Check out this 3d visualization tool. It allows you to explore xml datasets in 3d. It’s very similar to touchgraph’s cool java-based tool, only nicer looking but with less functionality. As a first pass though it shows great promise, I hope they stick with it and fill out the feature set. We’ve experimented with toolsets like these, using them as navigation aids on projects like the Romantic Audiences Project.

Analysts are speculating that the price of HDTV sets are going to drop in price faster than had been expected, largely due to new technology Intel is bringing to market this year. This is cool news, I had been planning on getting an HDTV set this year; competiton and an alternative to DLP sets are both welcome. You can read all the details if you’re interested, if not, just keep an eye out for LCOS-based televisions this summer.

A word of warning – don’t buy keyboard/mouse products from Gyration. They make a line of radio frequency keyboards and mice with 30-100 foot ranges depending on the model. I bought one to work with my living room home theater pc and man what a piece of crap. For $100, I got a keyboard that would only intermittently connect to the base station and a mouse that for the first 2 days completely refused to work. The mouse did eventually start working automagically one morning, and I did get the keyboard to finally connect to its base station, but even when it was connected and 3 inches from the base, it would miss literally 1/3 of the key presses. The thing was completely useless. Fortunately Staples let me exhange it for a Logitech. It doesn’t have anywhere near the supposed range of the Gyration, but the thing actually worked right out of the box.

Subsequent research on various htpc forums has shown me that while some folks are very happy with their Gyration products, there are also a lot of folks like me who have had or are having nothing but problems with their products. My advice? Stay far away.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to score an IBM versapoint or Slitek Airboard off of ebay. They’re cult favorites so it’s pretty competitive bidding on them, though it does look like I will be able to get one for less than I initially paid for the Gyration.

There’s a new bit torrent client available on sourceforge called azureus. It’s fantastic. It’s the first client to have a really decent GUI, plus they’ve added a number of very excellent features, including built-in irc chat, personal torrent serving, extensive monitoring tools (those alone make the thing worth grabbing) and a novel scheme to help make the leechers suffer for their greed. My advice? Grab this stat, then wander over to sharingthegroove.org and get yourself some (legal) killer live music. Or head over to file rush and get the latest game demos, or at least use it the next time you’re trying to score some demo and you don’t want to wait on fileplanet for 45 minutes hoping your turn will come up. Or maybe tv is your thing, if so check out sites like digital distractions or tvtorrents.com – who needs a vcr when there are sites like this?

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to torrents, but hopefully it’s enough to get people started.

Now this little number would be extremely useful. Imagine being able to share usb peripherals between many machines easily. As long as this requires no software on the client machines, this is a perfect solution. No word on price or specific technical details but I will be keeping my eyes on this one; I need a way to share a laser printer amongst linux and windows desktops. I hope it’s in the $50 range.

I’ve mentioned a few times how I think it’s like that over the next 5-10 years LEDs will come to replace the incandescent bulb in most uses. The New York Times has a pretty good article that covers the basics on how this transition will take place and why. An interesting tidbit – this has the potential to cut your electricity bill in half. Worth a read if the subject interests you. Note that you probably need a (free) account on nytimes.com to use this link.

Suspect that someone besides you is using your wireless access point? You might find airsnare handy. It’s the only free windows program I’ve come across that seems worthy in this category.

Do you find window’s search feature to be a slow, useless piece of crap? I definitely do. Give locate a try, for simple file searches on the system it’s super fast and there’s none of the useless interface clutter one finds in the MS search function. It doesn’t search the contents of documents the way the MS one does – it’s a straight port of the unix locate function – but the windows function is to slow to bother with anyway so you lose nothing by making the switch. There’s something to be said for small, elegant code.

These folks are providing a free service to turn your handwriting into a font. Submit a scan of your handwriting, and they generate the font. Very slick! There are companies that charge for this, in fact you occasionally run across their ads in computer magazines. I’m surprised to see this being offered for free.

Link originally found on the most excellent zeldman.com

Well, sort of maybe. When I got back from Seattle I seemed to have no bandwidth, my net connection was slower than a modem. An hour or so of investigation led me to the web server’s access log, where I discovered everyone and his brother downloading music from my supposedly private collection of mp3’s. A little more digging and I discover a set of web pages with hundreds of links to free music downloads, including MANY to my server. I’m not sure how they got the links – I’ve been using Andromeda to stream the mp3 files to my work machine and to my living room media box. I’m not aware of any hacks to Andromeda, though it’s entirely possible they exist. It’s also possible it was simply an issue of the google spider indexing my music directories and someone having the patience to google my domain for mp3 files, off the cuff I’m not sure if andromeda protects about that, and I know for a fact that I stupidly did not create a robots.txt file to exclude the music directory from spiders. So…one way or another this was probably my fault, it still sucked though. The worst thing is the fear that the RIAA knows of this and a subpena is on its way even as I type. I don’t know for how long I was exposed in this way; I do know I had been having intermittent bandwidth and particularly latency problems prior to christmas, so its possible and even likely that this has been going on for months. ugh. Anyway a quick change on the permissions of the music directory and the would be pirates are now getting 404 errors (you should see my logs). If you’re from the RIAA and you’re investigating, trust me, I didn’t do this on purpose, and I own legitimate copies of the music I’ve transcoded and stored on my server. Please go away and pick on someone else 😉

An interesting aside – Pink Floyd was the overwhelming choice of the pirates, like 80% of them were grabbing Pink Floyd, particularly older stuff like Umma Gumma and A Momentary Lapse of Reason. At least they have interesting and refined taste.