The Sect of Rama

Reminiscent of fish wrestling, frog hunting could be the next big thing.

A Do It Yourself UPS System. Not exactly pretty (unless thats your thing), or cheap at roughly $800AU, or $600US- but then again thats at least what you'd pay for a 12V 13Amp hour system capable of running a typical PC for around an hour.

Then there's the geek points you'd earn too.

Now that Sun employees have a convenient way to share multimedia files via their blogs' RSS feeds, it was time again to look at what was available to consume these streams. ipodder.org has a Windoze client, which works fine if you happen to run that on your desktop, but I was more interested in TTY based clients that would run on *nix platforms. Enter perlpodder.

As evidence of how simple consuming a cast can be, the perlpodder script is just over 200 lines (not including optional user prefs- and in four short steps (on my box anyway), you'll have more audio than you can shake an amplifier at:

perl -MCPAN -e "install XML::DOM"

wget http://unc.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/perlpodder/perlpodder.tar.gz

gzip -dc perlpodder.tar.gz | tar xf -

./perlpodder.pl

Not that I recommend that- you'll end up with nearly 1.5GB(!) of data in /tmp if you run it in its default state, but that's how easy it can be.

Now all we need are a few bold Sun employees to pioneer the effort on Mediacast! Perhaps we'll have to run blog posts through a voice synth like this (thanks AT&T Labs for the cool synth.)

Simply add my RSS feed to your favorite client, and let it do the heavy lifting.

When Nikon announced a $100 rebate on the D70 DSLR back in November, it pushed me off the fence and I finally got one. Shortly after, I completed their rebate process: "cut out your UPC, photocopy your right butt cheek, and send with a DNA sample to Nikon, PO Box...", and began the waiting game.

Being horrible with dates and generally remembering things, but having a huge pet peeve about companies not actually paying out the rebates, I scheduled an event on my Treo calendar at 6 weeks, the upper limit of their supposed refund mailing timeframe. That date came and passed about 3 weeks ago, but I've been too busy to pursue a course of action... not sure if I may have accidently thrown out a plain unmarked envelope thinking it was snail mail spam...

Well it finally arrived today! It was clearly labeled "Nikon" and "Your rebate is enclosed" with what appears to be a check poking through the window- more than enough to keep me from tossing it as junk mail. Good job Nikon-- even if it was 3 weeks late...

So if you were like me and jumped on the cheaper (and nicer) D70 bandwagon instead of the Canon series, watch for your rebate in the mail.

After getting into a heated discussion with Mr. Watt this morning on the reasons people risk life and limb to climb mountains, I decided to try some Google searches to support my perspective.

Results 1 - 10 of about 24,100 for "mountain climbing" AND hero.

Results 1 - 10 of about 8,010 for "mountain climbing" AND fool.

Three to one. What's that say about society?