It's time for one of those rarities: a post on this blog made almost exclusively from nifty links.

dotSUB makes me happy (and informed!) It's a site where you can subtitle (and translate) videos and podcasts, and its interface is a lot handier than my WikiTranscript idea (which may still be useful in terms of seeding something like dotSUB with a starter transcription - I need to play with the Sphinx voice rec engine more, though). I have never been able to understand an entire podcast before without the help of a friend or a text transcript hosted elsewhere on a website (and seriously, folks, it's so much nicer when you don't have to scroll through the text yourself...)

Ivan Kristic is amazing. He's the inventor of Bitfrost (which is fascinating; read the spec here), director of security at OLPC... and needs to have his office pranked sometime ;-)

Conference blogging (courtesy Ethan Zuckerman) - you mean there's a word for what I do, and other people post their notes to blogs? Sweet! This brings back memories of last year's Wikimania, when I coordinated session transcriptions (using a gobby document for each talk). Conclusion: notetaking is too much of an individual effort for this kind of thing to work - you end up with one person being the primary typer and others editing. I'm going to try doing this at the next conference I'm at - announce I'm taking notes on a gobby server and invite others to join me, but take responsibility for posting my own notes to a wiki somewhere. I think it will help, since I love taking notes on everything, type pretty fast, and have a hard time catching words sometimes during speeches (basically, if I look away for a few second, I have no idea what the speaker's saying - the disadvantage to being lipreading-reliant and using a Markov-type model to guess missed words through context).

Turn off your air conditioning.

I'm sorely tempted by these t-shirts, although I know I don't need them (and have enough shirts, really). Also, I appreciate that Questionable Content sells geeky girls' t-shirts. I almost don't want to admit this because I have (or had?) a longstanding aversion to thinking/talking about clothes and curves and hate sounding remotely "girly," but they... look (and feel) a lot better on me (as far as I'm concerned) than normal guys' t-shirts. Most of my wardrobe could still be worn by a guy my size, though.

That's all for now.