LOLcat meets Dune

Ok, it's now official: the whole LOLcat meme is out of control.

goto considered harmful

Another great xkcd cartoon...

wikipedian protester

Great new cartoon posted at xkcd.

checking out bytes

It's always interesting to see old distribution models applied to new media, and especially humourous when those models enforce constraints that simply don't apply to bytes. So I had a chuckle when I learned about the OverDrive distribution system being used by the BC Libraries to offer audio books to patrons.

I was pleased to hear that our library system now offered audio books as a direct download (yay!) and disappointed (but not surprised) to learn that DRM was involved (boo!). The chuckle came, however, when I read this snippet from the BC Libraries web site:

"You may have a maximum of 5 titles checked out from the Digital Library.
Downloaded titles are checked out for 14 days and are automatically returned to the library."

"Checked out"? "Returned"? What, do the bytes magically travel back from my computer or MP3 player to their home servers [giggle]? Such restrictions make sense in a world where you are actually borrowing a book or physical media; as long as you have the atoms in your hand, no one else can use them. But downloaded bytes?

I doubt, of course, that our library system lobbied for these restrictions - such concessions were likely by the publishers as a key condition to making them available through the library system at all. But when the gap between the fluid availability of bytes and centuries-old distribution model designed for physical objects becomes so glaringly obvious, it's only a matter of time before someone takes advantage of this inefficiency.

foxy del.icio.us

In a posting on the del.icio.us blog yesterday, product manager Nick announces the availability of an updated del.icio.us extension for Firefox. The quick tour page gives an excellent overview of the new features available, and being a del.icio.us fanboy, I had the new extension up and running in minutes. So far, I'm quite impressed with the greater integration of del.icio.us bookmarks within Firefox - my bookmarks now seem "nearer at hand" than they did when I had to jump to a separate web page to view and search them.

If you "roll" with both Firefox and del.icio.us, check out the quick tour to see if you'd like to trick out your browser with this new extension.

pity the pirates

When considering the negative impact of P2P networks, it's the MPAA or RIAA that come to mind. But in the old days pirates used to steal digital bits and encode them onto physical discs for sale to consumers looking for movies, music and software on the cheap. What ever happened to them?

TorrentFreak brings a human face to the impact of P2P networks on piracy in the tale of "Tony", a working-class bloke who lived his own rags-to-riches-and-back-to-rags again story. Snippets like the following brought tears to my eyes:

By 2001, Tony was renting a factory unit and employing 3 people to operate duplicators 24 hours a day, 7 days a week but although business was lively right up to 2004, profits were being squeezed every year. Forced to increase the amount of media burnt each week to make up for the shortfall in profit, it became clear that the business was in trouble - demand was falling dramatically.

“In 2005 we shut down the factory unit” said Tony, “we just couldn’t keep going on that scale, nobody was buying anything in quantity anymore. So we closed up and moved back into a bedroom at home with my wife and her sister operating the burners, something they hadn’t done in years. They weren’t happy.”

Forget the negative ads targeting illegal downloads of movies and songs. If more kids knew how their downloading activity have affected former pirates like "Tony" and his family, perhaps they'd give up downloading and get their pirated content at flea markets instead [sniff].

jack's gift

Santa, robots and the frightening year there was a Dark Christmas - what's not to like in a short story?

law of accelerating returns

Some of the most mind-blowing stuff I've read in a while: click on Ray Kurzweil's The Law of Accelerating Returns and just read it.

After reading this essay, I don't doubt Kurweil's assertion that we will likely be able to probe every nook and cranny of a human brain and model it in software within my lifetime. But would such a reconstituted brain be a person? I guess it comes down to this: is there a ghost in the machine?

constituo, ergo sum

Whilst reading this Wired article discussing why Google may have been willing to pay $1.65 smackeroos for YouTube, I came across what will definitely be the most high-brow groaner I'll see today:

"If you aren't posting, you don't exist," says Rishad Tobaccowala, CEO of Denuo, a new media consultancy. "People say, 'I post, therefore I am.'" Constituo, ergo sum. An interesting formulation that may well represent a new rationalism for the digital age. But for the moment, let's not put Descartes before the horse.

snow day

Photo collection from our snow day...

wireless power

An MIT professor presented an interesting paper at an American Institute of Physics forum this week: a description of a method to wirelessly transmit power to mobile devices. Unlike existing approaches that use inductive coupling (and normally require devices to be quite close together), this approach makes use of resonance and devices can be several metres apart.

More details are available in this MIT news release, and the paper describing the theory involved is available here.

go deep

round 'em up

I just gotta get me one of the EFF's "Fair Use Has A Posse" stickers! Equally as tempting would be the unusual "Andre the Giant Has A Posse" stickers... who thinks this stuff up?

bittorrent guide

Still faithful to your classic P2P software, but feelin' the urge to experiment with the hot new P2P application everyone is talking about? Check out Brian's BitTorrent FAQ and Guide and go get yerself some torrent goodness...

veggie cannon

I was intrigued by the concept of Make magazine the first time I heard about it. Come on: shop projects for geeks? What was there not to like?

Ditto one of the first podcasts I've seen from Make: a weekend project to build a veggie cannon . Powered by hairspray (I kid you not - could I make this stuff up?). Any description of this mighty veggie cannon that I might provide would pale in comparison to the real thing - go visit this link watch the video to see for yourself.

posting from google docs

When Google Docs and Spreadsheets was announced, I couldn't resist giving it a try. The mini-tour claimed documents could be posted to your blog and carry over tags you assigned in Docs & Spreadsheets, so I thought I'd give it a go (with this posting).

speed your surfing

After reading this post by NYT columnist David Pogue, I couldn't resist trying out this free web service that claims to speed up surfing by caching DNS requests. It could be just me, but web pages do seem to load more quickly now. The OpenDNS approach itself is also interesting: you tweak the settings on your home router to point to the OpenDNS service, and that's it! No software required on your computer.

Sweet.

pumpkin pie is pretty

Today's john report posting is by my daughter, Katelyn (who is all of 9 years old). Take it away, Kate!

Pumpkin pie

I think pumkin pie taste good because it is vearry yummy.It is also good because pumkin pie comes from a pumkin and pumpkins are orange (and orange is a pretty colour). And that is all I have to say.

Thanks, Kate!

copyright siege engine

Gizmodo has a posting that details the capabilities of the new ASUStek WL-700gE wireless router, which I can only describe as a copyright-kickin' siege engine.

Features include:

• built-in 160GB hard drive
• USB ports that support a number of devices (including external drives)
• built-in BitTorrent client that supports up to 7 simultaneous streams
• UPnP/DLNA support for sharing media content with compatible devices and software (like iTunes).

Not to put a fine point on this: you connect this puppy up to the Internet, spark up your web browser, point this router at torrents and off it goes! If it had the ability to support other software like tvRSS then you could truly use the Internet as your VCR...

top torrent sites

It's been a while since my last posting (geez, this is starting off like a confessional)...

I saw this interesting post this morning reviewing the top BitTorrent aggregation and search sites on the web. Nice breakdown by total torrents indexed, average number of new torrents each day, etc - as seen by the tracking site Alexa. I've been a fan of isoHunt for about a year now - it nearly always manages to have what I'm looking for. The top rated site in the review I read, however, points to an unknown rookie - BTJunkie - as having the most torrents (and most average daily new torrents) of all the torrent sites reviewed. BTJunkie also allows you to register searches and get updates via email when there are new hits (though who knows how much spam this may generate).