The Null Device

2001/12/2

Were I a James Bond villain, I would be Ernst Stavro Blofeld. (Probably because of the fluffy white cat.) (via Meg)

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A word of advice: if you're looking for a digital camera, do not buy an Ixla DualCam 640 (or Pretec DC-520, as I believe they're called); well, not if you're looking for one which will work reliably for more than a month or two. This camera has some severe flaws which come out after a month or so of use; the camera starts experiencing memory corruption, which can lead to pictures being truncated at best, and at worst, the camera deciding that it needs to reformat its memory when switched on. Or even more frustratingly, crashing when trying to read a specific image from its memory; which is very annoying, as it makes it possible to see some images but not to download them, because of the way the proprietary software works. (I did mention that it's entirely proprietary, and that you're at the mercies of a (shall I say slightly whimsical) TWAIN driver that runs only on Windows 9.x and MacOS classic, didn't I?)

I had the same problem with the previous camera, which I got replaced a few months ago, and now this one's doing it.

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Eccentrics of note: James Vipond is probably best known for his tireless crusade for non-sexual nudity þrough Poser graphics. His "nude Christian superheroes" page is no more (presumably it was too much for þe fragile sensibilities of some people out þere, or the legal departments of his hosts), but he now has a new page; and he has turned his attention to a classic pet project dear to numerous eccentrics and crackpots, among þem George Bernard Shaw and Noah Webster; namely, English spelling reform. (via Psychoceramics)

(And what he has to say actually makes sense; to be honest, the sooner we have one character representing the 'th' sound (which has no relation to the two letters in its name), the better, and the þ character would not only be backwards-compatible with Old English (and Icelandic), but also pretty cool. Bring it on, I say.)

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The world's smallest TCP/IP stack; compiles into 4K of 8-bit code, and runs on a Commodore 64 or a microcontroller as found in keyboards; and it comes with a miniature HTTP server too. (via NtK)

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This is not the Onion: The mayor of the town of Inglis, Florida, has drafted an edict officially banishing Satan from the town, and placed it in four posts, inscribed Repent, Request and Resist, on the outskirts of the town. Mayor Carolyn Risher, who was motivated to this action by seeing evidence of Satanic influence, such as drunk driving, child abuse and teenagers dressing in "goth" costume (undoubtedly whilst reading those darn Harry Potter books too), denies discriminating against religions, saying that the edict is all-encompassing -- well, for anyone who believes in Jesus Christ anyway. (via rotten.com)

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After being ordered to shut down its copyright-violating operations, KaZaA has claimed that it is unable to do so, because it is decentralised. Which is not true, as they do have some kind of central authentication system to keep reverse-engineered open-source clients off and keep people seeing their ads and using their Windows spyware, keeping them profitable. You can't have it both ways...

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