Spent today’s meager amount of free time on IRC conspiring with several of the best minds in the game when it comes to the sort of cat-and-mouse activities we seem to revel in playing.

We’re a strange breed, us mice; for most people a new phone means freedom and mobility. When people like US get new phones, however, the first thing we do is spend days online in chatrooms, our USB cables running betwixt handsets and computers, ideas, schemes and crazy things to try typed furiously to the mice on the other side of the chat window. Hours and days spent so that we can do things from our phones that we are already at home doing from our computers.

This irony is something that I’m perfectly OK with.

Supposedly the Alamo’s basement is one of the most haunted places in America.

Either that is a lie, or that documentary about the guy who traveled around the country in a fancy suit looking for his missing bike was. Who can you trust these days?

I feel lied to.

So Android isn’t QUITE the magical open platform i had imagined. As it turns out, T-Mobile and Google are doing all they can to ensure that the specific types of things I want to do with it stay impossible. It’s early in the game yet, but it could easily be characterized as “cat-and-mouse.” Unfortunately for them, these mice are always a few steps ahead of the cat. Plus, the fact that the cat made some really stupid mistakes out of the gate makes things a bit nicer for us mice.

MY Android phone is completely open to all the sorts of things that I want to do now, with some particular clever mice having compromised Google’s latest update and used thier own security against them, but if you’ve got a T-Mobile G1 and want to have the opportunity to do some of the more awesome stuff we mice are working on, it’s extremely important that you don’t update to the RC30 update. There’s nothing new and exciting in the update anyway.

Stay tuned…

I heartily recommend that you’re watching “Stephen Fry in America“, one of the finest television programs about the great country of America that this American has ever seen.

Mr. Fry travels around the country in his London taxi cab, talking to interesting people and learning about life in our country. As one who has spent almost all his time in a very limited area of this country, the things Stephen sees are pretty fascinating to me, as are the people he talks to — almost all of which are the types of people one wouldn’t expect a traveler from another country to want to talk to. Four of the six episodes have aired, and thus far Mr. Fry has visited whiskey factories and corpse farms, been forced to endure riding a horse, seen a deactivated Cold War missile silo, designed his own flavor of ice cream with Ben & Jerry, had a deep-fried southern Thanksgiving and done heaps of traveling and even more monologuing.

Unsurprisingly, this fantastic look at each state of America comes not from American television, but from those nice blokes at the BBC, meaning that if you don’t happen to live within broadcast range of the BBC, you’ll have to resort to the usual sneakiness involved in watching television from another country. It’ll be well worth your time, I promise.

Also, I fully expect Jim Dale to go traipsing around London in his NYC Yellow Cab ANY DAY NOW.

After discovering that the G1 had a hidden proxy configuration that allowed all internet traffic to be routed through a proxy of your choosing, I decided to dust off the old Internet Junkbuster, an Adblock predecessor from 1996 or so.

Like Adblock, Junkbuster allows one to specify via regular expressions a list of URL conditions to treat as advertisements, replacing them with 1-pixel transparent gifs before they get to your browser, effectively blocking any sort of unwanted intrusion into your web experience.

I tracked it down, compiled it from source, and got it running on my Dreamhost account. After configuring the G1 to use it, I found that it worked amazingly well. I fed it the current snapshot of the community-maintained “filterset.G“ blocking rules, and banished ads virtually entirely from my phone. Awesome.

Until, that is, Deamhost’s Abuse Department dropped me a line asking if I was aware that copious amounts of spam were being sent by my account, and notifying me that they were able to track all of the spam messages to my running Junkbuster installation.

I haven’t yet investigated to determine whether Junkbuster itself has been compromised by spammers or whether it’s just badly coded so as to allow this sort of abuse, but the discovery of my active installation and subsequent spam messages that were resultant from it happened within hours of me turning it on. Startlingly fast, in fact. I’m not sure there’s really any explanation other than Junkbuster itself now containing malicious code, but I’ll be looking into that shortly.

Either way, finding that the tool you’re using to remove the spam from your web surfing is, in fact, resulting in spam showing up in the email of strangers is delightfully ironic.

I don’t have much to say lately, but I need to say this:

Google’s Android mobile phone platform is freakin’ AMAZING. T-Mobile’s “G1” handset — which is the first of the commercially available Android phones — is very nearly as awesome a device as is the underlying platform.

Imagine the offspring resultant from a drunken one-night-stand between a Sidekick/Hiptop and an iPhone. That pretty much describes the G1; it is fully touch-enabled and has a wealth of downloadable applications ala iPhone, but boasts the flip-out keyboard and actual navigation buttons which are the hallmark of a Sidekick for those times you don’t feel like looking like a total tool rubbing your fingers all over your phone.

Best yet, you don’t need to deal with any of the iTunes bullcrap that every iPhone owner has to admit to disliking dealing with. If you want to put mp3s (or oggs, w00t!) on it, you simply plug a NORMAL USB CABLE into it and it shows up as a removable drive. Copy your music over and you’re good to go. Same with photos and videos. Software updates come automatically over the air, so no dealing with the endless cycle of backing up and restoring when iTunes makes a mess of things. (Or, if you’re a nerd like me, you can manually download the firmware update and apply it yourself.)

Unlike with iPhone, users can install applications that modify very nearly any aspect of the device, and are not at the whims of Apple as to whether the app will be “allowed” or not. For instance: I have an app installed that can turn on and off features when certain criteria are met. When the GPS finds that I’ve arrived at home, it automatically enables wifi. When I leave it turns it off again to preserve battery. If my battery drops below a certain point I’ve got it set to turn off GPS as well to further save battery. Try doing that with iPhone :).

Want to set an mp3, m4a or ogg file as a ringtone? No problem, support for that is built in.

All-in-all, Android has far exceeded my expectations, and is quite the anti-iPhone platform that I’d envisioned. I highly recommend it.

It’s pretty tough to argue with P. Diddy’s logic here:

http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/104400/

Just got home from Bill Maher’s “documentary” Religulous. Very enjoyable, but suffers from the same blight that seems to befall all theatrical “documentaries;” there’s either no thesis to be found, or nothing in the meat of the film to support the stated thesis.

Much of the film does a really good job of pointing out all the silly little things that followers of various religions take for granted as being normaller than all the crazy stuff those other religions teach, largely in ways that even fervent proponents of said religions can take to heart without being too offended. Not to say that Bill Maher doesn’t show off his usual level of douchebaggary, slyly making fun of people through irony to which they don’t catch on. There’s plenty of that in the film, some of it really funny. While adding to the enjoyment of the film, these awkward moments are often filled with pretty heavy-handed edits that really make me wonder what, exactly, it was that was really said/meant. Not sure whether what was depicted was real, but very sure that it was funny.

All in all, if one is looking for a Jackass / Da Ali G Show-style collection of disparate funny situations (possibly taken out of context) poking light-hearted fun at various tenets of the religious, one will not be disappointed with this film. This reviewer, however was left cold by both Maher’s stated thesis (that religion is going to lead man to its doom) and the fact that he didn’t actually use any of the film’s screen time to support it. He opened and closed the film in Megiddo, talking about prophesy and mankind’s inherent need to destroy itself, but everything in-between was the religious equivalent of fart jokes. Mormon underwear, Jihadist rappers, intergalactic overlords; really, the only “ha ha religion is so silly” element missing was the prophecies embedded in so-called Bible Code. But it sure was funny.

Next time, Bill, I’d suggest keeping it light-hearted; abandon your unsupported thesis and let us enjoy your religious fart jokes for what they are: really funny religious fart jokes.

For those looking for a more light-hearted, informational (and oddly more reverent) look at the various idiosyncrasies Earth’s religions manifest, I’d heartily suggest checking out Australia’s John Safran VS. God as well as Religulous. You won’t be disappointed.

(Here’s a little taste, courtesy of some nice bloke on YouTube: John Safran on The Bible Code.)

Hastily composited image re: massive media comparison of Sarah Palin to Chance the gardener:

I think I’ve stumbled across the solution to our problem of addiction to fuel of foreign origin and am going to share it with you now.

One of the most promising forms of alternate fuel is biodiesel, in that it requires no significant investment to run in many of today’s cars. There’s one little problem with biodiesel, though: we can’t possibly grow enough plant matter to supply all of our cars’ consumptive needs. Even if we all became vegetarians and stopped farming cattle — instead using all the plant matter we feed to them now to make biodiesel instead — we wouldn’t have enough. In addition, if we all stopped eating PLANTS as well as cattle, all the crops we grow now wouldn’t be enough to power our cars either.

There are many different forms of local, renewable non-oil fuel that have been discussed, be they electric, solar, smug, hydrogen or a multitude of others. The problem with those is that there’s no easy way to quickly convert existing cars to this new, untested fuel.

This means that if we’re going to adopt one of these fuels for use in all our Escalades and Hummers, it’s probably going to involve quitting oil “cold turkey,” buying new alternate-energy-powered Escalades and Hummers. This is a significant hassle. A “deal-breaker,” if I may. Americans are simply not going to want to get rid of their old Escalades and Hummers before their leases are up. This means that a hypothetical switchover will take years and years to complete in a best-case scenario, and more likely will never even begin at all.

It was while thinking of this problem that I stumbled suddenly upon my solution: cold turkey. Every Thanksgiving, billions of American households cook copious amounts of turkey, much of which never even gets eaten. I propose legislation both mandating a minimum size for Thanksgiving turkeys and limits on how much each person can consume, ensuring the maximum amount of leftovers.

Suddenly we have billions of pounds of turkey which can be rendered down into biodiesel to fuel our existing Hummers. You’re welcome, America.

A few days ago the muxtape guy broke silence on what’s going on with him and the RIAA. Short answer: he gave up. Probably wisely.

As predicted, muxtape as you knew it is gone forever. There are, however, a number of contenders trying really hard to slide into everyone’s consciousness as the replacement for muxtape. Favetape, for instance, is one of the most high-profile of the bunch. They’ve been doing a number of really cool things in the mixtape space, leaving me with little doubt that they’re going to be the de-facto place people make their mixtapes.

Until THEY get into things with the RIAA, that is. Sure, their model does not involve hosting any files (which is pretty dang cool, actually), but at the end of the day they’re generating referral revenue using content for which they don’t have a license. They will get shut down too. Unless they work out some kind of deal with the RIAA — which means you’re probably going to have to pay to use them.

So where does that leave us? The best solution that I see right now is to install Opentape; it’s simple, fast, and low-profile enough that your friends can continue to hear your mixes without the threat of some money-grubbers getting shut down. You COULD decide to go with favtape or mixtube or one of the others, but at the end of they day they’re trying to make a buck off you — which is the best way to ensure that they cease to exist. (The RIAA/BMI/ASCAP does not like it when you make money involving music. If your business even has a radio playing within earshot of your customers, you’re required to pay them the appropriate license. Same goes for “on-hold” music.)

For the future? Hold on to your butts, for I’ve got a couple ideas in the works that may make mixtaping even easier with less risk of being shut down. If I have such ideas, you can be sure OTHER people do as well, which will make up for the fact that I’m notorious for getting all excited about a project and then completely abandoning it after very little of the work has been done.

In the meantime, though: seriously check out Opentape.

New Hitchhiker’s Guide to be published… seven years after the author’s death

You know, it was bad enough reading the posthumously published A Salmon of Doubt — what with its snippets and explanations of changes that Douglas Adams PLANNED to make, ultimately turning the long-desired Dirk Gently story into a sixth Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy installment — but the idea of letting someone else entirely write a final book? That just seems like trouble to me. At least A Salmon of Doubt was cobbled together from various differing versions found on Mr. Adams’s‘s hard drive — taking the best bits from each — and thus maintaining some of Douglas’ intentions. Having someone completely create something from scratch just to “put an upbeat end to it” actually kind of offends me.

Look: I feel lousy enough that they actually succeeded in putting out a movie version, thus selling a poor interpretation of the thing we all love and adore to those who never understood it. (I imagine the un-initiated viewing that movie and saying “THAT’s what those nerds were reading all the time? Geez. What NERDS.”)

Seriously, world, STOP WITH THE DOING WHAT YOU THINK DEAD PEOPLE WOULD HAVE WANTED just so you can make a buck. I sincerely doubt that Douglas would want someone else to determine the fates of his characters.

What’s next? Putting a hit out on J.K. so that Beverly Cleary can write the “eighth Potter book?”

Arg.

(This was brought to my attention by Michael Hanscom, who maintains a fantastic set of interesting links, many of which I’m not aware at the time I read them.)

This is both a test and a mixtape. A little more of the prior than the latter, but I think the songs are decent.

I’ve been poking around in Opentape lately, adding things to make it better. I emailed them about incorporating things into actual opentape, but have not heard back from them.

I’m considering forking Opentape since a lot of what I want to add kind of conflicts with their philosophy of simplicity. Forking is generally frowned-upon, so we’ll see… I’m kicking around ‘SchmopenTape’ for the name, though, of my hypothetical fork.

Anyway, here goes:

I’ve added the ability to put in descriptions of songs, the auto-generation of Amazon links based on the artist/title of the song, as well as Amazon Affiliate ID support. (Meaning that when someone uses that link and buys something, you get some moneys.)

If anyone wants my changes, drop me a line.

I awoke this morning to an IM containing a link to the following image. I don’t know who made it and I don’t know where it came from, but I do know that it is brilliant.

If anyone has information on the creator of this image, I’d sure like to hear about it and give them credit.