When my girlfriend first saw my Mac I could see the envy in her eyes. Who wouldn’t envy this sexy machine? Soon after Lauren took the plunge and switched. She now has officially become a card carrying, windows bashing Mac user and I think it’s great! Let’s compare notes: She has her own blog, she bashes windows, she loves sports, and has a strange fascination with the TiVo. Yeah. You’re jealous. I know.

Since I recently sold my old Samsung I300 I’ve decided to purchase a TiVo. Being the geek that I am and knowing the hackability of these awesome little devices I went to Google to see what kind of hacks I could find. I found a plethora of TiVo knowledge at the Complete TiVo FAQ. This covers everything from upgrading the hard drives to installing NIC’s.

So where to go from here? TiVo is running a special on their refurbished 60hr series 2 recievers for $149 (USD) right now, which is pretty darn cheap. Follow that up with a TiVo AirNET card and you have a wireless TiVo just BEGGING to be hacked! All for less than $250.00! I can already see that I’ll be spending a lot of time pimping out my TiVo (wonder if Debian has been ported). Wonder if you’ll hear me complaining about my TiVo being hacked in the near future …

I watched the whole MacWorld keynote on TV today and all I can say is “wow”. I desperately want one of the new smaller TI Books. I’ve been looking for various items I can sell on ebay to raise the necessary funds. I think you can live on only one kidney, but I heard the market is down on black market organs. Oh well, I guess I’ll have to find a more legal way to fund my purchase.

In other news classes started today, which means I’m officially in the market for a labotomy. My Oracle class is going to be mind numbing to put it lightly. This combined with Art Appreciation will most likely result in suicidal tendencies for most of the semester. I just can’t wait for classes to be over and for me to graduate for good.

In a follow up to my previous article about micropayments I’m posting a proposed system for micropayments, which sounds viable.

It involves having users sign up for a service and then parsing your logs for requests made by that user. If the user has made a request the log parser charges the user for that request. A simple solution that could work in the real world.

As you all know I’ve been pondering purchasing a new iPod, but have yet to take the plunge.

The time might be upon me now. Recent rumors tell of a new video enabled iPod. Rumors range from a color screen with MPEG4 support to merely a portable set top player. Either of which would be undeniably cool.

I just read an exciting review of the upcoming Matrix sequels. I made the mistake of missing the first one while it was in the theaters. I won’t make that mistake this time around. I plan on being the first in line when this next one comes out. Here’s what I think is the juciest tidbit.

Fans will go particularly bonkers over one shot of an agent leaping from atop a moving car onto the hood of another and, with his feet, crushing the entire thing into a pretzel.

The article makes reference that the third one will in fact have both Neo and Agent Smith in it, which leaves everyone else up for grabs at this point. I read somewhere on the net that there is a possibility that Trinity is an agent, which would sadden me to no end.

There was an interesting article on Slashdot about ways to fight spam. Spam is the bastard child of email and isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. There have been a number of interesting ideas thrown out there, the most interesting of which is the idea of “micropayments.”

A micropayment is something that could come to light in a few different forms. I envision two types. The first would be monetary. The sender, if not on my “white list”, would be required to send a token payment (maybe 0.0001 dollars per email) to a PayPal type account before my SMTP server would accept the email.

The second type of micropayment option I could see is that of a processor payment. This would entail my SMTP server requesting a valid token for my email. The encrypted token would eat up a few CPU cycles, costing the server in load. Spammers wishing to send billions of messages a day would require vast server farms that would, hopefully, not be cost effective. The problem I see with this option is that large email shops like Yahoo! and Hotmail might not be able to support the load of their own email servers sending out valid email.

With thousands of people opening up their personal blogs every day, blogs are becoming a media form of their own. But, many do not realize that what they post could very well get them in trouble in real life. I learned this first hand in high school. Posting you think the bully in your school is an asshole is a sure fire way of getting your ass kicked. The Washington Post has an interesting article on the legalities of what authors post to their blogs.

Posting information or opinions on the Internet is not much different from publishing in a newspaper, and if the information is defamatory, compromises trade secrets, or violates copyright or trademark regulations, the publisher could face legal claims and monetary damages.

I’m sure theres more than one or two posts on this site that contain information that could get me into some sort of trouble. With my site getting more and more traffic every month I try harder and harder to keep my content legal-trouble free.

This is another interesting point to note. I feel that I would be a lot more open in my blog if it were anonymous. I’d let loose some of my more liberal (and conservative) feelings that I now hold back out of fear of offending a coworker, family member, or future employer.

There has been a lot of buzz in the Open Source community about which OS license is appropriate for government use. A recent thread on Slashdot talks about which license is the best choice. In a rare lack of “First Post!” syndrome the posters have managed an insightful thread. All make great points on why they should choose the GPL or why they should choose BSD license; they being the government.

On a whole I have to say the BSD license makes the most sense. Yes it would be nice if all code based on publicly funded projects was open, but it does not fall in line with current standards. If a publicly funded researcher uses public funds to find out a certain bacteria attacks and kills the AIDS virus natrually his research, by law in most cases, would have to be released without IP restrictions. This means Pfizer could come along and create a drug based on this research and charge billions of dollars for it.

While the above example may not be the greatest outcome, it must be said that Pfizer pays taxes too. Also, in the end the public is much better served by the solution than the research. On the other side of the coin, the GPL side, Pfizer should manufacture and distribute the drug for free, which does not make much sense.

I’ve been reading the buzz about Bluetooth for a few years. Like most others I wondered if this seemingly amazing technology would ever find its way into the mainstream. The answer is “Yes.” Everything from bluetooth printers to mice and keyboards are scheduled to come out this year (the mice and keyboard are already out).

This brings me to the point of this post. I bought a new cell phone with BT technology built in. I bought the Sony Ericsson T68i. The phone works with Apple’s iSync. This means that I can have my phone sitting in my pocket and as soon as I’m within 30 feet of my computer it syncs all of my calendars, contacts, etc. wirelessly. Yeah. Cool.

I also bought the CommuniCam as well, but plan on sending it back since it has no flash and is not a very good replacement for my Sony digital camera. I’ll probably pick one back up once more people have 3G service. One of the coolest features with ATT’s mLife service is that it has GPS searching. In other words you are standing on a corner and click “Find Resturants” and the service finds all resturants in the surrounding area. Yeah. Cool. The best feature that I’ve found thus far is that the phone accepts and sends cards flawlessly via IR to my current Palm Phone, the Samsung I300.