For those of you familiar with CDDB and Gracenote and the various precursors that spawned being able to identify your audio CDs by inserting them into your computer, you may be interested in hearing about MusicBrainz. The site/free service is a community-based open-source and open-database answer to the problem …

According to an article1 in EE Times UK, Neah Power Systems2 (of New York) is creating fuel-cell based batteries for laptops that can fit in existing bays. Their current statements predict hitting 150WH by the end of the year, which would be basically 3x the current crop of …

In a stunning revelation this week, the February 17th issue of ESPN Magazine contains a picture of the gigantic basketball player Yao on an airplane playing a heretofore unidentified computer game on a computer that is clearly not a Macintosh.[Picture in full article] Although reportedly a player of some …

According to an article on CNet, much-beleaguered Lucent Technologies is releasing a new cellular phone technology for data that will be ten times as fast as today's fastest cellular network, NTT DoCoMo. According to a Lucent press release, the chip that powers this speed has been developed by the same …

The folks at TiVo, who earlier this year announced their Series 2 product (with more storage and upcoming home-network connectivity features), have answered the pleas of current TiVo users who purchased lifetime TiVo subscriptions by allowing them to upgrade to the new system while preserving their existing membership. This announcement …

Striking another blow for censorship, the German government has closed down a web site, Ogrish.com, because it contained gruesome pictures, according to Cnet.com in an article posted this morning. Although it certainly appears that the site was tasteless and quite possibly illegal under German laws, it is an …

According to an article on Wired, the state of Kentucky has issued a mandate that all new public housing units that receive funding of 50% or more from the State's housing corporation (the KHC) be wired for high-speed internet access. The KHC has also stated that they're working on a …

In a recently published article in the IEEE's magazine, The Institute, the organization is calling for congress to take a second look at the DMCA. To quote the article: "Two recent court battles, as well as concerns raised by members, have prompted IEEE-USA?s Intellectual Property Committee to re- …

MAP, NASAs Microwave Anisotropy Probe, has finally given up its first results. If you're interested in topics like the age of the universe (13.7 billion years), this is a good place to get some additional info.

Check out this picture recently from a Gateway ad.

Contrary to the belief of our fine Ukrainian friend, Coca-Cola is actually NOT as well thought of as Apple. Apple took the number 2 spot behind Google in a poll of international brands. Coca-cola came in third, 2 percentage points behind Apple. If you want to read on, the article …

The Associated Press is reporting that NASA has found a piece of the Shuttle Columbia's left wing, which has played so prominently in recent theories about the shuttle's destruction. A report (not available) on Yahoo states that this part contains about two feet of the carbon-fiber wingtip plus another foot …

Not surprisingly, Microsoft has filed for a number of patents regarding their .NET initiative. An article on CNet is reporting that at least one of these patents is very broad and may well make the entire API to Microsoft's .NET platform a patented product and therefore stymie the efforts of …

The CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Company) reports in an article1 today that Canadian legislators are attempting to determine whether to issue biometric ID cards for citizens that are going south or whether to continue pressing for exemption from the USA PATRIOT act. Original link (http://cbc.ca/stories/2003/02 …

I've been using this piece of software for a number of days now, and I need to tell other people about it. The stuff works exactly as it should, very invisibly, great with Safari and Chimera (probably others). The software is free and comes to us from Schubert IT in …

Apple has released v0.2 of X11 for MacOS X 10.21. If you're using the previous version, the download page has a list of improvements. x11 is no longer available for download. ↩

Check out the TIA (Total Information Awareness) logo merchandise at Cafeshops.com. It's a hoot and the proceeds go to the ACLU.

Apple Computer this morning announced a new version of the Xserve 1U server and a new RAID device called (not surprisingly) Xserve RAID. The new Xserve has one or 2 1.33GHz G4 CPUs and uses DDR333 RAM for faster access. It also contains the new FirewWire-800 announced only one …

A number of sites have pointers to this internal memo1 allegedly from Sun Microsystems and posted on InternalMemos.com2. The gist of the memo is that more resources need to be committed within Sun to make sure that the development efforts necessary are spent on Java and that …

The BBC is reporting in the following article that a 10m hole opened up yesterday swallowing 3 lawns (gardens by English standards). The apparent cause is the boring of a connecting tunnel to London from the Chunnel that was taking place 20m below the surface.