The gentleman at BrowPau: http://www.brownpau.com/ provides a different look for his blog everytime you reload it. Very elegant designs.

RFID & DCMA – Remove the label go to jail; the future is revealed.

Cheap Batteries — AA batteries for less than 10 cents each delivered.

CD-R — CD-R are very cheap, if you can have your children fill out the rebate paperwork.

Sales Circular — This certainly implies something about the news paper advertising industry; but I’m not sure what.

Cool Toy
— expensive though.

Radioactive Keyring Lights — their back!

Columbia’s Weather — disaster in the air.

Mount FTP Disks — Golly you can mount FTP sites as disks on Mac OS X. Sweet.

Mindful Potato

Olive Pit — something to do after the martini.

Sock Monkey! — the visual thinker is not to be trusted.

Safety!

Loons – There as a time in this great country of ours when crackpot really stood for something, maybe we can get back to our roots.

Stop Energy – If your going to engage in satirical charactatures of proffessionals then at least be sure you get the formating right. He could have had so much fun with the security implications section of the RFC. What a waste.

Inside Treo – This was a big help in letting me supress my overwhelming desire to take my Treo apart, but then I can’t find the jeweler’s screw driver either.

Winter weather – Stop freeloading on that oppressive goverment weather monopoly get custom free enterprise weather online now!

VoIP vendor – Some people seem to be confused about the quality signature of boadband IP, might as well sell them phone service. Ok for a second line of the kid though.

Winter tires – are starting to seem like a very attractive idea around here

Food insects – “let them eat cake” is so old fashion.

G4 Powerbook Battery Reset? – My powerbook batter stopped taking a charge. A new one is $150 +/- $40. Bought a used one on eBay for $60. It appears that battery failure of this kind is often a problem with resetting the chargering system’s model of the battery. Frustrating not to know if this old battery is really useless or not.

Warchalk your cell phone? – apparently in some parts of the world people stand around on the street and will sell you some time on their cellphone. Now if we just add standard way to indicate your willing to do this, say a hanky in your left jeans pocked [:-)], then all of us who carry cell phones could make a little money on the side.

RSS feeds: If you do query at day pop you can convert it to an RSS feed by adding “&o=rss” to the tail end of the URL and then stuff it into your RSS news feed aggregator.

There must be a trivial way to convert search engine queries into RSS feeds…

BBC Audio: Now has all the programs of the last week available on line! I really like “Book at Bedtime”, and this is just as delightful: This American Life keeps all their stuff online.

Fraud: Having trouble getting a handle on corp. scandals? I doubt this will help.
thanks kimbo

Pop?: v.s. Soda (requires java).

Things to worry about: asteroids! “… early warning satellites detected an explosion in the Earth’s atmosphere June 6, at the height of the tension [India/Pakistan] with an energy release estimated to be 12 kilotons. Fortunately the detonation, equivalent to the blast that destroyed Hiroshima, occurred over the Mediterranean Sea. … In 1996, our satellite sensors detected a burst over Greenland equal to a 100-kiloton yield.”

9/11: Blueman group, the tragedy. Be sure to look at the scraps after the flash animation.

Keychain: lock your keychain or screen from the menubar on OS X 10.2

Gimp-Print!: Oh happy day, this suite of print drivers from the open source community allows my Mac, running OS X 10.2, to print on the nice Epson printer that I just happen to have lying around already. Meanwhile the vendor has been working on drivers for this thing for a few years. Once again developers with a personal need for a solution outrun developers being paid by disinterested product marketing people.

Kits!: Beautiful hobby kits for kites, boats, planes.

Catalogs: The catalog search tool at Google is amazing. Try something really obscure!

Market Making: Emerging marketplaces and how the rules that govern them come to pass is one of my interests. This is an essay by an early seller in the marketplace established by Google for buying awnsers to your questions.

Fax Away has a very civilized pricing model. They will send your fax for you, anyplace in the world, for reasonable costs/minute. They charge only for what you send. They use a prepaid model; you put ten dollars in to your account and then to send a fax in the US is 11 cents a minute. You email them the document you want faxed. Works perfectly for me. Meanwhile eFax.com will give you a free incomming fax number. Update: they now have a dollar a month account maintainance charge – so they aren’t useful for my very rare fax needs. It looks like InterFax now does what Fax Away used to do; but I haven’t tried them – I walked down to the copy shop and spent a dollar a page instead.

Some more random links from my browser history…

Dialup Internet: Wasted a little time looking for an dialup internet service to use when on the road. The Freedom List appears to be the place to do that shopping. You can get unlimited dialup nationwide for 6-16$ a month from dozens of vendors (so called ISP – or Internet Service Providers). The costs of an ISP break down into four parts: customer service, his computers (and thinks like storing mail and setting up the mailin handing), and then his access to the internet backbone packet routing, and his access to one or more of the or more of the local dial-in phone networks. Most of this costs are in these last two, I suspect. Those long lists of local telephone numbers your call are maintained by the dialup network providers. There are a handfull of these UUNet, QWest, Telia, etc. This ISP is one of the few that expose that the cost of the different dialup providers. Generally the ISPs also provide few really minor (i.e. cheap and easy to do) services. Mail handling is one example. Customer support is not cheap – so when you read reviews you can see that mostly that’s quite spotty.

Credit Card: I got a new credit card recently. I got it from these guys Farm Bureau Bank; they have been very pleasent to deal with on the phone – unlike the large card company I have been using who was always sending me thru vast phone mazes and trying to sell me junk while generally being clueless. The real reason I picked them was I get 2% [not any more, it’s now 1%] back on all my purchases, in cash, if I play their points game right. I found them using the Credit Card Goodies site which is mostly a place where people who like to shop for credit card deals hang out. It includes nice java applet that plots the advantages of various reward programs for you. Credit cards are a money substitute. Stores trust currency because it’s backed by the goverment. Stores trust credit cards because the credit cards twist their arms – “you will always take this, otherwise you will lose sales” – the store gets the benefit that people can buy stuff more casually. For that benefit they lose some money. So when you pay a $100 on card the store only gets 95$. How much they get depends on their deal/relationship with their bank/credit-card processor. The credit card companies (Visa, MasterCard, AMex, Discover, etc) are bridges between buyers and sellers. Another kind of standard that creates efficencies in the supply chain; but in this case it’s an owned standard and taxes are collected by the owners. My 2% cashback on the new card is the card issuing company bribing me to bring my credit card cash flow of this bridge thru their company. Some portions of the traffic flow across this credit card bridge are so concentrated that the Goverment thinks there are anti-trust issues (you can read court documents about that).

Safe Car?: There are various ways that members of an industry “conspire” to set standards to improve overall efficency. The auto insurance industry collects statistics about car safety, theft, etc. that they use to set insurance rates. It used to be this info was hard to get your hands on, but now much of it is on their web site. The frightening/facinating stuff there are the videos of crash testing. The real meat – what they use for setting insurance rates is the detailed data found here.

Amazing realtime data showing the flow of water in rivers and streams all over the country.

Malcom Gladwell’s web site has his very delightful articles for the New Yorker. In his latest article you can learn how some people can read people’s emotions from their faces. The article just prior to that is a light but unsurprising look at “The myth of talent.”

John Siracusa has done a heroic job in his series of articles on Mac OS X;
you can reach the entire set by starting from his latest
review of the Jaguar release. These are arstechnica a very high quality zine of about high technology, all their articles are worth reading. [You can subscribe using to their announcements bboard via this URL: http://arstechnica.com/etc/rdf/ars.rdf].

I’m surprised I’d not previously come across Bennett Carter’s political cartoons. He won this year’s Pulitzer prize. I particularly like his cartoons that illuminate the reframing at the heart of much PR.

I think this business, creating a diamond from the carbon in a corpse, is morbid.

I bought long distance service for my parents using this site, which shows the real price per minute and includes a number of services with no monthly ‘membership charge’. My house hold pays about 7$/month for long distance.

Mapquest maps are better than Yahoo’s.