Hello Rewind has to be one of the coolest ideas I've seen¹ in a while... they take a t-shirt (your t-shirt) and use it as the outside of a laptop sleeve. they use some of the proceeds to support Restore NYC and also employ women rescued by Restore NYC.

how cool is that? I've got a grey EFF t-shirt that might make a nice sleeve. or maybe something from t-shirt woot? or maybe a t-shirt from your alma mater? the possibilities are endless, and it's for a good cause!

¹ in the interest of full disclosure, I first saw Hello Rewind while browsing engadget, can't take credit for finding something this cool...

so there was ice on my car this morning... it does freeze here a few times each winter, but usually just the morning dew. last night though, it was raining, so a much thicker layer was waiting for me when I headed out to the car. here's one view

and another

thank goodness I have an ice scraper...

well, fermat has a little big younger brother. on thursday we picked up riley, a very handsome chocolate lab, from The Independent Lab Rescue of SoCal. he's about four years old, and the most polite well-behaved dog you've ever met. he'd been fostered with three cats, so we have a lot of hope that he and furry will soon be friends...

furry, on the other hand, isn't so sure. ;-) we've gated off the kitchen so furry has some dog-free space to himself, and he was in there when karen brought riley in the door on thursday night. there was a bit of low yowling and a tiny bit of hissing at the gate when they met, then we took riley into the den. about fifteen minutes later, furry poked his head around the corner. he's definitely curious, which I guess is a good sign. he could have just holed up in the kitchen for a while...

this morning they touched noses (progress), and then furry hissed at him (not so much progress). it'll take time, I guess... it's only been a couple of days.

oh... picture. here's a picture the rescue took. we'll have pictures of our own soon enough...

I'd been struggling with how to express my thoughts on the nobel peace prize... and then clay bennett came along and summed it up beautifully.

I think he's nailed it. obama's only qualification may well be that he's replaced george bush in office. I honestly don't think that's the case, but even if it were, the award is still deserved because the world is a decidedly safer place. if nothing else, I feel safer...

legoland let google streetview in to photograph the park.

I think my favorite part is the little icon in the thumbnail view that shows you where you are and which direction you're facing... usually that's a little green guy, but inside legoland it's a little lego character!

8 Classic Board Games That Destroy Friendships

the writeup itself is pretty snarky, but most of it is spot-on. especially the assessment of battleship...

I can't really remember playing mousetrap as a kid, so I can't comment on that one. the assessment of cranium is so right, it's scary.

anyways, read and enjoy...

sad

I mean, he lived a good life, and did amazing things... but still, the feeling of loss. and I never actually saw him play live......

and in what is perhaps a fitting (though oblique) monument to the man, It Might Get Loud opens this weekend. not about him, obviously, but his legacy is going to be all over the screen.

ok, this is pretty kooky. seems that some of the more rabid opposition to and outright distortion of healthcare reform is coming from the religious right¹. specifically, some really crazy distortions are found in talking points pulled together by the liberty counsel, apparently connected with jerry falwell's liberty university.

thedailykos does a pretty good job of refuting the talking points so I won't belabor it here. go read it though, it's pretty frightening the depths that people will stoop to... and I think this nugget sums it up best

...the Liberty Counsel's talking points appear to have been assembled by someone who is either only barely literate or who simply scanned the document for language that could be twisted to serve their own propaganda purposes, with little regard for what the legislation actually says.

edit:
more on death panels ... I agree, the later posts to the palin facebook don't really have the same......... flair... that her earlier writing and speaking does.

¹ which, as moby pointed out, is neither.

I saw this article in yahoo news, and had one thought pretty much immediately

the hypothesis is flawed

I buy organic veggies or milk not because I believe it to have some sort of mythical higher nutritional value. I buy it for what it doesn't have; insecticides, growth hormones, etc.

beyond that, I try to buy my organic produce at the local farmers' market. not because it's necessarily any better than what I might find elsewhere, but it hasn't been shipped in from the other side of the globe.

when I showed him the article, my friend alan pointed out that organic farming isn't just about an end product. it's about how much permanent damage we do to the land and the environment in the production of the food. even if no chemicals end up on the food I buy, that doesn't give me much hope if they just washed off end up in the water I drink, or the water that the next crop is irrigated with.

makes me want to find the original study, and more importantly, take a look at who funded the study and who funds the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. maybe I'm seeing conspiracy where there's plain laziness, but they really missed the boat on this one.

to close with another insight from alan:

This reminds me of other junk "science" research - like the ones saying that protein/health bars are no different than snickers candy bars. Because the only thing they compare are raw calories.

ruby rolled over 33333 miles at the end of may, while we were on a road trip to visit my in-laws. 22222 was the end of march 2008, so 11111 miles in 14 months. all things being equal, not really too bad. certainly below the california average.

so, I read this post on mythtvnews about hacking an appletv to run linux and a mythfrontend, and I just had to try it. a 40GB appletv arrived at my office last friday courtesy of amazon. after some hacking and a bit of frustration, I've got things mostly working...

• continuing the oxy tradition of naming boxes after cats, this little guy is caracal.

• getting gentoo installed and running was simple, possibly because I run gentoo on some other boxes.

• with a 2.6.24 kernel, nvidia driver 169.09 and a wired network, everything just about works. I still don't have the internal IR working though.

• wireless networking doesn't want to work under 2.6.24, which is a bummer because I want to set this up on the tv in the guest room.

• with a 2.6.25 kernel, wireless networking works.

• nvidia 169.09 won't build with 2.6.25, and the driver that does (173.14.09) doesn't seem to work. I get a flash of green and then nothing... black. X is running, mythfrontend is running, but nothing outputs to the tv.

all-in-all, the things that are working work well... playing 1080i and 720p recordings from the backend works just fine, with maybe the occasional buffering pause in 1080i.

next I'm going to try the 177.13 nvidia beta driver under 2.6.25 to see if that works any better than 173.14.09.

edit:
177.13 does the same thing that 173.14.09... quick green screen followed by a bunch of nothing.

I just ordered a ethernet over powerline kit and a second streamzap (identical to the one I use on the main mythbox). with that hardware (wired network and external IR input) the appletv should be ready to move to the guest room.

for the past month or so, I've been trying to quiet down the computer noise in the den/tv room/office. bigger heatsinks, bigger/slower fans, that sort of thing. no rocket science involved, and silent pc review is an invaluable resource.

after all that, it turns out that the loudest computer left is kitten, an aging mini-itx with a via edan processor. but here's the strange bit, kitten is fanless. the only moving parts in the entire box are in the harddrive, and the noise isn't the skritch-skritch of a harddrive. after some reading, it seems to be singing capacitors. there are some things we can do kernel-wise, which is what that link is about, but singing caps can also signal failing hardware, and since kitten is approaching 6 years old, and all of that time without cooling fans.........

so, last night I swapped kitten out for lynx, an asus wl500w running openwrt, a stripped down linux distribution for wireless access points. seems to be working quite well so far. it's doing most of what kitten did, and anything that was too heavy has been moved to boxes behind lynx on the internal network.

with lynx in place managing the network, things are much quieter. there are a couple of things I can try to quiet the other computers down a bit, but they're pretty quiet as-is. currently the loudest thing in the room is the fan in the tivo, and I'm not sure how much we can do to mitigate that...

ok, enough geeky talk for now. maybe more later... ;-)

for easter this year, karen and I went to the bel air presbyterian service with our friends david and marian... in the hollywood bowl!

it was all a bit weird. not the service itself, but being in a church service in this venue where I've seen so many concerts. rock, classical, jazz... I've even sung along to the sound of music a few times.

all said it was a pretty cool, though surreal morning.

ruby (my little red prius) rolled over 22222 miles on the way to work this morning. that's a bit of a milestone. it will very likely be a while before 33333, I just don't drive all that much.

rest in peace tomcat. long live tigger.

the server (tomcat) that handled the database and application server that makes this site possible (and a bunch of other services on the internal network) died last week.

I've built a new server (tigger), and recovered almost everthing that was on tomcat. the only thing I was unable to recover is the database, so we're stuck with this very old and out-of-date backup. I think I took this snapshot right after I set things up on tomcat years ago. I'll clean things up a bit in the next few days. and I'll start taking decent backups... I suppose it is true, the cobbler's children go shoeless. :-/