Make your own electronic book

Ever wanted to make your own electronic book?  No?  Me neither!  But then I found an out-of-print book at the library, which I really wanted a copy of.  Here's how I scanned it and cleaned it up into a nice usable document, using my desktop computer running Ubuntu.

Large file hosting: try ADrive

Often, when I'm skiing or on some other excursion, I take large numbers of photos and want to distribute them to other people. So I need a web host that offers a lot of storage space and high download capacity.

Pidgin, Google Talk, and XMPP

The Pidgin IM client supports just about every instant messaging protocol ever conceived, including many poorly-designed and undocumented proprietary protocols, such as those used by AOL, Yahoo!, and MSN.  It also supports  XMPP (aka Jabber), the open-standard protocol on which Google Talk is based.

There are some interesting technical and political issues surrounding the implementation of Google Talk's XMPP extensions...

Acer AS1410: first impressions

I recently bought an Acer AS1410 netbook/small notebook. Here's a bit more about my thought process while buying, and my initial review.

Supreme Court shadow boxing

Recently, Charles Blow of the New York Times noted that, if Sonia Sotomayor is confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice, there will be 6 Catholics, 2 Jews, and only 1 Protestant on the Supreme Court. This is a sharp reversal from the situation 30 years ago where there were 8 Protestants and one (very liberal) Catholic on the Court. Blow asks, "Does/should this matter? Why?"

Here's what I think:

The Best of the Best

Tonight I went to both sessions of the Best of the 48 Hour Film Project DC 2009. 24 short films were shown in all, out of 94 (?) total on-time submissions. There was some great work shown tonight, with the second session in particular just blowing me away.

The latest Pentax DSLR, wow!!

Forget netbooks or camcorders, I have a new gadget to lust after... the new Pentax K-7 DSLR camera.