I stumbled across another great index of RSS readers. Mostly all the same clients listed, but variety being the spice of life and whatnot, I figured folks might be interested in checking it out.

As I’ve mentioned a number of times, I’ve been on a sci-fi/fantasy kick for like a year and a half now. The annual Hugo awards are about to take place and in their honor Locus has posted a recommended reading list for books published this year. I’ve read quite a few on the list and thought some of you might find it interesting. China Miéville rocks most but several others are more than worthy of your reading consideration. check it out.

For those of you who remember huddling around a table in Scott’s basement or Pat Leighton’s attic or Mike Lord’s living room or my dining room, imagine if we had had this baby to huddle around instead! Gaming nirvana!

It cracks me up that these guys built it. On the one hand I admire their ingenuity, and on the other I wonder if they aren’t obsessing just a wee bit.

So anyway, now I am daydreaming building one with improvements, like monitors and a keyboard at each workstation so you can stream multimedia and messages to the players privately without resorting to the ‘billiard table’ approach these guys are using. What do you think andrew, can you score a half dozen LCD’s from dead machines?

(I’m kidding of course, though if I had folks to actually game with, maybe I wouldn’t be).

So I’m still obsessing on RSS aggregators, I am completely hooked on them. sourceforge started to provide software project feeds recently and they alone are worth the price of entry. Just today I found portabase, a free superhandy flat file database that runs on windows, linux and my new PDA (pics to come soon).

Anyway I promised I would say more on the subject. I can’t stress enough how handy these aggregators are. To try and help you folks get started, I found a great list of most all of the available software, most of them free. Check it out. If you’re on windows, Newsdesk is a good first choice to check it out with. On a mac, netnewswire absolutely rocks. Oh, and don’t forget that you can subscribe to daves-place too, using this url (plug it into your RSS client):

http://daves-place.dyndns.org/weblog/index.xml

Check out the aggregators - I promise you, if you give them a try you will change the way you use the web.

Just a warning - it’s possible daves-place will again go down for a period of time, possibly starting this weekend. Redhat pushed an update down to me that broke significant parts of the KDE gui that I use, so I get all kinds of application crashing going on in the gui. This sucks. It’s not a huge deal and basically has no performance impact on the server side of daves-place, which is its primary purpose, but I do use KDE occasionally and I need to get it running again. One of three things is going to happen: either I am going to bump immediately to kde 3.11 (just released), I am going to jump to redhat 8.0 (I’m currently running a heavily patched 7.3) or I am going to wait till Redhat 9 is in stable form in a month or so. It all depends on how impatient I get with my crippled GUI combined with how much time I can get out of the Topcat for assistance (he owes me some sysadmin time, we use the bartering system).

I’ll prolly post a warning right before I break everything, but just wanted to give the heads up.

Sorry for the outage. I pulled a boneheaded move and then compounded it by trying to do some networking stuff that had unintended consequences. This left daves-place down for two days, doh!

For the technically inclined, it’s actually pretty amusing. I was trying to get a second NIC going in the box remotely, played around with the networking scripts, set them as I thought was appropriate, and rebooted the box. Guess what CD I had left sitting in the machine? The Redhat 8 install CD, so the machine booted up to the installer. doh!. So I get home, discover this, pull the cd and reboot. Meanwhile though, it turns out that there is some issue prolly related to system interrupts that is causing the two NICs in the box to conflict with each other, from the OS’s perspective it thinks it is talking to one NIC when in fact the other is responding. The result of this was everything looked fine to me on my LAN, but actually the box was not responding to the outside world. Translation - no daves-place.

Anyway long story short last night I got home and shut down the second NIC so it stops grabbing an IP and the problem is temporarily solved. Now I need to dig into either routing tables or IRQ settings, not sure which yet, to solve the problem in the long run.

or whatever that thing was called (Cue Cat)? This was the device that was being given away free by everyone and his uncle, notably wired magazine and Radioshack, several years ago. It plugged into your USB port or your PS2 port, depending on which model you had, looked vaguely like a mouse laid flat out (the furry kind, not the computer kind), and let you scan bar codes into your computer. The idea behind it was everyone would start printing bar codes on everything, in ads, on your jeans, on the beans in your soup, whatever, and you could scan them with your cue cat and get useful information. Of course, of the number of problems with this concept, the chief one was, no one wanted even more marketing messages bombarding them, which was the agenda behind the device. The company died a well-deserved death, yay!

But…it turns out these cue cats can be useful on other contexts. Small mom and pop retailers, used to spending money on bar code readers, discovered that with the appropriate software, quickly kicked out by hackers, they could use them as free barcode readers, which had all kinds of uses for businesses. So a device that was for a brief period of time as common as an AOL disk disappeared. You can still buy them on ebay, but they’re a little pricey for a device that was free (about $8-9 before shipping).

Here’s where you come in. Do you have one? I have need of about 4-5 of them. It turns out they can also be turned into a recharge/source of power device for PDA’s, with a connector from Radio Shack and a little soldering. I am especially wanting USB models since I have tracked down a PS2 model already and the USB models can be used on my mac. So. If you send me your cue cat, I will paypal you $5 plus the shipping. Pretty simple deal, I save $5 or so, and you get a little lucre for that pos mouse thingy wired magazine sent you a few years ago. Or if you’re generous, you could just give it to me. Either way, I covet them. First 5 cue cat holders to apply get the cash. Speak up!

It turns out that Body Mass Index is a great general indicator of physical health and likely lifespan. Do you know what your BMI is? If not, check out a BMI calculator. You’re looking to have a number below 25 and if you really want to live to be an old foggie you want a 22 or lower. I’m at 22.7 so I have a little way to go yet
Actually I’ve been gaining weight lately, moving from 160 to 165 or so, which is sort of bumming me out. More exercise to come as a result. Thankfully the warm weather just rolled in with the dawn this morning, I’m hopping on my bike when I get home and going for a long ride.

Now this is cool. I’ve been reading Manage for at least 8-9 years now, but only on a casual basis. This is partly because it’s somewhat inaccesible - you can only reliably get the translated editions as trade paperbacks which are released years after the original editions are published in Japan, and I’ve had trouble identifying series that I enjoy. For every Adolf: A Tale of the Twentieth Century I pick up, it seems like I buy 5 Battle Angel Alitas, which has for the most part kept me from buying a lot of it. I’ve also found that I don’t enjoy the manga “canon” as much as the critics would expect me to: Things like Akira really didn’t do all that much for me.

Anyway I’m rambling. My point today is that a new magazine is out, Shonen Jump, which collects manga and runs them as series. It’s sort of like an asian flavored Vertigo Presents, or a PG-rated ‘Heavy Metal.” The comics seem to be skewed towards the younger reader, but still I am loving it, finally I can get my hands on large volumes of manga inexpensively and scope it out, rather than dropping $20 on a trade paperback that may or may not completely suck. It’s well worth checking out, a 300+ page issue sells for about $5 and will keep you in bathroom reading for at least a week. I plan to subscribe, plus I am trying to track down the initial issues on ebay (there have only been 4 issues so far).

Click this link just as fast as your mouse can get there. Spybot cleans out malicious cookies and spyware you’ve been accumulating on your computer probably without even knowing it. Be aware however that you need to pay close attention when running it - it’s possible to incapacitate software you rely on if you don’t read the instructions when running it - (Mike, this means you!).

A brief explanation in case you’re not familiar with the concept - advertisers dump little ‘cookies’ on your computer as you browse the web. These cookies are used to track what sites you visit and ads you click on, and they build up a profile of your usage. Spyware is also installed by various software packages like Kazaa when you install it, and the spyware reports back to the developer about how you use their software. In both cases, you don’t want this - if you can’t infer why from the description of what it’s doing, then just take my word for it

Spyware blockers have become as important as virus checkers imho, and this one is the new king of the hill, displacing my old favorite ad-aware.

I beat Unreal II this weekend. It’s funny, I played the game almost non-stop the weekend that I got it, got pretty far along into it, then stopped playing as other games distracted me. This weekend I fired it up and finished the game in like 10 minutes. I had no idea I was that close to finishing it, though I did know I was near the end.

All in all the game is a big letdown. I solved the first unreal and while it was something of a mixed bag, all in all it was a solid FPS in solo play. Unreal II is way too short, suffers from stupid-plot-itis, and a lack of compelling mechanics. The game is absolutely beautiful to look at. This is it’s most compelling feature, along with a couple of cool missions (most notably the ‘defend the ship while I fix some stuff’ mission in the mountains, but the poor quality of the enemy AI detracts from the enjoyment. Additionally, the game is a complete system hog, it’s the first game to really make me feel like I need to upgrade.

Overall I would give the game a C+. It’s gorgeous to look at and has a few cool missions, but it’s a system hog, it’s over before you know it, and they stripped out the multiplayer so as not to compete with UT2k3. If you find it for $20 it would be a maybe - at full price, skip it.

I think I’ve mentioned my sister’s website here before. Recently she added the pootycam, which is a perfectly pointless way to waste a few minutes of your day. Ever dreamed of watching a slacker dalmation while away her day snoozing and licking her various orifices? Now’s your chance, click the link!

I really need to work on getting the davecavecam going, I actually bought the camera for it ages ago but never got around to getting it up and running. The topcat owes me some system install work so maybe I will hassle him into getting the webcam going for me this month.

Here’s a handy collection of bookmarklets you can use in your browser. Bookmarklets are little snippets of code that can perform all sorts of useful functions for you, like looking up a phrase in google or translating text from one language to another. To use them just bookmark them, then when you are on a page where you need to perform one of the functions, just use your bookmark. Ta da! Very handy stuff.

Scientists take first steps towards extending the brain with silicon. This is seriously cool shit, and I am not exagerating - assuming this approach works, actual immortality is ours within our lifetime. I’ve been reading about this since the early 80’s, it’s completely awesome to see it take its first steps towards practical reality.

Of course it’s not really immortality in the way we might think of it, but if you were able to communicate with a perfect copy of me every day, even though I was 6 feet under, would you still think I was alive? I might not, but you definitely would. It reminds me of ancestor worship in asian cultures in a way; instead of revering the dead, you can actually sidle up to the family shrine and ask their advice.

Count on me backing up my head the moment this tech becomes commercially available. In fact you can start the bidding now on your own personal copy of me!

Well, in about 10 minutes my workgroup at the college is sitting down with the college’s President to discuss our future here at the college. Wish me luck, hopefully my status will be settled at the conclusion of the meeting, one way or another, and I can stop worrying about what’s going to happen.

Most of you know I have been increasingly disatisfied macs the last couple of years, so much so that I was about to sell off my last mac. It’s not OS X so much, in fact there are aspects of it I love, it’s mostly an issue of them being so goddamned slow, I mean ridiculously slow compared to pc’s. Mac bigots seem to just turn a blind eye on this subject, but I run both platforms and macs just suck speedwise, especially web browsing which is like 94% of my waking life (and yes, safari helps loads but it’s still no contest). Anyway I was about to ditch the laptop and enter a pc only world, but Kevin and I struck a deal and I’m getting his old mac desktop. Pretty much the only reason I decided to do this is because of Net Newswire. This program is changing how I surf the web radically and greatly increasing the amount of info I can absorb in the same amount of time. I absolutely love it. It’s a class of application known as an RSS aggregator, it allows you to pull together article headings from tons of websites (including this one) into an outline view that’s extremely easy to parse through.

There are RSS aggregators for the PC as well, but none nearly as elegant as Net Newswire. I’ll do a writeup of some alternatives this weekend, but if you’re on a mac box, by all means go grab it and take it for a spin, it’s superb.

(oh and the new mac will also be running snipsnap and another webserver at home, I want a playground for python and some other tools, so I guess net newswire wasn’t the only reason I wanted the mac desktop, it was just the main reason).

Ever wonder what your feedback rating on ebay is worth? A kennedy business school professor did and researched it. His conclusion:

Zeckhauser’s research has determined that a person’s good reputation is not only valuable, but it’s worth about 7.6 percent in a retail transaction.

You can read the full text of the article if you want, though the above pretty well sums it up
Glad to see that my fastidious behavior on ebay is likely paying off though, I really do try extremely hard to maintain my rating. Unfortunately this sometimes extends into behavior I wish I didn’t have to rely on, like not leaving negative feedback on a transaction that I wasn’t happy with for fear that the other party will leave negative feedback on me.

It also suggests to me that this whole notion of ‘persistent karma’ has some real legs. Imagine a world where everything you did online (and ultimately in real life) contributed to your karma profile. Blast a flame mail on an email list, get a bunch of negative karma. Help out some shmoe who can’t get his network routed correctly, get some positive karma. Curse out an old lady in traffic and cut her off, negative karma for you! Then when you go to do business with someone (say you’re hiring a plumber) you can check out their karma profile. This is the slashdot model writ large, and I am vastly oversimplifying, but you probably get the idea.. I’m not the first one to imagine it - Cory Doctorow over at boingboing even wrote a novel that covers the concept that you can download for free, check his website if you’re curious, and buy his novel if you think it’s cool. But more importantly t(to me anyway) - kick the idea of persistent karma around in your head too - what do you think? Good idea? Or horrific orwellian lack o’ privacy future? I’m fascinated by the whole notion and will be writing more of it here over the next couple of months.

I think I’ve actually blogged this site at least once before, but it has been so long that I had actually forgotten about it until someone pointed it out to me this afternoon:

American Science and Surplus

Has all kinds of stuff, from the practical (lazy susan bearings to make your own tv stand) to the unique (a bag full of high quality plastic lenses used originally in disposable cameras) to the bizarre (a robot shaped vaguely like an alligator that can climb walls using suction cups on its feet), the site is well worth a browse whether you’re looking for something or just looking to procrastinate

This morning sucked. It was warm and rainy on Sunday so I got up blisfully unaware that the temperature had dropped by at least 40 degrees. I walked outside in a light coat and leather gloves, coffee in hand, and was like ‘damn! cold!’ Then I discovered my door was frozen shut, spent 10 minutes trying to prise it open to no avail, ran back inside to get tools thinking ‘damn it’s really cold out! I ended up spending 20 minutes working at the door with a claw hammer and a screwdriver, meanwhile my hands froze into claws. I didn’t damage the car, amazingly, and it did start.

Why don’t I have de-icer you ask? I do. It was trapped in the backseat of the car ;-( I don’t think it would have helped though, the ice that was causing the door to stick was down in the weather stripping.

Ok you impatient bastids, I spent my entire saturday slaving over the pictures of my trip to Belize. You can stop pestering me about it, they’re up and you can scope em out. Head on over to the gallery section from the links at the top or bottom of the page.