From the author of MenuMeters, SideTrack, a replacement driver for the trackpad (touchpad) found on Apple PowerBooks and iBooks.

• Alkulukuja Paskova Karhu – The Prime Number Shitting Bear

• PoCom-UK-001
• Incredibles Preview – man, waiting another year for this?
• AMAZING Hellyboy toon render – holy crap that looks good (in the CGTalk forums) – followup message w/ production info

One interesting comment on cel-shading: using a morpher to change the model on camera angle, rendering on 2’s, and trying out final toon for more line control

Abe Burmeister confirms Andy’s report of Paypal freezing BitPass’s account… Doesn’t surprise me at all considering Paypal’s past history.

10/14: received in email update from Patrick Breitenbach, Paypal employee (posted up b/c he left the same statement as a comment on Andy’s original post):

I’m a PayPal employee and wanted to update readers on the status of the PayPal/BitPass relationship. Over the weekend BitPass’ PayPal account was suspended pending assurances that BitPass and PayPal were in compliance with the US Patriot Act given the nature of the respective companies’ services. PayPal did not intend to disrupt payment processing and we are reviewing our procedures to ensure that this situation doesn’t happen in the future. PayPal has been in direct contact with BitPass on the matter and BitPass’ account was fully restored this morning. Contrary to speculation, this incident had nothing at all to do with competitive issues and in fact PayPal supports companies such as BitPass, Cybersource and Xoom that are building complementary services.

Wow, John Hicks’ new css Zen Garden design is quite striking. Well, I’m not with the whole overflow bit, but still, a great design.

• TV’s Tipping Point: Why The Digital Revolution Is Only Just Beginning – speech given by Ashley Highfield, Director of BBC New Media & Technology, at the Royal Television Society on Oct 6
  

  And finally, the last trend — sharing. Broadband, which is growing exponentially in the UK (up 200 percent year on year to around 2.5 million subscribers now) will make downloading of decent video quality worthwhile, easy and cheap via the net. Downloading and sharing this video is the final piece of the jigsaw and will create a killer combination that I believe could undermine the existing models of pay-TV.

• Solving the problem of DV’s 4:1:1 sampling
• The Art of the Crack
• Foo Camp Wiki (more @ zawodny’s blog)
• HL2 leak config
• Link Markers: CSS Generated Content
• What’s new in Mozilla Firebird 0.7
• aaronsw: Shades of Gray, Followup to “Shades of Gray
• Effing C.C. – ba zing!
  

  Like I said, I don’t think cursing is necesarily bad. But, I do feel that our increasing comfort with it signifies a deeper cultural ill — that we are becoming a ruder, more careless, less civil and more thoughtless people.

  To put in terms you may understand better: we’re turning into a bunch of fucking assholes.

• First They Came For the Rich…. – Grover Norquist is a Nazi (or something along those lines)

Linux vs Solaris flaming on /.

Treo 600 software:

• telnet/ssh for Treo 300?
  • Top Gun ssh for PalmOS – SSHv1
  • Mocha Telnet for Palm OS – VT100/VT220 Telnet, SSHv2 (3DES)
• Verichat – Yahoo!, ICQ, MSN, AIM
• SnapperMail

Turned Away at Border

The love story of Trevor Hughes and his fiancee began in an elementary school in the Himalayan foothills.

They were “global nomads.” He was a diplomat’s son. She the daughter of missionaries. They lived in Asia, attended school together, fell in
love and want to get married in June.

But when Hughes’ fiancee, a German national, tried to visit him on a six-month tourist visa Monday, she was detained in Atlanta, handcuffed, jailed–even stripped of her diamond engagement ring.

Then, after 20 hours without food, she was put on a plane and shipped back to Stuttgart.

“This
isn’t the America I fought for,” said Hughes, who served in the Navy
and U.S. diplomatic corps. “You don’t expect that from a great country
like ours.”

What happened in Beate’s own words:

All my belongings were taken, including all my jewelry and I was handcuffed and marched out with the other “detainees” to the van. It was reiterated on several accounts that “these were just proceedings, I was not a criminal…” Somehow they seemed to think this would make it more acceptable to me.

More at Land of the Free?

• Turning The Valve Off: Effects Of The Half-Life 2 Source Theft>
• U.S. Bureau of Engra
  ving and Printing – hmm, their site is @ moneyfactory.com