September 14, 2005

• I love when celebrities make political statements. No sarcasm, I really do. Damon Wayans on the possible reinstatement of a military draft: "I'll send my sons [to Iraq] if [Bush] sends his daughters. Put those two drunk bitches on a plane and let them go fight. At least I know my sons would be getting some on the way."
• Cardboard box art. Super cool.
• Google will answer your text message queries. Driving directions, movie times, etc. Text "GOOGL" (46645) something like "120 F St NW, Washington, DC to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, Washington, DC" and they'll reply, giving you driving directions from Georgetown Law to the White House.
• ArsTechnica and Wired are carrying two stories saying that all you suckers with iPods and personal music players are going deaf!
• Yeah, let's all teach our children that eroding civil liberties and a gradual descent into an oppressive military state is fun! Who would buy this toy, and why? This is so disturbing. Next they'll be selling the Fisher Price Enemy Combatant Cell™, and the LEGO® Technic Warrantless Wiretap Kit!
• Tivo has caved to content-industry pressure to add broadcast flag protection to their latest update. Yep, this new OS update adds a "feature" that makes it so that you can't save certain shows past a certain date if the networks don't want you to. How is it in Tivo's interest to add this? This basically makes their product useless. Here's a screenshot. The "Betamax" decision, affirmed many times since, settled that Americans have the right to record television shows even if the copyright holder doesn't want them to. Sony v. Universal City Studios, 464 U.S. 417, 104 S. Ct. 774, 78 L. Ed. 2d 574 (1984). There is no copyholder right to a limited shelf-life of those recordings. BoingBoing posts about alternatives to Tivo.
• Google launched a Blog Search tool. At first glance, it doesn't seem all that useful, lacking the huge wealth of features at, for instance, Technorati (which is a very cool site, but I don't find use for anyway). Hopefully this just means Google will be indexing blogs more often. They've got my latest posts on there, one day after my posting them, so that's better than normal Google used to be.
• Another instance of silly pet owners. You should get a pet dry room, which uses infrared radiation to dry your pet off and prevent pet skin rash. These "doggie microwaves," as I like to call them, are clearly super necessary. I am considering putting up a separate category of posts here on my blog stricly for silly pet owner links. Something like Joel Hart's apparently trademarked "There's No Fruitcake Like A Religious Fruitcake" stuff.
• In the grand Zork style (the original Zork trilogy is now downloadable for free from Infocom, by the way) comes Shakespeare's Hamlet, the text-based adventure game!

Posted at September 14, 2005 12:45 PM | Comments (2)

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