The Big Think

Sony today announced its PSP, or PlayStation Portable. This little handheld wonder has all the power of a PS1 but in a portable format, and a beautiful LCD screen to boot! Check it out.

In related news, Nintendo announced their dual screen DS. It’s significantly clunkier looking than the PSP, but has a cools secondary screen. Nintendo says that this isn’t the final form-factor yet. Let’s hope not.
Calling Mr. Prime, Mr. Optimus Prime. Please report to customer service. Someone has found your lost kneecap.

He’s at it again. Man, this guy is good.

Signed up for a free 2 week Netflix subscription. Mark loves Netflix and we decided to give it a try. Plus, we got a free $75 Visa just for signing up!

The Weekly Standard: Just walk into your local 7-Eleven for a fountain drink and witness the enormity of the drink sizes: There’s the traditional Big Gulp (32 ounces), the Super Big Gulp (44 ounces), and the X-Treme Gulp Mug (52 ounces or 1.5 liters!)–not to mention the more curiously named Slurp and Gulp (32 ounces of soda plus 22 ounces of Slurpee). How much we are eating goes without saying. But just for the sake of shock value, out in theaters today is the award-winning documentary Super Size Me. In it, director and star Morgan Spurlock embarks on a month-long diet consisting solely of McDonald’s food.

Giles has shown me a great little app: Handbrake. It’s a collection of free DVD ripping apps that some guy collected and put under one Applescript umbrella. One easy to use app that lets you rip your DVD’s to hard drive to create a master DVD server. A single 2 hour movie with MP4 quality audio weighs in at 1 gig after compression. Beautiful! Now I’ll be able to get all of my DVD’s onto one hard drive. Giles is doing the same with his and is creating a DVD server for the whole house. Nice idea, I’d like to do the same thing. I need to finish out the structured wiring system we installed when the house was built and figure out a way to get the video signal from my G4 to the TV downstairs. Also need a way to control Quicktime from down there.
Thanks G!

via yahoo: U.S. crude struck the $40 mark on Friday for the first time since October 1990 in the run up to the first Gulf War, reinforcing concern that higher energy costs could upset global economic growth. [However], World oil prices fell from their 13-year peaks of $40 a barrel on Monday as leading world exporter Saudi Arabia said OPEC (news - web sites) should raise supply to stop high prices hurting world economic growth.

$40/barrel may be the peak of 13 years ago, but I’ve been driving for 18 years and have NEVER paid $1.85/gallon. So if a barrel of oil was more than $40 in 1990, why was the price only around $1.35? We’re not talking inflation here, folks. Somewhere there’s a rat in the pudding.
Okay, bad metaphor.

An editorial.

The Parts of Star Wars.

This guy may look like an ubergeek, but check out some of his scratch built models. He has real talent and should be doing it professionally.
Incidentally, scratch building means making something from scratch, often by scavenging parts from other models. Take some time to poke around here, there’s some very impressive stuff.