Treo 650: old and busted. Treo 700p: new hotness.

I got the Treo 700p. I like. The EVDO network is a lot faster: the web browser is, dare I say it, fast enough to be usable now.

Most importantly, Bubbles still works.

Listening to the DNA streams works, which is pretty cool.

It supports streaming video in WMV, but not Quicktime or RealVideo (e.g., ours). I can understand not supporting Real (who uses that crap any more?) but not supporting Quicktime? Come on, that's pretty useless.

It's not as much faster as I expected/hoped for downloading email (POP3S), but I guess that's more a latency issue than a bandwidth issue.

I tried again to use VersaMail the mail reader that comes with it (since it's in ROM, it's taking up space whether I want it or not), but I couldn't get it to do SMTP+TLS+AUTH delivery to my home machine, so I gave up and continued using the copy of Snapper that I bought last year. (Functionally they're basically identical, except that Snapper works.)

The camera is 1280x1024 instead of 640x480, but it's the same shitty plastic lens, so the pictures are just as blurry, dark and illegible as before, they're just bigger.

I use Missing Sync (which is generally pretty good), and before, I had the photo conduit set to download pictures on the phone to a folder and delete them when done. But with the 700p, there is an unpleasant new bug: it will only download photos that you've taken from the photo app -- not photos that have been sent to you as SMS and then downloaded to the phone, and not photos that you've taken from the SMS application. However, it will gleefully go ahead and delete those photos from the phone after not-downloading them. So beware.

(I reported it as a bug and their answer was, "We don't have a 700p." Nice.)

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some stuff.

It is a slow news day on the internets.

A cartoon about Drunk and Bitter Jesus versus Gay Porn Buddha.

A cartoon about Drunk and Bitter Jesus versus the Chocolate Easter Cock.


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finding the new

I've been playing around with last.fm recently. I like the idea of it -- there's a plugin you load into iTunes which spies on you and phones home to the server. So in theory, I get to do what I usually do (listen to my own collection) and the website makes recommendations based on that.

But, I've been seeding it for a couple months now and it has recommended very little that I wasn't already familiar with, and most of the others have been head-scratchers.

Also the "Last.fm Player" program that runs when you click on "listen" links on the site is pretty crappy. Do I really have to click on the link four or more times before it plays that song, or is it just lagged all to hell? I'm still not sure. And of course a 30 second preview is barely enough to get past the intro of a lot of songs, so it's mostly useless even when it does work.

Then they've got the usual blogging / popularity contest crud bolted onto the side, as is de rigeur for every web site these days. I haven't even looked at that part.

Pandora seems like it could be cool, but like most of these sorts of sites, it's far too interactive. To use it, I have to be listening to their stream and end up having to kill songs a lot -- which doesn't even work, since they will only let you skip like 4 songs an hour or something, so to use it, you end up being forced to sit through a lot of crap, just like that "radio" thing they used to have back in the nineteen-hundreds.

Is there anything that works better for discovering new music?

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need I remind you, monsters are real

Remember the centipede eating a mouse? Here's one catching a bat in mid-air.
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fine statuary

Many of these are awesome. Some favorites:






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DVD copy?

Dear Lazyweb,

What's the easiest way to copy a video DVD on MacOS without spending any money? (I.e., "don't say Toast".) It's not encrypted, it's a disc I made myself with iDVD, but I don't have the project file around any more. I just want to make a bit-for-bit clone of it.

Answer: Disk Utility; Select the drive of the DVD; "New Image", "DVD/CD master"; Select that file; "Burn".

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Panopticon Damacy

Invisible Sphere is a 5.5 foot diameter sphere covered with video monitors and surveillance cameras. Each monitor displays live video feed from a camera placed on the opposite side of the sphere. The sphere can be rolled around in its environment. It is a surveillance device that reveals what is just beyond it.
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long live the new flesh shoe

The shoe is stitched together with multiple pieces of latex rubber cast out of moulds made from my own skin. The shoe's toe and heel raise and lower as it occasionally vibrates/pulsates, and twitches on the floor as if it were still alive. The movement is not constant, and usually causes people to jump back while they are in the middle of leaning in for a closer look.

Previously.

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it's coming right for us

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Boom

Rocket dumps 250 tons of debris and burning fuel on parking lot.
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