Iain Sharp transformed his c.1989 Mac SE/30 into a Windows 2000 media server. From Leander Kahney's Wired News article on the heavy-duty hack:

The Mac-ITX is connected to Sharp's TV and stereo, and functions as his DVD player. It runs Windows 2000, and uses Windows Media Player, WinDVD, iTunes and Real Player. Sharp's concoction also features a 40-GB hard drive, slot-loading DVD/CD burner/player, video out (S-video and composite) and USB 2.0 and Firewire ports. It all works by remote control.

"With it all crammed together it works like a dream," he reports.

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Happy Birthday. We miss you.

Dan Gillmor is being publicly interviewed on the WELL about his fantasic "Journalism 3.0" manifesto, We the Media. All comers welcome.

OhmyNews is one of the most important new-media experiments anywhere in the world. It was the right publication at the right time.

I do discuss some work outside the U.S., though the book is based more on what's happening here than elsewhere. It turns out that I have a longish section about OhmyNews, as I visited them about 18 months ago while researching the book. I was dazzled by what I saw.

OhmyNews was launched in a place that was already well-wired for the Net. The news environment was ideal, in a sense, for a genuine opposition publication -- because three big newspapers had about 80 percent of the market share. Korea was at the cusp of political changes, and the reform-oriented candidate was a great vehicle for OhmyNews, which clearly helped elect him.

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Some eBay jokesters claim to be auctioning off a piece of wood used by George Bush as a prop during last night's presidentiary debate. I had a really bad flu bug this week, and must have been conked out cold by the time this moment happened. But, um, wow. I'm not sure which is weirder, the notion of a 2 x 4 being used as a debate prop (literally or figuratively), or the eBay listing purportedly hawking said prop. I did, however, catch the moment when Bush said "I hear there is a rumor on the Internets" about a pending military draft. Wake me up when it's all over, will you? All hail Photoshop. Link (Thanks, Maggie, image via somethingawful)

Party pooper and BoingBoing reader Hudson points us to the *actual* story behind the "wood" reference in last night's debate. Link to unphotoshopped image. Here's the debate snip:

Kerry: The president got $84 from a timber company that owns, and he's counted as a small business. Dick Cheney's counted as a small business. That's how they do things. That's just not right.
Bush: I own a timber company? That's news to me. Want to buy some wood?

Factcheck.org says Bush lied: "In fact, according to his 2003 financial disclosure form, Bush does own part interest in 'LSTF, LLC', a limited-liability company organized 'for the purpose of the production of trees for commercial sales.'" Link

justin degarmo
yoko ikeno
jules arthur
tom wilson
tara mcpherson
attaboy
luke chueh
ray caesar

Image: "Insignificant Other" (detail), Justin DeGarmo.
web zen home, web zen store, (Thanks, Frank). And while we're at it: a special sponsor shout-out to the illomonsters at Mondolithic.

Michael sez,

"Sixty Cameras Against the War," a multichannel documentary of the NYC peace demonstration on February 15th, 2003 is available for download from Archive.org under a Creative Commons license.

"60 CATW" took footage from 60 different videographers at the demonstration, and displays it in multiple screens at a time (up to 60) to give a range of activists' experiences in Manhattan as the NYPD used barricades, horse charges, and pepper spray to cleave the march in two.

Link (Thanks, Michael!)

Alex sez, "Members of the Bits of Freedom group conducted a test to see how much it would take for a service provider to take down a website hosting public domain material. They signed up with 10 providers and put online a work by Duthc author Multatuli, who died over 100 years ago. They stated that the work was in the public domain, and that it was written in 1871. They then set up a fake society to claim to be the copyright holders of the work. From a Hotmail address, they sent out complaints to all 10 of the providers. 7 out of 10 complied and removed the site, one within just 3 hours. Only one ISP actually pointed out that the copyright on the work expired many years ago. The conclusion of the investigation is worth reading, it starts 'It only takes a Hotmail account to bring a website down, and freedom of speech stands no chance in front of the Texan-style private ISP justice.'" 244K PDF Link

I've just finished Terry Pratchett's latest (and finest!) Discworld book, "Going Postal," which concerns itself with the re-opening of the Ankh-Morpork post office as a competitive check against the sempahore tower monopoly. Pratchett's hilarious Discworld novels are parables about issues of modern day, and work on multiple levels: as comedic novels, as stories and as political commentary, and Going Postal is no exception.

There are three elements of Going Postal that I completely loved:

1. (Nearly) all-new characters. The Discworld books have the signal virtue of being comprehensible no matter what order they're read in, but that said, there are a number of recurring characters, some of whom are getting a little shopworn. For Going Postal, Pratchett invents a suite of new and extremely likable characters, including an obsessive collector, a wonderfully cynical activist woman, and a pair of con-men (see below).
2. The Big Con. I'm a sucker for stories about cons and graft (see my review of the canonical text in the field), and Going Postal revolves around a fantastic and daring series of cons that are by turns nail-bitingly tense and gut-wrenchingly funny.
3. Tech savvy. Going Postal's mcguffin is the "clacks," a system of mechanical semaphore towers that have been strung across the continent in a kind of primitive telegraph/Internet. Pratchett completely nails the pioneering spirit, hacks, grift, and ingenuity present at the birth of every network, and his accounts of the technical workings of the clacks are nearly as gripping as classic real-world accounts of hacking derring-do.

Pratchett's name is a household word in the UK, but he's still relatively obscure in the US. There are dozens of Discworld novels out there, and this one is as good an entry as any -- I was totally hooked from page one. Link

I just downloaded the trailer for the PS2 game Katamari Damacy and now I want to buy a PS2, just to play it. Damn, this is demented: in Katamari, you're a rolling ball of detritus, careening through a Japanese town. As you roll over things (cars, picnic tables, people), they adhere to you, making you bigger, more ungainly, and capable of picking up bigger things. Eventually, you're meant to snowball your way up to truly stupendous articles -- all rendered in retro-cool pixel-art. Man, that's good squishee. Link (Thanks, Niels!)

Danny O'Brien's continuing his brilliant series, "To Evil," a monthly column in which he picks out a few genuinely evil people in the tech industry and describes their sins for our edification and amusement (and Danny is very, very amusing: "Ziff-Davidians" indeed!).

We start, as any trawl through the inferno should, up to our thighs in spam.

This month, Redmond's lawyers sprayed a unique license from its hind-most intellectual property glands - all over the IETF's proposal for an anti-spam mail authentication standard, Sender ID.

As ever, open source kill-joys had a few problems with Microsoft's license. First, the patent license they offered wasn't transferable. So everyone who got the source had to sign a deal with Microsoft to use their super-special patented technology.

Link (Thanks, Steve!)

This is an amazing photo-essay documenting the contents of homeless peoples' bags in London -- in some cases, the entire worldly goods of the subjects. Link (Thanks, James!)

Two Presidential candidates -- for the Green and Libertarian parties -- attempted to serve papers on the Commission on Presidential Debates, demanding the right to participate. As they attempted to approach the CPD officials, they were arrested:

The first report from St. Louis is in - and presidential candidates Michael Badnarik (Libertarian) and David Cobb (Green Party) were just arrested. Badnarik was carrying an Order to Show Cause, which he intended to serve the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD). Earlier today, Libertarians attempted to serve these same papers at the Washington, D.C. headquarters of the CPD - but were stopped from approaching the CPD office by security guards.

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