ITGumbo: spicing IT up

Happy Veterans day folks! Or for our readers in England, Australia, and Canada, happy Remembrance day yesterday, and happy Armistice day France!!! Here's your tech news in brief:

Peter Galskowsky describes what it was like to order a laptop from the one-laptop-per-child project. I've included this article for its snappy title alone: One Laptop Per Me. Why didn't I think of that?

Engadget wins best tech blog in the Weblog awards. At ITGumbo we are biding our time. bide bide bide.

And lastly, Google finally honors Veterans day by decorating their logo in military uniform. Except, you know, they did it yesterday, so you can't check out their holiday logo anymore. You know Google, some of us like to celebrate Veterans day TODAY when we get an extra DAY OFF to honor the services of our men and women in the military. It is a FEDERAL HOLIDAY after all. If you even recognize the federal government anymore.

Mirror mirror on the wall, is the popularity of facebook starting to fall? This article questions whether the original market for facebook, college kids with too much time on their hands, may migrate over to another networking product now that their parents can join too. Maybe I'm getting old, but for some reason I'm not overly concerned about this?

Here's someone whose personal crafting hobby is way superior to yours. Here's the step by step instructions on how to fold crazy complex Lord of the Rings characters out of origami. Be careful though; a thorough browsing of this site may make you feel inferior about your own pop-stick creations, and it's only monday morning.

New federal requirements for technology on voting machines make sure that these suckers will, um, work this next time around. Unfortunately, Stephen Colbert won't be on that ballot, though.

Put on Christmas list, please. This flashlight is also a camcorder, recording everything from night stalkers to shadow puppets. (Although, technically if you tried to make a shadow puppet you would get a video of your hand.) This is what technology should be about, people. Now if only they could figure out a way to get an ipod into a phone.....

Okay, now this next one is just TOO MUCH FUN! But be careful, it might gobble up the rest of your afternoon. Ask.com has just added a suggestion feature to your search box, so that when you start to type your search string it will give you suggestions of other searchers' burning questions. Type in the phrase "Is it legal to..." and you will receive a drop-down menu including: "Is it legal to marry your second cousin?" and "is it legal to own a penguin?" "How much does it cost" reveals that most people are confused about the current rates for US postage. And if you start with the words "Am I..." you'll find that most people are concerned with either being too fat or pregnant. Might be some correlation between those two things, folks. See, it all depends on what kind of questions you ask.

Here's a story especially for Halloween:
A scary but true tale of an American reporter in Asia trying to communicate around The Great Firewall of China. The supression of free speech is horrible, but... but... oh, come on, isn't that just such an awesome pun???

And if you're still not satisfied, Wired has published a slide show of some very geeky jack-o-lanterns, including this 3D replica of the Death Star. Force not included.

Okay, so I can tell that's not enough, that you need something more like seared-into-your-brain scary. Well, you asked for it: Remember how frustrated you were back in 2000 when your SIMs could barely figure out how to hug each other? Well, you'll want to step out of the way of this big heavy pendulum. Now all kinds of really gross stuff is possible on Second Life. Some of it may even soon be made illegal by the supreme court! Wow, the first amendment part of my brain is fighting with the part of my brain that can never undo what it saw when I Googled "she-male" back in 1999. There are drawbacks to growing up in the information age, you know. Now that's what I call scary, folks. Happy Halloween.

Who's afraid of the big bad Google? Some Australian publishers it seems. And anyone else who's selling links. If that's you, start boarding up the windows if you know what's good for you.

New high-tech credit cards with digital displays look like that solar calculator that you owned in 1982. But with more ability to increase your consumer debt!

Growth projections in Open Source Software by 2010 let both Open Source Developers AND proprietary software conglomerates sigh with relief. $22 billion looks different, after all, depending on where you're sitting. Of course, the figure is based on "analyst projections" which is a nice way for saying completely made up, but these pie charts make it look very official. mmm... pie.

Hey, do you guys remember MTV??? Did you know it still, like, exists and plays videos sometimes? Well, MTV is trying to beef up its online presence by creating a massive index of searchable song lyrics. So, if you ever wondered who it was who sang "Ba to the Ba da dang da dang ditty," just type it right in... assuming that's the correct spelling convention. We won't see this "innovation" until 2008, though, so in the meantime call your cable company and say... wait, just kidding. That era's over.

Apple's new operating system Leopard is out today and folks say it's worth the wait. But then again, when do Mac users ever deride taking a Friday off of work to purchase and play with a new product?

What is this, science Friday? The "scientists" at "NASA" have found a new slew of black holes, like a hundred of them, just sitting around the universe waiting to devour all the light in known creation. In a related note, Linux is losing the battle to Windows.

This item is strictly for programming dorks of a particular web variety: here it is, your programming language in LOLCats. Call it LOLCode. (BTW Error Condition... kthx)

Always wanted to confuse your cellphone with your blush? Toshiba has created a round cellphone that looks like a makeup mirror. Just put a pretty picture of you as your phone's wallpaper and you'll be all set!

Gmail does IMAP!
Gmail does IMAP!
Gmail does IMAP!
stop the presses folks.

It turns out Mozilla makes a ton of money by giving stuff away for free. Companies of the world, here's your model of a profitable open source community. I promise you, you can do it sans banner ads.

Want to get busted for stealing a government license printer? A good way to do so is to call tech support and ask how it works. And the Thomas Crown Affair led me to believe that thieves were smart...

CalTech researchers have created an electronic nose which can distinguish between smells and indicate which ones might be harmful. It still won't laugh at your electronic fart joke, though.

Hollywood writers guild considers going on strike to get a piece of internet residuals. After watching Heroes last night, I personally feel that a writers strike would only improve my television experience.

Dell-ification no longer to be a business-school buzzword??? Dell announces a plan to sell PCs through Staples. I guess supply-chain-optimization isn't the be-all-end-all we all thought it was. Are you listening, HBS?

Tired of the information age? Check out the biggest collection of brand-name pencils every assembled. Now all you need to do is find some of that... whadaya call it... paper.

Wired News breaks the story of a spy for the MPAA. That's the Motion Picture Association of America. The revelations of theft and deception are kind of like the old movie "Hackers." Except NOTHING LIKE IT WHATSOEVER... THIS IS NOT CONCEPT INFRINGEMENT.

Why do companies choose proprietary software over Open Source????? These survey responses are going to surprise you.

An anonymous tinkerer ranks and reviews all the current mobile platforms for ease of open development. Who is this masked man? The world may never know.

AOL is finally turning WOW.com into a social networking site for World of Warcraft users... And I thought the game was already both social and networking... shows what I know.

GPS makers TomTom and Nokia fight over position. Ha Ha, get it? GET IT???