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.

I’m weird, but I enjoy discussing contentious things with people. The best kind of debate is one where both sides put forward a good effort, and chip away at various misconceptions until one of a handful of things happens. Either you can find a solid central point of agreement either by figuring out what the core of what they really want is rather than the outside rhetoric is, or you can come to an understanding that the views are incompatible and agree to keep your own opinions and leave it at that.

Buried deep in one of the bonuses for a second doctor DVD, I found the real reason why so much of the doctor who series is missing from the early days.Over the years, many have blamed BBC’s shortsightedness, or the cost of the early digital tapes for this. They said that the tapes were erased and reused… In the DVD though, they told the real story. The number of copies of the series that could be made wasn’t limited by the cost of the tape, but rather by Actors union contracts.

(Link Dead)Might be weird for me to say so after the fiasco that was Comcast owning our local cable company, but I actually wouldn’t mind them buying Bresnan now. After all, they’re on the forefront of IPv6 native deployment.

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/04/google-planning-to-open-the-vp8-video-codec.ars So, Google’s planning on using Vp8, and mozilla is as well. And they’re going to “Open” it.Which makes the fact that Google is still funding ARM optimization for vorbis/theora interesting.One possibility is that Google won’t entirely open VP8 up. They may open it up for software royalty free, but keep hardware optimizations as something you license from them. On2 already has chips for VP8 decoding and encoding. Or they could license the code that generates VP8 files, while making decoding fully open and free.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/04/steve-jobs-weighs-on-iphone-os-dev-controversy.arsThey counter the complaints about quality, standards compliance, and added costs when comparing native code to cross platform code. Also showing how many of the apps Apple is holding up as standards are actually using techniques that apple now prohibits.http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2009/06/introducing-android-scripting.htmlOf course, Android supports scripting languages, including apparently editing and interactively executing code right on the phone.I wonder when I’ll get to have an android phone here at work…