Clearing my tabs: Dying of cute

Thanks to this post by cadhla, my flist now includes

The Daily Coyote (also available as dailycoyote)

This is a blog being kept by a woman who rescued an orphaned coyote pup and is now raising him in her log cabin in Wyoming. Seriously cute.

Linux gaining traction on the desktop?

No, but maybe on the laptop! according to this article in Engadget,

Arriving late and at twice its original touted price of $199, the Asus Eee has succeeded in the muscle-driven PC market with modest screen size, processor, RAM and storage specifications and solid (but not outstanding) battery life. Its name and design philosophy take unabashed cues from Nintendo's Wii. And like its inspiration, it's been a budget-conscious blockbuster.

Reuters reports that Asus is now shipping 20,000 of the 2 lb. mobile computing quasi-appliances every month. The Tawianese manufacturer has been so encouraged that it has raised its global forecast to five million Eees by the end of 2008 as it aims at becoming the fifth largest notebook PC company by 2010. Those are the kind of numbers that could make the top four take notice, setting off a frenzy of melodramatic pound-shedding to rival The Biggest Loser.

This is, of course, very encouraging. We have one at work; I'm currently debating whether to replace the stock Linux install with Ubuntu.

Clearing my tabs: the feeling of power

Just a couple of pointers to posts I flagged a while ago on the subject of power. No, not that kind of power -- all you superhero fans can go back to sleep now. All you political pundits, too. I'm talking kilowatts here. Lots of them, in some cases.

First of all there's this post about Stanford's use of silicon nanowires to build Li-ion batteries with 10 times the current capacity. Just don't short them.

Moving up the power curve, we have this techdirt post about recent advances in nuclear power. It has the potential to be cheap, safe, and environmentally friendly -- with no greenhouse gasses to worry about. No less than two companies have announced small reactors: Toshiba, and a new company called Hyperion (found via this post in Gizmodo). The Hyperion reactor promises 27MW for five years maintenance-free (after which you presumably dig it up and ship it back to the factory for refueling and refurbishment). The Toshiba reactor is said to be only 200KW, designed for, say, a large building or a house full of gamers.

Album notes

I've actually been getting a few things done on the music front.

1. Went down to Stanford to see who to talk to about selling albums. Most college bookstores have a section for works by alumni. Stanford doesn't: it's owned by some chain that doesn't give a damn. I pledged them $50 this year; next year I'll just send that much more to Carleton.
2. Essentially finished with adapting the various make rules and perl scripts to the new directory layout. Track working directories now live underneath the corresponding album working directories.
3. My TrackInfo script is now capable of computing total time for a list of songs, so it can take over much of the work of the Setlist script. Eventually it should allow me to integrate setlists and the corresponding concert recordings.
4. Did some tracklist planning. There are definitely three albums in the queue now. Stop laughing.

( I could use a little input from your collective wisdom here... )

I expect to have a web page with a tentative track list up by Monday, along with a couple of new scratch tracks.