Plutor

First, you hear about free iPods, and it’s an obvious scam. Then you read a Wired article about how it’s not so much of a scam. Then you read other things about the deal. Then you check it out, and you realize that, well, it is a pyramid scheme of sorts, but not the kind where it necessarily costs you money. Give freeipods.com a spam-filtered email address, give AOL a credit card number and don’t let them bill it, and get five of your friends to do the same. Seems worth it, and if Wired says it’s legit, I’ll go along with that.

Please follow this link to freeipods.com if you’re considering doing it, so that I get your referral.

(See also freeflatscreens.com)

Slashdot's ten millionth comment sums up the whole thing very well.

• Post 1M on Jun 15, ????
• Post 2M on Mar 1, ????
• Post 3M on Feb 13, ????
• Post 4M on Aug 2, 2001
• Post 5M on Jan 2, 2002
• Post 6M on May 20, 2003
• Post 7M on Sep 18, 2003
• Post 8M on Jan 16, 2004
• Post 9M on Apr 28, 2004
• Post 10M on Aug 18, 2004

• Post 4M to 5M: 153 days
• 5M to 6M: 138 days
• 6M to 7M: 121 days
• 7M to 8M: 120 days
• 8M to 9M: 102 days
• 9M to 10M: 112 days

At a roughly constant rate of posting, it will take 3 years to post 10 million more comments, or about 27 years to get to 100 million.

This is the only thing I’ve ever wanted.

Building a new computer can sometimes be a challenge. Not only do you need to know a lot of terminology and understand how everything goes together, but you also should do a good amount of research ([1], [2], [3]) into what’s most reliable and has the most nifty features. That’ll get you 90% of the way to a nice new machine on which you can play Doom 3.

The other 10% is luck. When you get your new Mobo, CPU, and RAM, and go to put it into the computer, and you discover that your 5-year-old ATX power supply is not the same thing as what your motherboard manufacturer means when they say “ATX power supply”, that’s not a good thing. Just to increase everyone else’s luck factor: newer motherboards (those for Athlon 64s and some XPs, and Pentium 4s) require a 4-pin “+12V connector” in addition to the standard 20-pin ATX connector. Here is the best information I’ve found on the matter (including how to decide how big of a PS to get!).

Update: Got a cheap POS from CompUSA. They have a lot of power supplies there.

Once in a while, when trying to debunk an urban legend, we can all forget that sometimes they’re true and get a mouthful of liquid nitrogen. Or is it this story that’s the urban legend? (Hm, shades of The Rocket Car)

I don’t have Quicktime installed on my Linux machine, and unless you have crossover, you probably don’t either. There’s always mplayerplug-in, but I’ve never had good luck with that. Finally inspired by Mozilla bug 255704, I’ve made a bookmarklet that converts every OBJECT tag on a page into a link to the source. You can then right click and download it.

Just drag this link to your bookmark toolbar: Objects to links

Note: right now this doesn’t work at the most useful location: Apple Trailers. They use some funky quicktime forwarding stuff. I’m working on a solution.

I love Wikipedia. It’s a bit scary to think that all of their hosting is done in a single place, which is in the path of Hurricane Charley. Update, 08-16: Looks like they did fine, since Charley turned northeast away from the Tampa area.

I think I've settled on the hardware for my new computer. I need to sleep on it though.

• Motherboard: MSI K8N Neo Platinum
• CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3000+
• Memory: Kingston HyperX 512M PC3200 (Dual-channel, and CAS level 2)
• Video card: Powercolor (ATI) Radeon 9600XT 128MB
• Also a new keyboard: Ortek SKB-2200

I'll probably ask for a 74G Western Digital Raptor (10k SATA) hard drive for my birthday. The video card decision was extremely difficult, but it came down to the fact that the Radeon 9700s were $50 more expensive from any vendor with more than a 70% rating on Pricewatch. This way, maybe I won't feel so bad about upgrading to an X800 or something in a couple years.

Update, 08-13: Slept on it, ordered mobo, CPU, and better memory than I had originally considered (with free FarCry, and a $30 rebate) from ZipZoomFly. Update 2: Ordered video card and keyboard from Newegg.

Although it’s not quite what I had in mind, Nomad will find these TV RSS feeds awfully close.

I’m posting this from “WebWarriorz” at the Brass Mill Center in Waterbury, CT. Ten minutes from my home, and a member of the Counter-Strike: Source Beta. Whee! (More to come)

Remember WEBoggle? The guy who made a mirror has ended up making tons of functionality improvements. It’s apparently a lot faster on the backend, you can submit words that you think are missing from the dictionary, and it now supports two simultaneous games (one of which is 5x5 Big Boggle)! Check it out.

Update, 08-13: Holy hell. WEBoggle was posted to Metafilter today (for the second time, to be honest). It was flooded with about six thousand players. I wish it were still on my site, but it’s nice to see comments like “This kicks ass. Best use of simple DHTML game I’ve seen."

Watching Season 3 of our Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Ghetto Box Set, I came across the episode Family Business. It’s not an extremely notable episode (besides the old-Ferrengi-lady nudity), but it sticks out prominently in my mind (and not because of the nudity). It’s the first time we meet freighter captain Kasidy Yates. I had known that Penny Johnson was in the series eventually, and I was dreading it. I could never trust Sherry Palmer. Never! The episode was over before I realized how great of an actress she really is. I didn’t doubt her sincerity and utter likeableness in DS9 for a moment. It totally blew me away.

Remember when Google Answers debunked one of those stupid “So you think you know everything” emails? Well, Fark has considerately accumulated all of the useless and untrue facts in a single place! Yippee!

I found this a while ago, but it makes a good Friday-afternoon goof-off link. The Wooden Periodic Table Table. Inspired by an Oliver Sacks book — Uncle Tungsten — and later visited by the same (and likely the only) world-famous neurologist. Some highlights: His Sodium party (watch the videos), the radioactive Fiestaware bowl, and Flourine storage.

“If New York were its own country, its army, the New York City Police Department, would be the twentieth-best-funded army in the world, just behind Greece and just ahead of North Korea. Its GDP, $413.9 billion, would be the seventeenth largest, just behind the Russian Federation and just ahead of Switzerland. With more than 8 million residents, it would be more populous than Ireland, Switzerland, or New Zealand; roughly half the countries in the Middle East (including Israel); most of the former republics of the Soviet Union; and all the Scandinavian countries besides Sweden.” Should New York City Secede?

A lot of people use it, so here’s the heads-up: All versions of Putty have a serious security vulnerability that could allow the server to execute arbitrary code. The worst part is that it can be done before authentication, i.e. before your machine could know that there’s a man-in-the-middle attack going on. Download version 0.55 for the fix.

Two sites, that while not exactly related, both focus on similar themes. Both are part of my daily Web Routine:

1. This is Broken
2. The Daily WTF

My mom does reliability testing of computer chips for IBM. Once in a while I see a story that reminds me of her. For example, Sun Microsystems is trying to make a wireless chip. Although they’re using proximity communication instead of the far faster (and completely uncontrollable) quantum tunneling, it does sound neat. The computers of the future could just look like a bag of dice.

You gotta love those math nerds. Be the dorkiest kid on the slopes with your new Klein Bottle Hat! (More about Klein bottles at the wikipedia entry)

I’ve never really had anything specific against PHP. The problem I’ve always had is that it’s too similar to Perl for me to be able to keep them straight in my head, but too different for my Perl skills to be much use at all. Someone has now contrasted PHP and Perl from a strict usability point of view. And the arguments make perfect sense.

So “Nintendo DS” is the official name. It’s one hot handheld. Stereo speakers builtin, ~$170 release price, and more than 120 games in development. I’m signed up.

Also, I finally got an official quote from the horse’s mouth about wireless: “DS users will be able to connect with a local wireless network of up to 16 players. Nintendo’s guaranteed range is 30 feet, but will extend far beyond that depending on circumstances. It … will make use of both IEEE 802.11 and Nintendo’s proprietary communication protocol, which provides low battery consumption. … The DS technology also provides for a wireless LAN connection, which could allow a theoretically infinite number of players to … compete at a central game hub on the Internet…” (Emphasis mine) Holy hell.

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy teaser trailer. Lots of mirrors in the discussion, but the official link worked for me. This is going to be the best movie ever made, no matter how bad it is.

Apparently there’s a highway north of the North Pole.

At work, we got new dual-Opteron SunFire v20z’s for the newly-acquired TravelWeb. I got to test one. First thing I decided to do was a distributed.net client benchmark.

  Desktop: Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz, 512K L2 cache, 512M RAM.   Opteron server: Dual AMD Opteron 248 2.2GHz, 1M L2 cache, 2G RAM.

Dnetc benchmarking only runs on a single processor, but I ended up with the Opteron running twice as fast as my desktop. I’m in love.