Last night I went to see the Rilo Kiley tour kickoff. We missed The Golden Age (the line outside was sort of a mess), but did catch Tim Kasher doing a solo-acoustic set, which ended with a couple of really great songs, then M. Ward doing his great folk guitar thing, and then Rilo Kiley playing a great set to the sold-out crowd.

Recently, I’ve been on a BitTorrent kick. Truly impressive what’s out there. Bytemonsoon is an interesting tracker that has a category dedicated entirely to comics, which is great. There are sets of +30yo books, scanned from aged first prints. Most of these are packaged in CBR or CBZ format, which are basically numbered RAR and ZIP archives, coded for the CDisplay Comic Reader, a pretty awesomely made comic viewing program (Windows only). Quite cool.

When using BitTorrent on my PC, I found myself consistently getting spontaneous reboots. I finally looked into it, and lo and behold, it’s a known problem with my Netgear FA311 card. The suggestion to upgrade the drivers to the latest (v1.80) seems to have fixed things. Always a pleasant surprise when you can find a fix, and it actually works as advertised.

Free-X has released an exploit which allows loading Linux w/o a modchip.

The existance of an exploitable vulnerability within the dashboard could totally compromises the XBOX security system. It will make the box independent from Microsoft signed code and therefore this information is released to the public now on the 4th of July 2003, the day of the XBOX Independence.

Tried out iChatAV (audio) tonight. A much better experience than expected. Very little lag, and surprisingly good audio quality (going across a 15″ and 12″ Powerbooks on DSL/Cable).

Holy, crap, this two-parter Observer article is a must read: The last resort

When you have a teenager on the rampage, who are you going to turn to? In America, parents send their troubled offspring to Jamaica’s Tranquility Bay – a ‘behaviour-modification centre’ which charges $40,000 a year to ‘cure’ them. Decca Aitkenhead, the first journalist to gain access to the centre in five years, wonders if there isn’t too high a price to pay

Discussion at boingboing.