Gizmodo – the gadget weblog

Winamp 3 is out. Hopefully it’s better baked than the pre-betas, but something gives me the feeling that it’s not. Well, there’s always Winamp 2.

More: Winamp3 faqs, backwards plugin compatibility: general/dsp/api, api, input, vis coming soon from nullsoft.

Lots of linky love:

• The Warre of All Against All – Papua New Guinean history compared to a world ruled by the DMCA
• KCRW – I just joined. They have 128K Shoutcast Streams
• Blogs: AKMA’s Random Thoughts, The Communist Squirrel, CrustyGeek Musings
• The media titans still don’t get it – Scott Rosenberg writes a great piece on the true value of the Net.
• Yowza, I haven’t been paying attention to the whole Exxon/Indonesia thing. Pretty bad juju
• C.A.F.E. 2002 – a Benefit for EFF’s Campaign for Audio-Visual Free Expression; Wil Wheaton vs Barney in a boxing ring! Rock!
• Hmm, Microsoft Typographica was discontinued because “the downloads were being abused”? Couldn’t mod_rewrite or some mod_throttle policies solve that problem easily enough? Oh, that’s right…
• New NASA Hypersonic Flight Vehicles Coming Soon – Hmm, artists renditions of NASAs proposed Hyper-X test vehicles
• What Lessig Doesn’t Point Out – an interesting /. thread
• Danger: FAQ – You can send an email to apply for hiptop (T-Mobile Sidekick) developer info here
• Jalindi Igloo – plug CVS support into editors like xml spy, HomeSite, and Visual Studio
• TortoiseCVS – or plug CVS right into Explorer, now @ v1.0.0!
• Mozilla Related:
• Mozilla Footprint Projects
• Embedding Mozilla
• From DevEdge: XPInstall Guidelines for Plugin Installations

So, I’ve been feeling pretty good about putting the free_culture presentation up online. I mean, hey, it’s gotten about 20K hits in just a bit over a day. Not too shabby. I was thinking about it, though. A quick Google search shows that there are currently about 180 million people online in the USA/Canada. Compared to that, and the people who have seen this presentation is a tiny blip (most of which is already preaching to the choir in any case).

How can we get this out to more people? How can we expose this to the average AOL user? (carpet bomb cd’s of course, but how else?) Are good one page explanations online that can spread the word as effectively? I admit, I’m a latecomer in actually thinking about these issues, but I think there needs to be a more effective way to reach out and make this reach critical mass somehow. If anyone has ideas (to actually implement), let me know…

After talking and watching a friend drive stick last night something clicked, and driving stick became a whole lot easier. I’d been driving around most of the weekend (I bought my first manual transmission car last week) and was getting gradually more comfortable, but I think it wasn’t until last night that I had my fun/scariness crossover threshold. Shifting into first is much easier when you put a lot more gas into it. My technique can still use work, but it’s becoming much more natural. Last night I got into this sort of state where I wasn’t even thinking about it. I think that’s good.

Vision Quest – Utterly fascinating.

According to a printout Dobelle hands me, the price tag for curing blindness is now around $115,000:

• Visual Prosthesis System: $100,000
• 1 miniature camera mounted on eyeglasses
• 1 frame grabber
• 1 microcomputer
• 1 stimulus generation module
• 2 implanted electrode arrays with percutaneous pedestals
• 3 sets of rechargeable batteries and 1 charger (customer is responsible for replacement batteries as needed)
• 5-year full warranty (not including travel or freight)
• 5 years of annual follow-up examinations in Portugal (not including travel) unlimited telephone consultation
• Evaluation of patient: $2,000 psychiatric evaluation/all other testing
• Hospital expenses: $10,000
• Miscellaneous expenses: $5,000 airfare to Lisbon, hotel and food for one week (2 people) miscellaneous (such as taxis)

Also in this month’s Wired, Hacking Vegas, an article on MIT card sharks, and Professor X, an article on the Alexander Shulgin, the chemist that reintroduced MDMA to the world. (it was first synthesized by Merck back in 1912)

Taking a minute to veg out from work here…

So, I’ve survived my first /.ing. Still a lot of hits coming in, about 1 or 2 ever few seconds, but nothing too bad. Interesting seeing the /.ing happening first-hand. I don’t think the server ever buckled, as I had a pretty reasonable throttle policy (50req/30s, set to 40req/90s to spread the love to some mirrors). Surprisingly few redirects though. About 1300 last night and 2700 this morning. So far, my servers kicked out over 60GB and still going. Some stats, brought to you ‘grep’, ‘wc’, and (what would we do w/o you) ‘|’, approximately:

• 17,000 hits on the index page
• 11,000 hits on the flash presentation
• 1,000 hits on the MP3 file
• 160 hits on the tarball (for those who “want it all” I guess)

In any case, while this is all well and good, I just wanted to mention how much I love Apache. Creating a weighted redirect was trivially easy. It was just a matter of creating a custom error document and creating a little php script w/ a switch that would generate a random number from 1-100 and redirect w/ a Location header as appropriate (so, if $i<40 would redirect 40% of the excess load to a specific mirror). The only thing that would have been more slick is if mod_throttle passed the exact URI in the REDIRECT_ERROR_NOTES, which would allow more exact redirections (by default, it only passes the policy name).

While the feedback overall has been positive, I swear some of these guys sending me email on this free_culture are 15 year olds. Total flashbacks to slides on mjd‘s Mailing List Judo.

You’d think that “Special Agents” would have better things with their time these days, but who knows? – FBI releases advisory about 802.11-spotting “wardriving”

I didn’t even know there was a slashdot.jp