Remember the old ‘what if microsoft built cars’ joke that came out of a COMDEX show a number of years ago? Sometimes real life is more amusing that the jokes meant to satirize it. Hint for the impatient – look carefully at the photo of the dashboard of that car in the third picture down from the top. Get it? God help us all if MS does succeed in getting the car manufacturers to adopt embedded windows as the OS for our cars.

…do I go back on Statins. I have my three month doctor’s appointment tomorrow. There is a seemingly overwhelming body of evidence that basically all type 2 diabetics should be taking statins. The problem is that I was on them for about 2 months and I had unbelievable pain issues. I’ve never had pain as bad as when I was taking them. This is a known side effect for the drug with a small percentage of users. It’s possible that other factors were contributing to the pain issues with me – I was on a collection of drugs at the time – but man, the risk of returning to those pains is making me very leery of going back on them. On the other hand, my continued existence ultimately seems to depend on my use of them. Do I take the pain now so I can dodder about an old folks home in my late 70’s? Or do I live a less painful existence now and have my heart pop on me in my 60’s? What would you do?

One of my favorite movies from the past couple of years, Master and Commander, ships today on DVD. It’s well worth grabbing this week while it’s cheap, especially if like me you’re a fan of the novels the movie is based on. The books are just awesome – if you enjoyed the movie and you’re looking for some great summer reading, give the first book a try. It takes a little while to get comfortable with O’brian’s style, but the payoff is more than worth it.

Yahoo has been upgrading their mapping feature. Recently they added the ability to find wi-fi hotspots – map an area, then click the link at the bottom left. If you search on Brunswick Maine and do this, you’ll find the link to the location I’m typing this in from (Bowdoin College Library), including some login details. Fortunately my home network link, which is only lightly secured, isn’t in there yet. Is yours?

A month or so ago I talked a little bit about what a 21’st century VCR might look like – combine RSS with BitTorrent and you get a system that automatically collects the TV shows you’d like to watch on your hard drive for you while you sleep. The problem with the implementation I mentioned a month ago was it only runs on Radio Userland, which most of us don’t have. Folks are working on this stuff though, and now we have a python based tool that will run on any platform that will run Python, ie almost anything ;-). It’s rough around the edges and probably only for geeks right now, but the premise is sound and the implementations are getting there – I strongly suspect that soon enough this type of tool will be refined enough that the same pool of folks who jumped all over Napster will be jumping all over broadcast television. What do you suppose the chances are that the networks are even thinking about this type of stuff?

Aside from refining this such that joe and jane consumer can run it, the next step is to get other media types integrated. Everyone seems to be focused on broadcast tv, me meanwhile, I would prefer to be able to grab Fresh Air off of NPR in an automated fashion. If anyone stumbles across these types of systems being applied to radio or print, I’d like to know about it.

I’ve mentioned in the past how my current favorite solution to the crisis surrounding electronic distribution of content is to use a version of the model in canada – taxes flow into a fund that is shared amongst the artists. In Canada’s case they’re currently doing this with recordable media – my suggestion has been to apply the taxes to everyone’s internet connection. Now an economist has run some analysis on this model and concluded that for $6 a month ‘consumers would pay less for more entertainment’ and his conclusion is it’s a sustainable economic model.

The biggest impediment to something like this coming to pass, assuming the analysis is sufficiently accurate? The content companies stranglehold (through campaign contributions) on our elected officials. Once again, a plea to vote responsibly – we need campaign finance reform and we need to make it clear to our legislators that we want the copyright dillema resolved not through criminalization of P2P and DRM on everything from our TV’s to our toasters, but through an approach that extends the concepts of fair use.

A friend’s request for information on page layout on the cheap led me by chance to Inkscape, an open source illustration tool. Is it ready to dethrone Illustrator or Freehand? Well, no. But it is good enough to be worth playing around with. Plus it’s cross-platform (no Mac binaries available, but if you’re clever you can use fink to compile it for OSX) and supports SVG as its native file format. Kudos to the development team, this project is shaping up really well.

It appears the fallout from comcast acquiring techtv has begun. Leo graciously deflects blame from G4/Comcast, but basically this wouldn’t be happening in the absence of the ownership changing hands, so I’m less gracious. Leo is a bit of a clown and that would occasionally interfere with the flow of the show during his time on the Screensavers, but despite this he really was the best the show had to offer. I was sorry to hear he was leaving the Screensavers and sorrier to hear he’s going off-air entirely. Here’s hoping that once everything shakes out with the ownership transition the new management brings him back.

Back on the RSS meme. Check out ebalylistings.net’s ebay search RSS feeds. If you’re on the hunt for something specific on ebay, refine your search, submit it, and get an RSS feed you can paste into your fave aggregator. No more daily ebay prowls – just wait for matching items to show up.

This is another example of the kinds of stuff I think google ought to be adding – refined, vertical search with RSS feeds. Hopefully someone working in google labs is paying attention to things like this and newstrove.

Ok, we all know of air and passive cooled computing, it’s what’s in the majority of the machines we use every day, and if you’re slighlty tech-savvy you might have heard of water cooling (and if you haven’t, you soon will – the next generation of cpu’s are too hot for traditional air cooling. Rumor is Apple’s G5 laptop will be liquid cooled). Anyway, even I hadn’t heard of rodent cooling until today. Imagine the little fellow trundling along on his wheel, wafting a cool breeze across your processor as you game. Food pellet powered too, which is about as efficient as it gets 😉

[link from the almost always excellent decafbad.com]