Wow… It’s 8:15PM MST and Google is offline. I feel as though the Earth just stopped rotating or something.

Ah, now it’s back.

This doesn’t look good. Seems that the International Trade Commission might ban the import of hard drives manufactured by a number of big-name companies because of a patent dispute. It seems a little unlikely at first glance, but there’s a precedent, as the article explains.

This is an unsolicited bit of praise for SparkFun Electronics, an online store that sells all sorts of cool stuff for electronics experimentation. They have a nice selection of microprocessor prototype boards including some from European companies like Olimex, some nifty LED arrays and LCDs with serial interfaces, robot parts, tools, etc. Their site also has fun stuff some great tutorials on soldering surface-mount parts by hand and photos of projects they’ve done just for the helluvit, as well as some active discussion forums in support of the stuff they sell and related topics. Most remarkable of all (to me): they’re about a mile from my house! I picked up my first order today; it certainly won’t be my last order. read more

A tree down the street from our house always puts on a dazzling display of color this time of year:

I love the way Amazon.com attempts to recommend things for me to buy based on other things I’ve bought or looked at or things that other people have bought. I love it not because it’s useful but because it occasionally produces comical results. For example, here’s one of today’s helpful suggestions, generated after I looked at the knife sharpener on the left some weeks ago:

There’s an essay here that discusses (at some length) a point I’ve started ranting about to anyone who will listen to me: Apple seems to have adopted an active strategy of gradually excluding third-party developers. It’s a strategy that I can understand in some sense, but I believe it’s not a good one for Apple. (Consider, for instance, the legal complaints filed against Microsoft over their bundling of applications with the Windows operating system. These complaints are generally based upon the argument that such practices are anti-competitive. However, while it is still entirely possible to write a third-party media-playback app for Windows, it is not possible to write third-party apps for the iPhone, iPod, or Apple set-top box.) Obviously it’s not a good one for people such as myself who make their living in part by writing software for Apple’s computers. On the other hand, once you notice that most of their money is being made not by selling computers, and then you recall that they dropped the word “Computer” from the name of the company recently, it’s all fairly self-consistent. read more

It was nearly a year ago that I posted an entry here about the enigmatic animation of someone singing and twirling a leek. Through the odd evolutionary forces of the web, we now have a new version from Japan, sung by voice-synthesis software:

Thanks go to MusicThing for this; the original post with some amount of explanation is here.

My photo gallery is back online. I took it down awhile ago because it got hacked and finally got around to patching it up today. It’s still a little rough around the edges but it should all work. I have disabled the comment mechanism altogether because I don’t trust it. (The authors of Gallery go on at great length about how secure their software is, but the fact remains that my installation of it was hacked.)

You can reach it by clicking here or clicking the handy Photo Gallery link under the heading Adam’s Stuff in the right-hand column of this page. read more