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An enterprising college student built an air conditioner for under $30 with a fan, a garbage can of ice water and some tubing.

How the contraption works: cold ice water flows through coiled tubing attached to the back of a fan which cools the blowing air. The condensation could get messy and you won’t get the same results as a store-bought A/C, but this is a cool (har) DIY project for the broke and sweaty.

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A peer of mine at work Pat Collins sent me this very interesting link today about how with some MAC address spoofing and ICMP tunneling you can hack your way into a wireless network.

To summarize, an HTTP request is sent to to the raw socket which is handled by the linux kernal (Note: can’t do this in windows folks) which is setup to be the the default route to the tunnel which redirects to the ICMP socket (tunnel) and then sent back to the kernal to interpret as an ICMP packet on the real wireless interface. I’ve never seen anything like this. Just another reason to think wireless isn’t as secure as we think it is..

The big “D” Michael Dell has spoken some words lately about absorbing Apple’s OSX into Dell’s mix of OS’s distributed with their systems. I wonder how Microsoft feels knowing that not only is Apple’s future plans to go X86, but the biggest computer distributor in the world [Dell] wants a piece of their competition [Apple]..

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“If Apple decides to open the Mac OS to others, we would be happy to offer it to our customers,” Dell wrote in an email. It’s the first time any PC industry executive has openly shown enthusiasm for selling machines with Apple’s software.
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Yeah I know, everyone’s sick of hearing the media’s BS on the MJ jury decision but these 2 flash parodies are hella funny:

http://www.liquidgeneration.com/poptoons/michaeljackson_smoothcriminal.asp
http://media.ebaumsworld.com/nevercoppedafeel.swf

Though Lotus isn’t scheduled to introduce ND7 until the third quarter of 2005 Lotus is already showing off some of the capabilities that it’s working to add to a later iteration code named “Hannover”. This and all planned to arrive 12 to 18 months after the release of Notes 7.

According to Lotus officials, at least part of the reason behind divulging its future plans for Notes is to quiet rumors that the company remains uncommitted to the Notes product line.

Hannover will be designed to let people organize and manage their information based on a specific project or topic across various Notes tools. Using a demonstration version of the software, Loria showed that if a person were to click on an e-mail related to a specific issue, he or she could quickly access all of the correspondence that might have been received about the topic from others, regardless of the manner in which those messages were sent. Data could also be organized to reflect communications with a particular person, or group of people, using the software.

After hearing some good things at work about the LR Nelson “RainTrain” traveling sprinkler I ended up purchasing it at Amazon. Believe it or not it was cheaper there then Lowes and Home Depot and with free shipping none the less. This should be some good entertainment for the front yard

If you’ve ever wanted to benchmark your hard drive against another or were just curious to how fast it truely was checkout this free application by Simpli Software called HDTach.

Apparently this highly regarded tool will allow you to store a 9gb dual-layer DVD to a 1 - 2gb compressed file. Also retaining all the extras, digital audio, etc at 1/8th the space it would normally consume. No fancy MPEG-4 functions needed and you have a real DVD for your “physical archive”

ratDVD takes a full featured DVD movie and puts it into a highly compressed .ratDVD container format file - while preserving all the features of the original DVD such as:

-Full anamorphic picture, seamless branching, multiple video angles, multiple audio channels, subpictures, etc.
-Keep movie versions (Directors Cut, Theatrical version, etc.), Alternate story endings, making of, video commentary , cut scenes, etc..
-Keep complete menus, navigation and features
-Reliable high quality, valid check-summed container.

You can also convert a .ratDVD file back to DVD format, burn it to a DVDR and watch the movie using a regular DVD player.

ratDVD supports metatags similar to ID3 tags in MP3 files. The metatags can contain information about the movie, such as title, actors, year of release, plot outline etc. It can even include a thumbnail of the DVD cover. The information for the tags is automatically retrieved from IMDB.

I came across a very cool tool today called ShareKMC. It is similar to Synergy except it adds the ability to copy/paste images between the two computers.

Here are a few reviews:

On a side note: I found yet another tool that is similar to Synergy called Kavoom