Dispatches

DisplayLink is licensing technology that promises to make adding a second (or sixth) monitor as easy as plugging into a spare USB port. Samsung’s 940UX 19“ LCD (Under $350, review) is among the first to employ it, though IOGEAR’s USB to VGA adapter is also available (about $65, review). This isn’t without problems, though. Image quality is said to be sharp until it moves, then it stutters and chops, more from CNet Labs. Still, might be useful for low-motion office-type applications.

It was part of a long thread among WordPress hackers over the summer and fall, but this post at VulgarisOverIP just reminded of it: minify promises to be an easy way to compress external CSS and JavaScript without adding extra steps to your develop/deploy process. No, really, look at the usage instructions. (To be clear, the Vulgaris and Google Code versions are different, one derived from the other and backported to PHP4 compatible. Still, the concept is the same.)

Vulgaris reports a nearly 300% decrease in time to download, definitely worth the effort.

We’ve known about the birch bark glue Romans used on their clay pots and jars for a while, but now researchers in Germany are calling it “Caesar’s Superglue.” Researchers at the Rhine State Museum in Bonn apparently found it used to bond silver plate to an iron helmet in a 2000 year old repair job. The superglue part: the bond was still good.

It’s way cool to see Lichen‘s Scriblio installation instructions translated to Hungarian. Even cooler to have Sarah the tagging librarian take hard look at it and give us some criticism (and praise!). But I’m positively ecstatic to see Robin Hastings’ post on installing Scriblio (it’s not easy on Windows, apparently).

Part of it is pride in seeing something that I’ve been working on for so long finally get out into the world, but Scriblio really does get better with every comment or criticism. And it takes giant leaps forward every time somebody installs it and reports on how it went. Way cool. Thank you.

Japan‘s The Ministry of Foreign Affairs English-language Web Japan is a bottomless trove of in-flight magazine-quality stories like ANTIBACTERIAL EPIDEMIC and J-culture-hyping love-fests like Honoring The World’s Manga Artists.

If American propaganda efforts are this bad, why do foreign governments even bother blocking them?

It can only be taken as evidence of our wealth and privilege that two years after Macy’s bought Marshall Field’s people are planning a Black Friday rally and holiday boycott to protest the name change.

I guess the criticism is that it’s one thing for somebody to open up their music for remixing, but an entirely different thing to do the same with a movie. Or is it? Is it (click re-fragmented)?

I can use my iPhone pretty much anywhere, but ATT is going to charge me $1.30 a minute for calls, $.50 per text, and $.02 per KB for data while in Denmark.

ATT requires international activation but they do offer some tips for international roamers. I bought an international iPhone data plan (20MB for $25), but I also learned that visual voice mail counts against that (regular voice mail counts against minutes, at the $1.30 rate). I could have paid $6 a month to get a discounted voice rate, but I’d have to make 20 minutes of calls for it to pay off. And there’s no plan to give me discounted SMS.

I’m a WordPress Partisan, so I agree with Mark Ghosh’s criticism of this WordPress vs Drupal Report. Still, it reminds me that I should point out XXLmag, SLAM Online, and Ford among the very non-bloggy sites built on WordPress.

Matt pointed out that Automattic has purchased Gravatar, the globally recognizable avatar service. Om speaks of the economics and Matt’s cagy, but it’s hard not to see the possibility of creating a larger identity solution around this. WordPress’ market penetration is huge, a service that connects those nearly two million blogs could offer real value, especially in connection with Automattic’s Akismet.

Aside: now that Gravitar’s reliability is up, I’ll probably get Sexy Comments running here soon.

Magazines fail all the time, but it’s hard not to look at them as signs of something larger. MacWEEK‘s fizzle was claimed to represent the demise of the Mac, Computer Shopper has lost more weight than a Slim Fast spokesmodel (800 pages to 80 in ten years!). And now Business 2.0 Magazine is shutting down and sending cancellation notices to readers.

Perhaps the lesson here is that there’s nothing too 2.0 about stories that suggest you buy low and sell high?

The housing market may be melting down, but prices are near rock bottom in these places — and offer opportunities for savvy investors to get in now. 4 smart housing plays.

Cindy Harper, Systems Librarian at Colgate University, posted to the IUG list with this notion today:

I’m clearing out a large group of expired student records, and wonder if anyone else has had the same idea that has occurred to me. [Our ILS] keeps track in the patron record of TOTCHKOUTs (total checkouts). At the expiration of the students’ record at the end of their four or so years, this represents a measure that is not perfect, but could distinguish heavy library users from non-users. Of course, it combines book chekouts, video and music checkouts, reserve checkouts, etc. And it misses the effect of electronic sources. I was thinking of trying to get GPA data for these graduates and use an ANCOVA (Analysis of Covariance) to see, once you’ve accounted for the effect of different majors and year-of-graduation effects, if there’s a correlation between library use and GPA?

Has anyone done this type of study? Do you analyze your TOTCHKOUT data in any way?

I’d second her question. Public libraries, I think, do better at correlating their statistics with other metrics in their communities. What do we know about academic libraries?

Anybody who thinks Free Software is anti-copyright or disrespectful of intellectual property should take a look at Mark Jaquith’s post, What a GPL’d Movable Type means. Let’s be clear, Anil Dash takes issue with Jaquith’s interpretation, but the point is Jaquith’s offense at what appears to be Six Apart’s grabbiness for any code somebody might contribute.

Freedom 0 was one thing, the willingness of a person to pour his or her sweat into something, then watch somebody else (or even risk watching somebody else) profit from it is another.

In another sign that my generation’s culture is gaining dominance, NPR gave video games a bit of coverage this morning. Unfortunately, the story that makes it sound like the company invented playtesting doesn’t suggest that Microsoft’s behemoth investment in the Halo franchise makes that testing (and, perhaps, blandness) necessary. (Meanwhile, MSNBC last year ran an off-message story about how playtesters declared the Wii the top console.)

Reality: Playtesting is one of those dream jobs that people scour Craigslist for or start questionable-looking services around. As a side benefit, it improves your vision.

The CEO of NH’s first online-only, distance education high school expects about 700 students to enroll in its first semester, to start in January. So says a report at NHPR.

Perhaps Talk Like A Pirate Day has been too successful when NPR hosts are doing it, but anything that’s so important to our children’s future success is important enough for me. And if you need a brush up on your skills, don’t miss this instructional video.

The following, quoted from Daily Kos:

Accodring to Chambers, God has caused fearsome floods, egregious earthquakes, horrendous hurricanes, terrifying tornadoes, pestilential plagues, ferocious famines, devastating droughts, genocidal wars, birth defects, calamitous catastrophes resulting in the wide-spread death, destruction and terrorization of millions upon millions of the Earth’s inhabitants including innocent babes, infants, children, the aged and infirm without mercy or distinction.

So, you think “yeah, he’s got a point.” And you read this, and you realize “he’s flipping smart.”

Chambers says he’s tried to contact God numerous times, “Plaintiff, despite reasonable efforts to effectuate personal service upon Defendant ( ‘Come out, come out, wherever you are’ ) has been unable to do so.”

The suit also requests that the court given the “peculiar circumstances” of this case waive personal service. It says being Omniscient, the plaintiff assumes God will have actual knowledge of the action.

A Pentagon commissioned $400,000 RAND study, Enlisting Madison Avenue: The Marketing Approach to Earning Popular Support in Theaters of Operation, concludes “the ‘force’ brand, which the United States peddled for the first few years of the occupation, was doomed from the start and lost ground to enemies’ competing brands.”

Have You Thanked the Internet Lately? OneWebDay, our opportunity to celebrate “one web, one world, one wish” is just about a week away (though it falls on Yom Kippur). This video explains a bit and Tim Berners-Lee is planning his own video (worth mentioning: his net neutrality post).

If things work out, I’ll be posting a video too, even though I’ll likely be offline most of that day (not observing Yom Kippur, at a friend’s wedding).

Is Bush really so hawkish that he refuses to formally declare an end to the Korean War?

The short story is that you simply put “tags:” in the subject or body and anything that follows becomes a tag. It’s worth remembering that the Subject of the email becomes the title and the body becomes the description. The longer story is at Flickr.

In a development that even FOXNews couldn’t ignore, US attorney general Alberto Gonzales has resigned, he thinks.

If the news is to be believed, separate teams have found hardware and software-based solutions to unlock an iPhone.

It’s worth noting that all this is legal because of an exemption, <a href=“http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2007/03/02/04" title=“On The Media: Transcript of “Mobile Malcontent” (March 2, 2007)">much needed and hard fought.

Hey, I’m a fan of that old book smell too, can I get some scratch-n-sniff stickers?

A hurricane, high crosswinds at the landing site, a nitrogen leak, and two damaged tiles. Watch the shuttle land live on NASA TV.