The I/O Brush allows you to “paint” with textures, colors, and video from the real world.

“It worked last night on a different asteroid.”

This guy gets it right.

If you have no idea who that is, well, you probably won’t enjoy this.

SSH tunneling, because it means we don’t have to trust nefarious hotel wireless networks (though despite the endorsement implied, we didn’t actually use the tool — geeks that we are, we wrote a script).

BoingBoing points us to a fascinating tool for comparing the relative value of dollars in different time periods. One of their illustrating examples is pretty cool:

Babe Ruth’s salary in 1932 was $80,000. In 2004 the CPI was 13.8 times larger than it was in 1932 and the GDP deflator 12 times larger. This means that if we are interested in Ruth’s purchasing power of housing or meals, then he was “earning” the equivalence of about $1,000,000 today. The relative cost of (unskilled) labor is 42 times higher in 2004 than in 1932. So if we wanted to compare his wage to what someone selling hot dogs would earn, we could say his “relative wage” is $3,400,000. GDP per capita and GDP are 80 and 200 times larger in 2004 than they were in 1932. Thus Ruth’s earnings relative to the average output would be $6,230,000 today. Finally, as a share of GDP, Ruth “output” that year would be $16,000,000 in today’s money.

We received a concerned email in re: the “Mac virus” that’s floating around. Here’s our reply:

From:   [king heathen]
Subject: Re: what about this mac virus mary's telling me about?
Date: February 17, 2006 8:32:32 PM CST
To:   [co-worker]

> On Feb 17, 2006, at 8:07 PM, [coworker] wrote:
> what do I need to know / do?

1. If people try to send you files with iChat that 
   you're not expecting, don't accept them.

2. If you do accept them, 
   don't uncompress them.

3. If you do accept them 
   and uncompress them, 
   don't execute the contents by double-clicking the file.

4. If you do accept them 
   and uncompress them 
   and double-click the contents, 
   don't type your admin password.

5. If you do accept them 
   and uncompress them 
   and double-click the contents 
   and type your admin password, 
   well, then you'll be infected, and the trojan will try to spread 
   itself. It doesn't do anything else, but it will be annoying.

Summary? It requires so much intervention from the user to get 
installed and run that it's only barely a trojan. Since it's so 
lame in those terms AND has no destructive payload, it's pretty 
much a non-event.

There more here if you want.

Here’s something you may need if you have a hankerin’ to code Perl in latin.

Warren Ellis and Joss Whedon do a little back-and-forth in Ellis’ comments section. Enjoy.

More evidence we’re living in the future. Key quote: “Roomba’s coming out tonight. Clean up your toys or Roomba will eat them!”