…and forgets to take a real camera
I keep forgetting to blog this. My brother had a chance to go to Hawaii and he took his new camera phone with him, then filled his weblog with action shots of his adventures in Hawaii. You’ll probably need to scroll through his archives a bit to get to the photos since he’s posted quite a few since then.

It’s interesting the tradeoffs between spontaneity and image fidelity - most of the pics he posted shade way too far into the purple/blue end of the spectrum, leaving me wishing he had brought a real camera, but on the other hand if he had, he wouldn’t have been able to post them as they happened.

Anyway, worth a gander, especially if, like me, you’ve never been to Hawaii.

Here’s a clever idea - establish a wiki as the authoritative source of information about people, and allow the people themselves to self edit the content. Check it out over at Biojack.com. I’m not in there yet, nor is the famous photographer who shares my name. What amuses me is imagining the battles that will spring up around famous folks who are controversial, like, say, George Bush. Get bickering folks! Or at least, get yourself in there.

I’ve mentioned this before - Verizon is aggressively rolling out Fiber To The Premises (fttp) - this is true asynchronous broadband to our homes folks, imagine connectivity several orders of magnitude faster than that so-called ’speedy’ cable modem on your desk now, but for the same price. Anyway I’m mentioning it today because verizon has announced that they’re expanding their rollout to six more states, including mine (NY). My bet is I am still at least a couple of years away from seeing this available to me, but it’s progress. I’m excited about this in the same way I anxiously anticipated cable modems 8-10 years ago- it’s going to enable another round of innovation just as the cable modems did.

(and it has the fringe benefit of kicking time warner in the ass - longtime readers know how angry I’ve been about the limited upstream capacity of their network. If the cable company can’t figure out this isn’t a broadcast medium, fine. We’ll let the telcos make the point. It can’t happen soon enough for me).

I’ve talked about and linked to folks talking about how to route around the existing tv networks. It’s already happening right now of course, just take a look at suprnova.org a few hours after your favorite tv show has aired and you’ll find it there for the downloading, usually edited such that the commercials and filler material are gone. The problem is it needs to be automatic - this needs to happen as seamlessly as your existing tivo setup works for this to really take off. I love peering into the crannies of the software development community to see what kinds of things the developers are cooking up. Here’s today’s excellent example - Buttress. There are a number of apps attempting to do the relatively simple thing buttress is doing - subscribe to an RSS feed, whenever that feed links to a torrent file, Buttress grabs it and ques it up in your Bit torrent client. You come home and find your favorite content ready and waiting for you.

Cool, cool stuff. A little rough around the edges, but some digging on your part and you’ve got yourself the perfect personalized tv network. Give these concepts another 6 months to a year to evolve and we will start to hear the networks squealing and the congress legislating to stop this.

This is Java-based so it should run on any platform with the appropriate JVM installed. I leave it to you all to find the appropriate RSS feeds

Check out the following paragraph:

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey

Neat huh? Assuming it worked for you the same way it worked for me, ie I was able to read that paragraph about as quickly as I could have normally. Bad spellers untie, it’s apparantly irrelevant

A little known fact to most of the folks who wander by here - for the past several years Toys R Us has run a ‘buy 2, get 1 free’ special on console videogames during the holiday season. This year it begins this Sunday, the 24th. If you’re looking to buy a few games as gifts, you can save yourself $50 by doing your shopping early and getting them at Toys R Us sometime during the next week.

Siblings considering this deal should be aware that the new Grand Theft Auto game or Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne for the PS2 are both excellent choices for me, or Paper Mario for the Gamecube.

Think of a discussion board, then cross it with that corkboard in the hall outside the administrative offices in your high school, and imagine what a programmer might do with it. Then check out webnote. Does it look anything like what you were imagining? Be sure to try the filtering feature. This is cool cool stuff. I’m going to try and get this up and running on my server once the code has evolved a bit, it’s still under very active development. Note that you can jump to the root address (www.aypwip.org/webnote) to make your own ‘corkboard’ and read about the codebase and the developer’s plans for it.

This requires a modern browser, Firefox, IE 6 or Safari, just fyi.

here’s a cool little piece of…welll….I’ll call it a kinetic sculpture. Type in a word, watch it rendered out, then play with the bouncy string of letters. Somewhat similar to touchgraph, which I’ve mentioned a few times in the past, just in terms of aesthetics.

Nasa has released an amazing 3d terrain browser for windows. If you’re on a windows box with a reasonably capable 3d card, you simply must check this out. They use sattelite imagery to give you a photorealistic environment to navigate around in. Ever wondered what the volcanoes of Hawaii look like up close? Go check it out. Bottom of the grand canyon? It’s yours to fly through. This is amazingly cool technology. I immediately recalled twistory and tried to imagine what it would look like if it used an interface like this. When I run across headlines about the use of GIS data in education this is the kind of stuff I imagine, not the rather more dry (I know, I know, equally valuable….it’s still dry) kinds of uses it’s being put to today.

I’ve touched on this subject before, but I want to bring it up again today - google has just stealth launched their new Google Print service. No doubt you’ve been to amazon.com and noticed how they publish exerpts of many books on the book’s product page. This is an extension of that notion - Google’s intent is to make the full text of books searchable. I know this is going to sound like hyperbole, but if Google manages to succeed in convincing publishers that this is a good thing, it’s medium term effect on our civilization will be as profound as Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press. It’s all about the knowledge transmission folks, doing it in the most expeditious way possible, and this is a major step in the right direction.

Once again, my plea - make your government representatives aware that these kinds of advances are good things, that locking away content behind copyright is a bad thing - it’s impeding progress in the evolution of the information age.

Meanwhile, go read the text of the talk Brewster Kahle gave at the recent Web 2.0 conference and if that doesn’t convince you…..I give up

Many folks probably remember the proliferation of free online file storage services during the dot com boom - places similar to the still running xdrive. Most of them died off as the funding evaporated, and the ones that didn’t have mostly transitioned to paid services. Some clever folks have figured out how to use your gmail account as free online file storage. This can be extremely handy if you don’t have a thumb drive or some other way to carry files you always need from machine to machine. You’ll need to install the client software to get this running. Note that it’s windows and IE (Ugh!) only.

I have a large thumb drive to deal with this problem but for those of you who don’t this is well worth a look. No doubt some enterprising mac hacker will build a mac analog to this (or already has, if so post in the comments and I’ll link over to it).

Check out Mark Pesce’s take on the future of tv. I happen to agree with his basic premise (broadband and the ease of distribution it brings will obviate the need for broadcast ‘networks’ - we’re all entering into an age when we can be broadcasters), and I’ve touched on some of the same points here in regards to music. I’m a little more skeptical that we’ll actually survive the big company’s court challenges to our rights to own and repurpose the content we acquire though. Still this is great reading, check it out.

My lease runs through May. I’m already beginning to watch the real estate market here in Saratoga Springs. My plan is to buy a house in the very early spring. I have a number of options - I can buy right in Saratoga Springs and walk to work, but I’ll be in a very crappy house in a very suburban ‘jammed up against the neighbors’ setting. I could live with this - the ability to walk to work and to dinner in town is really compelling, I was very envious of my peers at Bowdoin who could do this. I could also buy in the surrounding region and, as with Bowdoin, commute for 20 minutes or so to work. This could possibly get me a waterfront home on the Hudson, but it would put me far away from the conveniences like shopping and dining, and while I lived with a 20 minute commute for at least 7-8 years (4+ heading north to Bowdoin and 3-4 heading south to Portland), I would love to be rid of it. Or there’s one other option - I could build my own house after buying some land in Saratoga Springs or right near it. If I chose this latter route I could choose to do something really interesting and build a really unique home, say something like this (that site is great btw, they post all kinds of interesting and novel stuff). I’d definitely go for the double unit if I went with that model.

I’ve ordered the book I linked to, and over the next couple of months I’ll need to decide how I want to do this. The wrinkle with buying the land is that I probably can’t get that done and the house built by May when my lease runs out. My landlords are pretty cool and might let me stay a bit longer if I need to but I’d rather not have to go through that if I can avoid it.

So. More as things develop. I have to say right now I’m leaning towards the $150k house inside the city limits, with the walk to work, and use it as an investment, it’s bound to increase in value and I can move in a few years into a house I build, or onto the water up north somewhere.

As I mentioned earlier this week, I’m honoring the Independent Games Festival by talking about a bunch of excellent free and or open source games. Another example is one one I’ve linked to in the past namely The Battle for Wesnoth. This is an excellent turn-based strategy game. The game has continued to evolve at a rapid pace since I first linked to it in February of this year - it’s much refined and the included campaign is vaslty superior. If you like games like Heroes of Might and Magic or Warlords I can basically guarantee you’ll like Wesnoth. Check it out, it’s well worth a look.

SimCity was the rarest of games - it transcended the traditional gaming audience and broke out into the mass market, garnering coverage and accolades in the mainstream media and ending up on the computers of many folks who wouldn’t normally play games. Other titles have broken through in this manner - The Sims and Myst serve as prime examples. What’s unfortunate is that few folks outside of hardcore gamers have heard of Transport Tycoon. It was published a few years after Simcity and was clearly inspired by the sort of open ended ‘electronic tinker toy’ gameplay of SimCity. In Transport Tycoon, your focus is on constructing the transportation networks that connect cities. As you build up your transportation network the cities you’re connected to evolve and grow, and competitors emerge.

Despite not breaking out into the mainstream, Transport Tycoon developed a hardcore fanbase that exists to this day, and some of these folks have banded together to produce an enhanced open source port of the original game that runs on all the major operating systems.

It’s a little convoluted to get up and running since the installation requires a copy of the original Transport Tycoon Deluxe. Fortunately that title is long out of print, and so you can download a copy of it from the Home of the Underdogs. If this troubles you, you can also acquire a copy for under $5 on ebay. Either way, you need it simply for the graphic files - openttd uses the original game graphics.

I’d recommend this game to anyone - the port is really impressive, adding features, enhancing some of the original systems, and basically bringing the game into the modern age. Plus they have an extensive set of enhancements they’ve been adding as time passes. Check it out, it’s well worth it. And if anyone feels like taking me on in multiplayer, I’m game.

I have this minor fetish for maps. Several of them are hung as posters in my cottage, and I’ve gotten quite a few somewhat rare maps as gifts over the years. I was pleasantly surprised to stumble across map24.com, which has a fantastic mapping engine. While it seems a little less accurate than mapblast, the dynamic nature of the maps more than makes up for it, and it’s much faster at showing you adjacent regions of the area you’re looking at compared to other systems, plus it has the unique ability for you to plot your route directly on the maps. This last is the best feature - you can generate precise mileage estimates for everything from cross-state trips to your local jogging route.

Even if none of the above interests you, I’d still encourage even the casual browser to check out the site at least once. Among other things it’s a great example of a rich web app with a fantastic interface - the shape, one hopes, of things to come.

I should also note - you need Java on your system and functioning within your browser, and if the maps don’t appear to be dynamic to you, make sure to click on the ‘interactive’ link at the top if the interface.

This one’s for Andrew, but anyone who grew up watching the Transformers will probably enjoy this obsessively researched timeline of the Transformers. A pop-culture history lesson in 15 minutes - who can resist? Note that this is an angelfire.com link, so engage your popup blocker at its highest setting if you’re going to cick on the link.

If you’re a fan of collectible card games, or card games in general, or Magic the Gathering specifically, check out mtgplay.com. How these folks are able to offer this when there’s a commercial online service that enables Magic the Gathering play I don’t know, it seems to be clearly in violation of copyright for the card art scans at least, but draw your own conclusions (and cards). Win32 only I’m sorry to say, though it would probably run ok under emulation on a mac.

I needed to order a few things at Amazon.com this weekend and when I was checking out, I noticed I was getting a small discount on my order. It turns out if you use the new A9.com search engine, you’ll automatically get a discount on your Amazon.com orders. My order was around $60 and I saved a little over $1. This undoubtably uses cookies so you’ll need to have cookies enabled in your browser for this to work, and you’ll probably need to first log into your amazon.com account (to set the token for your identity) then go use A9 to search for something. While that sounds cumbersome it’s a relatively painless way to save a little money. And the search engine’s not bad, especially if you’re looking for images.