Tool Lullabies

Joel sent me a link to an album of Tool songs redone as lullabies. This is wrong on so many levels.

Do you really want your baby listening to Tool? Hell, yes! Instead of distorted guitars and thunderous drums, we've used mellotron, glockenspiel and chimes to highlight Tool's dreamy melodies. These incredibly lush lullaby versions of Tool's best-known songs will captivate and engage your baby while they drift off to slumberland. Forget Baby Einstein. What about Baby Maynard? This is brain food for a whole different breed of whiz kid.

I bet Joel buys this.

Limor / Lady Ada

Wired News had an article on HOPE, where there was a presentation by "Lady Ada", aka Limor, on a cell phone jammer. I was thoroughly intrigued, because I've been wanting to design one myself. The trick is getting the frequencies and tuning right. Then you just have to build a radio that broadcasts noise instead of signal. Cool.

Anyway, Limor's website has some nifty ideas. Even if her front page menu doesn't seem to like either IE or Firefox very well (though FF works better). The "Atmex" setup also looks pretty sweet.

U.S. Poverty Guidelines for 2005

The Department of Health and Human Services publishes a table of wages that indicate the poverty cutoff based on household size. According to this, with some extrapolation, I can have quite a few people in my house before we'd be considered in poverty. Cool.

Internationalized Domain Names

Also checking for info on IDNs, this info on VeriSign's website came up. Back when I was in college I figured it'd be possible to escape Unicode characters for URLs, for example, the way some URLs have %20 to represent a space. There are some sneaky aspects of using Unicode in URLs, though, such as the varieties of spaces, minor kanji variants, and the like. There's a remapping of Unicode characters for use in IDNs. Apparently this IDN format has been submitted as IETF RFCs.

In the end, the domain name system will disappear. Until someone comes up with something better, though, we have to put up with an archaic system.

ICANN and Becoming a DNS Registrar

For one reason or another I was searching for information on how to become a DNS registrar. A quick Google search led me to a FAQ on ICANN's site. There's a page that explains the process required. The application "form" is also available online, and appears to require extensive information.

Fees for accrediation are onerous: US$2500, non-refundable, just for the application. The yearly fee is a fixed US$4000 plus an variable quarterly amount. Additionally, $70k in working capital plus insurance is required. ICANN maintains a list of accredited registrars.

Obviously they don't want just any random schmuck doing this. It's a pretty juicy setup, though, since essentially it's a cartel. Not like that's a bad thing in the case of maintaining the fragile DNS, but it means that price fixing for domains is much more likely.

The reason I was checking up on this was because I recently had some name registration trouble with BulkRegister and it got me pissed off. I should switch to a better registrar. So I was idly wondering what it would take to roll my own...now I know. Unfortunately, one has to be a heavy hitter to play the name game.

takoyaki.org

Found this site while looking for Honda Cub info in the U.S. Pretty amusing domain name.

Tomy

While looking for assembly instructions for the R/C cars Joel bought for his son, I checked out Tomy's mother site and found their subsidiary's site that sells Americanized 'gashapon' in the U.S.: Tomy Yujin Corporation. As expected, they only sell to vending operators or distributors. I suppose all one has to do is incorporate....

sci.lang.japan FAQ wiki

Once upon a time, when people used Usenet, I regularly perused sci.lang.japan to try to improve my knowledge of Japanese. I'm not sure if it helped: now I can talk about Japanese better than I can speak in Japanese!

Defence Facilities Administration Agency

K.N. received something from a cable broadcaster that claimed that had a return address in a building managed by this agency. Weird.

BSD vs Linux

I've been thinking about running FreeBSD on my upcoming new 'puter rather than Linux, but I've been looking for comparisons between the two before I make up my mind. This page is a pro-BSD stance.

Of course I'd prefer a microkernel rather than a monolithic kernel, but my options are limited.

Bluetooth Virtual Keyboard

Ok, this is cool, but I don't need Bluetooth. Where's the wired version?

$190 on ThinkGeek
Info on Gadget Review

Reflections on Digital Photographs

A great article regarding the glut of digital photographs relative to film, and what to do about it. An opinion piece from the May 2006 issue of Spectrum. Wish I'd found the online version before I scanned this out of my copy to send to people.