got Respect: Bruce Tognazzini is pushing a new name and new segment of the usability profession. "I have spent the last several months thinking about and talking with others about this issue, all the while casting about for a new title for our profession. I have ...

IBM makes play for Linux lead in new ad campaign: In the midst of the SCO brouhaha, IBM apparently feels comfortable enough to unleash a new round of Linux ads. "He's nine years old, bright-eyed and hungry to learn. ... Meet Linux, a human embodiment of the computer operating system, ...

Hybrid map that is. Maybe this isn't such a new thing, but I just noticed today that Google Maps has a new Hybrid mode. In Hybrid mode, all of the labeled items from the map view are superimposed over the satellite image. Slashdot has a post on it from two ...

With all of the Macarazzi watching for every little change, Apple seems to have a hard time keeping a lid on new products. This time it's leaked info on a new Power Mac G5. Adding to speculation that the launch of a new machine may be sooner rather than later, ...

Web Services Get Managed: It's always interesting how a new technology creates a brand-new industry angle. "...[the] company's SIFT (service instrumentation, filtering and tracking) tool monitors and analyzes the performance of transactions that use Web services and pinpoints the source of performance problems across each component in the Web services ...

Apple just released the latest iteration of the iMac with faster processors, a built-in iSight camera for easy video conferencing, an 8X dual-layer DVD writer (and CD-RW combined), among other spiffy new features. The new software featured on the iMac is FrontRow, a new multimedia interface that can be controlled ...

The Windows Update site has been, well, updated. I was doing some maintenance on my parents' machines last night at about 10 p.m. and everything was as it usually is. However, right now at 6:19 a.m. the next morning, the Windows Update site is sporting a new look, asking me ...

New York Times opens up code: This is kind of cool. It s good to see an organization like the New York Times contribute some stuff to open source. The New York Times likes open source so much so that, as it gradually moves more of its print operations online, ...

Big News! New Google Operator (Google Weblog) "Today, Google introduced a new advanced search feature that enables users to search not only for a particular keyword, but also for its synonyms. This is accomplished by placing a ~ character directly in front of the keyword in the search box." I ...

Introduction to Best Software Writing I: Joel Spolsky just published a new book. I loved his last book. And even though all of its content was contained on his site, just having it in a single text was great. Well, just like last time, all of the content of this ...

New York Times" href="http://backend.userland.com/directory/167/feeds/newYorkTimes">Feeds > New York Times: With all this talk about news aggreagators, now you just need some high-quality news to aggregate. Here you go.

Open New Windows for PDF and other Non-Web Documents: Nielsen dictates an exception to his "open no new browser windows" rule. Seems like a good point to me. When using PC-native file formats such as PDF or spreadsheets, users feel like they're interacting with a PC application. Because users are ...

About the new Yahoo! Mail: Jeremy writes about the new Yahoo! Mail interface and has a great screenshot. Oh, and if you look at that screenshot, you'll see that there are over 42,000 messages in my inbox. The product still works well with a big volume of mail. He includes ...

Microsoft: Upgraded Motherboard = New Windows Licence: Microsoft recently sent a memo to all their OEM partners explaining that the core essence of a computer was the motherboard, and if it was upgraded, then the entire machine is considered new, and a new Windows license must be purchased. An upgrade ...

Apparently, Google is quietly testing a new look for their search engine. A few random users are receiving special 'lucky' cookies when they first visit the site that let their browsers use the new look. Evil web genius Jesse Ruderman has created a bookmarklet that will let you try it ...

Here's a simple usability thing that is so handy. In the latest version of WinSCP (an SFTP client), you can right click and select "New > File". This is huge for me. I have to create new files out on remote hosts all the time, and I finally just created ...

Rebuilt New Orleans could be cutting edge: Very interesting idea here. Now how I'd want to advance my cities technology, but still interesting. Ugly as she was, Katrina may have given BellSouth a rare opportunity: the chance to turn one of the oldest cities in the USA into a showcase ...

Another NY Times v Tasini? Amazon's Book Search Hits a Snag: There may be a hitch with Amazon's new book search service. "...the Authors Guild is up in arms about Amazon's new book search function. [...] Amazon apparently has the agreement of the publishers to provide this feature. However, the ...

Why your cool church web site needs (the new) Google Analytics: Mean dean gives a good look and what s new with Google Analytics. I think this is the first big update since Google bought Urchin. Yesterday, at the Emetrics Summit in San Francisco, Brett Crosby and Jeff Veen announced a ...

Archives: The New York Times: The New York Times has opened up their archive from 1891 to 1995, the year they went online. When you find an article, you can read the first paragraph, but the rest of it will cost you about a buck. Search the Article Archive: 1851-1995 ...

Slashdot T-Shirt Contest: Here are the winners. They're pretty good.

Google treading on Microsoft turf in Dell tests: In the article, both Dell and Google confirm this report. The report, citing unnamed sources, said Dell and Google are in talks to put Google software on as many as 100 million new Dell PCs following a bidding process in which Google ...

Gizmodo had this snapshot of what is reportedly Apple's new iMac G5. It's supposed to be released next week, but somebody got a sneak peek in an elevator at Charles DeGaulle Airport. Looks to be little more than a thick flat panel monitor, with the computer's guts tucked behind ...

The FuzzyBlog :: Scott Johnson's Blog: A very good point about the new Atom / Echo / Whatever-The-Next-Name-Is spec: it will support images and other media as blog postings. This opens up a ton of issues, which Scott explains.

NYPL: Style Guide: Need to come up with HTML and CSS coding standards for your company? You could do a lot worse than this resource a set of well-written, easy-to-understand guides from the New York Public Library.

New York Hack: Here's a really interesting-looking blog written by a New York City cab driver. She writes like I imagine a NYC cabbie sounds like in real life: It was another slow shift tonight. And though there weren't many people taking cabs, there were more than enough a**hole drivers ...

As you can see, DeaneBarker.net is running under its new platform. And, besides a couple of knucleheads at my old work sitting around waiting for me to install so they could log in under the default account and change the name of the blog to "DeaneBarker.nizzle" ....everything went pretty well. ...

Possible new iPod causing buzz: Because if there's anything an iPod needs, it's more storage space. The photo viewer angle seems interesting. Is Apple Computer Inc. fine-tuning an enhanced iPod with roughly 50 percent more storage and a color screen to display photos?

Korea launches a switch to open source: They may seem like strange bedfellows, but two announcements this week strengthen open-source in government IT structures: "Thousands of computers in ministries, government-linked organizations and universities in South Korea will replace Microsoft's Windows operating system and Office productivity suite with open-source alternatives under ...

Movable Type Plugin directory update: The list of Movable Type plugins just keeps getting better and better. Here's a big list of new ones, including a few for Google Maps integration, del.icio.us integration, and more. A good plugin API is an amazing thing, sometimes.

Is Windows 95 still about 5 years too new for your tastes? Calmira brings new-age flashy eye-candy (like the Start Menu) to your Windows 3.11 installation. Calmira is a complete 16-bit shell that lets you manage files, launch applications and control tasks. It brings Windows 3.1 up to date with ...

Yahoo proposes new Internet anti-spam structure: Good thing this is Yahoo!, because it's going to take a big company to pull this off. They're apparently going to open-source it. Under Yahoo's new architecture, a system sending an e-mail message would embed a secure, private key in a message header. The ...

New domains '.mobi' and '.xxx' under consideration ...Inernet addresses ending in ".mobi" would allow sites built for the small screens of mobile phones. ... The ".xxx" domain is sponsored by the International Foundation for Online Responsibility. ... The other applications are: ".asia," ".cat," ".jobs," ".mail," ".post," ".tel" and ".travel." The ...

A List Apart: ALA is shiny and new this morning. Looks pretty. New design. New structure. New server. New publishing system powered by Ruby on Rails. As the dog days of summer draw to a close, we present A List Apart 4.0. So buy a tee shirt already. I wonder ...

PHP version 5.0.0 has now officially been released, bringing a large number of long-overdue changes to PHP. The Zend Engine II with a new object model and dozens of new features. XML support has been completely redone in PHP 5, all extensions are now focused around the excellent libxml2 library ...

Admit it: whenever some group like 37 Signals or Six Apart comes out with a new software product, you secretly think, "I could of done that." How many of us developers thing we could build something just as good if we only put in the time? I do. Yes, I ...

I'm about to admit something odd, and perhaps career-threatening: I'm sick of learning. There, I said it, and I feel better. It's true: learning about new technologies and new ways of doing things is something that plays on an addiction of mine and of many other geeks, I'm sure. We ...

eBay item #3626246138 is obviously a joke (isn't it?) but wont the seller have to pay a hefty commission?

Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters: After all these years, Slashdot is redesigning (the link is a preview). Sort of. This was the winning design to convert Slashdot from it's old-school HTML to a current CSS-driven design. Not much has changed, though it's cleaner and we finally say goodbye ...

Apple just announced a new wireless keyboard and mouse that use Bluetooth technology. They use adaptive frequency hopping to avoid interference with other like devices. "A robust 128-bit over-the-air encryption keeps sensitive information safe as it is being typed." $69 a piece, and the mouse still lacks a second button ...

Gems from the archive of the New York Times (kottke.org): I could kiss Jason Kottke for this. It s a look through the newly-opened archives of the New York Times for interesting stuff. Now that the NY Times has discontinued their Times Select subscription program and made much more of their ...

PeopleSoft's Board Rejects Oracle's Second Bid: Last time they had two issues: price and anti-trust concerns. With Larry's new bid, they just have one: "PeopleSoft Inc. on Friday urged stockholders to reject Oracle Corp.'s unsolicited $6.3 billion takeover offer, citing the possibility of regulatory objections to the deal between the ...

css Zen Garden: The Beauty in CSS Design: We've covered CSS Zen Garden before, but if you haven't been there lately, you're missing some of the best work I've seen in a while. Take a look at new designs like Corporate Zenworks, Port of Call, and No Frontiers. That's the ...

The real Batmobile: A funny article on how they designed the new Batmobile. When production designer Nathan Crowley was trying to conceive the car's look, he went to a hobby shop and bought 1:12 scale models of a Lamborghini Countach and a Hummer. Crowley cut those two models apart and ...

Apple Computer introduced today a G5 tower with a single 1.8GHz processor in it, which adds a new lower rung on the G5 lineup. Priced at $1,500, it's aimed directly at those who need a bit more power and more expansion possibilities than the G5 eMac or G5 iMac, but ...

I was picking up my Accord from the service department of my dealer today, and I wandered through the new car showroom. I noticed that 2004 Accords come with XM Satellite Radio pre-installed with free sign-up and three-month free subscription. Great marketing move. Odds are very good that you'll be ...

NY Times writes its own obituary: Bummer. The notice was on the front page of The New York Times, announcing the paper's imminent ritual act of suicide. Most of the most-interesting parts of the Times will now be closed off from the general internet. Instead of letting everyone see ...

Apple has put a new spin on their logo as part of the upcoming 'Panther' release of OSX. "It is not clear whether Apple will adopt the new silver logo for product design, marketing and packaging, or simply restrict it to the new software. Whatever Apple decides to do, the ...

Much like (insert color) is the new black, the URL is the new command line. Sites like whois.sc (who we've mentioned previously), A9, and others let you cut a step out of searching by just firing in your search terms along with the address. No search screen to wade through ...

General Motors will equip the 2006 Cadillac DTS and Buick Lucerne with a new gadget called HotShot. HotShot will heat the windshield washer fluid in the vehicle to 170 degrees before spraying it on your ice- or snow-covered windshield, nicely melting the cold stuff pretty quickly. HotShot has actually been ...

New battery packs powerful punch: This is really, really interesting to me for one reason: it could facilitate and promote wind energy. A new type of a room-size battery, however, may be poised to store energy for the nation s vast electric grid almost as easily as a reservoir stockpiles water, ...

Once again, I've been tinkering with the search on this site. We've gone through several iterations here, but I think this one is a keeper. Most recently, I abandoned the SQL-based search system I was using and switched to using Google. However, much to my surprise, it didn't work that ...

PCI Express to usher in PC changes: An older article that I missed. There's a new PCI standard coming which runs at 2.5 GHz and has the potential for 40 GHz. "Intel is among the strongest backers of PCI Express, a successor to the PCI standard used to connect devices ...

I think The Flood of New Orleans is the first really big crisis in the U.S. to come after blogs have hit their prime. 9/11 was back in 2001, before blogs were big, and before you got the unfettered accounts of amateur jounalism like we've got with this. But with ...

Gateway feels lure of consumer electronics: Here s more on the Gateway transformation I wrote about a few weeks ago. Moving toward a business model it calls branded integrator, Gateway is preparing to unveil a wide range of consumer-electronics products that work together and share content. It is also designing services ...

Customer Poaching: That SForce app that we wrote about a few weeks ago is going to lead the charge to a new industry niche, I think. Boston-based Salesnet will announce Wireless CRM Instant Messaging, adding instant messaging capabilities to its Salesnet Wireless service. Users, mostly field sales representatives, would be ...

Segway XT: Beefy-looking new Segway. Featuring all-terrain tires, a robust new fender design, new extended-range lithium-ion batteries and specially tuned software, this rugged Segway XT will go practically anywhere you want to go.

Defense Lawyers Cringe at MediaDefender s Child-Porn Patrol Plans: This is interesting. [ ] MediaDefender planned to unleash a peer-to-peer crawler to search unspecified file-sharing networks for child-porn videos and images based on keywords such as young, kids and taboo provided by the AG s office. Once suspected image files were ...

First-Gen Zune Getting All The New Features: This is How You Treat Your Customers: Wow, Microsoft is getting some good press over this. And Apple for perhaps the first time in history looks really bad by comparison. The first generation 30GB Zune—which 1.2 million of you already purchased—is ...

Forget Your Password?: A new survey is out today about password security. It ain't pretty. "In a survey of 3,000 administrators, managers and security specialists, Rainbow found that 55 percent of users write their passwords down at least once and that nine percent write down every password at some point. ...

New websites: Joel Spolsky just had both his Web sites Fog Creek and Fog Bugz redesigned by Happy Cog Studios. He has an interesting piece this morning about the process, and about how he incrementally destroyed one design and had to start over. That s when I knew we ...

Moving or migrating Windows Small Business Server (SBS) has got to be one of the more wretched tasks of a Windows system admin. Moving servers is never fun, but SBS is especially bad. You see, SBS is designed for up to 75 users on a single network and it's designed ...

I'm at a total loss for words. I can't even think of anything clever to say about this, so I'll just post a link and be done with it.

David Raynes: SubCategories 1.2: There was much complaining when Movable Type 3.0 came out that there wasn't anything new in it. To a large extent, the complainers were right there was very little new functionality...on the surface. The real gem of MT3, it turns out, is the new plug-in ...

Proof that Gmail has raised the ante in the Webmail game: new betas from the two other big players -- New Hotmail screenshots (Microsoft Mail, it's called) New Yahoo Mail screenshots It goes without saying that they're all Ajaxed up.

Here's a question on blogging practice: what do you do for follow-up posts or updates to an existing post? Do you make a new post? Update the original post? Post a comment? I have examples of all three options so far, and I have yet to figure out which one ...

Mozilla Thunderbird: Thunderbird 0.4 is out. The attachment icon (the paper clip) has been broken out to its own column (instead of being overlad on the envelope you could never see it) so you can sort on it now, and the envelope now includes "forwarded" and "replied" arrows like ...

The folks over at mozilla.org have been busy: New Firefox Release 1.0PR includes Live Bookmarks, which creates a bookmarks folder out of an RSS feed, and a really slick interface for finding text in a page. It does disable some older extensions, though, so look out. My main gripe is ...

We unleashed our new search page over the weekend. To make it work correctly, we had to retroactively keyword all past entries (a endeavor about which I will write more later). but with that done, it seems to be working quite well. The engine returns terms in two groups ...

Happy Friday: Cryptographers have discovered a way to hack Bluetooth-enabled devices even when security features are switched on. The discovery may make it even easier for hackers to eavesdrop on conversations and charge their own calls to someone else's cellphone. "Our attack makes it possible to crack every communication between ...

You can stop speculating. Apple has added two new iPods to their line up. The U2 Special Edition and the iPod Photo. The U2 version is black with a red dial and will feature the signatures of the band members engraved on the back. The iPod Photo will support iPhoto ...

Paying Spammers Not to Spam: A novel theory, but I'm against anything that aids spammers. They deserve nothing more than a nice, solid kick in the face. The service, offered by San Antonio, Texas-based Global Removal, charges subscribers a $5 lifetime fee to have their e-mail addresses put on a ...

A few new developments in the Shelfari saga Josh Hug, the CEO of Shelfari, posted a comment on my last post, he had this to say: This is Josh the CEO of Shelfari. I look forward to seeing your reviews of our future designs. I am sorry we have ...

ResourceShelf: Google is quickly trying to become the source on any information. They just added support for telephone area codes, Universal Product Codes (UPC), Vehicle ID (VIN) numbers, U.S. Postal Service tracking numbers, and flight tracking.

Grand Theft Auto seen breaking games sales record: Lots of big new gaming titles are going to hit the market in the next month, starting with Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas today. At about $50 each, first-week sales of 4.5 million units would equal about $225 million. Should it reach ...

Microsoft kills off Outlook Express: This was probably inevitable, but it makes you wonder what Microsoft's entry-level, bundled email program is going to be. Are they going to push MSN as the email program for new machines? "'[Outlook Express] just sits where it is,' said Dan Leach, lead product manager ...

Reminiscent of the newspapers from Minority Report, e-paper is being developed... "Hot on the heels of the invention of a wafer-thin foldable screen that can display static type and may one day replace newspapers as it can be overwritten each day, scientists at Philips Research in Eindhoven have found a ...

Apple has been hinting about a new iPod, and Monday's Newsweek cover has been leaked, and guess what's on it? Steve Jobs and the newer, smaller, higher capacity (why?!) iPod. Much like Time and the new iMac back in 2002, Newsweek has leaked an image with Steve Jobs and the ...

Here's America's unquietest library: The first surprise is that this is a library. The second surprise is that it's in Salt Lake City, of all places. With all due respect to residents of the obviously great state of Utah, you're just not known for being this daring. "The $65 million ...

Simplicity: This is a good essay that's a huge counterpoint to the "embrace limitations" philosophy that 37 Signals started pushing a few years ago when Basecamp came out. I think what Joel is saying is that you need features, but they need to appear simple to the end users. And ...

Sorry for wasting away your Friday, but you really should check out Pandora. Can you help me discover more music that I'll like? Those questions often evolved into great conversations. Each friend told us their favorite artists and songs, explored the music we suggested, gave us feedback, and we in ...

From a Microsoft promo email I got today: New technologies such as [...] can help you build incredible new web services, and up level the web experience. Please, please tell me that "up level" is not going to be the new phrase. I'm still irritated about "Web 2.0."

Search engines' new tools hasten info hunt: These were all released this morning. Has anybody tried them yet? [...] Ask Jeeves introduces preview tool Binoculars: Under each search result, you put your mouse over an image of binoculars and Jeeves displays a mini picture of the underlying Web site. The ...

From the 'It Was Bound To Happen' department: Symantec reports that a new virus is making the rounds that deletes all files on the infected PC: The malware targets Windows computers, and arrives in an email bearing the subject "Re" and an attachment that will have an .asp, .hta, .htm, ...

The Mozilla Foundation has released the 0.8 release of my favorite browser. However, perhaps in order to escape withering criticism from owen ;-), they have yet again changed the name of the browser to Firefox. The new release marks a significant milestone on the development roadmap towards the highly anticipated ...

Disney Debuts New Safer, Quieter and More Environmentally Friendly Fireworks Technology: Disney has sort of open-sourced a new way to launch fireworks. The new method uses compressed air instead of black powder. (The quote below is from a press release, so it's a little self-serving.) As a recognized industry leader ...

Fans bounty on referee: New Zealand rugby fans are furious with the referee they believe contributed to their surprise loss to France. They ve begun mass-vandalizing the referee s Wikipedia page and using it to post apparent threats and bounties. The entry says Barnes suffers from a vision-related disease which results in ...

Netcraft reports on a new worm that installs a network traffic sniffer as part of its payload. A new worm whose payload includes the SDBot trojan tries to install a "sniffer," seeking to use infected computers to capture login and banking information for other computers on the same network. While ...

I got to thinking the other day that the content management field is flooded, especially the open-source systems. Go to sites like CMSInfo.org, OpenSourceCMS.com, CMSWatch.com, etc. and you'll see hundreds of them. Then, every week, I get notifications that new ones have been released: NetWizard Matrix, and Tiki, and WSW, ...

RSS" href="http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/index.html">The New York Times : RSS: The New York Times is now offering RSS feeds.

Wells Fargo Warns Of Email Hoax: I got this yesterday, but Outlook blocked the attachment. "The email, which is titled 'Wells Fargo New Business Account Application' states that the user's 'application' has been rejected. If a user opens the attachment, however, a Trojan is placed onto the user's system that ...

isbndb.com - free ISBN database: A thing of beauty underway here: The goal of the project is to create a multilingual database of books with well defined remote access protocols and free individual access. Think Amazon API for every book ever written. Database. Books. My two favorite words. Via ResearchBuzz.

YouTube - Mindstorms Autofabrik: This is so cool, I might die. It's a video of a factory made out of Lego Mindstorms that makes cars...from Legos. Yep, they're self-aware now, folks. And they reproduce. Will you be ready when the Legos come for you?

NewsGator - the RSS news aggregator for Outlook: Do you find yourself checking the same sites many times a day for updates? Ever wish the operators could be so nice as to email you when they add something? Well, now they can...sorta. NewsGator is an add-in for Outlook that checks ...

'Spy' plans for new cars A new study in Britain reveals that car makers may be required to install a chip in each new car so the government can monitor traffic violations as they happen. "The government is reportedly planning to fit all cars in Britain with a personalized ...

That's a lotta flippin' flops: The teraflops are popping as IBM's Blue Gene performs 135.3 trillion floating point operations per second running benchmark software. An IBM supercomputer clocked as the world's fastest has surpassed its own speed record, the Energy Department reported Thursday. Via InformationWeek.

Mozilla Coffee: You can get Worldly Lizard, Lazy Lizard, Nervous Lizard, or Enviro Lizard. "Welcome Mozilla users! In an effort to support the worlds best browser and email client, RJ Tarpley's has agreed to donate half the profit of all orders from Mozilla users directly to The Mozilla Foundation."

A new virus hoax is going around. I've gotten it from three people this morning. It's one of those things that tells you delete a file (that you really need), then sends it to other people you know. So it's just a worm, with a payload of getting trusting people ...

Introduction to Aspect-Oriented Programming: A new acronym to learn: AOP is Aspect Oriented Programming. Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) complements OO programming by allowing the developer to dynamically modify the static OO model to create a system that can grow to meet new requirements. Just as objects in the real world can ...

We were starting to get a lot of posts along an engineering and construction theme, so I made a place for them. I re-categorized a dozen or so entries, but it's going to take a while to get them all in there. Considering another category for "Energy." I invite comments.

Firefox and Thunderbird Garage: Another cool book on the Wonder Twins of the Web. I'm still waiting for the first one. Welcome to Firefox and Thunderbird Garage. This book will introduce you to the exciting world of safe and secure browsing and email using two great products: the Firefox browser ...

The New Photoshop CS: Review of the new Photoshop CS. Answers the question, why upgrade? ...you may open the program and initially wonder why you upgraded since the user interface, at least on first glance, is quite similar to the Photoshop 7 interface aside from the new splash screen and ...

Nigerian Spammers Seek Credibility, Enlist BBC: "Now it seems media outlets like the BBC are unwittingly being used as references of a sort, as real news stories get included in emails to confirm details of the scam's premise." There's an example of what he talks about on this site. These ...

The AOLer Translator: "This translator will take what you write in it and turn it into the manner a 12-year-old AOLer would write it." Or... "THIS TRANSLA2R WIL TAEK WUT U WRIET IN IT AND TURN IT IN2 TEH MAN3R A 12-Y3AR-OLD AOL3R WUD WRIET IT1!!!1!11 OMG" Via MetaFilter.

I love these new "timed team event" shows like Monster Garage, Monster House, and Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. In these shows, a team has to build or convert something in a set time limit, usually five days. There's usually a lot of drama, yelling, and screaming, but they invariably end ...

From the "You Get What You Pay For" department, C-Net is reporting that Wal-Mart may be selling HP Pavillion ze2308wm laptops this Christmas season for the low-low price of $398. Wal-mart pulled a similar stunt last year, but since then I haven't heard any rave reviews about the quality of ...

Google Groups: There are some apparently big changes to Google Groups coming soon, as this beta site suggests. You can bookmark groups (handy, as I hate digging for them), and there's an intriguing "Create your own group" link. Sadly, it was riddled with 404 errors as of a few minutes ...

The Chatham Islands, off the east coast of New Zealand (and a Kiwi province), are a bit off, time-wise: When it's 5:00PM in Chicago, it's 10:45 AM in the Chatham Islands. Read that again once. Yep, the local time zone is at UTC plus 12 hours and 45 minutes. I ...

SCO Revokes I.B.M.'s License for Operating System Software: And it's done. "'I.B.M. no longer has the authority to sell or distribute AIX, and customers no longer have the right to use AIX software,' Darl C. McBride, the chief executive of SCO, said." SCO is asking for $3 billion.

Microsoft is beginning their push to out-Google Google. They've launched a preview site containing their new search technology. What do we have under the hood? A brand new algorithmic search engine built from the ground up on Microsoft technology. Give it a spin and tell us what you ...

This ought to create some interesting debate; LS9, a San Carlos, CA, based company, has developed a method of producing crude oil using genetically engineered bacteria. And it doesn t take millions of years, like the old-fashioned natural method. LS9 s designer bacteria eat ordinary agricultural feedstocks, then excrete hydrocarbon molecules of ...

Saunderslog 3.0 launches: We just launched a new site for Alec Saunders, and he was nice enough to blog about it. So, earlier this year I decided that my old design was getting kind of long in the tooth. Nor did I have the time to devote to building a ...

Bill & Co. have apparently decided that a good PR program is the key to beating hackers, virii & worms. Educate your students, faculty, and staff on the simple steps they can take to protect their PCs. Download the posters from the links below, or place an order and we’ll ...

Drew McClellan has put up a sort of advent calendar for web nerds, releasing 24 short web development articles this month, one per day, with an eye towards teaching you neat stuff that you may not already know. Each day from now until 24th December, we'll be publishing a new ...

Those geniuses at Google are at it again, now providing satellite photos of the areas of New Orleans, LA, that were hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina. If you do a Google Maps search for New Orleans, LA, you'll get the map of the city with an extra red button, labeled ...

Yargh! The salty sea dogs at the Mozilla Foundation have provided ye with a fine booty in the Mozilla 1.0 pre-release. Slashdot reports that they hoped that a million land lubbers might raid their download site within ten days of the release, but the scallywags reached that in only four ...

Red Hat Decides To Do Its Own Press: Red Hat goes into the magazine business with "Wide Open." The magazine, available for $35 for a charter subscription, will be focused on professionals and non-professionals interested in open source and how to use it, Red Hat said. Each magazine will include ...

Texas law to block misleading spam takes effect Sept. 1 "Unsolicited advertising must carry the note 'ADV:' in its subject line, and messages with sexual material must say 'ADV: Adult Advertisement.' Backers of the law hope those notes will help Internet service providers and spam-filtering software remove spam before it ...

AOL's Garden Might Flourish Without Rainman: I did some searching for "Rainman" and didn't find much. The good news is they're bagging it for HTML. Over the past year, the Dulles new-media pioneer built a fancy new system to publish its fare not in the company's proprietary programming language called ...

RealPlayer 10 Adds New Mistakes to Old: A pretty funny lambasting disguised as a review of the new RealPlayer 10. RealNetworks' multimedia-playback program once known as RealPlayer, then RealOne and now, with last week's release of a new version, RealPlayer once again is both widely used ...

According to an article on ananova.com, CD's may be replaced within 5 years by a new type of media; fingertip-sized memory chips that can store up to a gigabyte each. Scientists at Princeton University teamed up with HP engineers to develop new methods to combine organic and inorganic materials, making ...

RIAA files 80 new file-swapping suits "The Recording Industry Association of America on Thursday said it filed 80 new lawsuits against alleged file swappers, a move that comes after a wave of letters it sent earlier this month that warned targets of their legal risk. [...] It [...] sent warning ...

Timetable for New Domain Names Approved: Domains names in Arabic and Chinese are coming. "The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, during its regular meeting in the Arabic-speaking Tunisia, called for studies by next September on technical, economic, trademark and other considerations related to new names. The studies would ...

Australia's Internet Industry Association is launching a new campaign to educate consumers on the best way to eliminate spam: "Don't try - Don't buy - Don't reply". "'Spam is the unwelcome by-product of a largely free and open email system', says IIA chief executive, Peter Coroneos. 'Spammers are freeriding on ...

Brand new Camaro: $427,000: A company out of New York has resurrected the Camaro, re-envisioning and building them from scratch. The look of the new Baldwin-Motion 540 Camaro SuperCoupe calls to mind the the 1969 Camaro, but this is a bigger, broader two-seat monster. The SuperCoupe is powered by a ...

Google's Aging Delay for New Sites: A few days ago, I voiced a suspicion I had about the correlation between the amount of time a site had been on the Net, and how well it does in Google's index. Johnny from Blank of the Day was nice enough to drop ...

[Note: For updated information about this problem, and details of (1) a hardware migration to a new server, and (2) a same-time upgrade from SBS 2000 to 2003, check out this post from July 23, 2005.] Well, I was in the office until 4 a.m., but I think I actually ...

Dell to put Google on all new PCs: I think Google is going to become the new Microsoft. [...] that the arrangement [means] that the Google's search toolbar would appear on the screens of all new Dell systems and that Dell users would be directed to a Web page branded ...

Cute email about programming found at ForwardGarden.com. Sometimes, I miss the days of the "High School / Jr. High" programmer. Keep reading through the "Master Programmer" section, because there's more underneath. High School / Jr. High =================== 10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD" 20 END First Year in College ===================== program Hello(input, ...

Readying Gateway's post-PC future: Man, I gotta buy some Gateway stock: "Eighteen years after co-founding what would become of one most recognized PC companies in the history of the computer industry, Waitt is working as quickly as he can to shed Gateway's image as a PC builder. ... 'We're taking ...

Norwegian hacker cracks iTunes code: I'll say it again, DRM will never work. Last Friday, a new security-cracking program called QTFairUse was posted along with the message "So sue me" on a Web site for which Johansen is listed as the registrant, or owner. The new program circumvents ...

China to promote own alternative to DVDs: Well, at least they're not disposable. Looking to compete on its own terms in the lucrative entertainment industry, China announced a government-funded project Tuesday to promote an alternative to DVDs and "attack the market share" of the increasingly global video format. The rollout ...

Hi-tech tome takes on paperbacks: Very cool, as far as ebook readers go. Includes a good picture of the page turning animation. "To keep page turners happy, Mr Robson and his team have fitted the e-book with a small but powerful computer that animates a turning page when the reader ...

Toll records catch unfaithful spouses: Big Brother pops up in all sorts of places. Adulterers, beware: Your cheatin heart might be exposed by E-ZPass. E-ZPass and other electronic toll collection systems are emerging as a powerful means of proving infidelity. That s because when your spouse doesn t know where you ve been, ...

Six Apart ProNet - Plugin Directory - Built for 3.2: If you're on the latest version of Movable Type, take a browse of the plugins built to take advantage of the new API hooks in that version. There's some really great stuff here: Ajaxify Ajaxify is a set of plugins ...

5 'exabytes' of information created in '02, report says: I bet in a few years, we'll be able to fit it all on a Kanguru drive. I wonder if they talked to the guy that cataloged all the porn. "...twice as much new information had been created in 2002 as ...

The Feedback Rating System in Movable Type 3.2: Movable Type 3.2 is due pretty soon, and they're adding some great features to it. Here's a welcome addition: a comment (and trackback) rating system. [...] the system isn't just for fighting spam: Any feedback item can be have a positive score ...

Link to porn site baffles N.J. governor's aides: This is kind of funny, in a perverse kind of way. A state Commerce and Economic Growth Commission Web site link to its "business resource center" took viewers Tuesday afternoon and maybe for much longer to full-color, hard-core teen pornography. ...

Bayesian filter for MT: This looks promising. Hope it works as good as Bayesian spam filter for Outlook. "...I spent the last 2 days working on a bayesian plugin. To cut the story short, the plugin will allow you to train your movabletype blog to automatically identify spam comments and ...

Back in 1968, Alan Poster bought a new 1968 Corvette Roadster, only to have it stolen three months later. He had just gone through a divorce and had stretched himself a bit buying said Vette, so didn't have the cash to buy theft insurance (his was one of 78,000 cars ...

When good software goes bad: Here's a shocker by and large, software sucks. A Consumer Reports survey: "The March survey of 10,000 computer users found widespread dissatisfaction with the level of service offered by U.S. software manufacturers. Quality has been the victim as companies cut corners to cut costs. ...

Steve Jobs just wrapped up his keynote at this year's World Wide Developer Conference and aside from the 30-inch Cinema HD Display the primary focus of his talk was Tiger, the next generation of OS X due in 2005. Some highlights of Tiger include: Spotlight - A new search utility ...

Spidering Hacks : 100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools: The art of screen-scraping just got a Bible. "...Spidering Hacks provides expert tips on spidering and scraping methodologies. You'll begin with a crash course in spidering concepts, tools [...]. and ethics (how to know when you've gone too far: what's acceptable and ...

I must admit I wasn't expecting anything earth-shattering from Steve Jobs yesterday and for the most part I wasn't disappointed. While unveiling some pretty cool toys, both hardware and software, he failed to deliver anything that on it's surface will immediately sway a consumer to purchase a Mac over a ...

News: Palm reveals new company name: follow up on this post. "In preparation for its split into two separate companies, Palm has come up with a name for its new, hardware-only self: PalmOne." Via Gizmodo.

Don t Buy That New Prius! Test-Drive a Used Car Instead: Wired Magazine argues that buying a used car is vastly more energy efficient than buying a new Prius. Making a Prius consumes 113 million BTUs, according to sustainability engineer Pablo Paster. A single gallon of gas contains about 113,000 Btus, ...

Gruesome video game becomes first banned in New Zealand A computer game that encourages players to kill all in sight in ever more gruesome ways has become the first video game banned in New Zealand.

Google Adding New Features to Google Trends: Google s new Trends feature shows you the hottest search terms that day. I looked in on it the other day, and I was confused at some of the things people were searching for. They seemed so random and specific. Here s why: people are ...

Last night, while looking for "Shout Elmo" in Shopko, I found an unrestricted XBox 360 with Call of Duty 2 running. After playing for 10 minutes, I was quite sure there were Germans hiding amongst the towels in the next aisle. When I got home I accused my wife of ...

Share Your OPML: Top 100 Feeds: If you're new to RSS or are just looking for some new feeds, Dave Winer's "Share Your OPML" site has an OPML file of the Top 100 feeds that you can download and import to your aggregator. This site allows people to upload their ...

Napster to let users face the m