Nosce te ipsum

Oh my! This tasty little morsil comes to use from Engadget.

An anonymous donor was kind, so kind, enough to send us a special sneak preview of how our RSS feed would look in the upcoming (when? oh when?) OS X 10.4 Tiger. We’ve got a couple of screenshots and a video encoded with Quicktime 7 using MPEG4. They depict a screensaver written in the new Quartz Extreme with a new developer application called Quartz Composer, that animates RSS feeds in, shall we say, a pretty jaw-droppingly slick way. Video link below, and peep another screenshot after the jump.

Tiger RSS screensaver video [2.87MB, Quicktime]

...and that's just an RSS enabled screen saving powered by Quartz. Come on April!

I was browsing the shelves at the local book store over my lunch hour on Friday and was surprised to see that Kevin Mitnick's new book had been published entitled:

The Art of Intrusion : The Real Stories Behind the Exploits of Hackers, Intruders & Deceivers

It's a little different from his last book - whereas they had people write in with a variety of exploits and hacks and at the end of each chapter, Kevin discusses how to protect against such exploits in your own environment. Pretty interesting reading.

This morning I pulled down the weekend's podcast load and Leo Laporte did a podcast with Kevin where he stated that he was ready to switch over to the Mac has his main machine. (If you remember Woz gave Kevin a 17" Powerbook when he was legally allowed to go back online after his ordeal).

There's a good story in the Times about Wil Wheaton because of his recent appearance in CSI. Wil also did a post about it here.

Like a lot of other people, I've been reading Wil's blog for years now before the term was ever popular and I see so much of all of us in the struggles that Wil has gone through over the years - he really is an inspirational guy.

In January I sat there watching his keynote address and thinking that this is just one really humble, cool human being who deserves all the good things that come his way.

Thanks to Doc Searls for the heads up on this.

From Slashdot

It shouldn't be long before Apple's legal team goes after this one. LuxPro out of Taiwan introduced the Super Shuffle at CeBit, a look-a-like portable that is identical to the iPod Shuffle right down to the sihouette ads, but with the addition of an FM tuner and voice recording. Slashdot Discussion

More in-depth breakdown between the two units.

And the ensuing showdown at CeBIT between Apple and LuxPro.

From Heise:

Urged by Apple's lawyers Luxpro had taken the player out of its show cases on Friday, only to put it back in again on Saturday for the benefit of the weekend visitors to the CeBIT event. Who, moreover, did seem to show an interest in the device: The player offers besides all functions present in the genuine iPod shuffle an FM tuner, a WMA playing capability (according to the manufacturer also with digital rights management) and voice recording - only AAC support has to be dispensed with. At that the iPod lookalike is only marginally thicker and according to statements by staff at the stand "in any case cheaper than the original."

Even a visibly distraught Apple product manager was unable on the Saturday evening to persuade Luxpro´s stand manager to once again remove the Super shuffle from the display. The stand the visual appearance of which is strongly reminiscent of an Apple ad campaign provided a bizarre backdrop to the brief yet heated verbal encounter that ended without mutual agreement. "Our lawyers are in the process of weighing legal options," the Apple press spokesman, Georg Albrecht, told heise online. (Robert W. Smith)

I'm not a lawyer (thank you Lord) and I don't proclaim to know the nuances of copyright law but can this possibly be legal? Such an utter and total clone (sans the new enhancements). One thing I'll say about LuxPro - they got balls.

I came across this last month and got a good laugh out of it. Lord, please strike me down when I get to the point where I need a company like Microsoft to tell me how to understand what my child is doing on the computer.

Anyway, it was am amusing read on how Microsoft will teach you how to understand l33t $p3@k!