Tao of Mac

May 17th 2005 · 3 min read

Monday Links

Yeah, it's Monday. And being Monday, one of the best parts of the day is getting home and checking the news.

Despite my usual Garfieldian bias against Mondays, it was actually quite a productive day productivity-wise, since I have been using GTDTiddlyWiki to devastating effect. As a -oriented notebook the thing can't be beat, although I still prefer Freemind to flesh out ideas and keep track of more detailed research.

On with the news, then.

  • Benjamin Kowarsch dropped me a line pointing to astmasters.net, a new community website devoted to Asterisk on . VoIP is one of the things I've been purposefully neglecting on this site, but the technology is now so prevalent that I can address it without any risk of dinging my .
  • More (slightly more substantiated) rumors about the remote control thingy that is supposed to come out any day now. Maybe.
  • Colin neatly summarizes one of the main points against all the "cellphone will kill the " stuff we keep getting nice, juicy, biased reporting about (replace "" with " player" if you're monopolistically challenged). Me, I'd also throw in the much more restrictive phone DRM standards, some of which will eventually require over-the-air validation of access credentials (check out the latest OMA specs). Wonders never cease.
  • E3 is going to start this week (Michael's gone there, the lucky sod), and most of the (mentally or otherwise) adolescent population with a penchant for gaming will be wondering if the PS3 is going to make the Xbox360 irrelevant (or otherwise). Expect strong opinions on both sides of the fence - but as far as I'm concerned, the most open and standards-compliant home entertainment center wins.
  • Mobile gaming gets a lot more exciting. That is, if you manage not to fall asleep during televised pool matches. Still, this is one of the first public mentions I've seen of Nokia's SNAP - but then, I never thought it was an actual product name...
  • Still in the mobile front, someone in the UK just lost 15 million customers. Like... don't these people report active SIM cards? What's with the "phone in a drawer" thing?
  • Oh, and speaking of furniture, I want one of these tables. Sadly, it's a limited edition piece, so I'll have to wait for the cheap IKEA knock-offs.
  • Broadband services competing - I understand this may seem barely newsworthy, but here in Portugal (where the incumbent is a major player in both and cable broadband access) we'd love to see actual competition taking place.
  • Cars and Software don't mix - anyone letting this sort of thing happen to their product has some serious explaining to do... Or they can always try to code it again in Free Pascal, I guess.
  • MSN Desktop Search, the only desktop search that on my laptop is out of beta. And it has add-ins, which is something to keep in mind when considering your relationship to the Force. Or maybe it's just one of those things.
  • And since we're talking about , here's one of the funniest news items of the day - due to both the rampant astroturfing and some of the zealots' knee-jerk reactions. The amount of people willing to consider this a viable scenario sheds a very bleak light on Slashdot's credibility... Or its audience's. You be the judge.
  • Nevertheless, Slashdot still manages to uncover a few gems once in a while. Check out this History of PDAs (and lots of other things that were equivalent to PDAs on their own time). For extra geek credits, make a list of the ones you actually owned and link back to that site (and here).
  • Yet another proprietary home NAS solution that won't deliver. Before going out and trying to get one, read on the similar Ximeta solution.
  • However, the best hardware-related item of the day just has to be this tutorial on adding an SD card reader to the WRT54g (via Bruno, who has a mirror of the page somewhere for those of you whose firewalls restrict access to sites on non-standard ports).