The Rigged-Up Net

If you see me carrying around a supersoaker, hope that I can’t find my matches! 😀

Supersoaker flamethrower.

There are no “steals” for prime property here. Homes with the three key components — great location, good condition and curb appeal — are selling at approximately 95 percent of the list price.

Summer is hot in Houston — what’s the temperature of the market in your area?

This is aweseome! Frat-boy humor at its finest!

The Bottle Rocket Incident

Amazon.com Inc.’s free-shipping programs are costing the retailer more as its sales grow. Amazon spent $103 million on free shipping to customers in the first half of this year, up from $77 million in the first half of 2004, the company said in its quarterly report filed Thursday

Amazon shipping costs top $100M

Check out this video footage of cops looting a Walmart… [shakes head]

Police looting Wal-Mart

Ah – fun for the whole family!

Make A Taser From A Disposible Camera

This is pretty cool!

The iTRC is a two-part application. The remote control software runs on a hacked Zipit device under Linux. The simple iTRC Server application is lauched on your Mac and relays messages between iTunes and the iTRC. A basic protocol is used on top of TCP/IP for communication across WiFi.

$99 DIY WiFi iTunes Remote Control

U.S. teen pregnancy and birth rates have plummeted to all-time lows as more teenagers delay sex, abstain from it, use contraception and use it more effectively. Abortions also are down.

Pregnancies among unmarried teens have plummeted

Its amazing what people will do…

Sony PSP running Macintosh System 7.5.5

This is good stuff…

Being a small sample of the boo-boos and blunders proudly displayed at the anti-war rally in San Francisco on September 24, 2005

DOWN WITH LITERACY!

I was wondering when they were going to do this…

PSP Memory Stick Duo to Compact Flash converter

Hooray for the red, yellow and orange! Those are the colors featured on the newly redesigned $10 bill, the third currency denomination to add splashes of color to the traditional green of U.S. currency

New $10 Bill Gets a Colorful

Divx Create is free – today only….

DivX Create

This is very impressive… up-to-date locations of where all the cabs are in certain cities… wow!

Google Ride Finder

D00d! I love EARL! How can you not, especially when they go “OLD SCHOOL!” 😀

It airs on Tuesday nights…

http://www.nbc.com/My_Name_Is_Earl/

HSL is pretty cool!

Sunlight Direct is one of the main companies that makes HSL stuff….

Click here for a video clip about it.

Click here for Sunlight Direct’s website

Quicktime 7 for Win32 is out… which adds supports for the H.264 video codec.

However, when you go to download QT7 for Windows, you have to download the Quicktime and iTunes bundle… which is fine if you actually want iTunes…. but if you don’t, here’s the link to the standalone Quicktime installer:

Standalone QuickTime Player

Ok, whats interesting was that I had this on my todo… basically, set up a random VPN server so I could securely connect to it while I’m roaming on some random public wifi network. Google beat me to it – oh well. 🙂

Anyhow, its a basic MS-type 128-bit PPTP service and the userid/password are dynamically generated on the fly. Although there’s only a Win32 client right now, making this work in MacOSX and Linux is fairly trivial. So here are the instructions to get it working on MacOSX and using it as a template for Linux should be easy.

Here’s the Google Wifi page: Google Secure Access

You can now send mail from Gmail using a different email address… which is cool – now you can send or reply to email using a different profile. Sweet!

How to send e-mails from any address using Gmail’s SMTP server

Oh wow – class action lawsuit again Palm about their crappy Treo… FINALLY!

Palm Sued Over Defective Treos

and

Palm being sued over Treo

Wineries have come under scrutiny because the fermentation process that turns grape sugars to alcohol releases ethanol, methanol and other organic compounds into the atmosphere, where they react with sunlight and heat to form ozone, one of the components of smog, air regulators said.

‘Wine Smog’ a Growing Concern in Calif.

Wow, you can build a vacuum form table just like the one they have on MythBusters… cool!

Build a Vacuum Form Table

A new theory proposes that mad cow disease may have come from feeding British cattle meal contaminated with human remains infected with a variation of the disease.

Theory: Mad Cow May Have Come From Humans

All about DRM, and why it sucks:

The Customer Is Always Wrong: A User’s Guide to DRM in Online Music

I LOVE IT!

Although many physicists think such ideas are claptrap, it would be ideal if the United States could teleport U.S. soldiers into “a cave, tap bin Laden on the shoulder, and say: ‘Hey, let’s go,’ ” said Ranney Adams, spokesperson for the Air Force Research Laboratory at Edwards Air Force Base in the Southern California desert. “But we’re not there (yet).”

Not for want of trying, though. Last year, the Air Force spent $25,000 on a report, titled “Teleportation Physics Study,” to examine possible ways to teleport humans and objects through space.

Military examines ‘beaming up’ data, people – Critics say its extreme computing, energy needs keep teleportation unlikely for now

Interesting discussion about Gtalk

For now I’m discouraging people from switching to Google’s new IM network. It simply does not offer enough benefit to justify further fragmentation of the IM world. We’re probably never going to see meaningful innovation and advancement of IM utility until we find a way to get past the horrible plumbing that exists underneath, and Google Talk as it exists today is doing more harm to that goal than good. No amount of vapor or rumor regarding gee-whiz VoIP or search capabilities is going to offset the closed nature of their new network for me.

On Google Talk, I apparently talk a lot

Buy now, pay later: It’s been the mantra of American consumers for decades. The results are obvious in the ballooning balances on credit cards and mortgage loans, and in the mushrooming U.S. trade deficit, which reflects the nation’s nearly insatiable appetite for cheap, imported goods.

Debt Load Makes Americans Vulnerable

I’m so glad someone else agrees… SIP Rulez!

Google Talk And Skype Are Boring, And Here’s Why

The Fed chief on Friday cautioned Americans against thinking the value of their homes and other investments will only go higher, saying “history has not dealt kindly” with that kind of optimism.

Greenspan: Housing Market Will Cool Off

AMEN!

These hints–many of them previously unpublished–can help you avoid the plague of poorly written SQL statements

25 SQL Commandments

The trend among college women has prompted some sexual behavior experts to light-heartedly refer to the term “LUG,” or “lesbian until graduation,” said Craig Kinsley, a neuroscientist at the University of Richmond who studies the biology of sexual orientation and gender.

Survey Finds More Women Try Bisexuality

The other day, for $40 I bought an eight-port gigabit ethernet switch. And then I bought a pair of RTL8169 GigE NIC’s ($12 each) for a couple of linux servers I have. Then I decided to use the onboard Marvell Yukon GigE NIC on my workstation… at which point WinXP decided to freeze everytime I opened my web browser.

Turns out the Marvell Yukon drivers have a huge bug in it. If you own a Marvell Yukon GigE NIC, I highly recommend saving yourself a whole-lotta trouble and just go download the latest drivers here.

As a devotee of a diet movement called caloric restriction, or CR, she believes that consuming less will allow her to live longer. It’s a notion she learned from her father, CR pioneer Roy Walford, and one she’s comfortable sharing with a national audience.

Dieters Eat Less to Live Longer

The economists’ analysis, based around a mathematical model, suggest that more people would have won a million – and the contestants have taken home more overall – if they were less risk averse and willing to gamble. But contestants would also have suffered some staggering losses, against human nature. “Most people are not reckless,” says Lanot. “They are cautious and worry a lot about losses.”

Too scared to be a millionaire?

How to build a $500 MythTV box….

The $500 Dollar Mythbox Project

So it seems that the placebo effect is not purely psychological:

A brain imaging study, conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan, has revealed that our bodies’ natural painkilling system might play a role in the placebo effect.

Placebo effect causes a natural high

For those of you guys who know my buddy Alec – He’s going in for open-heart surgery on Tuesday.

He seems to be in high-spirits and he’s at the Mayo Clinic, so it looks like everything will be ok. 🙂

Its funny – Tivo is such a great product, but they can’t get the business part of it figure out… now they’re adding DRM and some other stupid “auto-delete” feature… its like they WANT to fail…

TiVo 7.2 OS adds content protection, blocks transfers, and auto-deletes some shows

This is pretty cool:

Estimate the value of your current or prospective home by getting recent sales information for homes in your area.

Home Value Search

“There have been reports linking double-dipping to hepatitis and this is actually what closed the tattoo parlors in New York City in the 1960s,” Geronemus told Reuters Health. “More recently there have been reports of hepatitis C with the placement of tattoos and that could lead to a debilitating illness.”

Think twice before getting tattoo, expert advises