Category: WordPress

I got Wireless Hacks out of the library the other day and it’s about so much more than wireless: it really serves as a good primer on networking, security hardening, with a leavening of the internet gift culture.

Lots of OS X goodness as well.

Thanks to this book, I am running a squid proxy and working on sending all my packets through an encrypted tunnel: he makes it all look easy.
Continue reading “are all the “hacks” books this good?”

The Robot Co-op: All Consuming has become a part of the Robot Co-op family!:

All Consuming has become a part of the Robot Co-op family!

So 43 Things and All Consuming have assimilated each other. And now you can list albums and movies as consumables . . .

Will I bother? It would make sense if it tied in with audioscrobbler or used Growl to handle updates in real time.

WE’RE ALL IN THE SAME GANG:

Here are our suggestions:

Your blog is so stupid Rosie O’Donell made fun of it in free verse on her blog.

Your blog is like a sausage patty: no links.

Your blog is so boring Nick Denton wants to pay you $1000 a month not to write.

Your blog is like a pedestrian walkway: no traffic.

Your blog is so lame even Greg Lindsay refused to write for it.

Your blog is like Martha Stewart during her trial for securities fraud: no comments.

Your blog is so ugly Matt Drudge sent you an e-mail offering to help you redesign it “so it’s more aesthetically pleasing.”

Your blog is like the intensive care unit after 8 P.M.: no visitors.

Your blog is so self-indulgent Stephanie Klein sent you a box of tampons and a note that says, “Get over it.”

Your blog is so badly written it got you your own column at the New York Press.

Your blog is like Jason Kidd’s domestic situation after court-ordered anger-management classes: no hits.

Ouch. I winced at a few of these.

News:

Rats fed on a diet rich in genetically modified corn developed abnormalities to internal organs and changes to their blood, raising fears that human health could be affected by eating GM food.

The Independent on Sunday can today reveal details of secret research carried out by Monsanto, the GM food giant, which shows that rats fed the modified corn had smaller kidneys and variations in the composition of their blood.

Reasons to look for the GMO-free label: I’m not saying it’s all poison, but why hide the facts?

[hat tip to Wade]

Slay the iPod :

And that one man isn’t a musician, a devoted promoter or even a thoughtful artists org representitive. It’s a geek. Same sort as now decide what is valid vs invalid worthy of delivery emails. Worse, it’s a biz-geek with a history of closed-circuit thinking.

So Gary is unhappy with the iPod and its dominance in the marketplace. Trouble is, I think he is confusing dominance with domination: the iPod owns the retail segment for portable music players but does that mean they own the music segment as well?

From where I sit, not hardly: you can buy an iPod and then easily ensure you never share so much as another thin dime with Apple. You can stuff your shiny little gadget with music you already own, music you record from internet radio, even music from the p2p networks [note: the legality or proprietary of these methods is subject to your local laws and customs].

And if you look at the RIAA, you can find plenty of musicians, promoters and the like: have they done anything to look more appealing than Steve Jobs to the average music fan?

I seem to hear this regular refrain that Apple or more directly Steve Jobs is wrecking . . . something. It’s not clear what, though. I understand the issues with DRM but those are easily sidestepped. There’s something about the very existence of the iPod that bugs some people.

And the piece (1) referenced above makes it clear that the record industry is unhappy with the position they’re in: now that they see how well music sans media sells, they want to jack up the price, but they can’t. They’re like the monkey with his hand in the coconut, unwilling to let go of that handful of nuts, even as the lion gets closer and closer . . . .

I just got a survey through my school mailing list (what, don’t have all elementary schools have a listserver?) and it’s all about kid’s TV watching habits. The assumption was that all kids watch TV. Mine don’t and their teachers are well aware of it. [*]

I resisted the urge to express myself plainly, but I left the conversation open. It’s hard to tell someone that kids have no more need for a minimum daily allowance of TV than they do for masturbation: I’ll save that for later.

* My 6 year old was called on to correct her teacher’s deliberate misspellings the other week, to the amazement of the 2nd and 3rd graders (she’s in a mixed grade classroom, the Montessori way). When the teacher explained that the little spark doesn’t watch TV and her language skills come for reading, another child we know called out “they have a TV, they just don’t have cable.” As if that makes a difference. Her teacher knew better, that all we watch are movies (Mulan 2 today) and occasional baseball games. An experiment that has paid off in ways we never anticipated . . .

Apropos of that, I just found this:
If You’re Not Making Television, It’s Making You. by Dirk Koning:

Over the past 25 years, hundreds of teens and adults have discovered that if you’re not making television, it’s making you. They’ve had this epiphany while volunteering at the Community Media Center’s public-access station, GRTV, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. As they learned to angle a camera for a different perspective, edit for a desired effect, or schedule a broadcast to reach a certain audience, they realized that, all their lives—for good and for ill—television has been shaping their thinking, molding their culture, and persuading their purchases

Now playing: Fight Test by The Flaming Lips (2) from the album “Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots” | Get it (7)