G’day.

The moon is in it’s most beautiful full and fat outfit, just starting to rise over the trees of my garden.

It’s been a perfect Saturday, full of unmentionable joys, wonderful calm weather and I have half an hour to check out what’s new out in the world. BBC and KSTA serve me with the usual mix of problems and news that are happening around this planet, but E2 as usual serves me on it’s front page with much more soothing fare: kyle’s biography of Ellis Regina makes me so curious that I get to check her out on LastFM and discover a new Brasilian singer apart from Joao Gilberto and Gilberto Gil. Then there is a beautiful diary entry, a discussion of an elizabethan novel and some rude remarks about the south of the U.S.

I mean, apart from Kuro5hin, were else will you find art and anarchy so close together?

For over 7 years, E2 continues to be the best place on the web.

Stuff the rest.

Excellent summary of the operating system that are hovering on the fringe of the more mainstream Linux/*BSD’s by David Chisnall. If you for instance ever wanted to run an operating system on the hardware equivalent of a dead badger, Contiki seems to be your thing.

Check it out 

Tim Flannery, professor of earth and life sciences at Macquarie University, chair of the Copenhagen Climate Council and Australian of the Year (who would have thought that Australians could be so enlightened? I was expecting a cricketer or at least the CEO of a mining company) has outlined the political challenges that West-Island and its inhabitants are facing to battle their climate change induced, catastrophic drought in the latest edition of the New Scientist.  From local government to federal government, they all have their work cut out for them: drought proofing the cities, dramatically increasing the cost of water, rainwater tank installation for every household can be done locally, but what if Mr Howard continues to refuse joining Kyoto and reduce the footprint of the nation with the highest per capita emissions of CO2 worldwide?

If he doesn’t recognize quickly that Australians are starting to worry about the lack of incentive his government is showing, he could be the first western leader kicked out of office for environmental shortsightness.

Roger Hughes, regular contributor to E2, has taken up the challenge to ride his bike through western Europe, to be exact from Nottingham to Rome. This way he will not only see Europe from a different perspective, but also raise awareness and gather money for the  Down’s Syndrome Association. As you do these days, he is simultaneously writing a blog about his experience, which is a very worthy read.

So, pop over there, donate a bit and read all about his travels.

I recently lost my Ipod while travelling. Very annoying, but fortunately I had all my music and videos backed up on one of my Macs, so at least my wonderful collection of astonishingly bad eighties disco tracks was not lost. The question was of course: what now? I needed something mobile to fulfill my need for constant entertainment on car journeys and planes, and have a device I can use to listen to my favourite podcasts at night. Another Ipod was an obvious choice, but has two significant disadvantages:

• the screen is too small for anything but short video clips
• annoyingly, one can only synchronise with one dedicated machine.
• while present, the current Ipod software running on Linux is still quite unstable

So I needed something with a bigger screen that was able to run most video codecs and easily synchronised with all 4 different OSes that were running at work and in my household: OpenBSD, Linux, Windows and OsX. After a little bit of research I stumbled over a great offer for this: the Archos 500 is only 12 x 7cm small, but features an enormous screen and firmware that pretty much reads every media format you throw at. The 30GB hd is big enough for my music collection and 10 feature films in AVI format, which should be enough even for the most torrid long haul flight. Here is my Archos, busy playing the introductory sequence from Serenity:

The audioquality is excellent, the screen is astonishing, and as a bonus I can record all my favourite shows from TV while I’m not around via its interface to my satellite receiver. Battery life seems adequate (I still haven’t run into trouble there) and it’s small enough to carry around in jacket.

Geek bliss.