Look out, YouTube.  It’s Hammer Time!

For those of you trying to figure out what to buy me for Christmas, I could really use a new computer.  So maybe this schedule of CompUSA’s liquidation rates will help you find that special something for this special someone.

gTalk talks with AIM, and it also works through gMail. Awesome.

All I want for Christmas is a NES PC.  You can buy it for me here.  C’mon, you know you wanna.  (Now I want to build one…)

The Russians are coming!  Yesterday: Putin.  Today Livejournal.  Tomorrow: The World?

Polonium Pen.  No matter what happens, get one for Kasparov.

There are enough cellphone subscriptions for half the world now.

But although mobile subscriptions have reached the equivalent of 50 percent of the population, this does not mean that half the people in the world now have a mobile phone, since Informa said 59 countries have mobile penetration of over 100 percent — where some owners have more than one phone.

Yeah, yeah, I’m only rockin’ out on “easy”, but it’s still rock.

Having succeeded in curing every political ail in America, MoveOn now will do battle with Facebook.  Spats to follow.  Does MoveOn really care or are they pandering to the 18-25 year old crowd to widen their base?

Series of tubes to clog by 2010? “[I]t may take more than one attempt to confirm an online purchase or it may take longer to download the latest video from YouTube.”  Ohs nos!  Sounds like…  well, the internets as they are right now…

SR-17: Now That Was Some Airplane

The SR-71 served six presidents, protecting America for a quarter of a century. Unbeknownst to most of the country, the plane flew over North Vietnam, Red China, North Korea, the Middle East, South Africa, Cuba, Nicaragua, Iran, Libya, and the Falkland Islands. On a weekly basis, the SR-71 kept watch over every Soviet nuclear submarine and mobile missile site, and all of their troop movements.

It was a key factor in winning the Cold War.

It’s been a while since I’ve bothered browsing for records.  I don’t have much of a system for listening to vinyl, just an old player with built in speakers that I got at an auction for a whopping 1$US.  Given the state of my player, the quality factor just doesn’t jump out like it should.  Still, there’s something to be said for the hiss of a needle on a spinning record.  It’s a sound that’s getting more and more foreign to folks.  Kids today, and all.  But a good number of people still pick vinyl up, enough that you can usually find some decent new releases.

One neat little thing I noticed while poking through the vinyl at Plan 9 yesterday was that some companies are bundling the records with coupons so you can download MP3s of the songs for free.  This might account for vinyl seeing a resurgence despite declining CD sales.  As Eliot Van Buskirk wrote in “Vinyl May Be Final Nail in CD’s Coffin”:

Pressing plants are ramping up production, but where is the demand coming from? Why do so many people still love vinyl, even though its bulky, analog nature is anathema to everything music is supposed to be these days? Records, the vinyl evangelists will tell you, provide more of a connection between fans and artists. And many of today’s music fans buy 180-gram vinyl LPs for home listening and MP3s for their portable devices.

“For many of us, and certainly for many of our artists, the vinyl is the true version of the release,” said Matador’s Patrick Amory. “The size and presence of the artwork, the division into sides, the better sound quality, above all the involvement and work the listener has to put in, all make it the format of choice for people who really care about music.”

Because these music fans also listen using portable players and computers, Matador and other labels include coupons in record packaging that can be used to download MP3 versions of the songs. Amory called the coupon program “hugely popular.”

A nice little bonus for folks who would like to listen to the songs on their MP3 player without having to buy the CD, buy them on iTunes, or just theft them.  I’m not sure on the quality of the files, but one would hope they’d be good, especially since most folks who buy vinyl these days are audiophiles who might prefer their MP3s at the highest quality possible.  Still, if vinyl’s growing popularity is going to lead to growing production, it just might be worth upgrading to a decent turntable.

Embark’s new Facebook application College Planner lets you research colleges and apply to them without ever having to leave Facebook.  From CNet News:

Online applications, I suppose, have been thoroughly destigmatized (back in my day, there was still the concern that an electronic application wouldn’t be taken as seriously as a paper one), but it’s still a bit ironic to be applying to college through a site that’s best known as an addictive procrastination hub.

What really stands out about “social college applications” is that many people I knew (not all, obviously) were fiercely private about where they were applying, especially if the school was a “reach.” Then again, this was before high schoolers were eagerly exposing their souls on MySpace.com profiles, so perhaps privacy is no longer sacred.

AllFaceBook, CNet’s source, has a follow up post about making sure your profile is ready to be snooped at by colleges.  Folks in the workforce have known (or should have known) to do this for years, as more and more employers are turning to Google to help with background checks of prospective applicants.  It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to expect colleges to start doing the same, finding prospective students’ MySpace and Facebook pages for whatever info they may want to judge a potential student by.

Rita Flórez writes at GOOD Magazine about how zines continue to florish, even in the face of easier and cheaper means of reaching a wider audience with the Internet.  One part stands out to me:

To Pagan Kennedy, creator of Pagan’s Head and author of ’Zine, blogs and sites like MySpace are just the natural extension of zine culture. “In many ways, the zine world is very much like the internet,” she says. “It’s just that zines happened through the mail, so it happened slowly. Even the conventions of the zine world—the personal zine, where you tell your life story—are very much like blogs and MySpace.”

Still, for avid zine readers like Rowe and Frederick, there’s a distinction between blogs and zines. “I don’t think MySpace has the zine spirit,” says Rowe. “The motivation behind a zine is [personal], but you don’t care about getting noticed. Print gives you many more options. If you publish it online, it’s limited by the coding.”

Emphasis mine.

Websites, zine or otherwise, are only limited by their coding in as much as their author’s knowledge of coding is limited.  As someone who has written online in assorted forms for the last ten years, I can tell you that presentation is very important, not just in blogging but in presenting any content on any site, especially when trying to present something like fiction or a journal.

While the web presents the author with a wider audience, it also presents the audience with a wider pool of things to get their attention.  The author’s job then becomes not only to provide solid content but to figure out a creative way to present that content and make it stand out.  If you were aiming to publish a zine online, to stick to a blog format of just pictures and text is to set yourself up to be lost in the crowd.  With so many tools available, as basic as Photoshop or an understanding of CSS and DHTML or as advanced as Flash and beyond, there are many ways to take text and make it so much more.  It just takes time and commitment, just about as much as you’d have to put into making a solid print zine.  But if you care about your material and getting it into other eyes, you should be willing to do that legwork.

(Via Kottke.)