Oren’s Weblog

In the devices that should exist by now category, it seems to me that now that there are CD changers that hold hundreds of disks (like this 400 disk Sony), they ought to come equipped with Ethernet and/or WiFi connections. You should be able to load the changer up with CDs and let it go out to CDDB (or Gracenote or whatever they’re called these days) and do their own metadata retrieval and indexing.

Instead they seem to think it’s a marketing feature that they have a keyboard connection – now that sounds like a recipe for repetetive stress injuries if I ever heard one.

Update
After some further googling, I did see that there is a 200-disk Kenwood changer that connects to a PC via a RS-232 serial cable (now that’s modern) and they offer software to download info from CDDB. And there is a hardware/software system scalled TitleTrack for the Mac that hooks the Mac via USB to Sony changers and accomplishes the same thing. But that costs $389 – almost twice the cost of a 400-disk changer. Jeeze.

My almost-six-year-old son has been spending a fair amount of time using my new 15″ Powerbook. When he minimizes a window down into the dock he says “I sucked it up.”

I offer this terminology to Apple royalty-free

So we gave him KidPix for Hannukah, after having heard raves about it from my brother when his kids were small some dozen years ago. And it’s just as cool as I hoped – the drawing tools are intuitive and the effects are easy to use and cool, and I love the sounds!

But I was disappointed to see that the latest version (Kid Pix 3 Deluxe) was a Classic app, not an OS X app, and only supports 800 x 600 resolution with thousands of colors.

MacKiev is supposedly porting Kid Pix to OS X, but they apparently announced it over a year ago…sigh.

We’re almost to the end of what has been a very long home remodelling project . As part of that project we added some space to our son’s bedroom, including a new closet, and I had the contractor put a power drop in the closet for the express purpose of having a shelf where he could plug in all the battery-operated things he needs to recharge.

Last night before I went to bed, I realized that he’s not the only person in the house who needs that kind of facility – I counted six devices of the non-child variety recharging: 2 mobile phones, a digital camera, my Powerbook, a toothbrush, and my bicycle headlight.

The Creative Commons has just turned one – Happy Birthday, CC! Here is their entirely too groovy flash animation which explains their mission and success to date at providing a common licensing alternative to the copyright mess. It’s a big (7 MB) download, but well worth watching!

I was not initially enthusiastic about the Lord of The Rings movies – perhaps I heard too much hype before I saw the first one, but it struck me as being overly long and didn’t really grab me. But I just watched the second one on DVD this past weekend, and got *totally* sucked in. Interestingly enough, my colleague Bill Schaefer had the exact opposite experience – so go figure.

At any rate, I’m looking forward to seeing the thrilling conclusion. And here is a story about how the software used to create the final battle scenes was so smart that the Orcs kept running away from the battle. There’s a lesson in there somewhere for our foreign policy, I’m sure.

Basically, all the necessary information for decision-making was fed into this network of computers without determining for them whether they would win or lose.

So some extra computer tinkering was required to ensure that the trilogy’s climactic battle worked the way Jackson wanted.

Thanks to Cory Doctorow for pointing this out!

A very clever Canadian billboard. Thanks to kasia in a nutshell.