Good article in today's NY Times about the One Laptop Per Child initiative. "Mary Lou Jepsen, the chief technologist for the project, likes to refer to the insight that transformed the machine from utopian dream to working prototype as "a really wacky idea."" Check it out! ---- BTW, you don't need the OLPC laptop to check out one of the...

I see TIME has a breath-takingly stupid list that pupports to be "the greatest and most influential records ever." Not one non-English-language record. Not one record from continental Europe. Not one from Africa. Not one from South America. Not one from Asia (I don't think the Plastic Ono Band counts). Australia/Pacific gets one for AC/DC. Only four non-US artists in...

I spent the last month making my own home-made USB control surface: a Velleman USB IO board, a multiplexor board of my own, some home-made pressure pads/ribbon controllers, and various pots, switches and plugs for external pedals and controllers. Looks good in a brown leatherette upholstered box. I'm working on programing the USB to MIDI software so that it can...

Is there anyone out there in reader-land who has a PC, a Zune, a USB Sniffer and some development experience? I'm dying to see what's going on during a Zune sync so that I can figure out how to simulate that with the Mac/Linux command line. The addy as always is erica@mindspring.com. Thanks....

Browsing through my Funny folder today, I came across this bizarre press release from 1999: TOKYO — Sanyo Electric Co. Ltd. will market a digital still camera that supports the 340-Mbyte Microdrive introduced by IBM Corp. earlier this month. Microdrive will enable a digital still camera to store over 10,000 frames of VGA pictures, or 7.5 minutes of JPEG...

At nine feet long, the IK Multimedia StealthPlug guitar-to-computer interface is possibly the skinniest way to go digital. The StealthPlug is a cable with a USB plug on one end and a quarter-inch guitar plug on the other. In between, there's a little arrowhead that converts the analog guitar signal to digital and the computer's digital signal back to analog...

Do I use Curves or Levels first? O'Reilly author Ken Milburn got an email from a reader asking about his magically layer-creating action for Photoshop that he describes in the second edition of his book Digital Photography Expert Techniques, and I thought everyone might like to share. You can apply this action to any file you've just opened for...

In case you missed the news, a few months ago Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) split into two groups. The digital group moved to the Presidio facilities in San Francisco under the ILM banner, and the physical production group stayed at its home port in San Rafael & was subsequently renamed Kerner Optical. I recently visited a colleague of mine...

Device Certificate after the jump....

Here are the folder and device properties specifically for my Zune, plus its supported filetypes. I'm guessing the Sync partner is the one computer that my Zune hosts to. Biff is the meta-syntactic name I selected as my Zune ID. The Bytes/Free bytes are accurate. The Battery level seems low as it reads as fully charged on the device and...