Food: For some damn reason, it’s impossible to get pork sausages here in southern CA. The only good ones I’ve had were at the Cat and Fiddle, an english pub in LA, who do really kick-ass all-day UK-style breakfasts.
Justin's Linklog Posts
Funny: According to a ‘top Austrian doctor’, picking your nose and eating it is good for you:
Tech: … nearly. The Sony Reader EBR-1000EP. 170 pixels-per-inch is a nice resolution, and in general it looks very cool, esp. considering the E-Paper aspects (ie. looks like paper, back-lighting not required, easier to read). However — never mind that it’s only available in Japan so far, even once it becomes available in the US, its pricing structure is moronic:
Censorship: This is pretty funny — a friend writes that SonicWall‘s ‘Content Filter’ has judged my home page and FOUND IT WANTING:
Funny: Big Dead Place: ‘This site is dedicated to Antarctica and to thinking about Antarctica.’ It’s also pretty funny, and full of meat for an Antarctic obsessive like me.
Tech: Excellent post from Colin Charles here:
Spam: Jon Udell: How to forge an S/MIME signature, and Liudvikas Bukys’ take on the results: ‘Jon Udell tries his hand at S/MIME signature forgery, revealing that PKI is not a panacea. A digital signature proves something. The proof is strong but the something is weak (if it just demonstrates that you clicked a few things to get a persona certificate).’
Patents:
FFII: Conferences and ‘Patent Riots’ in Brussels 2004-04-14
: ‘The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) calls
on its 50.000 European supporters and on 300.000 petition signatories,
including more than 2000 CEOs of European software companies, to take to
the streets in Brussels on April 14 and in national capitals around 1st
of May, and to temporarily block access to their websites, in protest
against new moves by the EU Council and Commission to legalise patents
on computerised calculation rules and business methods’.
Politics: 
Ed
Vielmetti has spotted these stencils around Ann Arbor — I’ve seen ’em
around Irvine. The meme is spreading (and it’s a great one): ‘One-Term President’ Stencils.
Computer: Argh. When I bought my laptop, I had no option but to buy it with Windows XP — IBM doesn’t seem to sell them any other way. (you can pay extra to buy it that way from EmperorLinux, but really, the main reason I wouldn’t want it is to save money, I’m afraid.)
Names: Popbitch sez ‘Microsoft are just about to launch their new Windows Server 2003. The project manager who oversaw its development? Todd Wanke.’
Spam: DNS blocklists are a well-established, low-latency way to query a database of IP addresses for info. If you need to query a database over the internet quickly and in a connectionless manner, they’re ideal.
History: 
Megalithomania is an incredible
website ‘originally dedicated to Irish megaliths, but now expanded to
include all sorts of antiquities that are of importance/interest.’
UIs: Apple planning ‘Spoken Interface’ for 10.4. Damn! This was one of the main reasons I chose Linux over MacOS X for my new laptop!
Politics: Bruce Sterling’s speech at SXSW ’04. It’s excellent. He covers climate change, globalization, the Bush administration’s Lysenkoism, the spam problem, WMDs, and the Spanish election. Now I want to move to Austin ;)
Tech: GPRS roaming works… technically. Joi Ito gets a $3,500 bill for checking his mail around the world. Yowch.
Funny:
AP: SoCal city falls victim to Internet hoax, considers banning items made
with water. It’s the old ‘dihydrogen monoxide’ hoax again:
Spam: In a /. comment, someone says ‘CAPTCHA images are rilly rilly hard to beat, it’s all just rumours’. This is the CAPTCHA he’s talking about. 8 hours later, it’s been broken. Oops!
Mac: Rien de Moof plus.
Open Source: A good entry at sourcefrog.net describing some reasons people are driven to use open source — the closed-source component library one, in particular, drives me nuts.
Web: Plain text, transparently turned into nice markup, is an idea that’s clearly never going to go away.
eVoting: Craig passes on this link: apparently thousands of Orange County voters were given the wrong ballots in last week’s election. The result is that in 21 precincts, there were more ballots cast than registered voters. It gets better — apparently the voting machine vendor has said it will be impossible to figure out how many ballots are invalid as a result. It’d be funny if it wasn’t such a big deal…
Ireland: Now that the IP Enforcement directive has passed, Irish readers might be interested to find out how their MEPs voted on it.
EU: EU Reporter (PDF) thoroughly trashes the new law:
Security: Educated Guesswork forwards a great illustration of real-world security-measure subversion.
Ireland: Latest from the o2 Retail Kennedy Rd foneblog: the staff’s tattoos!
Architecture: For reasons which I won’t go into here, I wound up doing a Google Image Search for ‘toilet’ which turned up a link to this page: Toilets of the World. However, he’s missing one very important variety: the world-famous Goan ‘Hog Bog’.
Ireland: Pledge to take a trip to Iceland. Daev says ‘pledge to visit Iceland as a tourist if they stop whaling’ — if he gets enough clicks on this campaign, he’ll get a trip on one of Greenpeace’s ships!
Security: SCO accidentally leaked their previous lawsuit plans — to sue Bank of America — through MS Word’s ability to retain prior changes in a Word document.
Hardware: So IBM Thinkpads come with a predesktop area — a hidden 4GB partition of recovery files, Windows XP install disks, windows drivers, etc. taking up space on the hard disk.
Linux: wmctrl and Devil’s Pie — two nifty tools for window control. Both are command-line tools that use NetWM, a standard for X11 window managers, to hook into window manager policy and apply scriptable control to windows as they appear (in the Devil’s Pie case) or to pre-existing windows (in the wmctrl case).
Spam: Kottke passes on news of the second coming — in spam:
Networking: FOAF is really building steam now.