* Via meryl, Gnooks – book reco engine * Backgrounder on steganography over at gadgetopia * Gizmodo has a piece about ATTWS’s new song identification service * For adrian, how to turn a Game Boy Advance into a microcontroller. * Raymond explains why Windows can’t boot off a USB device tho the comments suggest several solutions – sureboot and bartpe. * I need a worldphone this summer, perhaps the moto v600. * Great list of PC hardware references via geekman. * Software co-ops, very interesting development. The pressure on software pricing grows… * Python tutorial via simson, i need to learn python.

Atlas of the Year 1000 is a great little read. Walks thru the major political structures in the year 1000 around the world, and the changes that were happening to them. Lots of maps.

Really showed how pathetic my world history education is – history started in 1776 by my education. There are just huge domains of asian, middle eastern, african history of which I am woefully ignorant.

And I’m a sucker for maps.

What? They cut WinFS?? – sounds like maybe WinFS hasn’t been scaled back much, tho this posting is pretty vague about how it works on legacy media and networks (a reasonably hard problem). It certainly hints that WinFS will work just fine on a network against a remote WinFS machine – Longhorn or Longhorn server.

Hoisting this up out of my comments, Kevin points towards tools to find your existing product keys on your machine. Very helpful, I have 9 machines I manage and I can never keep straight which one has which key. Thanks Kevin

Hear hear – BuzzMachine… by Jeff Jarvis – No, when and if government employees find a threat against America, they should go and with dispatch stomp it out. The last thing we need is for them to have to go meet with the President. They are and should be empowered by the law to take action.

Not just government employees – it is the job of every citizen to fight for our rights, to build the economy, to defend our country, etc. None of us should sit back and wait for the government to fix every problem out there.

Nice roundup of reviews at gizmodo – Nvidia GeForce 6800Ultra Review Roundup – it’s time to upgrade video cards again. I continue to find it interesting that today’s apps have an unquenchable demand for GPU MIPs, while my appetite for more CPU MIPs isn’t that great. This has interesting implications in the longrun for Intel, for the balance of power in the industry, etc.

For my first Hesse ever, I recently read The Glass Bead Game: (Magister Ludi). I found it to be a pretty provoking read that seems still quite relevant today – certainly a valuable read for anyone considering a deep investment in higher education. And I found the structure of the book (intro to the game; biography; posthumous writings of Knecht) interesting and a break from the typical structure of most novels.

Clearly the book has some obsessive fans – just search the web for “Magister Ludi”, “Joseph Knecht”, or “Glass Bead Game” (I think these people miss the point of the book).

I had a goal earlier this year to read a new and different magazine each week – this book made me drop that goal. It was a compelling piece of writing, and made me realize that most magazines consist of a bag of ads interspersed with whatever articles were available at deadline. OK that is a little cynical but I still think I’ll use my reading time to read more substantial and provoking works.

Marginal Revolution: Markets in everything - restaurant edition – great tips for how to get into any restaurant regardless of the purported availability of tables

Simson’s Weblog: Looking Back at MIT – My own experience doesn’t support the “Grades really matter” point but then I generally had decent grades. But all the rest of this counsel seems very wise. Choice of major really really doesn’t matter – what matters is that you learn how to think – how to analyze and synthesize – not so much what you think about. My undergraduate years were all about analysis, I didn’t really learn much synthesis until graduate school, you need both.

More Twists and Turns on the Road to Longhorn – One alleged e-mail from a senior Microsoft Windows executive, dated March 4, claims the company has decided to curtail its Windows file-storage system (WinFS) plans by allowing the file system to work on individual PCs with Longhorn client, but holding off on allowing WinFS to work over a corporate network until a later Windows release.

hmm, this seems unfortunate. it is not clear to me i want a lot of storage innovation on the client, that just seems to lead to more stateful clients, i’ve been trying to extract locked up state from my clients for years. i want more storage in the cloud, available and usable from any client machine i happen to be at.

NBC.com – The Apprentice – OK can Omarosa really be as obviously duplicitous as she seems to be? I almost have to believe that she is playing a role and that her part is scripted, no one can be this pathological. She reminds me of the old Jon Lovitz pathological liar character.

* At marginal revolution, a good survey of current econ blogs * Also at Marginal Revolution, a good survey of graduate economics programs and related material * interesting article about the future of broadcast television * Rich points to a bunch of campaign finance resources. Fundrace is amazing. * Mike Swift at UW pointed me towards Andrew Odlyzko – lots of good articles on telecom and internet pricing and usage

Jon’s Radio points towards Spoofstick which looks like a nice feature for helping to address web address spoofing – seems like this just ought to be a feature of a toolbar or the browser

p. Hey I needed a goofy t-shirt recently and found Zazzle. Very easy to create my own shirt, easy to upload graphics, and the t-shirt shipped 1 day later and arrived fast. Great service, good range of products, very easy web-based design tool. Oh and very economic to order quantity 1.

p. I also considered Designashirt and it probably had even nicer web-based design tools (flash based as i recall) but they had a minimum order of 6. But the web experience was good.