Monthly Archives: December 2004

Apple Fans Mod Macs

December 22, 2004 – 4:27 am

Joseph DeRuvo Jr.’s i-Tablet is this year’s Mac Mod. Wired’s Leander Kahneyusually covers the story, but DeRuvo published this one himself at MacMod.
Kahney covered Jeff Paradiso’s converted iBook tablet as part of his 2002 story on Mac modders. He followed that up in 2003 with a story about a pyramid-shaped PowerMac that glowed blue. [...]

By Casey | Posted in Technology | Comments (1)



Cross-country Journeys In Time-Lapse

December 22, 2004 – 2:11 am

I feel a tinge of jealousy every time I see something like this: Lacquer Sound’s Road Trip.
Similar: I covered Matt Frondorf’s Mile Markers project a while back. (Picture from Mile Markers).

By Casey | Posted in Books, Movies, Music | Comments (1)

Gary Webb: A Journalist Who Dared

December 21, 2004 – 5:29 am

AlterNet ran an interesting story about Gary Webb’s recent suicide and the events that may have led to it.
Webb was the 49-year-old former Pulitzer-winning reporter who in 1996, while working for the San Jose Mercury News, touched off a national debate with a three-part series that linked the CIA-sponsored Nicaraguan Contras to a crack-dealing epidemic [...]

By Casey | Posted in Politics & Controversy | Comments (0)

FCC’s Complaint System Gamed

December 21, 2004 – 4:01 am

I’ve got a backlog o stories to post here, including this old one about broadcast programming complaints to the FCC. The FCC reports that it received a mere 350 complaints in 2000, but 240,000 in 2003. So what can account for the nearly 700-X increase? The FCC did some homework on the matter:
According to a [...]

By Casey | Posted in Politics & Controversy | Comments (1)

GPS Happy

December 20, 2004 – 11:59 pm

My brother and his wife surprised me with a Rayming TN-200 GPS this holiday season. What’s so great about it? It’s a tiny USB powered brick that interfaces easily with a laptop. The plan? Wardriving (yes, it’s sooo three years ago), better geolocation while traveling, matching GPS coordinates to photos, and as much mayhem as [...]

By Casey | Posted in Technology | Comments (2)



Seacoast Industry

December 20, 2004 – 9:37 pm

Sometimes a story will popup as a clear reminder that the world is not always as it seems. I will admit both surprise and amusement when I found that Foster’s Daily Democrat reported Saturday on the content of a federal indictment of a Kittery, Maine, health club. Geography lesson: Foster’s covers New Hampshire’s seacoast — [...]

By Casey | Posted in Politics & Controversy | Comments (1)

Displaying Word Docs and PDFs in Safari

December 20, 2004 – 2:25 am

Royce asked:
How can I disable or tweak Download Manager so that files can be read in line with the download and manually launch through the Download Manager?
I want to be able to click on a PDF or Word doc and have it open inline without having the Download Manager handle it to the [...]

By Casey | Posted in Technology | Comments (1)

Fun With License Plates

December 19, 2004 – 4:07 am

Jameson wrote me today to point out that he can get a New Hampshire Moose license plate with the text “-BRK4M”
He found my story about New Hampshire license plates, including the bit about NH’s online plate lookup.
Then he pointed out that he could get a Purple Heart plate with the text “FUGW”
Political [...]

By Casey | Posted in Questionable...funny. Pointless. | Comments (2)

iSight Accessories And Beauty Tips

December 18, 2004 – 11:43 pm

MacDevCenter published a guide on How to Look Great on iChat AV back in March. The point? Video is changing telecommunications:
No longer can we sit in grubby geek glee, protected by our avatar shields, wearing only uniforms of underwear. Endangered are the days where we can pass digital transmissions and gas simultaneously, picking our noses [...]

By Casey | Posted in Technology | Comments (1)

Weird Palm Apps

December 18, 2004 – 6:07 am

CanalPDA, a Spanish-language PDA info site has released an English version of their story about the weirdest Palm OS programs. You’ll have to follow the link to read about why they thought the apps were so weird, but the titles give some clue:
Voodoo
Palm Mirror
Bistromatic
FakeCall
Palmasutra
fDic
Divination
Scare The Doggy
Bubble Wrap Emulator
HAL9000

By Casey | Posted in Questionable...funny. Pointless. | Comments (0)

Darn Comment Spam

December 17, 2004 – 6:46 am

Now that most email clients have reasonable spam filtering capabilities, spammers are targeting comments systems on blogs, guestbooks (I thought those had disappeared, but I saw one yesterday) and other open submission forms that post to the web.
IP banning probably never worked, as spammers have been using open proxys for years. Word blacklists (like ignore [...]

By Casey | Posted in Technology | Comments (1)

Beware The Cheap PC

December 17, 2004 – 4:09 am

The public radio show Future Tense did a story Monday that asks “Will you regret buying a cheapie PC?”
Computers are cheaper than ever. But if you’re looking at a new machine this holiday season, Dwight Silverman of the Houston Chronicle says beware of the low, low prices.
Why will you regret it? The machines are [...]

By Casey | Posted in Technology | Comments (1)

More About Google Print

December 17, 2004 – 1:01 am

Prediction: we’ll talk about Google Print until they debut the beta, then we’ll talk about it more.
Copyfight posted some followup on Google’s announcement earlier this week. Of note was a quote from Michael Madison:
A first thought: It’s one more example, and a pretty important one, of the fading of the lines separating copyright law [...]

By Casey | Posted in Books, Movies, Music | Comments (0)

iPod Supplies Tight; Holiday Sales To Exceed Four Million

December 16, 2004 – 9:07 am

Summary: four million to be sold this holiday season; adoption rate higher than for Sony’s Walkman.
From MacNN:
An article in the The Wall Street Journal today says that iPods are becoming scarce at retailers around the country. The report says that Amazon.com, Buy.com, and other online retailers are now out of stock and “Apple is [...]

By Casey | Posted in Books, Movies, Music | Comments (1)

Wireless Security: WEP Dead

December 16, 2004 – 4:05 am

WiFi Net News is saying R.I.P. W.E.P. after news of a new version of Aircrack was released that can break WEP in seconds after passively sniffing only a small number of packets. The result is that it takes only two to five minutes to crack a key.
Even keys changed every 10 minutes are thus susceptible [...]

By Casey | Posted in Technology | Comments (21)