They make a good case, on gizmodo , trying to replace facebook using a distributed network of sites. Of course, others have rightly stated that really, the web is already a social network. There’s tons of sites for doing individual pieces of what facebook needs. The main problem I see with that vision is that it doesn’t seem like we have unified privacy and access controls across sites. I can publish stuff and share it on google reader, but the only ones I can give access to read and post to it are other google reader users.

I finally finished this one. It just goes to show how incredibly slow I am at completing games. This one was released in February of last year… What can you say about DQ? The entire series is considered Casual in Japan, and is the gaming equivalent of comfort food. It has many features that modern rpg gamers consider to be throwbacks and hard, but as a whole the game isn’t a huge challenge.

I was busy this month on episodic games mostly. Only managed 1 book.Books:8. The Multiplex Man, James Hogan. Interesting book for being written in the very early 90’s. Talks about the US turning into a green socialist monstrosity, while the former Russian held countries went off into space without us, and had significantly more freedom.Games:3. Wolfenstein 3D. Played the PS3 version of this. Took about 8 hours to get through all 6 episodes, but I was trying to be thorough.

I’ve started using Google Reader on things. It makes everything so much more convenient and reduces the amount of time I spend on the internet… I just started putting my video series I watch into RSS as well, under a separate folder…The next step, of course, is to get all of my comics in, relieving me of the drudgery of hitting comics pages that have no updates, or trying to remember the last time I read all of my comic pages.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/30/steve_jobs_claims_ogg_theora_attack/I think Apple, if they hadn’t already crossed over into the evil category, has definitely done a cannonball into lake Evil with this one.And this…http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/04/html5-video-in-internet-explorer-9-h264-and-h264-alone.arsIt seems like Apple and Microsoft are definitely stepping up their collaborative effort that they’ve been doing while pretending to compete through the 90’s and 2000’s…

http://lifehacker.com/5526025/make-the-most-of-your-multiple-monitors-in-windows-7I like it. They not only deal with 3 monitors natively, but they have Synergy in there too, one of the things I always have to explain to people about my setup.

Amazon remembers all…Including where I lived 11 years ago.Unfortunately, they also shipped a present for my wife to a place I lived 11 years ago…*sigh*

http://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/2010/04/fcc-creates-tv-spectrum-death-panel.arsThey want to free up more spectrum… and sell it to cell phone companies.That’s really not what we need. The big problem for wireless broadband right now is that you’re limited to a handful of large companies. Small companies have to compete for the scraps of wireless bandwidth that are in the 900/2.4/5.3/5.8 ranges… What we need is more ISM space that isn’t regulated or assigned to any one company so that we can have real alternatives to the big wireless carriers.

http://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/2010/04/arkansas-rules-when-it-comes-to-isp-competition-but-so-what.arsPeople make a lot of noise about municipal broadband efforts. I can see the good and the bad of them. For the good, they wouldn’t be constrained by what’s economically feasible and what the competition can put out in that area. On the negative, after the short term span of them being superior wears off, they could lead to a stagnation of bandwidth and capabilities in the area as the competitive forces all drop out, unable to compete with something that can be subsidized by taxpayer dollars.

http://www.ludens.cl/Electron/chinverter/chinverter.htmlThis is an excellent page showing all of the problems with a Taiwanese power ups/inverter/charger/etc green power sort of thing. I would never dream of calling for government regulations on this sort of thing. The problem we have right now is that the ability of these companies to produce and ship crap to other countries outstrips our ability to discover they’re crap and warn everyone. We really need some sort of third party charity whose sole purpose is to do detailed testing of all of the electric components that come out and write up huge guides on their shortcomings and hazards… Maybe if it has wide enough distribution and everyone uses it to check their components before buying them, it’ll force some of these companies to improve the quality of their parts…Or they’ll take the other path, keep changing their name over and over again to continue to sell this junk.