StickyC.com

newegg.com Finally, a 3.5″ firewire drive enclosure that looks sexy AND costs less than 50 bucks!

Wired bots.

This guide explains how to create an AIM/MSN bot of your very own. You should have some technical knowledge on DOS/Perl/general programming before continuing.

microsöft.com

Internet News Article | Reuters.com

SEATTLE (Reuters) - Boeing Co. (BA.N: Quote, Profile, Research) on Thursday announced pricing for its Connexion high-speed Internet service that will soon enable travelers to surf the Web or send messages to friends or co-workers while cruising at 30,000 feet.

Commercial air passengers with standard wireless connections on their laptops or handheld devices would be able to use the new Boeing service to check e-mail, visit their favorite Internet sites or plug into their company’s secure network… The flat rate, which would give a user unlimited Internet access, will cost $29.95 for flights lasting longer than six hours. Each three- to six-hour leg will be charged at $19.95, while access on trips under three hours would cost $14.95. What happened to all that song and dance about wi-fi messing with the avionics on modern flights? I wonder how much money it takes to shield the smoke detectors in the bathrooms….

Games from Within: Physical Structure and C - Part 1: A First Look

This two-part article will attempt to explain why the physical structure of a program is so important, present some useful guidelines, and show its effect on compile times.

“Want to know the weirdest way to kill a roly poly bug? Put socks on it.”

Did you know Roly Polies (pill bugs, doodlebugs, isopods) are actually crustaceans?

More than you ever wanted to know about isopods. Including some rather large ones.

I just finished writing Behind the iTunes Music Store: A Technical Description of iTMS and FairPlay. As you might guess, it explains how the iTunes Music Store works, including the only human-readable description of how FairPlay, Apple’s DRM system, works. Get it before the government does!

Comments, corrections, and additions are appreciated. Also, I’m looking for a way to intercept and decrypt SSL traffic.

[Aaron Swartz]

PLAZM | FONTS | DOWNLOADS

In an effort to explore the meaning of corporate icons in our world, type designer Roland Henss has created an alphabet called Capitalis Pirata. By placing fragments of corporate icons into the form of an alphabet, Henss challenges the notion of ownership of letterforms. Since a copyright can not be placed on the alphabet itself, this typeface raises issues about the boundaries of ownership and the proprietary nature of letterforms in the public domain.

Ned Batchelder: March 2004

One of the common components of software engineering culture is the shared build. A team of people work together to produce a piece of software, and on a regular basis, often daily, that software is built for the team. One of the cardinal sins in this culture is breaking the build: changing the software so that it can no longer be built. To punish the offender, and provide a bonding experience for the innocent victims on the team, a ritual develops around how to treat the offender.

nym pseudo: So I’m going to be a Pyro

When Xeni blogged ‘So you want to be a Pyro’, I was all over it. A chance to actually learn safely the ropes with the people who know it the best. I couldn’t go to the local seminar in LA, but knew it was going to be worth the five hours of driving to and back from San Diego.

Antiword is a utility to read Microsoft Word files and convert them to plain text, PostScript®, or DocBook files… The DocBook stuff is still experimental, but the plain text seems to work quite well for me, and I’ve successfully turned Word files into PostScript® files, and then turned those into PDF filess using ps2pdf. You could go one step further than the PS to PDF Converter site and build an online converter to turn Word Files into PDF files, or, well… whatever else you can dream up.

(See also: antiexcel)

[RasterWeb!]

CNN.com - New high-tech tools help soldiers pinpoint gunfire in Iraq - Mar 24, 2004

Sensors atop an aluminum pole on the back of a Humvee pick up supersonic shock waves to give an approximate location of gunfire, and sound waves measured from the muzzle blast narrow it some more.

A cigarette box-sized display on the dashboard or windshield then shows the findings. “Incoming, 5 o’clock,” says a speaker inside the box. Not unlike my pal’s Valentine 1 radar detector… I should look into that. Not that cops are shooting at me, but I think it’s only a matter of time….

Emulators for Palm PDAs

For as long as I’ve been using OS X, LaunchBar has reined supreme as the one shareware application I could never use the operating system without, and the first download suggested to anyone switching over from Windows. For launching applications and accessing local content without grabbing the mouse, LaunchBar was the only game in town and worth every penny of the $39 registration fee.

But there’s a new gunslinger on the horizon — run, don’t walk, and download Quicksilver.

Quicksilver offers everything LaunchBar does, but with a greater suite of interface choices and functionality, and is completely open source and free to use. You can search for mp3s in iTunes, grab contacts from your address book and send emails, open browser bookmarks, navigate your local harddrive — all from one simple interface engaged with the same LaunchBar-esque Option-Space (which you can change), and by typing the first few letters of whatever content you want. And like LaunchBar, Quicksilver remembers the characters you typed to access your preferred content, so it quickly builds a database of options molded around your particular needs.

But Quicksilver goes beyond being a simple launcher — it also offers a Shelf to place content on, a Clipboard viewer which remembers your capture history, and loads of customizable options.

Quicksilver also comes with three interface options (unlike LaunchBar’s single drop-down style) — “Window”, “Menu”, and “Bezel”. Window is the default interface, though I personally prefer (and highly recommend selecting) Bezel for it mimicks the center-screen, semi-transparent look of LiteSwitch X and OS X’s volume / brightness / eject feedback icons. In Bezel mode, Quicksilver feels like a natural appendage of the operating system.

As for speed (comparing Quicksilver to LaunchBar) Quicksilver feels faster, and is noticeably quicker on startup. After getting up to speed with the interface (thanks to this handy tutorial) I was doing everything I used to do in LaunchBar, but faster.

I never thought any application would replace LaunchBar, but the Quicksilver developers have done just that. Download Quicksilver and see if you aren’t just as hooked. And don’t bother looking for a price tag. Quicksilver is free.

[What Do I Know]

downhillbattle.org bring us another project to make music more accessible - bannedmusic.org . Using BitTorrent, bannedmusic.org has created an all in one, 3MB package that installs BitTorrent and starts downloading the album: This one step “Easy Downloader” dramatically reduces server requirements, and could be useful in any number of other situations. Try downloading one of the albums and then read about how we did it… The download system is explained and even suggests room for improvement (torrent java clients, integration with mozilla etc). The packages are available for Windows and Apple OSs. [Rocknerd]

So why is this cool? Because it allows a distributor to disseminate large quantities of controlled data without spending a fortune on bandwidth and server hardware. The most popular P2P networks don’t really support any kind of package signing and it’s difficult or impossible to find a specific source to download from. Sure, there’s integrity checking, but there is no guarantee that the source file is what it’s labelled as - In reality, the creator has no control over what’s being downloaded under the guise of their filename. To provide a reliably source, the distributor must become the source, and if the source package is large, that can cost expensive bandwidth. By distributing a BitTorrent seed, the content distributor gets both control over the content and abundant bandwidth at minimal cost to them.

The Inscrutable 8-Ball Revealed

Detailed below, the reader will find a procedure for disassembling a Magic 8-Ball®

Cheers to thee, Magic 8-Ball!

I have invented a game to use up the massive number of text messages that T-Mobile allots me every month. It’s called T9 roulette. It goes a little something like this:

• Pick someone in your phonebook, preferably not mom or your boss. For the purpose of this description we’ll call her Maurice.
• Write "Maurice is a"
• Mash buttons until you have constructed a word of desirable length
• Send

I’ve had countless hours of fun already, and apparently it is so awesome that it inspired Rusty Foster to upgrade his 4 year old phone. Give it a try!

[overstated]

Xbox Media Center

XboxMediaCenter is a free open source (GPL) multimedia player for the Xbox™ from Microsoft. (XboxMediaCenter is also known as “Xbox Media Center” or simply “XBMC”). Currently the XboxMediaCenter can be used to play and view supported video/audio/picture formats such as MPEG-1/2, DivX, XVID, MP3, JPG and more direct from a CD/DVD in the Xbox™ DVD-ROM or of the Xbox™ hard disk drive, it can also play files from a PC over a LAN / network via XStream Server software or from a Windows (SMB) share. It has playlists and slideshow. These features enable the Xbox™ running XboxMediaCenter to fully function as a multi-media jukebox. Note! XBMC is a hobby project that is only developed by volunteers in their spare-time for free. (Remember XboxMediaCenter does require a Xbox mod-chip installed in the Xbox™ to work).

LegalTorrents - Your source for legal BitTorrent files

This classic 1968 George A. Romero zombie movie is now part of the public domain, and we’re hosting a copy to help the Internet Archive’s bandwidth. Please note: ‘WARNING - This is a graphic horror film with some gory special effects.’

Boing Boing: Bambi as prog-rock epic

Bambi as prog-rock epic Spastic Ink’s prog-rock epic, “A Wild Hare,” is a Zappa-esque guitar interpretation of Walt Disney’s Bambi; there’s a video that maps the music onto cuts from the animated film