For basketball fans: poor quality but otherwise mind boggling Dwayne Wade highlight clip compilation.

Apple's iPod looks to dominate the dashboard

I must be missing something, but given that we have zero military units ready to deploy, why wouldn't China invade Taiwan right now?

Am I misunderstand their desire to get Taiwan back? Or am I missing some leverage that we hold over them? Or are they just being rather reasonable and peaceful?

NYC temperature and vegetation maps highlight the obvious correlations.

Good news if this is for real:

Dan Kaminsky, DNS hacker and rootkit infection sleuth, has devised a test for checking to see if your Internet connection is "neutral" -- that is, whether your connection is being filtered, throttled, slowed down, or monkeyed with secretly by your ISP:

Kaminsky calls his technique "TCP-based active probing for faults." He says that the software he's developing will be similar to the Traceroute Internet utility that is used to track what path Internet traffic takes as it hops between two machines on different ends of the network.

But unlike Traceroute, Kaminsky's software will be able to make traffic appear as if it is coming from a particular carrier or is being used for a certain type of application, like VoIP. It will also be able to identify where the traffic is being dropped and could ultimately be used to finger service providers that are treating some network traffic as second-class.

If it's easy for people to figure out (and publicize for others) which ISPs are neutral, and which are trying to sell limited access to the internet, it should help market forces to push things towards the neutral side.

another NOLA blog

AT&T launches Homezone -- DISH Network satellite service (from Echostar) coupled with DSL (from AT&T). The DSL service is used as transport for long tail (and mainstream) video services from Akimbo. Not to be confused with U-verse, which is a pure DSL play based on very high speed DSL.

Kingston enters the portable media player market

Opinion: Apple's Copy Protection Isn't Just Bad For Consumers, It's Bad For Business

Mixing media
Giant cable companies are duking it out with the nation's telcos to see who can provide the most comprehensive phone, broadband, video and mobile services to tech-savvy consumers

Sarita’s Macaroni & Cheese, or S’MAC, serves 10 different versions of Mac & Cheese. And that's all. 345 E. 12th St. (betw. 1st & 2nd Aves.)

How to open a Master combination lock.

Linda has a new page. Hope this is okay to announce. You can subscribe here. Click 'add to homepage' to add it to your homepage.

CA has its own foreign policy now?

Governor, Blair sign warming accord
UNUSUAL STATE-NATION PACT PUTS DISTANCE BETWEEN LEADERS, BUSH

Front page coverage of a new media art show coming to SJ next week ...

``This will transform San Jose into the North American epicenter for the intersection of art and digital culture,'' said Dietz, former curator of new media at Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Epicenter, baby! Okay, we get a little excited out here in the provinces.

ZeroOne website

Guy who works on Boston's Big Dig project is appalled at the wasted materials. So he collects stuff that looks good, hauls it away himself, and uses it all to build this house.

Via boing-boing:

In 1968, Otto Preminger made 23 Skidoo, a psychedelic film starring Jackie Gleason as a mobster, Groucho Marx as the kingpin, and Mickey Rooney as a snitch. Throw in some LSD and you've got the makings of a very strange cinematic trip. The trailer for 23 Skidoo is now on YouTube and it's a gas.

apple i talk

High-definition video add-on coming to iPod

"The initial players will be able to handle MPEG 4, Divx, HD.264 and other video formats."

Interesting piggy-back strategy. Rather than doing the whole thing from scratch, they hitch a ride off Apple's base technology and extend it.

Online Videos & Playing Into Apple’s Hands

This is reminiscent of the digital music market, which is chockfull of players with marginal market share. Apple’s iPod/iTunes dominates the market because it provides a stress free (some call it integrated) experience for the end user.

CNN snatching page out of YouTube's book

AOL to Test-Launch Video Search Service
NEW YORK (Reuters)—AOL plans to announce on Monday it will test launch a new Internet video service in an attempt to demonstrate how much it has learned from mistakes that cost the once reigning king of the online world its leading position.

The new service, AOL Video, aims to be the one-stop shop for online videos and will let users search for videos across the Web, upload their own, or buy or watch for free thousands of TV shows from any one of 45 video-on-demand channels on nearly any device.

The Hard Disk That Changed the World -- happy 50th to the hard disk. The winchester disk (a sealed unit rather than a unit with interchangible disk packs) came along in '73, also developed by IBM in San Jose.

Just found this yesterday (am I late to the party?): War In Context - "Iraq + war on terrorism + Middle East conflict + critical perspectives". Seems like a fairly comprehensive listing of current pieces (mostly major media) on the war, with lots of pull quotes. Not much analysis, but a good way to keep up with all the reporting.

DirecTV: August Launch For New DVRs -- long awaited box with H.264/AVC support. non-TiVo (yuk)