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OQO, FlipStart, Sony U50, Sony U750P, FlyBook, Tiqit, Antelope- WiFi Seeker, Finder, Detector roundup

In this roundup, we look at five reasonably priced hardware WiFi finders.

Lycos screensaver aims to make spamming an expensive proposition

Lycos Europe will begin offering a new screensaver that it hopes will make spamming an increasingly costly business. The screensaver, available at cleverly-named makelovenotspam.com, works by hitting sites that advertise in spam e-mails with an endless barrage of data requests. Lycos hopes to get a sufficient number of people signed up and running the screensaver so that spammers will see their bandwidth bills soar. The sites targeted will come from blacklists generated by Spamcop and other anti-spam organizations.

How to Paint a Room: What Your Mother Never Told You

Someone today asked me how to paint a room. About once a month, someone asks me how to paint a room because they think I’m “handy.” I’m not a professional painter. I don’t even like painting much. But I have gotten pretty fast at it over the years. I’ve ignored lots of rules and found lots of others that work. And I’ve made a huge number of mistakes. Even after 12 years of painting things, I still can’t make my paint jobs look as good as the ones that pros do, but I can do it for less. That said, when the work requires more than 5 days of effort on my part, I look to hire it out — pros can generally do that sort of thing in a lot less time and do it better.

Sysinternals Freeware - Utilities for Windows NT and Windows 2000 - PageDefrag

One of the limitations of the Windows NT/2000 defragmentation interface is that it is not possible to defragment files that are open for exclusive access. Thus, standard defragmentation programs can neither show you how fragmented your paging files or Registry hives are, nor defragment them. Paging and Registry file fragmentation can be one of the leading causes of performance degradation related to file fragmentation in a system.

PageDefrag uses advanced techniques to provide you what commercial defragmenters cannot: the ability for you to see how fragmented your paging files and Registry hives are, and to defragment them. In addition, it defragments event log files and Windows 2000/XP hibernation files (where system memory is saved when you hibernate a laptop).

ThisisLondon A group of former pupils at a London comprehensive school are poised to win thousands of pounds in unpaid royalties for singing on Pink Floyd’s classic Another Brick In The Wall 25 years ago.

Delicious Library

The Delicious Library is a CD cataloging system with a lot of groovy features. The one that caught my eye allows you to use the iSight as a bar-code scanner for CD title entry. I remember a similar app for the PC called DVD Profiler that allowed you to use a CueCat to enter DVD barcodes into your library. Very helpful when there’s several different editions of a particular release. Very cool!

CNN.com - Producer who broke into ‘CSI: NY’ fired - Nov 15, 2004

CBS News has fired the producer responsible for breaking into “CSI: NY” last week for a special report on Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s death, a CBS executive said Monday, speaking on condition of anonymity.

A monkey that knows kung-fu (mpg video link)

I’m a big tech geek and have gone through dozens of home entertainment configurations, the one item that’s remained consistent through the years is my remote - the MX-500. This thing is the bomb - Supports both head-to-head IR learning and code-based learning, Macros, 10 device channels with multiple pages each, sturdy as hell (I’ve had the same remote for 3 years and it still works great - no flaky buttons), goes for months on a set of AA’s, backlit, great button layout for TiVo. I can’t say enough about this baby. The best part is, right now, it’s super cheap at Amazon - $69 brand new, shipped!

Bikes (Motorcycles) in the Fast Lane - A Motorcycle News Blog

Called “Booster Bike”, this rollercoaster is based on “sitting on a motorcycle” for 600 meters, taking three camelbacks, one horseshoe, a horizontal loop and then a high speed curve.

vkn An excellent animation composed of graffiti.

How to never miss an episode with BitTorrent and RSS

In this post you will learn how you can never miss an episode of your favorite shows ever again. This will be accomplished through the magic of BitTorrent and RSS.

I’m bad at watching TV. I always miss my favorite shows like The West Wing and Enterprise. I can never remember when they’re on and when I do, they’re already three-quarters through. My solution thus far has been to go to Suprnova and download the torrent. This, of course, requires that I remember that to do that, and then I have to wait three hours. Wouldn’t it be better if the morning after the show aired a high quality copy of the show sat sitting on my hard drive waiting for me to watch it? The answer is yes, yes it would.

The are many solutions to this problem, but this is how I do it. Basically what’s happening is that the BT client checks an RSS feed for torrents that match certain criteria. When it detects those criteria, it begins to download the torrent. The result is something like TiVo, but free.

The how-to:

1. You will need to use Azureus. It’s a pretty good BT client and I’d recommend using it anyway. It is a Java application and works on most platforms.
2. You will also need the RSS Import plugin for Azureus. Installing it is a matter of dragging the unzipped folder into the plugins folder in your Azureus directory and restarting Azureus.
3. In Azureus, go into the preferences and expand the plugins tab. Choose RSS Importer.
4. Check the Activate RSS Importer Plugin box.
5. Enter http://www.tvtorrents.net/rss.php as the RSS Channel to import. You can also enter http://www.btefnet.com/backend.php, each some shows that the other doesn’t. The BT-EFNet one, for instance, has The Daily Show. Chacun a son go�t.
6. In the next text box, Filter …, enter a regular expression that matches the name of torrent of the the show you want to download. A quick guide to the kinds of regular expressions that are expected here is provided on the RSS Import page. For The West Wing, for example, I put in west.wing.hdtv — which means download any file that include the letters west, followed by any single character, followed by the letters wing, followed by any number of characters, followed by the letters hdtv, to make sure I get the HDTV version and not the VCD version. For multiple shows, separate them with a semi-colon, so west.wing.hdtv;enterprise.*hdtv would download The West Wing and Enterprise.
7. Under Recheck channels… I would recommend putting in 60, so as not to bombard the TV Torrents server with more requests than necessary.
8. And you’re set. Don’t worry about the other options. Now you just have to wait for the next episode to air. You should have it in your downloads folder the next day.

And now you never have to worry about re-runs again. I grabbed this from the Google cache as pealco.net’s bandwidth has been exceeded.

Releasing RadioPod from Ben Hammersley’s Dangerous Precedent

I’ve cobbled together a server app, RadioPod, to record streaming radio stations, convert them to MP3s, and then provide an RSS 2.0 feed for a PodCasting application to download and then throw into iTunes ready for my iPod. I%u2019m using it for The Today Programme off BBC Radio 4 every morning. It’s jolly nice to walk the dogs and listen to James Naughtie.

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Virtual Bartender WAY better than the BK Subservient Chicken!

edit: I’ve been told nobody knows what the BK Subservient Chicken is.. Check it out first

Another Clown
Originally uploaded by StickyC.

Brushed iPod Turn those scratches of evil into scratches of gold with a little eblow grease.

Sysinternals Freeware - Utilities for Windows NT and Windows 2000 - FileMon

FileMon monitors and displays file system activity on a system in real-time.

MikeyP.com Long time friend and Big Man On Campus for EA’s The Sims, MikeyP has finally started updating his web page again. In standard tradition, he’s already blogged his favorite booze recipe.

Cantar Cantar-x’s new mobile digital audio recording station sure looks wicked. Enough buttons, dials, and sliders to keep your average geek happy for hours, even if they could care less about doing field recording. If it had blue LED’s, it’d cause spontaneous geek combustion all over the planet.