Articles


It's a lonely day in the neighborhood...

Fred Rogers, Mr. Rogers of Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood died last night. He was diagnosed in January with stomach cancer and is survived by two sons and his wife. Stories are available on most of the news outlets. Personally, I remember many happy hours watching Mr. Rogers and am heartened by …

Ireland forcing telcoms to store call data.

In another shocking privacy twist, the WebLog of Karlin Lillington recounts an afternoon spent at a briefing by Irish authorities about a proposed new security policy. At this briefing, they revealed that, over a year ago, the Irish government had instructed all telecoms providers to maintain three years worth of …

Use your cell phone as a remote to your laptop

Yet another ridiculous, useful, and decidedly cool piece of software for the Macintosh. Sony Ericsson Clicker allows you to use a Bluetooth phone as a remote input device for a Macintosh with a Bluetooth adapter. Great if you need an impromptu controller for Keynote.

"Lawrence" MovieFest a success

Thanks to everyone who came, the MovieFest yesterday was a lot of fun. We had a full house and the print of the film was every bit as good as I had remembered. The next MovieFest will be the last weekend in March. If you want to nominate a title …

Amusing Seti@Home note

Despite the fact that I registered for Seti@Home in May of 1999 and stopped using it in November of 1999, I still churned out more work units than 94+% of the people to sign up. According to my log on their site, I managed to generate 1.275 years …

AOL's customer DB hacked (maybe)

Wired is reporting in an article on their site that AOL's customer database, Merlin, was broken into by hackers using a combination of old-fashioned social engineering techniques and some adroit hacking. There are some disputes of this, though, in other press reports, including an article in The Register.

Taberna del Alabardero - Washington, DC

Last night, we went to Taberna del Alabardero, a DC restaurant acclaimed to be one of the best Spanish restaurants in the United States. Reviews in the Washingtonian were excellent, but some of the others were mixed, however we found it an excellent experience. There are many ways to judge …

Microsoft releases new DRM technology

Microsoft today announced its new Rights Management software for Windows 2000 Server. The press release is here, and an article from CNet is here. The basic structure is to provide Windows programs with access (via a programming API to be available later this year) to documents with user- specific, time-specific …


The Official Chair of Office Hockey?

I was digging through the Herman Miller site looking for a new chair (try eBay), and ran across a link to a QuickTime movie entitled "The Official Chair of Office Hockey". You'll have to go to the Aeron page to check it out (in the right-hand column).

Music publishers sue, well..., music publishers

In yet another round of fun Napster-related lawsuits, CNet is reporting in this article that Napster investor Bertelsmann is being sued by a group of music producers for, in effect, causing more piracy by prolonging the life of the now-failed music-swapping service.

Harvard study reports net blocking threatens legit sites

An article points us to a study from Harvard University about IP sharing and filtering. Not surprisingly, the study indicates that lots of sites tend to share the same IP addresses, due to the scarcity of IP addresses and the way that most company's provide web hosting. The basic concern …

University of Wyoming watches file trading

According to an article on CNet is reporting that the University of Wyoming has been using a program from Audible Magic to watch over file trading on the campus networks. Chances are that most of the traders didn't know this was going on before the announcement, but the administration is …

Update your blog from your phone

Just because you don't have enough opportunity to update your venerable web log from your computer, an article in Wired describes a new and growing set of software aimed at bloggers who want to take the show on the road.

WiFi/Cellular phones coming

According to an article in the Wall Street journal, a number of companies (including Motorola, Samsung, etc.) are working on portable devices that will compute and provide phone communication over WiFi and cellular networks. The article shows one-such device already available in South Korea.

IBM Chooses QTopia for PPC PDA

An article on Geek.com is reporting that IBM is going to build their new PPC PDA using the QTopia OS. Basically, it's the same OS as the Sharp Zaurus, and is a Linux with a QT UI. QT is a cross-platform development toolkit from the Norwegian company, Trolltech. It …

Nikon releases new COOLPIX cameras

According to an article on MacCentral announces new cameras from Nikon. The cameras are upgrades of the COOLPIX family, lower priced and featured than the D-1 and D-100. More pixels, smaller form factors, 256-level metering...

PDF Workflow menu for OS X 10.2.4

For those who work with PDF files under OS X, there's a cool little feature in version 10.2.4 and later that allows you to do some post-processing on the PDF files after they've been "printed". This article from MacOS X Hints details how to get the menu to …

MacRumors Buyer's Guide

The folks at MacRumors have created a new Buyer's Guide aimed at giving Mac users (and would-be Mac users) a quick view of which models are getting long in the tooth and which ones are ripe for the picking.