The Windkey and the Lamplighter

Zimbabwe announced today that they will shift their currency denomination by ten places. I am told that quite recently their greatest denomination was fifty billion. That note is now worth five new Zimbabwe dollars.

From the TSA’s own description of a recent false positive:

The passenger was an engineer and said he built the battery to power his DVD player for the long flight to Hawaii. After recognizing that the item could be seen by other passengers as a threat, the man surrendered it to Supervisory TSO Raiford Patterson and was allowed to board the flight.

Miniluv would be proud. This thoughtcriminal learned to love Big Brother before joyfully accepting his sentence—government confiscation of his property.

It turns out that most web browsers leak information about your browsing history. One neat example from the publicist of this fact shows how to guess the gender of the user. The trick is to show a bunch of links in the page, then use JavaScript to examine the color of each link.

It thinks my work machine is a girl, but my home machine is a boy. I suppose the work machine visits almost entirely Google and internal sites.

And the Child spake and the tribes of Nato immediately loosed the Caveats that had previously bound them. And in the great battle that ensued the forces of the light were triumphant. For as long as the Child stood with his arms raised aloft, the enemy suffered great blows and the threat of terror was no more.

From the Gospel of our President and Savior Barack Obama according to his Apostle Media.

It’s not just a fan, it’s a Vornado. Amazing how much difference it makes to keep the air moving in here. In a pinch, it also removes loud talkers from the hallway outside.

WordPress has their iPhone client out. Seems nice enough so far. Most interestingly, they’ve released their source under the GNU GPL. That means that they wrote it from scratch, without any libraries buy their own and Apple’s.

Looking for some Saturday night TV? You’ve got a few hours left to catch Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog:

This is Joss Whedon’s most recent project. It really is available for viewing this weekend only. After that it’ll be available on DVD, and may still be available for paid download from Apple’s iTunes store. This weekend, it’s free from http://www.drhorrible.com/.

This is completely fantastically cool.
Just watch:

The Moon Transiting Earth, from Deep Impact

One of the things that most planetary spacecraft do, at some point, is swing their cameras around to take a look at home. Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society has collected these pictures here.

Wow. The iconic Apollo picture is here, of course, as are some from the Russian Zond missions of the same era. The Voyager “Pale Blue Dot” picture is here, and there’s even one from the surface of Mars, from Spirit. Take a look.

A staff member at Apple’s Burlington store estimated the wait at 2.5–3 hours as of 11am. He blamed it in part on an AT&T server crash—and now that it was online, there’d be a wait of two and a half to three hours. Even if AT&T’s server was down for an hour, that’d put them at most an hour behind schedule. A three hour line implies either a big line from the morning, yet uncleared, or more demand than they can register in the store.

I saw four registration booths running. Assuming Apple’s 10-15 minute setup estimate is correct, that can handle 40-60 sales per hour. I saw between 200 and 250 people in line, but a number appeared to be couples or family groups. If they can be handled as one sale, it seems plausible that those four stations can clear that line in 2.5–3 hours.

I’m sure Apple is regretting their choice to require in-store registration this time around. At-home iTunes registration is all that allowed them to move a hundred thousand iPhones on the first day last year. It also avoided any lines at any stores.