Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Friday, August 15, 2003

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Sour Note to Microsoft Deal: "Microsoft's latest deal would let Europeans download music on the cheap, but it also buttresses the EU's contention that the American monolith is attempting to dominate the audiovisual field by bundling its own player with its dominant desktop system." [Wired News]

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iChat AV, iSight chat system: "impressive": "iSight's biggest drawback is you won't be able to do video chatting with most of the world, which uses Windows and slow, dial-up connections...Still, Apple often sets the trend for other companies. And sometimes, as in the case of the iPod music player, the company even deigns to extend its products to Windows users over time. So Apple's success in video instant messaging holds hope for all of us." [The Macintosh News Network]

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Open-source FTP and SSH Browser for Mac OS X: "Cyberduck 2.1b2 is an open source SFTP (SSH Secure File Transfer) and FTP browser licenced under the GPL. Cyberduck features the same intuitive interface for both FTP and SFTP browsing." [The Macintosh News Network]

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Power Outages: "BBC News is providing better coverage than stateside news outlets, as usual." [Matt Croydon::postneo]

Wireless slave of freedom -- Comment()
I wrote a net column titled Wireless slaves of freedom (in Finnish, Vapauden orjaksi langattomasti). The column discusses how information technology makes us slaves while promising freedom.

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Use TeXShop as a PDF manipulation tool: "TeX engine in concert with the latest version of TeXShop makes for an immensely useful PDF manipulation package. [...] TeXShop will open any PDF file dropped on its icon, and you can copy and paste any rectangular section of a PDF file into, for example, OmniGraffle, Keynote or PowerPoint. Even easier, you can drag across a section of the PDF file using the selection tool in TeXShop and then drag-and-drop that section into a document from another application." [macosxhints]

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Fun with the Google calculator: "I spent some time last night playing with Google's newest toy, the Google Calculator. [...] If you want to get really ridiculous, you can find out how many yoctometers there are in one vigintillion parsecs (~3.08 x 10^103 if you're curious)." [kottke.org]

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Do they really work?: "We've all seen the ads. And we've all wondered if they really do work. But few of us ever try them. Even fewer document their experience on a weblog. That's right, we're talking about Penis Enlargement Pills. Over on Do Penis Enlargement Pills Work? you can follow one man's experience, starting from day #1 when he took the baseline measurements...." [Jeremy Zawodny's blog]