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From the La Crosse Tribune, A boy and his cabbage of significant size:

Wisconsin ten-year-old Douglas Mezera grew a 31-pound cabbage for a competition sponsored by Bonnie Plant. The Alabama plant company’s program aims to promote gardening as fun and rewarding. What do you do with so much cabbage? “We made it into homemade sauerkraut,” Douglas’ mom said. “It’s good.”

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I thought the matter was dead after Boeing shut down their much hyped in-flight WiFi plans (yep), but Engadget got a seat on JetBlue’s private introductory flight for their WiFi service. The good news is that it’s free, the not surprising news is that Yahoo! is partnering in it (and it requires a Yahoo! account), the bad news is that all you get is Yahoo! IM and email. No web browsing, or anything else useful. Well, that and there’s no power outlets.

The Library Problem:

In March of 2006 my wife Mary and I owned about 3,500 books. We both have eclectic interests, voracious appetites for knowledge, and a great love of used bookstores. The problem was that we had no idea what books we had or where any of them were. We lost books all the time, cursed late into the night digging through piles for that one book we knew must be there, and even bought books only to find that we already owned them. There were books on random shelves, books on the floor, we were tripping over books when we walked up and down the stairs. In short, we had a mess.

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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.

Roadside Attractions Fading from Landscape:

A staple of the American road trip could be slowly disappearing from the nation’s interstates and byways. Owners of some roadside attractions are deciding that interest is waning

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.

Dan’s instructable for custom rewrite rules in WordPress is better than the docs in the codex.

Matt has updated his site with a less blog-like front page and I just discovered Unsleepable, which is very bloggy, but seems like a good start for what I want to do next.

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)?

Corporate networks are defenseless against the growing threat from instant messaging, and the government warns WiFi is insecure and easily sniffed.

Experts suggest we take precautions against the growing risk of p2p software that’s exposing sensitive documents and threatening national security.

Businesses blame security problems on their employees, their mobile devices, and other consumer technologies.

And now we have MySpace.

Eurostat 2006: Internet usage in the EU25: “Nearly half of individuals in the EU25 used the internet at least once a week in 2006 and a third of households and three-quarters of enterprises had broadband internet access.” Statistics Denmark 2007: Access to the Internet: 78% of population has home internet access.