From Engadget... of course... A robot that consumes flies and uses their consequential energy, if you will, to power itself. Ummm, wow, and you thought your teenager's feet smelled bad:

We know what you’re thinking. A robot that totes around human sewage, digesting living beings for energy? What, you’re not inexorably excited about this? The EcoBot II (ah, what a benign, nonthreatening name) is fed flies into 12 sewage-based bacterial fuel cells, which break them down, digest them, and use the electrons released as current. And we don’t wanna hear no jibberjabber about how it’s only a matter of time before these bots turn on their human masters, because if you’re gonna go, what’s so bad about being slowly digested in human feces by giant robot oppressors?

/me marks September 21st on my calendar...

On that day, the first three Star Wars films (Episodes IV-VI: A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi) will be released on DVD after having been digitally cleaned up. Lowry Digital Images assigned 80 employees and 600 networked Power Mac G5 computers with the equivalent of 378 terabytes (378 million megabytes) of hard-disk storage to take the original films to their DVD boxed set release.

from USA Today and Paul Thurrott via Scoble

The awesome and bloggerific KC Lemson points to a Knowledge Base article that describes how to tell Internet Explorer to leave your Office documents and files alone when you're opening them from a web server via hyperlink. We use SharePoint where I work, and it can be downright annoying at times when a document opens in-line in Internet Explorer when what I really want is for it to open in the application that was used to create it.

This is easy but good stuff - excerpt from the KB article:

To configure Internet Explorer to open Office files in the appropriate Office program by using the Folder Options tool:

1. Open My Computer.
2. On the Tools menu (or the View menu), click Folder Options (or click Options).
3. Click the File Types tab.
4. In the Registered file types list, click the specific Office document type (for example, Microsoft Excel Worksheet), and then click Advanced (or click Edit).
5. In the Edit File Type dialog box, click to clear the Browse in same window check box (or click to clear the Open Web documents in place check box).
6. Click OK.

UPDATE: The Genesis space capsule crashed in the desert after a parachute system intended to slow it's descent failed to deploy. The plan was for a helicopter crew to hook the parachute in mid-air in order to prevent the capsule from impacting the ground even under parachute speeds, but without the chute the capsule impacted at nearly 200 miles per hour.

I grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, which is home to Los Alamos National Laboratory. Scientists there do incredible research about many, many things - including our sun and such important and fascinating things as the solar winds, Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) and solar flares. My stepfather pioneered the term CME and has dedicated years of work in the field. I have not had a chance to talk to him yet about what the loss of this experiment means to his colleagues, but I imagine it's a real heart-breaker. There is still some optimism that there will be usable solar matter collected from the mission, and my fingers are crossed.

At precisely 8:52:46 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time (PDT), northwest of Bend, Oregon, a fireball will appear in the sky: a white-hot dot of light, brighter than the planet Venus, gliding across the blue morning sky.

No, it's not a scary movie, it's a space capsule returning to earth after being jettisoned by the Genesis spacecraft. Inside are samples of our sun's solar wind particles, which are being returned to earth for research.

If you live in Southern Oregon (from Bend to the southeast), Southern Idaho or Northern Nevada, look up in the sky at about 8:52 a.m. today - and take a video - I am curious what this will look like!

• Viewer's map here
• Story here

I received an email this evening announcing that SharePoint Experts has just released PowerUndelete for WSS:

"Whenever someone deletes a list item, or a document from a document library, PowerUndelete captures it and stores it in an "Undelete bin". End users are empowered to "undelete" their own documents, saving the support desk from the trials of recovering files and list items from database backups."

Very cool - this is promising stuff. I have not been able to try it yet (but may do so once I can see it in action). A video demo showing the product will be made available within the next day or two. You can get more information on the SharePoint Experts web site. They have a few different add-on enhancements available for SharePoint.

Lots of passwords to remember for web sites and Windows accounts? Now you can log into them using your fingerprint.

Microsoft has released three new devices: A keyboard with built-in reader, an advanced mouse with a reader to accompany it, and a simple reader device all on its own.

I'll be interested to see how these are secured.

See the informative animated flash marketing thing here.

Microsoft has extended (doubled) the time they will allow businesses to block the automated installation Windows XP SP2. I have mixed feelings/thoughts about this, but ultimately I think it's a good thing for Microsoft to allow it's customers to control the update for a while.

For my part, I think everyone should install this service pack as soon as you reasonably can. Companies should know that delaying without a good business reason to do so is almost certainly a mistake. If your reason is that you overheard or read about some vague problems, you better have the details, and they better be real. I've already had a number of conversations with IT-types who made what they positioned as an informed business decision not to install SP2, with absolutely no good reasoning behind their decision.

Details on the delay from Microsoft Watch:

Microsoft has allowed XP users who were leery of taking delivery of Windows XP Service Pack 2 to postpone the patch by using automatic-patch-blocking tools. Microsoft is now giving XP customers using Windows Update/Automatic Update a deadline (April 12, 2005) by which they need to finish preparing for SP2 before Microsoft pushes SP2 out to them.

and from Microsoft's web site:

Please note that the mechanism to temporarily disable delivery of Windows XP SP2 will be available for a period of 240 days (8 months) from August 16. At the end of this period, Windows XP SP2 will be delivered to all Windows XP and Windows XP Service Pack 1 systems.

At precisely 8:52:46 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time (PDT), northwest of Bend, Oregon, a fireball will appear in the sky: a white-hot dot of light, brighter than the planet Venus, gliding across the blue morning sky.

No, it's not a scary movie, it's a space capsule returning to earth after being jettisoned by the Genesis spacecraft. Inside are samples of our sun's solar wind particles, which are being returned to earth for research.

If you live in Southern Oregon (from Bend to the southeast), Southern Idaho or Northern Nevada, look up in the sky at about 8:52 a.m. today - and take a video - I am curious what this will look like!

• Viewer's map here
• Story here

I subscribe and post updates from my weblog to a site that aggregates Oregon weblogs, called orblogs.com. If you're from the area and/or are interested in the wide variety of opinions and thoughts that make up the blogging community in Oregon, you should check it out.

It looks like as sometime recently they have a RSS 2.0 XML feed available. It showed up in my referrers this evening. Not sure how I missed that, but it's a welcome addition to the site.

Yay! Publication dates!!

From Engadget: Update on RIM Blackberry 7100t (aka, the "Charm")

"We’re not sure how much this is going to change things we mentioned earlier today, but now that some corroborating photos have surfaced on an unnamed website, now we’re admittedly getting a little (only a little, okay?) anxious about the supposedly imminent release of the RIM Blackberry 7100t. Apparently (as pictured) T-Mobile appears to be a carrier, and we also understand it may have Bluetooth 1.1."

Cool keypad idea on this one, where they put two characters per key and then use adaptive text guessing to form your words for you (kind of like T9 text input, but presumably more accurate since the probability of getting the correct key combinations correct will be much higher).

Okay, so earlier this evening I was over at a friend's place visiting, and two of the kids there are attending Science and Technology high school magnet academy here in Beaverton, Oregon starting tomorrow. I was talking about how cell phones can be business leashes and how Blackberries, while quite helpful and useful from a business standpoint, are more like a ball and chain on the “Tether Continuum.”

Okay you smart math/science./technology students - here's a probability quiz for you: The popular T9 text input method uses a standard phone keypad and does predictive text analysis based on the combination of keys you press against a known dictionary of words. This new device has two characters per key instead of 3. Given use of the same dictionary on both devices, and that you are typing the same words and phrases on each device, how much more accurate will the Blackberry Charm text input will be? ;-)

Via Newsweek and PVRBlog:

“... now couch potatoes are perched on the cusp of true paradise. Soon they won't even have to stand up to trudge to the mailbox; fat broadband pipes will let them directly download movies over the Net to their television ...

“... In an interview with NEWSWEEK last year, CEO Reed Hastings predicted that by the end of the decade, Netflix will deliver most of its rentals over the Net, supplanting its distribution centers and trademark red envelopes. "We named the company Netflix, we didn't name it DVD by Mail," he said.”

Nice - so if I am subscriber to both TiVo and Netflix (which I am), I can order my movies and have them downloaded straight to my TiVo for viewing? Woah, cool!

Keeping my eyes open for this one. Something tells me I'll have to have a series 2 TiVo, though... Like the one I was eye-balling at Frys yesterday... Might just have to finally give up on the haX0red series one box.

It's another long weekend at home, and after pretty much nothing but clouds and rain Saturday, the great weather today means an opportunity to get some stuff done outside. Among the around-the-house items I have been tending to this afternoon, I harvested a bunch of garden stuff:

• The first (of many, it appears) ripe tomato
• About 20 ears of corn
• About 20 carrots
• 10 beets
• 12 bell peppers
• Uncountable sweet peas
• A few strawberries

And there's plenty more of everything where that came from, with the exception of the corn - the plants were a little too close together, it appears, and most of the ears are too small. But the ones that did grow are awfully good.

If the weather holds out, there's going to be a tomato give-away happening pretty soon - there's just no way I can eat all of those.

Oh, and the big sunflowers are topping out at about 18 feet at the tallest, with stalks almost as thick as my forearm. Those are some amazing plants!

The forecast I received this morning on my trusty mobile device told me it would be 73 degrees and partly cloudy, and offered the same for the rest of the weekend.

So far it's been drizzling rain all day and completely clouded over. My garden needs some sun. The lawn is too wet to mow. I drove the motorcycle to the shop in the rain to get the brake recall thing done, and got wet. I turned on the heat for the first time in forever.

Trusty mobile device. Yeah, right.

If this is partly cloudy, what's next?

If you run any version of dasBlog, this is important to you.

Thanks to Bliz for letting me know to update my dasBlog installation. A new patch is available to fix an issue with all previous versions that can allow a malicious person to gain access to your user credentials for the dasBlog app (but not the system).

• Get the patch
• Read the news
• Visit Bliz

Don't know about you, but I've had enough for one week. Three days off. W00t!

Plans: taking the motorcycle in for a brake recall, visiting a friend's coffee shop, hanging out, mowing the yard, and we'll see what else.

What's everyone else up to?