Toast442.org

From the Washington Post, via Yahoo News: Amendment 2, a measure to that would have removed the wording that technically prohibits “colored children” from attending white schools from Alabama’s constitution, was narrowly defeated in the November 2nd vote. Yes - segregationist institutions and poll taxes will remain a part of Alabama’s highest law.

One of the leaders in the fight against Amendment 2 was the Alabama Christian Coalition. They claim it wasn’t about race - it’s about taxes. They managed to put the fear into voters that the feds would raise their taxes to pay for public school improvements if they removed language that says Alabama doesn’t guarantee an education for everyone (aimed at countering the Brown V. Board ruling.) I guess that they’re so proud of their schools they fear being forced to bring them up to par with the rest of the country. Or maybe that’s not the real reason behind fighting the amendment…

How come it’s always these “Christian Coalition” people that seem to put forward this type of thing? Sometimes I feel like we’re actually moving backwards through time. What’s next - preventing people from riding the bus?

In light of recent developments with Tivo, most notably the rancid advertising add-on that we’ll all be seeing, I’ve been looking at the alternatives. Well, apparently, so have others. Hack-a-Day, the site that brings you daily links to all sorts of wonderfully geeky projects, has a good round up of sites that pertain to DIY versions of Tivo, including my leading favorite, MythTV.

MythTV looks like a pretty big win if you can scare up the hardware to run it, and the links provided give you some step-by-step guides to getting everything up and running smoothly.

Check this out: A joystick, loaded with a complete Commodore 64 unit and 30 classic C-64 games! I’ve been playing with the little joysticks that have the old arcade gems like Pac-Man, Galaxian, etc., but this just blows them all away. Unfortunately, the only place to get them appears to be QVC, as they bought the entire run of 250,000. The good news is that they are only $30 (or two for $50.)

With a little hacking, you could turn these into a full C-64 system - if you can only find the keyboard and other ports to solder onto the board. Apparently the thing even comes will a full BASIC ROM. Very cool. I guess I don’t really need one because I still have two working machines (and a Lt. Kernel hard drive!) but what cooler thing than having one of these hooked up to the TV?

Read more for listed games, but they include such greats as Impossible Mission 1 & 2, Paradroid, World Karate Champion, and Tower Toppler. Of course if you want to play Toppler, you can download an OS X version here and you can get Freedroid (a Paradroid clone) for OS X here.

Update December 20, 2004: Check out the story in the New York Times about the designer. Linked from here.

This article from the AP tells about how exploding cell phones are becoming a “problem,” what with 83 whole incidents this past year in the past two years out of 170 million cell phone users. The problem lies with the Li-Ion batteries. These types of batteries, if not charged properly, can overheat and effectively explode. Most of the cases of this happening have been with cheap replacements and knock-off chargers. Without the proper safeguards in place in the battery and charger, stuff like this can happen.

So if you want to improve your odds, make sure you only use replacement batteries and charges directly from your cell phone’s manufacturer. And try not to buy cheap crap phones - I’d trust a Motorola or Nokia to have fewer problems than some of the low-rent LG and Kyoceras, two companies that have had recent battery recalls.

Link to video showing some exploding Li-Ion batteries (from a competing battery company.)

I’ve finally got the site moved to a new hosting service and everything should be blazing fast now as it’s no longer sitting at the end of a 768Kbps line. In tests, I’m pulling over 600KB/sec, basically maxing out my line, so who knows how fast this is. The only downside is the photo albums are broken - I need to pare them down a little before re-enabling them.

Over at Kempa.com, they’ve got a good review (with photos and video) of the wicked cool Japanese gramophone kit. It’s basically some plastic and styrofoam bits that when pieced together allows recording of audio to the plastic surface of CDs and the like. It works just like the recorders of 90 years ago, except that they probably didn’t use discarded CD-Rs to write on. Probably. The whole thing is $30-$70 depending on your importer - they’re just now hitting the U.S. verycoolthings.com looks to be the importer of choice ($70)

Sound is predictably tinny and awful, but so was the original. So record those tunes to a medium that even the RIAA can’t touch, and party like your great grandpa…

Man .. can’t Bush do anything without pissing someone off? While attending a meeting discussing Latin American immigration policies, somehow his security crew managed to upset our hosts for the evening by forcing them to walk through metal detectors. Eventually this resulted in a scuffle when Chilean authorities prevented part of Bush’s security detail from entering. Bush “intervened” by wading into the fracas and pulling out his man. Eventually, the planned dinner was cancelled outright. Nice.

I guess they didn’t get this whole security thing worked out in advance. I used to think that it was just the war that upset the rest of the world. Now I see that just about anywhere this man shows up something bad happens. Sheesh.

Link to Salon article.
Link to CNN article.

The Coding Monkeys have just released a new version of SubEthaEdit, their awesome collaborative editor for OS X. If you haven’t played with this, get a few friends together and check it out. It allows multiple people to edit files at the same time each getting their own view of the text. It works so well and so naturally that you can’t believe how you lived without it. Very cool stuff for meetings and conferences for taking notes collectively. It also serves as a very slick little editor for code, allowing syntax coloring and formatting templates.

For those who do know what SEE is, they’ve added much improved printing support, a way to pipe text through command line utilities, user-editable syntax coloring, and HTML export of text. Nice stuff. The command line pipes are very useful for me.

It’s free for non-commercial use, $35 dollars otherwise. Well worth the price.

Download it now.

According to this article at Yahoo News, the Tivo we all know and love will start popping up advertisements to users when they fast forward over commercials. That is, advertisers can now pay to pop up ads for their products even if you skip over them. There are two reasons I loved Tivo - Skipping commercials and time shifting of programs. They’ve just reduced their usefulness by 50% for me.

I was just about to purchase a couple of new Tivo units to network at home. No freaking way I’m going to do this now. It’s probably time to just bite the bullet and put together MythTV - I can use the time Tivo is showing ads to me to build it. What a bunch of idiots.

Update Nov 19, 2004: I came across this post on Tivo’s user community forum. It’s from a Tivo marketing guy, and basically gives the facts concerning the advertising “upgrade”:

Contrary to what a quick skim might suggest, TiVo is not removing fast forward. You can still zip through your program, same as before.

The tags mentioned in the article exist today, and have been in use for a couple of years now (including during fast forward).

Rather than generic thumbs-up tags, the new tags can be larger, and display both branding and new options for interactivity (contests, surveys, etc).

Nothing is full screen, nothing blocks your ability to control your television.

The displayed tags are tied to the broadcast commercial. No Coke ads over Pepsi commercials. The tags are only there if the advertiser or broadcaster includes them in the broadcast.

Assuming that this is all correct, it doesn’t sound as bad as initial reports suggested. However, the whole “tags can be larger and display branding” kind of worries me. Plus, I see enough ads for freaking Coke and Burger King and don’t want to be asked if I want to play the Burger King “King the Whopper” interactive game every time I’m trying to watch an episode of CSI or something. The thing is - I want to skip over ads. Now they’re back - just in a different form. I know - they’re trying to placate the advertisers and hence the TV networks - but hell - who says we have to keep them happy?

Galerie has just been released in version 4.0. Galerie will suck in pictures from iPhoto and now (GraphicConverter and iView Media Pro as well) and spit out nice web pages based on scads of downloadable templates. Galerie will take these generated pages and upload them to your web hosting space using FTP, which makes it very easy to put together quick pages of images you want people to see. And it doesn’t work with just photos - just about any type of Quicktime compatible media can be added to a page where they will play automatically.

Let’s see - what else? Slideshows, picture watermarking, captioning, keywords, great collection of templates. What more coud you ask for? Oh - Did I mention that Galerie is FREE as well? Yup - you don’t really need to waste money on any another web page generation app if you have this one. Download it now.