LookIt

New waste of time (but only a little)

Google Sightseeing. Good selection of odd things in satellite photos. Let's hope it lasts.

Somewhat related: a great all-color book from 1976 called Mission to Earth: Landsat Views the World. This was produced by the U.S. Government Printing Office, and is gorgeous. It is 400 pages (in large format) of stunning satellite photos and geographical descriptions of various places on earth. A must-have for those who like photos from above.

Boy, those anti-spam fines sure are scary

The US Federal Trade Commission recently announced that they had fined Kodak for sending spam. Kodak had sent over two million offending messages, so the FTC fined them....

$26,331.

Real-world failures in book scanning

Why scanning books and putting them on the web doesn't work. It's not just Don^Hri. It's the whole idea that this can be done cheaply and usefully at the same time.

Looking for some less obvious MacBook benchmarks

In today's Macintouch, I ask "Do the DIMMs *have* to be matched by size? That is, could I remove one of the 256M DIMMs and put in a 1G DIMM (of appropriate speed) and have a 1.25G system?". David Charlap quotes from the owner's manual that it should be possible, but with some performance degradation, and says "As for how much it will suffer, someone will have to perform some benchmarks. Some computers don't take much of a hit, and others end up virtually crippled."

So, dear readers, if any of you have bought a 512M MacBook (not MacBook Pro), and have also bought a non-Apple upgrade to 2G, could you do some basic benchmarking in the three possible configurations (512M, 1.25G, 2G)? I would be happy to post the results here. CINEBENCH and the memory tests from Geekbench would be great.

Related but different question: how does amount of RAM affect battery life? More chips mean more battery drain, but more RAM means less use of the disk because of virtual memory. Any pointers to articles or notes on this would also be appreciated. The question for me is 1G vs. 2G; the cost of starting at 2G is fairly high, and is sure to drop over the course of a year, and if the DIMM pairing question above yields "forget it, you really want paired", going from 1G to 2G means throwing away the 1G DIMMs.

Satisfaction

A bit of a departure from my normal folky music postings. Probably my favorite band around 1980 was Devo. I remember seeing their introduction to the world of TV on Saturday Night Live: a very twisted cover of the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction". I was at a party, and many people in the room watching the music kept asking "What the @#$% is this?". A few of us, on the other hand, were goggle-eyed, laughing, and loving it.

Here is a later version of Satisfaction (MP3, 4.6 meg) from a hot, wild concert I was at in Boston, 7/17/80. I'm glad to see someone circulating a nice FM radio version!

MAD about the Sixties

If I had seen MAD about the Sixties when it came out a decade ago, I would have bought it. It is now out of print but available cheaply from sellers of used and discontinued books. If you are a male in your late 40s, and you adored MAD even half as much as my friends and I did when you were growing up, you will love this book. It is really a "best-of" from the era, with an emphasis on the latter part of the decade. There will be a dozen (or dozens!) of your favorite articles, covers, and comics from the usual gang of idiots.

I got my copy through PaperBackSwap, a service with which I am very happy. I have traded about 30 books, and gotten a whole raft of things that are easily worth the $2ish of postage I spend on sending out my trades.

Why I shred my boarding passes

...and why you should too. I hope that the airlines that collect boarding passes as you get on the plane (such as Southwest) are diligent about shredding them as well.

FWIW, I found this article on the InfoSec News mailing list, which is a great resource for security folks.

Worse acronyms

Tim started it, and Bill picked up the ball. We old-skool folks are proud of our tools, too. My web sites are created with HATE (HTML, Apache, and any old Text Editor).