I’m shopping for a new car and figured I should make having a reasonable MP3 solution part of the choice. I don’t want to buy an aftermarket head unit; I live in San Francisco, things get stolen. I found several trunk mounted hard drive players that integrate in various ways. Do you know of something better?

PhatNoise. 20 gig: ~$850

Goes through great lengths to emulate the CD changer protocol so you can control the MP3 collection from your head unit. They also make the Kenwood Music Keg, an RF system.
UI: head unit’s CD changer. Interface: CD changer.

MuzicVault. 20 gig: $350

Hooks in via FM or patched into stereo.
UI: Palm Pilot (wacky!). Interface: FM or patch in.

Neo Car Jukebox. 20 gig: $300

Looks like the Fast Eddie edition.
UI: wired remote. Interface: FM or patch in.

Omnifi DMP-1: 20 gig: $600

Big feature is a wireless adapter ($70) which lets you load music on it when the car is in your garage. I have a feeling this doesn’t work as well as you’d hope.
UI: wired remote. Installation: patch in, scanty details.

The bug seems to be triggered by faulty logic around wearing the sand people robes. In certain circumstances the robes are removed from you; teleporting to the Ebon Hawk, for instance. When this happens the robes get glitched. If you put the robes on again and try to enter the Enclave it fails and you get killed without explanation.

The workaround I used was to take the robes off. This got me past the glitch. My “looks like sand people” bit was still set, so I was able to enter the enclave without being attacked. Another option is to go back to before you ever put the robes on and then only put them on at the last minute. You may still hit the glitch though. A final option is to give up on the disguise entirely and just roll in.

See this forum search for more info, also see the KotOR XBox bug FAQ. To the 95% of my readers who have no idea what this is all about; isn’t being a game geek funny?

If you’re into this sort of technology make a point of seeing the video. It’s a 160 meg download.

CRPGs have another theme: the acquisition of stuff. You start out wimpy with a tiny little dagger and a loincloth. By the end of the game you’re a bad-ass with +7 glowing long swords and titanium power armour. RPG-like games like Diablo make the acquisition of stuff the primary gameplay experience, like clothes shopping with more killing.

Which brings me to my idea: how about a game where the goal is not to acquire stuff, but to get rid of it? You start out super powerful with all the geegaws and skullsplitters you could want. In your process of saving the world you learn these things have no power and you have to simplify to find true meaning and technique.

It’d require a tricky game mechanic to make work. Maybe in getting rid of things you focus and customize your remaining stuff until you are left with one simple elegant possession which is the focus of your power.

Guyelle’s wife is now officially the worst 24 character ever. She’s on screen for, what, 45 seconds? She’s in the office for a total of 15 minutes. Her husband dies a few hours earlier, we’re in the midst of a bioterrorism crisis at CTU, but she has to clean out his office right now. It only takes 10 minutes to pack his stuff, but that’s just enough time for her to create another Plot Twist. Deus ex vidua.

They don’t wrap up the interesting side stories. Will anything redeem Chloe O’Brian, the person so awful she doesn’t even have her own fan web page? And what about Jack’s junk habit? It sure would have been a better ending to have Jack go back to his SUV to be alone with a nice syringe full of smack.

The best thing about the show was Chase and the axe. Kim abandoned her last amputee boyfriend. Poor Chase.

This admission is astonishing. Usually it’s a single reporter to blame; here the NYT as a whole is saying they got it wrong. This article is an important milestone in the US coming to terms with the fact that the war on Iraq was based on false pretenses.

Why don’t programming languages let me put spaces in variable names? whyDoIHaveToDoThis or_this_crud, why can’t I just put spaces in things?

for user id in user ids {
  if is valid user (user id) and
       is authorized user (user id) {
    show report(user id)
    user(user id).bill for report(one dollar)
  }
}

tell application "Finder"
    set windowName to name of front window
    close front window
end tell 

I know there’s a sucker born every minute, but who would fall for this stuff? The particularly remarkable thing is you have to have an e-gold account to even play. Wouldn’t you think the few people who have e-gold accounts are likely smarter than to fall for this? Maybe their marks are scammers too and this is all about money laundering.

But there’s one problem with my aggregator lifestyle: it feels like work. Blog reading used to be fun goofing off, nipping off to BoingBoing for a few minutes. Now all my blog reading is compressed into 45 minutes in the morning before I drive to work. It’s a morning chore.

Worse, my aggregator keeps track of unread items. And that list gets bigger if I don’t get around to it for a few days. Suddenly I have a giant backlog of random blog entries I have to read. Another workqueue.

The foremost reaction I think most people had when seeing this video was complete disgust, horror, and sadness. It’s an awful thing. I find it both fascinating and hideous that people seeing the video immediately went below the surface view to look for discrepancies, evidence that there was something more here than what was presented. And making detailed comments, like the style of the plastic chair or the presence of a ring on someone’s hand. As if to ignore the primary image, a man’s head being sawed off by a large knife.

I’m also interested in how quickly some Americans are willing to believe that this video is not real, that it was staged by some pro-US faction. I don’t fully trust my government either. I’m still surprised that someone didn’t just plant WMD evidence in Iraq. But somehow this video seems to go too far. Can I really believe my country would stage this?

The detailed examination of evidence is interesting. As soon as you look at something like this closely, all sorts of weirdnesses pop out. The jumping timecodes and the out-of-sync audio are technical discrepancies. The lack of blood and movement makes the beheading look strange (although what would a normal beheading look like?!) And the story is odd too, Berg’s being held by Iraq and/or the US, the coincidence of Berg and Moussaoui.

The final thing that intrigues me is that if you believe that all these discrepancies point to deception, then you have to believe the deceivers had the power to set this up and yet were so incompetent as to not even get basic things like video timestamps and people’s accents right. How can that be?

I am awed at the power of the brutality of this video and ashamed at my own fascination with the speculation surrounding this poor man’s death. This conspiracy analysis is a way to intellectualize a tragic event, to replace basic sadness and horror at a man being brutally killed with some clever made-for-TV conspiracy plot.

But then again, this event is a crucial happening in a crucial time. Governments have done worse things to protect their positions. Perhaps all these discrepancies do add up to something. How will we ever know?

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Forgive me for being harsh, but, um, yeah. Your “job” consists of accepting credit card payments in a PayPal account, skimming 20%, and then wiring the cash to Ukraine? What did you think you were doing?

Here’s a hint: payment processing jobs do not involve an individual’s private account. And another hint: Ukraine is essentially jurisdiction-free when it comes to the Internet.

That’s why I liked Jackie Brown so much: Tarantino could indulge his obsession to homage while actually telling a meaningful human story. You know what would be brilliant? A Dogme 95 Quentin Tarantino film. Have the filmgeek boy make a movie without all the lighting and editing tricks. Restriction is freedom.

The difference between the actual video and the limited images in today’s papers is astonishing. The newspapers pictures look calm, quiet. The video is swift and horribly brutal. The most disturbing thing is hearing the murderers shout “Allahu Akbar” over and over again.

I watched it because I think it’s important to view the truth of things. I hate modesty censorship of news. But there are some things you may prefer not to see.

But I never quite felt cool enough to listen to Sonic Youth. It was just a bit too raw and punk for my nerdishness. Now I’m an adult and my music doesn’t identify me and I’m glad to say Sonic Youth still rocks. Sister, Evol, Dirty, even Washing Machine are all just great. I feel both alienated and hip.

I continue to look for a copy of their first album. At this point I’m almost ready to rip an 18 year old cassette tape.

The advertisement said the pleasure’s everlasting.

The demonstration was at Eurocrypt. Le Monde seems to have the first news report (translation). More: Nicolas, Kos, Slashdot, an earlier deredacting attempt.

Two glitches to be aware of. The copy protection is user-hostile. And on my GeForce Ti4200 the game crashes regularly unless I underclock the video card 5%. Weird thing is it doesn’t seem to be heat related.

Distribution is via BitTorrent
Shop as usual... and avoid panic buying

It’s cool. The most apparent thing is how bright the display is and how it looks good from any angle. Passive lighting is a good thing. The redraw rate is horrible and the algorithm is weird: does some sort of inverting of the screen. This all makes this generation of tech useless for most computing applications. But as an ebook, it’s good.

I can. The apostrophe rule is simple. An apostrophe never marks a plural. The rule about CEO vs. C.E.O. is less clear. The NYT style guide probably has a list of where you don’t use dots. I think it’s better to never use dots at all.

Python makes doing things like this such a joy. Here’s my hack code. Ugly, but simple.