MythBusters dude Adam Savage explains how the credit card companies convinced Discovery Channel to not allow MythBusters to do a segment on how hackable RFID is.

Vuclip makes it easy to search and view videos from YouTube on your phone.

A program called Gutenmark formats books from the Gutenberg Project for easier reading. Gutenberg Project is an online repository of books in the public domain (i.e. no copyright restrictions).

Living cash only saved this family 24%. Totally makes cents, er, sense. Sorry.

10 quick scrabble words to help you get rid of those pesky consonants "Q" and "Z" and extra vowels. Includes aa, qat, zax, cwm, xu, qua, suq, adz, jo and qadi. Read the article if you need the definitions.

Further proof of the phrase "There's lies, damn lies and statistics."

I think this is Steve Rubel's best post in a while. Very informative for anyone interested in how social media and search will impact PR and marketing.

Presentation from the dog trainer I linked to earlier. THIS might be valuable for our puppy training exercises.

Might need this for training our new pup.

Should North Carolina teachers' pay be tied to time of service and credentialing? Article argues for tying teachers' pay to performance.

Very interesting. Mozilla, the folks behind Firefox, are experimenting with a service called Ubiquity that will allow average folks like you and me to create our own mashups on the fly.

You knew I'd be interested in this after my go-round with our school district re. textbooks. Obviously geared towards college students, still good for anyone who has a student and who's school doesn't provide textbooks for every kid.

I hope this practice doesn't take off with other ISPs. Comcast is going to limit users to 250 gig a month. That's crap.

This is hysterical: a Firefox plug-in that keeps you from seeing poorly written comments on Youtube. I'd love to see this rolled out for all commenting systems, although that would deprive me of one of the more entertaining parts of my day.

Biz Week article that does a pretty good job of explaining why all corporations need to be engaged in social media.

This is actually a pretty important story. Google is the one single player, outside of maybe Microsoft, who can get average folks to use RSS. I've said for a long time that the biggest problem with RSS is that it's hard to explain to non-techies. Google's move here should catapult the usage of RSS to common usage in the near future.

Why local search is hard. Buried in the column is some info that should help inform local businesses how they should structure their online presence for success.

Ribar asks the Greensboro News & Record's columnist, who is all for the ban against illegal immigrants' children being allowed to attend community colleges and is a hardliner on illegal immigrants in general, why the newspaper is delivering newspapers to illegal immigrants. He also asks that if cracking down on illegal immigration is so important, why doesn't the N&R require their carriers to confirm the legal status of households before beginning delivery. These things are a lot easier when someone else has to do them, huh?

Biz Week article about how companies are prompting soon-to-retire baby boomers to impart their knowledge and wisdom on the Gen-X and Gen-Yers.

Article about the proposed changes to credit card industry regulation. My take is that the credit card companies got greedy, treated the rest of us like a bunch of suckers, and even Congress is blushing at the amount of abuse the banks have heaped on consumers.

"Loans 90 days or more overdue, deemed troubled by the FDIC, jumped 20 percent to $162 billion from $136 billion in the first quarter, the FDIC said. Real-estate loans accounted for almost 90 percent of the rise in the past three quarters, the agency said."

Free Windows "cleaning" utilities. Me thinks I might need one of these.

Most interesting points to me from this Biz Week article re. the credit crunch:

– Most if not all credit related problems trace back to mortgage ills. So much for last year's assurances that the mortgage meltdown could be quarantined from the rest of the economy.

– Exports and savings might be the salvation and the future of the US economy. If that's the case then we're in for a long, painful economic ride but one that will eventually make the country more secure.

– If the second point is true then we won't be returning to 'normal'. I'd say that's a good thing, right?

I absolutely love this description of "overly Flash-y" websites: "It seems almost without fail that they are either blowing my browser window up full size, asking me to read light grey 9px text, overflowing with obfuscatory flashterbation, teasing me with custom designed scrollbars that don’t behave as you’d expect, or asking me to evaluate their work based on postage stamp sized photographs." "Obfuscatory flashterbation" is my new favorite term.

$8.95 annual fee gets you access to a ton of PDF versions of books, MP3 of audio books, etc. There's also a free database of HTML versions of books out of copyright.

Interactive display of interesting wanderings in human history. Lindbergh's flight, De Soto's expedition, Lewis & Clark's expedition, voyages of Marco Polo, etc. Very cool. Wish this had been around when I was in school.

Hack that allows you to play DVDs on your Wii.

This Firefox extension allows you to permanently "delete" (really block) any element from a web page or web site. Kind of like an ad blocker, but for everything.

This article actually looks at how newspapers screwed up even before the web. The rogues gallery of failed efforts includes ViewTron, New Century Networks, Real Cities and abuzz.

BoingBoing has a hack from OppressedPrinterUser on how to get your printer to quit giving you the "almost out" message way before it's necessary: "This guy had also suspected that his Brother was lying to him, and he'd discovered a way to force it to fess up. Brother's toner cartridges have a sensor built into them; OppressedPrinterUser found that covering the sensor with a small piece of dark electrical tape tricked the printer into thinking he'd installed a new cartridge. I followed his instructions, and my printer began to work. At least eight months have passed. I've printed hundreds of pages since, and the text still hasn't begun to fade. On FixYourOwnPrinter.com, many Brother owners have written in to thank OppressedPrinterUser for his hack. One guy says that after covering the sensor, he printed 1,800 more pages before his toner finally ran out."

Not a normal part of my reading list, but this essay on education is thought provoking. He has a great quote from Frederick Hess and Chester Finn re. No Child Left Behind: "No Child Left Behind's dogmatic aspirations and fractured design are producing a compliance-driven regimen that recreates the very pathologies it was intended to solve. It is time to relearn the lessons of the Great Society, when ambitious programs designed to promote justice and opportunity were undone by utopian formulations, unworkable implementation structures, and the stubborn unwillingness of supporters to acknowledge the limitations of federal action in the American system."

Old Man"s War series may be good for J. Need to check it out.

What seems like an easy hack to get free Wi-Fi in airports. From the article it sounds like the hack exploits networks that allow redirects of images. Apparently this trick is a couple of years old so maybe the networks have been fixed, but hey, give it a try.

Easy way to convert audio or video files from one format to another. This is a Windows version.

Rex Hammock writes about a Nashville company that will transport items from the Ikea store in Atlanta and also assemble the items for a fee. As someone who nearly killed himself assembling a piece of Ikea furniture I especially appreciate that second part. We don't have Ikea here in Winston-Salem, but the store in Charlotte isn't too far away so I don't know that we need the delivery service. Still…

The tape that's been on a bunch of athletes, including Kerri Walsh at the olympics. First saw it on a tennis player (can't remember which one) and apparently the tape keeps muscles from over-flexing.

Open architecture for creating a hosted "web 3.0" site. More than just CMS it offers calendars, drag and drop form builder, databound dropdown lists, searchable lists, etc. Free for up to five biz users or any nonprofit.

A look at why you should think carefully before you donate.

Commercial loans tightening up along with the rest of the loan types means that more small biz owners are turning to credit cards for "loans". Hello 30% interest! Who needs loan sharks?

Winston-Salem Forsyth County Schools' 08-09 budget request. Interesting to see how our schools plan to spend money.

This is cool: "Starting with a Chicago-area facility due to open later this year, Microsoft will use an approach in which servers arrive at the data center in a sealed container, already networked together and ready to go. The container itself is then hooked up to power, networking, and air conditioning. "The trucks back 'em in, rack 'em, and stack 'em," Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie told CNET News. And the containers remain sealed, Ozzie said. Once a certain number of servers in the container have failed, it will be pulled out and sent back to the manufacturer and a new container loaded in."

I know enough about databases to know I don't know much. Still this online database service seems to be exactly what I was looking for 10 years ago when I was trying to figure out how to use Access for my small publishing company's subscription management system. Gonna have to try it out.

Firefox extension that allows you to right click on any file and send it to google docs.

A nice breakdown of who the players are in the battle for online advertising.

Some not-surprising yet still sobering trends in news consumption. Numbers from The Pew Research Center. Newspaper readers 1993: 58% 2008: 34%. Local TV News: 1993: 77% 2008: 52%. Nightly network news: 1993: 60% 2008: 29%

Story re. local content. Following is quote from post:

"First, Tolles does some rough math:

'There are about 1,400 daily newspapers and 7,000 television and radio stations in the U.S., and back-of-the-envelope math shows that they each produce about three to six stories per day, or about 22,000 local stories for the entire U.S.'

If you ask me, he’s severely underestimating the number of local stories. Nevertheless, he says there’s a “vacuum” of local news. Which, if you look at it at a neighborhood level, you could argue he’s right."

Synopsis of a review of a book about the building of Washington, DC. Interesting even for a DC bred boy like me.

Bellows Falls, Vermont sounds like my kind of town based on this story. Instead of allowing the town to fade into the sunset the residents are exhibiting a boot strap entrepreneurial streak.

Interesting discussion on UrbanPlanet about the direction of the Triad economy. Some think that going after the "aerotropolis" idea via the Heart of the Triad project, the FedEx hub, etc. is most promising. Others discuss the Piedmont Triad Research Park and think Winston-Salem's future in particular is closely tied to that, and others think the best bet is kind of "all of the above." Some concerns about the burgeoning interstate network as well. Good, even-handed, online discussion with no snark. I like it.

This page has a nice graph showing mainstream media sites' linking habits. Seems there's a correlation between outbound links and inbound links. In other words if you show the link love it's returned.

Lest we think that Google just rolls out of bed and launches a product without much thought, we see through these series of screenshots the evolution of the Gmail design before it was launched. It really is true that designing something that's simple for the user is very hard.