the tweney review

Phoenix Technologies, which makes BIOSes for notebooks and desktop computers, has a nifty idea: something called Firstware Assistant that lets you check your Outlook calendar and email without booting up the machine. You turn on the machine through a special quick-boot cycle that bypasses Windows and lets you view only certain data. You can’t download your email this way, though — just view the most recent messages.

A related idea: Intel’s Extended Mobile Access, which lets you view the status of nearby Wi-Fi signals and monitor email as it comes in, through a second, small LCD on the outside of your notebook. It uses more power but looks promising.

I want the T-shirt!

MSNBC: More and more people are calling themselves flexitarians — meat-eating vegetarians.

Or, as I used to call myself, a non-practicing vegetarian.

Veggie guru Molly Katzen is quoted as saying, “I don’t feel it’s wrong if you’ve got a great big plate of vegetables [and] your protein is from a healthy, happy chicken, or a grass-fed cow.”

Actually, for the past month I’ve been a free-rangeatarian. I’ll eat meat as long as it’s had a decent life.

I was motivated to make the switch in part by reading Michael Pollan’s piece on Peter Singer in the NYT, published in 2002. (But note the correction in the Times’ abstract here.)

It turns out that this is very easy to do at home. We were already buying organic, free-farmed milk and most of the meat we bought was free-range anyhow. But it’s somewhat harder when dining out. It rules out almost all meat, many fish (e.g. almost all salmon and catfish), and pretty much any eggs. If I were going to be really strict about it, I wouldn’t eat much cheese or milk, either, but I’ve got to draw the line somewhere. My lunches these days feature a lot of cheese sandwiches and tuna sandwiches.

This is just too much fun not to post a link to it.

About a month ago, I moved this weblog and my haiku site to Birdhouse Hosting, run by my friend Scot Hacker. It was a good move: Both sites are faster, Scot’s spam-filtering has given me back 20 minutes a day that I used to spend deleting junk mail, and most importantly, Scot is a patient, capable, and thorough sysadmin. Birdhouse rocks.

The Merc’s Dan Gillmor says now is time to face facts, make needed investment — in data infrastructure (last mile broadband, in particular), in education, in basic research, and in health care. Without these investments, Silicon Valley — and the U.S. at large — could easily lose what competitive edge it still has. It’s a persuasive argument, but is anyone listening? The cost of health care alone is already making it very, very difficult to start a company, or even hire permanent workers, in California. With a poorly educated workforce, crumbling infrastructure, crushing levels of state government debt, and high costs of living, Silicon Valley starts to look less and less attractive to entrepreneurs.

Brad Templeton has a canny solution to the domain-name fiasco: Let almost anyone create their own top-level domain, as long as they’re able to maintain it and contribute to the maintenance of the overall domain name system (DNS).

Instead of just a few TLDs, like .com, .gov, and .biz, we’d have zillions: .yahoo, .yellowpages, .banjo, .whatever. Whoever owned each TLD owner would decide how to handle registration of domain names with that extension–and what rules to enforce. Voila: Instead of unethical monopoly and impotent bureacracy, we’d have competition, more compatibility with trademark law, and more options.

My only reservation is that this might just shift the locus of the battle. Instead of people squatting on domain names, they’d squat on TLDs instead. But it would still offer options — if I’ve got tweney.website, you could still register tweney.online and try to convince people that .online is a better address anyway.

“While using the Bovine Rectal Palpation Simulator the student palpates virtual objects resembling parts of the reproductive tract inside the rear-half of a fibreglass cow.”

(via strata lucida)

A school in the U.K. is now offering a course in Elvish — or more precisely, Sindarin and Quenya, two languages invented by Tolkein.

According to attorney Scott Bursor, phone companies’ practice of “locking” phones so they can’t be used with any other carrier is anticompetitive. He’s not the only one who’s angry about locked phones. But don’t just sit there — Schuyler Erle tells you how to do something about it.