As if anyone needed it – the guardian has posted a poll designed to uncover the top 20 geek novels, and as of now I’ve read 18 of the top 20, I’m missing only Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks and Trouble With Lichen by John Wyndham. I just read my first Banks novel earlier this year, The Player of Games, and really enjoyed it, so I’m adding Phlebas to my wishlist. I’d never heard of Trouble with Lichen before and Amazon doesn’t seem to have much info on it.

In terms of which of those top 20 books I’d name as my personal favorite, I’d have to go with:

Dune

Though it’s a pretty tough call – Neuromancer, Snow Crash, Watchmen and Cryptonomicon are all killer books that I really enjoyed.

I honestly have no idea if this is all going to work out as this current.boom seems to think it is, but man, it really is the second coming of client-server. Today’s example? A flowchart engine built in flash from gliffy.com. They’re in beta and unfortunately not taking new accounts right now, but that link will give you a pretty good sense of what their service is about.

There’s a pretty good comment in the latest cringely column that touches on the core of this I think – he’s talking specifically about Microsoft when he says this:

1) Gates and Ozzie HUGELY over-estimate the role of advertising. This is intentional because it distracts with enthusiasm and plays into current Internet hype. Advertising alone will not be able to support these services, especially if Microsoft benefits from them only tangentially as Ozzie suggests. Remember that for Gates and Ballmer to be happy, Microsoft will have to maintain $2.5 billion per month in revenue and $1.5 billion per month in profit. That’s FIVE TIMES the size of Google without Google’s ad expertise or ad infrastructure. It simply won’t happen.

But the takeaway is – there’s not as much money in net advertising as there is in selling licensed software, not by a ginormous order of magnitude. I agree with Cringley, it’s hard to imagine Microsoft sustaining itself on this business. The question is, can all these smaller players like today’s example? Some of them, including Gliffy, seem to intend to upsell into paid services for some of this stuff, but at least as far as I can recall there’s not a ton of success with this model. Anyone know how many folks actually pay Yahoo for an enhanced email account, for example? Or Flickr? My sense is not a lot, and you’re basically dis-incented to do so because there’s always someone else with a better deal anyway. I’m seeing tons of cool applications coming out these days (Writely, Gliffy, Num Sum, and so on) but what I don’t see is the business model. It reminds me of the first dot.bomb, bigtime. Anyone seeing something I’m not here?

Digicamreview has reviewed the Panasonic Lumix DMC LX1, the first consumer level 16×9 digital camera. I’m in the market for a new camera. My trusty canon a40 has been great but 2 megapixels doesn’t cut it anymore. This one is tempting – I shoot a lot of panoramas of the hikes I go on, and this thing would be fantastic for that, both in wide and tall mode – wide so I can take fewer shots per panorama, tall so I can capture more of the sky when I’m shooting the mountains I hike in. To be honest I would never have considered a panasonic until I saw this review. I’d been focusing on Canon and Pentax so far, Canon because they rule and Pentax because they have a decent submersible camera that’s fairly inexpensive. I can get a wide angle lens for several of the Canons I’ve been considering but it adds bulk to the camera and this time around I’m trying to get as light and small of a camera as I can. The review is generally positive, it’s main complaints are with the noise levels the camera produces and the fact that it’s relatively expensive for an 8MP camera. I’m adding it to the list of models to consider when I get around to buying a new camera this spring.

Of course wags will observe I basically still am, but check out this awesome inexpensive gocart project. Take two cheap cordless drills, add sanding discs to them, bolt them down onto a platform, add wheels, and you’ve got a gocart that controls like a tank. Add a tennis ball launcher to this and some protection for the occupant and you’ve got the best kid toy ever.

[via Make]

I have a weakness for epic fantasy, borne of my mother’s decision to read the hobbit and then the entire lord of the rings trilogy to my sister and I over the course of our childhood. George RR Martin’s ‘A Song of Fire and Ice’ series is along with Steven Erikson’s Malazan series about as good as it gets these days in terms of this genre, and after a 5 year wait the latest volume in Martin’s series , A Feast for Crows, is out. Early reviews are sadly mixed, observing that the book is overlong and demonstrating a lack of good editorial advice, but I’m buying it nonetheless. Fortunately for fans, the next volume shouldn’t take nearly as long to arrive – Martin basically wrote himself into a 1000+ page corner and decided to re-edit and cut the massive tome into two volumes, so the 6th book in the series will supposedly come out this spring. We’ll see about that, but in the meantime there’s the current volume to enjoy. I’ll post a review once I’ve read it, though it will be a while. I’m currently wading through the latest Malazan book from Erikson (House of Chains) and my bet is I won’t touch another epic fantasy for a while. Don’t get me wrong, Erikson is great, but a single 1k page epic is enough for me for a while.

Full disclosure here – I’m testing integration of wordpress (my weblog software) and Amazon. Clicking on the link means I’ll get a small commission if you buy the book. I’m actually not trying to make any money here, I just find it convenient to have an easy and legal way to get product imagery into my weblog. For example:

I’ve written occasionally about how LED lights will gradually displace incandescent bulbs in most applications over the coming decade or so, and this is already happening – look closely at the tail lights of that truck you’re passing, or the traffic light you’re stuck at, and also note how you can buy LED bulbs to replace your existing incandescent bulbs right now, they’re just a little pricey and a little dim for most applications. There’s news today that major progress has been made on the dimness front – researchers in Japan have managed to almost double the luminosity of LED’s. I think this means you’ll be able to manufacture a bulb that’s sufficiently bright to replace incandescents for most household uses. At what cost, I don’t know (and given that the inventor is leaving his research job to commercialize this, my guess is ‘not cheap’ to start), but it’s another step down the path.