You can check it out here.

Email me if this link dies and I’ll replace it with a working one.

Pretty insightful and worth the watch.

The first privately-funded and privately-developed rocket, Falcon 1, has successfully made it into space. Falcon 1 was developed by SpaceX, a space-transportation startup company founded by PayPal co-founder Elon Musk. Eight minutes after launch, Falcon 1 reached a speed of 5200 meters per second and passed above the International Space Station. Pretty cool.

You can watch it here:

I just love learning about biology as it relates to technology. This video repays watching.

So recently I went to a lot of trouble to hook up the MythTV system I built a couple years ago, only to realize two weeks later that I don’t use it. I don’t really watch TV much at all anymore. However, there are a few YouTube channels I enjoy. More specifically, I tend to prefer the bias of Russia Today and AlJazeera English versus the horse shit that tends to come out of American media. There are a few other YouTube channels that are worth watching.

So, the problem I ran into after a week or so of watching these YouTube channels is that YouTube’s interface completely sucks. After checking around for other options for interfaces, Miro is what I ended up settling on. Miro is basically a video podcast client, but it supports BitTorrent and YouTube channels. I remember checking it out when it was called Democracy Player, but I wasn’t really impressed for reasons I can no longer remember.

What this means for you is that you can always have interesting, free, on-demand content available on your computer for when you’re ready to watch. Channels I subscribe to can basically be divided into four categories: News, Science & Technology, Libertarianism, and Humor. When I open Miro each day, I click on “New” and click Play. I am then shown a mix of videos that I am almost always interested in watching. I can skip, delete, keep each video, or just let it play through and expire ones I’ve seen after five days. The result is by far more stimulating than the content I get from my cable company.

Just FYI for those of you looking for something better than traditional cable television.

“If Fannie and Freddie were not underwritten by the federal government, investors would demand Fannie and Freddie provide assurance that they follow accepted management and accounting practices…. By transferring the risk of a widespread mortgage default, the government increases the likelihood of a painful crash in the housing market. This is because the special privileges granted to Fannie and Freddie have distorted the housing market by allowing them to attract capital they could not attract under pure market conditions. As a result, capital is diverted from its most productive use into housing. This reduces the efficacy of the entire market and thus reduces the standard of living of all Americans.”

- Ron Paul, 5 fucking years ago

In honor of the September 11 attacks, I present America and Al Qaeda with guests Michael Scheuer, Chris Hedges, Asad Durrani, Fawaz Gerges for the first episode. The second episode will be out next week.

This version of XP SP3 looks more like Vista than any version of XP I’ve seen before. Don’t get me wrong, I suggest you avoid Windows all together. If you feel comfortable trying Linux, check out Ubuntu. Otherwise, buy a Mac.

Think you can’t afford a Mac? I just bought an iMac G5 on eBay for $300. It has a nice 17″ LCD screen and works wonderfully for anything you’d want to use a normal computer for. So, no excuses.

Anyway, if you’re one of those crack heads that likes Vista because you think it looks cool, but you still value your system resources, Give this version a spin.

Well, basically. This lecture by Drew Endy is essentially about reverse-engineering DNA sequences and the future of nanotechnology. Great stuff.

So I discovered Mozilla Prism for the first time a few days ago. It’s nothing incredibly special. It basically allows you to open web apps in their own windows, independent of web browsers. This becomes a little cooler when you combine it with Google Gears, which gives many of these applications an offline capability.

Sadly, Google Gears is not available for 64-bit Linux, but you can still get it here.

Now you can treat GMail, or any other Google App, like a stand-alone application. It’s the best of all worlds.