For a couple of hours worth of work, would you do it? There was a time when I would without a second’s hesitation. Now I’m ambivalent. In this case the money to be made is again off of ebay. Toys R Us is having a buy one get one free deal. Two of the games sell for $35-40 on ebay, so for $50 I can get games which have a resale value of $70-80. All I have to do is list them on ebay and the money is mine. Will I bother doing it? You decide

Here’s an alternative view, and it’s not what you think. De-regulation and the axis of weasels are to blame, not the $50 billion to repair aged transmission system the president would have you think is at fault. More lining of greedy weasel’s pockets, or paranoid ‘the black helicopters are circling’ from the left? You decide. Me? I’d love the opportunity to go weasel hunting with a 12-guage.

What’s tragic is the same millions of brain dead idiots who bought the ‘we must stop the weapons of mass destruction’ in Iraq will buy the ‘we have to raise rates to the tune of 50 billion to cover the expense of transmission line upgrades’ and suck it up and pay still more for electricity while the axis of weasels line their pockets with the dividends this will pay for them. God I wish people weren’t so fucking stupid.

I still maintain that any fan of twitch arcade games owes it to themselves to get crimsonland installed on their machine. I can’t stop playing this game, the death of my machine has kept me away from it for about a week now and I’ve got a serious jones going for it. Meanwhile though I discovered another worthy challenger to the throne. Feed that twitch jones, support your local shareware authors today (the game’s great btw, better graphics than Crimsonland too….though on balance I would take Crimsonland over it, it’s still a superb little game).

This piece is a non-technical overview of OLED’s, which many think will displace LCD flat panel monitors. The first consumer device with one built in shipped from Kodak recently. Here’s hoping they don’t suffer from the price and latency problems that LCD’s have.

Ever read the cryptonomicon? You should, any science fiction/WWII history buff ought to. One of the premises of the book is that ultimately offshore ‘data havens’ will enable companies to hide transactions and communications from government and law enforcement, sort of in the way that financial transactions can be concealed in the Swiss banking system. A side effect of this could be that you could conduct ‘unauthorized’ data transactions on these networks without fear of repercussions from the authorities. I’ve become mostly convinced that ultimately these data havens will come into being - countries outside of the sphere of interest of ‘western’ capitalism will build data infrastructures because they have the potential to be hugely profitable. I’ve actually been mildly obsessed with this ever since I read Cryptonomicon.

What might these data havens look like? Well, they might for example look like this. Want to download first run hollywood movies? Perfect copies of music CD’s? Audiobooks? Fine, get busy. Several enterprising palistinians in the west bank are providing you with a supposedly anonymous way to go about ’stealing’ copyrighted materials to your heart’s content.

I was pleased as punch to discover this. I still remain convinced this is one of the shapes of things to come, it only makes sense. Why should billions of Indian or Chinese or african citizens follow US copyright law? It’s in their financial interest not to, and maybe from them will spring a more rational method of compensation for artists.

In the end I dropped a little over $900 on the media box I recently built to serve as a ‘tivo on steroids’ in my home theater setup. I had started the process thinking I would be able to do it for $5-600 so by the end of it I was bumming about it. But after spending the last several weeks using it I’ve concluded it’s totally been worth it, just for the fact that I get to watch the Daily Show every night while I’m eating supper. I know that sounds foolish, but man, there is definitely something to be said for laughter. I finish supper in a great mood every night now. If you’ve never bothered with the Daily Show it’s definitely worth checking out. Meanwhile the media box has nothing but upside potential since I haven’t even gotten around to installing things like the emulators (M.A.M.E. - Robotron and Raidan on the big screen!), and my htpc. Great stuff, if you’ve been considering building a home media pc, all I can say is go for it, I’m really digging mine.

There’s been speculation recently that we’re nearing the end of moore’s law, which describes the exponential growth of computational power that we’ve seen over the past 30 or 40 years. There are a number of issues, chief among them being heat - the silicon wafers that CPU’s are created from are approaching the point where the density of transistors on them is generating heat close to their melting point. One approach to this is cooling - ever more sophisticated cooling systems to handle the heat burden, but as a practical matter it’s probably not feasible to get a liquid nitrogen cooling system installed in those p5 systems Dell would love to sell you in a few years.

As a result this is an area of intense research. What may surprise you is that the holy grail of semiconductor research, at least according to most folks, is diamonds. Diamonds can handle the most extreme heat. But of course they’re exorbitantly expensive, and I don’t think diamonds 1 foot or larger in diameter even exist, and that’s the size you would need to slice wafers from to build semiconductors on. So what’s a researcher to do? Make artificial diamonds of course! Industry has already been doing this for decades but not using technologies which are economical or capable of producing those 1 foot wafers you need to build general purpose semiconductors.

Until now. To most everyone’s surprise, not one but two companies appear to be close to solving this problem. Already one of them is beginning commercial shipments of artificial diamonds to the jewelry industry that are largely indistinguishable from mined diamonds, and their intent is to use the capital generated from these sales to fund semiconductor-class diamond production.

This is fascinating stuff. Mind you, none of this is likely to lead to a diamond-powered p5 sitting on your desk next year. But a diamond-powered p10 is now within the realm of the possible, wereas if you had asked scientists about this 6 months ago almost all of them would have said it’s basically science fiction. This is one of those huge huge scientific breakthroughs that basically flys under the radar. No one will notice this has happened and yet it is very likely to cause a fundamental shift in our underlying computing technologies over the next 20 years or so. Cool cool beans, and 2000 frames a second in Quake 5
If the subject interests you, wired magazine has a great in-depth piece on it.

How’s that for an obscure title. Score yourself some teflon tape for the feet of your mouse super cheap, as in under $5 shipped. This stuff helps make your mouse have as close to zero friction as you can get. Think this is all too silly for words? check out a review then. Oh, and compare prices - this stuff is precisely the same as the stuff dan is reviewing, with the exception that he paid a little more than twice as much for only a few inches of the stuff. Stocking stuffer this xmas? Spontaneous gift for that geek friend of yours? Whatever floats your boat, it’s super cheap.

Football season is starting in less than a month, whoohoo!. I’ve already caught a couple of preseason games, but tonight is the first worthy game - the Giants are back in town. Will the more experienced secondary live up to its hype? Can the offense sustain the roll they were on during the second half of last season? Can Tiki carry the running game again? Has Keith Hamilton recovered or is he done? The first chance to look at these and other issues comes tonight on ESPN, you know I’ll be glued to it
Longtime readers probably recall my annual football predictions, worth roughly the price of the paper they’re printed on (ie nothing). Still, I’ll get to them in a couple of weeks after I’ve had a chance to watch a good number of preseason games and digest all the roster changes the teams have gone through.

Ok so these aren’t as cool as the ones my brother put together a few weeks ago, but still, check out these excellent Aerial shots of Maine. For those of you who have tagged along on one of my favorite kayaking trips, check out the shots of Bailey’s Island, I’ve circumnavigated that island at least a half dozen times. The same site also has shots from numerous other New England locations. Link courtesy of the usually excellent metafilter

Making a test post to try out a new client.

Just testing a new desktop blogging client to see if I like it better than simply using the built-in movabletype inteface. I grabbed it because it can check spelling and because it should integrate seamlessly with FeedDemon, my new fave toy.