Martin is always a great read – latest diesels in europe, audi a8. man I wish these were available here. as he says the citroen is hot looking.

Also a link to some of the discussions around energy balances of biofuels

64,000 attendance for a meaningless scrimmage. Outstanding.

via hitormiss, the books that move men – analysis and the list. fascinating differences between the sexes.

The novel that means most to men is about indifference, alienation and lack of emotional responses. That which means most to women is about deeply held feelings, a struggle to overcome circumstances and passion, research by the University of London has found.

and

Men’s reading choices tend to identify themselves with novels that include intellectual struggle. Personal vulnerability is represented as a more or less angst-ridden struggle against convention, a sense of isolation from social normality.

and

Part of the reason for this, we decided, was that, to a far larger degree than women, men’s formative reading was done between the ages of 12 and 20 - indeed, specifically around the ages of 15 and 16. For men, fiction was a rite of passage into manhood during painful adolescence.

Good discussions of the final tiebreaker puzzle over at crossword fiend and crossword bebop. Personally I sailed through the first 6 weeks and easily made it into the tiebreaker round. But today’s tiebreaker puzzle crushed me. I knew there was a nonstandard trick involved, but I didn’t figure it out in any kind of reasonable time. Hat tip to the mystery winner who may have just made a lucky guess at the right answer – if I had smartly applied game theory to today’s tiebreaker, I would have called in with an educated guess as well. I know that I am nowhere near the crossword solver that some of the participants are, my only chance to win would have been to make an educated guess. Someone did that and won, smart thinking.

• New version of network magic out – congrats guys. coverage at ehomeupgrade. (i am on the board)
• Jobster zeitgeist via phil. very nice.
• Phil also has a new version of berry411 in beta. the essential blackberry app.

• Moto m5 miniblue bluetooth headset. Nice find rich. I will get one of these as soon as they exist.
• A mobile wifi hotspot like the kyocera kr1.
• Dymo handheld printer for labelling cables, etc.
• SPU-based storage adapter like the xfx revo. All the benefits of raid, hot pluggability, way more flexible.
• Hardware for routing A/V over cat5. I have a lot of cat5 in the house.

• The Elder Scrolls Oblivion. What a massive game world. You could get lost in this thing for years.
• Secondlife. kind of yawn. the graphics aren’t as good as online games and the action isn’t as fun. but obviously a lot of people like it. the customizability and persistence features are cool. just shows again that you can’t go wrong giving people ways to form communities and to express themselves.
• Newsgator inbox. I depend upon newsgator. But it seems I have to pay for it yet again if I want the latest outlook integration. not clear to me it is worth it. UPDATE: no you don’t have to pay again, the newsgator team pointed me towards the right download. thanks guys.
• Direct2Drive. Tried this for one game download, worked great. Nice to not have to shuffle cd/dvds to play a game. A little nervous about what kind of drm hackery it might be installing on my system.

• “Mr Midshipman Hornblower”:amazon by C. S. Forester. What a great yarn. And the first of a series of ten or so books. If you’ve exhausted all the current popular serial fantasy (Potter, Tolkein, Narnia, etc) and you need to branch out, this would be a fine series to read. Great for young male readers. Not so good maybe for young women – as a product of its times and its genre, there are few female characters of note.
• “I, Claudius”:amazon by Robert Graves. History comes alive! Impressive work of story telling and of scholarship. Makes roman history fascinating.
• “Holmes on the Range”:amazon by Steve Hockensmith. The “deducifyin’” of Holmes, as practiced by a cowhand in the historical american west. The author creates a very interesting set of brothers and does a nice job keeping in voice throughout the story.

I’m a sucker for maps. Some great ones at Marginal Revolution, weighting countries by things besides area – population, tourism, exports, etc.

Speculations by kevin kelly on the future of science. Interesting. Thanks to marginal revolution.

Sounddogs – “Welcome to the world’s first online sound effects library.” I think I blogged this years ago but reminded of by kevin kelly

The Jobster team has one of these new typepad widgets. cool. seems like several of our other portfolio companies should have one too – judy’s book (they already have a way to integrate content in a blog), pure networks, perfectmatch, etc.

Imagineering blog. great insight into the disney imagineering culture – “A forum for Pixar and Disney professionals passionate about the Disney Theme Parks to catalog past Imagineering missteps and offer tenable practical solutions in hopes that a new wave of creative management at Imagineering can restore some of the wonder and magic that’s been missing from the parks for decades”

Related post: Sounddogs

I’ve been spending a fair bit of time with my music lately. Re-ripping everything I own in lossless format, and also trying a bunch of new stuff via lala. The amount of data involved now is substantial enough that I would be sad if I had to rerip everything. And we are a multi-listener, multi-ipod household, so I need to provide access to the music for multiple users. Here is what I currently do.

• Acquisition. I rip everything in flac lossless format using dbpoweramp using accuraterip to insure quality. I used to use exactaudiocopy, it is a fine program too, but I find the dbpoweramp interface a little cleaner. From this effort, I get an ever-growing store of flac-encoded content as I rerip all my cds.
• Conversion. Unfortunately the iPod doesn’t speak flac, and the ipod hard disks aren’t big enough to handle flac. So weekly I downconvert all my new flac content to mp3 using dbpoweramp again. works pretty well in batch mode.
• Library-ization. I take the converted mp3 content once a week and add it to iTunes on one machine, and I let iTunes rename/reorg the files on this machine only. Because I am replacing old mp3s from previous rips, this sometimes creates some cleanup work for me – dupe files, etc. I’ve tried various strategies to limit he cleanup work but none of them work well.
• Fanout. To get the library on all machines, I currently use beyondcompare. It seems pretty fast and has an intuitive interface for me. I can save my various configs, it is pretty quick and painless to get everything in sync. this gives everyone a copy of the mp3 lib, and on their machines they can keep their own ratings, etc. Oh one key thing I also use – on my mac mini I have just started using sharepoints – makes it easy to share an arbitrary directory for network use by pc clients.
• Archiving. I also use beyondcompare to make a couple copies of the underlying flac storage, even though no one really uses those versions directly. I did install a flac filter on one machine so I could play the flac versions directly in WMP but I rarely do that.

The next two things I intend to do are:

• add in another hard disk to the fanout/archiving mix, and rotate it to my office, so that I have offsite storage.I’ve already done this informally but I need to make it a core part of the process.
• look into how to export the itunes ratings from one machine to another. I personally use two machines and I’d like to keep the ratings in sync on those two. I’ve seen articles on how to do this, just need to dig in a little.
• I also need to start thinking about how to integrate multiple ipods for my own use. my music collection in mp3 format far exceeds the storage of the biggest ipod. so far I’ve been able to keep on top of this by rating songs and dumping all the 1-stars off the ipod automagically at sync time. but with all the lala-provided discs I am trialling, I have way too much music – I want to carry around all the songs I know I like, plus all the ones I have yet to listen to. Not sure what the right strategy is here yet.

I love google maps and mapquest, but if you are planning a multi-leg road trip – say for instance visiting 8 colleges and universities over 4 days – AAA triptiks are still pretty darn useful. They make it easy to specify multiple stops, save your plans and try variants, and they print out pretty well. I joined AAA for other reasons, I’m not sure I would pay the fee just for triptiks, but if you are already a member, worth trying.