Today is Talk Like a Pirate Day, matey.

Well, good luck finding anybody to talk to.

Long-time readers will recall that I followed the file-sharing subculture closely back when it was a Rilly Big Thing. So when I saw Talk Like a Pirate Day mentioned, I had to stop and think: Wow, I haven't thought about that stuff for awhile. So I took a look around ( Read more... )

I first heard about the Espresso Book Machine in 2001, back when it was called PerfectBook 080. That machine is now old enough to vote, yet...where are they? I was talking about that question in the mid-oughts, and described what I called just-in-time bookstores (which were in fact gumball machines for printed books) in 2006. A recent piece in the ( Read more... )

• This item may not be visible after a few more days, so catch it now: A very weird "hotspot" turned up in the satellite water temperature record at the far eastern end of Lake Superior. For a short while, water temps excursed from the 30s up to the 60s F. Instrument Error? Cargo ship on fire? UFO exploding? STORMY baiting and then rounding up ( Read more... )

• Hachette is now doing exactly the right thing (instead of exactly the wrong thing) by exploring new sales channels. In this case, it's Gumroad, a technology that allows retail sales on Twitter. I need to look more closely, but I could certainly get behind that. And--yeek!--a real use for Twitter!
• "Nutrition is full of all kinds of nonsense."Boy, is ( Read more... )

• Sales of the Raspberry Pi board are closing in on four million. Wow. I'm an optimist, but I'll confess that I wasn't that much of an optimist!
• Some ISPs have apparently begun blocking encrypted traffic (especially VPNs) because VPNs make it difficult to throttle traffic based on what that traffic is. Basically, a user of Golden Frog's VPN ( Read more... )

Something occurred to me this morning, regarding the whole business of the li'l teeny island of Antigua setting up a legal pirate's marketplace of Other People's Stuff: Dare you to get it out of there.

I looked and did not find any current indication of how much bandwidth connects Antigua (or lord knows, Barbuda) to anywhere else. (Five-year-old ( Read more... )

I originally thought it was a hoax when I heard about it this past January. It sure sounded like one. But it's for real: The World Trade Organization has given the otherwise unexceptional Caribbean nation of Antigua permission to sell US copyrighted content, without any payment to copyright owners.

WTF?

It's revenge, people. Antigua was making a ( Read more... )

• The length of the Earth's day varies more than I would guess, and the cause seems to be a certain amount of slosh in our molten core.
• PC World is shutting down its print edition. I still have early copies of both PC World and PC Magazine in boxes, including issues from those heady days when the PC universe was exploding like a supernova and the ( Read more... )

For the most part, the ebook pirates have forgotten about me. Five or six years ago, I was all over the pirate sites. Now I'm not even on the Pirate Bay, and haven't been for some time. Binsearch shows that the last time I was uploaded to Usenet was almost a year ago. It's enough to give a guy a complex. (It's certainly enough to make me feel like ( Read more... )

• Ars has the best article I've yet seen on the recent ruling in the Apple ebook price fixing trial. Insight: Publishers get less under agency than they do under wholesale, but they're willing to accept it to keep control of pricing. Book publishing is a freaky business. This may not work out as planned for the publishers.
• Also from Ars: Weird search ( Read more... )