This and that

[mdlbear]

I left work early yesterday because there was no water in the building -- apparently the repairs done last week were either unsuccessful or insufficient. I'm wondering what the situation will be this morning; early reports suggest that there may be enough water to operate the toilets. I worked from home for a couple of hours, mainly installing and setting up the Scratchbox embedded development environment. It's apparently the basis for the Maemo development platform for the (announced but not yet available) Nokia 770.

E Ink just announced that it will be offering prototyping kits that include a 6" diagonal, 170 pixels per inch, 4 gray level, 800x600 e-ink display. Like all E Ink displays, it only needs power to change the display, not to maintain the image. The kit also includes a development board with a 400 MHz Gumstix single-board computer as well as I/O boards for MMC, Bluetooth and USB. (Blatantly stolen from DocBug.) I was originally tempted to buy one for use as a songbook replacement, but between the small screen and the astronomical price ($3K -- they didn't have the order form up yesterday) I think I'll wait for somebody to build it into an actual product.

The NPR News segment on Filk (featuring folks and songs from Conchord 2005) will air this week on the nationally-syndicated program "Day to Day". Xeni Jardin, who produced the segment, writes "I'm fairly certain that it will air Thursday, but may be bumped to Friday. Suggest that you keep an eye on this website for details -- the archived audio will be permanently available there, too."

Saw the last part of Martin Scorsese's documentary on Bob Dylan last night on PBS. It's out on DVD, so I'll be ordering it soon.