Note to self – add this to Newsgator sub list

Now this is one I might actually carry – emergent report : gadgets/general/swissarmyusbflash.html – tho now they have created the first USB dongle that will cause you to commit a felony if you carry it on a plane.

Nokia’s Lifeblog, Microsoft’s Sensecam, Gordon Bell’s MyLifeBits, some CMU students blogging a lot of the activity – lots of early thinking happening about recording your entire life. And a couple thousand startups focused on the most trivial first implementation, moblogs. I don’t see that many companies focused on the longer term vision tho.

Way cool – The house-building robot - Engadget - www.engadget.com – I’ve been excited about the work going on with desktop rapid prototyping machines, here is the idea on a whole different scale.

As always, David Stutz is a good read – The Synthesist - commodity_software. Thanks to Emergent Report where I first saw this link.

Tong Family Blog: Disk Drive recommendations – a good overview. I have the little brother of the 10,000 RPM SATA drive rich mentions and i’ve been very happy with it, it has a material impact on system speed.

Greg Reinacker’s Weblog - Business on the Golf Course – truly amazing, the XBOX as a business tool. Heck with golf; who wants to play Call of Duty and talk business?

BananaSlug – adds a random word to your query. Surprisingly interesting results.

Cooking with Google – enter the ingredients you have on hand, see what recipes match.

Ouch – Mike Sax: Passport support for an arm and a leg – $11,500 to be a Microsoft Passport ISV. Compare and contrast with the expense to become an Amazon affiliate or a Google affiliate. Hmm.

Engadget Exclusive: Your phone is obsolete - AT&T Wireless requiring customers to replace their phones - Engadget - www.engadget.com – crap i just got the moto smartphone. They better make me a good offer.

(As an aside, I love the fact that engadget and gizmodo are now trying to beat each other on the gadget news front – twice as much news now!)

Pointers to this all over the blogosphere – Berkshire Hathaway 2003 Annual Letter (pdf) – and articles in the WSJ and local papers, I wonder how many hits this is getting this weekend.

NBC.com > The Apprentice > Prot?g? Corporation – and good riddance. Maybe now you can get the medical attention that your “concussion” demands.

Ok i borrowed ideas from Adrian’s Weather Station and now I can view my webcams at home from any WAP device – notably my blackberry. Very cool. Adrian talked about the next step a little with me today – wire up my doorbell so that, when it is pressed, I automatically get an SMS including the link to my webcam so I can see immediately who is at the door. Ultimately I want to be able to talk to anyone at my door and see them. Really all the pieces are there today – I’ve got an intercom and camera at the door, i just need to be able to route their I/O realtime over IP to my blackberry.

I tried Twin Tracks : The Unexpected Origins of the Modern World. Gosh was this boooooring.

The premise – start with a historical event, follow a set of ?six degrees of separation? links to a modern event, and show the strange connections along the way. I am sure this is a work of some scholarship. To research and find these connections is time consuming.

But so what. There is nothing causal about these chains. I know bill gates, he knows the premier of china, does that mean that I have any influence over the government/culture/society of china? No. Throw in 2 or 3 more degrees of separation and it is just absurd – my grandmother spent a night in the White House during the Harding administration, can we tie Harding to current events in China. And the stories in this book have 10-15 links, if you’ve played the ?six degrees? game at all, you see quickly how trivial it is to link anyone to anyone, there is nothing statistically surprising about these links.

The booh has 25 narratives of this form, I gave up on the 2nd. Worse than reading someone’s blog.

Add Your Own Background Noise – very cool. Back in the day when the NetMeeting team worked for me, I always wanted to add custom background noise and video to a conference – bluescreening without the bluescreen. We needed more generations of Moore’s Law on our side to make this happen, but looks like we are on the way there.