Tech:

• Go green: Choose Linux. As it turns out, the average Linux box lasts two years longer than the average Windows box. Think of the landfill savings!
• 42 reasons you can switch to the Mac.
• Here’s the movie trailer for the PS3 Home on-line system. Nope, still not caring.
• Steven Spielberg is working on a Wii game.
• And, now, a word from the internet.
• Nine programming theorems from one blogger’s perspective.  Too many of them are too true.

Movies and TV:

• Seven movies will never see, including a Marx Bros. reunion movie that never got made.
• Jason Lee to play David Seville – yes, Alvin’s Dad – in new Chipmunks movie.
• Louis Van Amstel: Short? Or Diva? Neither would surprise me. (Via TV Tattle.)
• Big Matt Groening interview. Talks about the SIMPSONS movies, SIMPSONS trivia, FAMILY GUY, his comic strip, and more.

Miscellaneous:

• Teenagers are reading?

This is an excerpt from the latest Borders mailer:

That’s right — the book is available now, and you can reserve it today! I’m so confused.

American Idol:

• American Idol will have a Beatles week this season.
• A great writeup of one person’s experience trying out for AI in Seattle. (Thanks, Patricia!)
• McPhee meets lonelygirl15.
• Full American Idol writeup for Seattle coming this afternoon. . .

Mac Stuff:

• The curious specs for the AppleTV. Very underpowered. Perhaps purposefully? Energy conservation? Price considerations? Hollywood demands?
• Revision3 and Digg’s Jay Adelson on why Apple TV matters. He makes a strong case.
• Latest rumor: Apple to announce Beatles on iTunes with SuperBowl ad?
• Pretty soon, you might be able to use (Linux) KDE applications on the Mac.

Web Stuff:

• WeatherBill has officially launched. You can now bet on the weather legally.
• Create your own favicon for your website. Expect this to show up at Various and Sundry real soon now.

Miscellaneous:

• Less than 4% of published books are still commercially viable.
• The results are in! You can, indeed, lose weight with the Wii.
• 23 Tips for Hacking Your TiVo.

• Apple will make new MacBook owners pay to unlock the new 802.11n spec already built in to their computers. Why? Sarbanes-Oxley. Is there no end to the lunacy of that law? (On the bright side, at least it’s only a $5 fee.)
• Whoops. Hold Your Wee for a Wii contestant dies.
• Cisco wanted access to iTunes for the use of the iPhone name. Did they ever think Apple would give them that?
• Whoops. Netscape accidentally breaks RSS for a short spell.
• Impressively large pictures of New York City.
• Whoops. Keifer Sutherland breaks 24 figure prototype. (Via Comic News Tracker)
• Guitar Hero: 1980s Edition announced. (Via Looneyblog)
• Whoops. Miss New Jersey USA resigns — she’s pregnant.

• The TiVo has been hacked, sort of. Let’s put it this way — if you are using Linux or Mac and want the same access to the TiVo files as PC-based TiVoToGo users have, now you can get that! This is good news, indeed. The first tutorial on ripping from the TiVo to your iPod is now up.
• Cory Doctorow explains how giving away his novels make him more money.
• How about a map of the Star Trek universe? It’s huge!
• James Kim is a C|Net editor who’s been missing with his family for the past week. I thought there was zero chance they’d ever be found alive. I thought for sure that their car had run off the road in a snowstorm and was just waiting to be found. But holy crap! His family has been found alive in the car, stranded there for nearly a week — but he hasn’t. He walked away from the car to try to find help on Saturday. My fingers are crossed for him now. There’s a full scale aerial search on for him.
• Retired pro baseball player cleans garage and finds long forgotten box full of fan mail. He answers it all, even adding postage to the SASEs where need be. Great guy, except he currently works for Scott Boras. Nobody’s perfect. (via)
• The weekly DVD release list is coming up later today.

Here’s a book that I plan on picking up this Christmas season. On The Edge: The Spectacular Rise And Fall Of Commodore is a new history of the computer company that is responsible for me being the computer geek that I am today. I used that Commodore 64 until I went to college in 1994, and it worked just fine. That was back in the day when you were a geek and a “teacher’s pet” for typing up your homework. I always found typing to be quicker and less painful than hand writing long papers out.

Nowadays, the high school kids want to type like they do on their cell phones for credit. My, how times change.

Slashdot | The Rise and Fall of Commodore

It’s a sad truth, and the book describes this in an often bitter fashion, that the early history of computers seems to focus on Apple, IBM and Microsoft while Commodore’s massive contributions to the industry are routinely ignored. The common misconception that Apple started the home computing industry is simply wrong. Commodore was the first to show a personal computer, the first to deliver low-cost computers to the masses, the first to sell a million computers, and the first to arrive with a true multimedia computer. Fortunately this book sets a lot of the record straight.

And be sure to read through the comments thread after the review for a real trip down memory line. I can remember some of those PEEKs and POKEs and all the sprite programming and Jim Butterfield’s book and typing in long programs out of magazines and — kids today don’t know how easy they have it.

Or, how hard. We learned programs by looking at them on paper and then typing them in ourselves, then altering them to see what happened. Today’s kids just throw the demo CD in and play the game or run the utility. No learning. You can go to websites that offer tutorials, but then you download the code and run it and barely ever look at it afterwards. Darn shame, all of it.

• With a little bit of practice, you could play Donkey Konga with four bongos all by yourself.
• Weird Al credits the internet for his recent success. This has been your daily Weird Al link.
• National Novel Writing Month begins next week, and it’s official: I will never ever find the time to participate. Not ever. I’m already writing 2500-3000 words a week, on average, for Pipeline. Isn’t that enough? Maybe If I did the novel over three months of insanity, I could pull it off?
• Latest Apple rumor: A 50 inch monitor in 2007 to go along with the iTV.
• Latest Apple reality: The MacBook Pro is now available with a dual core chip and lotsa RAM.
• Great TiVo offer: $125 for the box and a year’s worth of service. It’s a single tuner Series 2. I guess they’re blowing them out now. It’s a great machine.
• Barenaked Ladies are making good money off the digital downloads of their latest album. Sadly, the album is mostly crap, but at least they’re finding a successful alternate business model that doesn’t involve DRMs or record labels taking huge cuts.
• Men, be warned: Kevin McClurg once slept with another man’s girlfriend. And that man created a website. BWAH HA HA
• Cool pictures of the space shuttle launch taken from the air.
• THE SHIELD to spin off Dutch? I like the character, but I don’t think we need a full hour of him, weekly.
• New DVD releases to come this afternoon.

• Top photographers of tomorrow are teenagers today — and photobloggers!

• 10 Chick Flicks Men Will Enjoy. I’ve seen only four of them, but they’re also counting THE PRINCESS BRIDE as a chick flick. Still, the reasoning for each is solid. BEAUTY AND THE BEAST makes the list solely for Gaston’s musical number!

• Bloggers-turned-book-authors is a hot trend in publishing, and one people think is already about to turn ugly. So don’t look for the VARIOUS AND SUNDRY MEMOIRS at a Borders near you anytime soon.

• Code Search is Google’s new repository for Source Code. Kottke.org has been going through it and finding some interesting searches — everything from drunk coders to passwords.

• Quotes for Programmers.

• Brilliant advice on typography. Smart, common sense rules to live by.

• IE7 is coming very very soon.

* A book of a million [tag]random[/tag] digits.

• [tag]Barnes and Noble[/tag]‘s web site now includes PayPal as a payment option. Very cool.

• What does JK [tag]Rowling[/tag] do with all that [tag]Harry Potter[/tag] money? She doesn’t spend it too frivolously, as it turns out.

• [tag]Nick Hornby[/tag] on the art of reading.

• How to pronounce those hard-to-pronounce literary names.

Towel Day :: A tribute to [tag]Douglas Adams[/tag] (1952-2001)

You sass that hoopy Douglas Adams? Now there’s a frood who knew where his [tag]towel[/tag] was. You are invited to join your fellow hitchhikers in mourning the loss of the late great one. Join in on towel day to show your appreciation for the humor and insight that Douglas Adams brought to all our lives.

• All those cool Escher-esque images I’ve linked to lately? The artist’s name is [tag]Rob Gonsalves[/tag], and you can buy his book.

• I feel a lovely little bit of schadenfreude at the thought that nobody will ever recognize [tag]Barry Bonds[/tag]‘ home run record. Sure, he may surpass Hank Aaron in a database somewhere, but nobody thinks of it as legitimate or deserved. Is it really a record if the world ignores it?

• Microsoft’s [tag]Vista[/tag] OS does away with drop-down menus. It uses “[tag]ribbons[/tag].”

• The people at [tag]Opera[/tag] answer questions about the [tag]Nintendo[/tag] [tag]Wii[/tag] including their web browser. Most of the answers are, “We can’t discuss that yet,” but it’s still vaguely interesting. And this has been your Wii story for the day.

• Nintendo is now saying the Wii will be under 25,000 yen. (Currently, that works out to $222.) They expect to ship 6 million of them in this fiscal year. It sounds like their fiscal year might be January – December. That’s a quick 6 million units. Imagine if Microsoft could have pulled that off with the XBox 360 last Christmas?

• Don’t play the Wii in a room with halogen lamps. Plus: Nintendo pushing for October Wii release?

TRUE COLOSSUS By TIM ARANGO – New York Post Online Edition: business

OPRAH Winfrey has inked a deal to publish a fitness book with her personal trainer Bob Greene in what industry insiders say is the richest nonfiction book deal in history, sources told On The Money.

Oprah. A fitness book. Discuss.

Might I make a suggestion?

I’ve never read any of his books, but I know he has a large following and is well-respected. I was sorry to read this over the weekend.

From his publisher’s website:

Now in my case, what I have is primary amyloidosis with cardiomyapathy. That means that some (only about 5% at present) of my bone marrow is producing amyloids which are depositing in the wall of my heart, causing it to thicken and stiffen. Untreated, it would eventually make my heart unable to function any longer and I would have a median life expectancy of one year from diagnosis. Fortunately, I am set up for treatment, which expands my median life expectancy to four years. This does NOT mean I have four years to live. For those who’ve forgotten their freshman or pre-freshman (high school or junior high) math, a median means half the numbers fall above that value and half fall below. It is NOT an average. In any case, I intend to live considerably longer than that. Everybody knows or has heard of someone who was told they had five years to live, only that was twenty years ago and here they guy is, still around and kicking. I mean to beat him. I sat down and figured out how long it would take me to write all of the books I currently have in mind, without adding anything new and without trying rush anything. The figure I came up with was thirty years. Now, I’m fifty-seven, so anyone my age hoping for another thirty years is asking for a fair bit, but I don’t care. That is my minimum goal. I am going to finish those books, all of them, and that is that.

• What’s the best way to publish a tech book? On-line? Print? Both? One of the guys fro 37Signals goes at it with Tim O’Reilly, the publisher at APress, and more. Fascinating discussion of the economics of book publishing for computer programmers.

• What’s new in Firefox 2.0′s alpha? Check the screen shots out.

• Running Windows inside of Mac? Possibly in the next version of OS X. . . Personally, I’d like to see it so I could play with Linux.

• New pics of the Nintendo Revolution.

• One art prof drops Apple for Linux. The license fee savings allowed for cheaper classes and increased book instruction.

• A slightly more technical explanation of why Adobe isn’t doing Universal Binaries for Photoshop and Illustrator.

• Any day now, Griffin. Any day. . .