Assorted Geekish Mutterings

Really tired right now. Stayed up too late yesterday finishing off The Sentinel by Arthur C. Clark. Earlier this month I read 2010: Odyssey Two and 2061: Odyssey Three. I'll probably go to a library this weekend looking for 3001.

Mac People have something to be excited about as Camino v0.9 alpha 1 was released tonight. You can read the absurdly long release notes here if you've got twenty or thirty minutes. And speaking of MoFo alphas, test builds of Firefox 1.0.5 are available for anyone brave enough to try it, according to the second post at the new Mozilla Quality Blog.

Over the past few days I've been playing around with DivX 6, Nero Recode 2, and ratDVD, looking for a high-quality and fast way to decode some of my movies to save HD space. DivX was just monstrously slow and produced a noticeably desaturated picture. Plus, in my experience anyway, it produced just a 35 to 40% compression rate. No thanks. ratDVD crashed almost right away the only time I've used it so far, and I haven't done much with Decode 2 yet. I'll let you know if anything blows me away.

My old bargain-basement keyboard that I found in front of an abandoned house stopped working last week, finally giving me the chance to go all-out on a new one. So I dropped nearly ten big-boys on a generic 112-keyer. That's right, you heard me. It's got "power," "sleep," and "wake" keys that don't do anything, and it didn't come with any software. It's only the most rad keyboard ever.

I have to go watch Aqua Teen Hunger Force now.