Earlier today The Pirate Bay servers were raided by Swedish police officials (causing the site to shutdown). The MPAA has released an official press release (beware non-Mac users, it’s a PDF) on the matter.

It’s a shame. The Pirate Bay was one of my favorite trackers (for the amount of stuff and because it was a free tracker which I could use to host torrents) even if it was nearly always down.

Update:

SITE DOWN - WILL BE UP AND FULLY FUNCTIONAL WITHIN A DAY OR TWO

Looks like The Pirate Bay will be back up!

Update:
They’re back again! With a spiffy new logo too.

PrivatePhone is a service from NetZeroVoice that assigns users a free telephone number so they can give it out instead of their personal phone number. Calls to the PrivatePhone number are answered by voicemail. The voicemail message is recorded and then can be retrieved either online, or from a regular telephone (dial your PrivatePhone number, press the “*” key before your greeting begins, and enter your PIN at the prompt).

The PrivatePhone service works similar to e-mail. The only difference is instead of receiving only e-mail messages, you can also receive voice messages.

My phone number is (443) 832-4258. Feel free to leave me a voicemail message.

On a side note, I just noticed that Last Comic Standing is back on NBC premiering tonight (5/30/06) at 8PM eastern time.

Wasn’t fun to be outside.

Not sure why, maybe it was because I was outside.

Saw this on lastfm the other day. Made me wonder- is it really a bug?…

Other than a new interface revealed in the recently released Office 2007 beta, it seems there is also a new default font. It’s called Calibri; it’s a san-sarif font, versus Times New Roman, a serif font.

I found a great application for Tiger (OS 10.4). It’s called Temperature Monitor and it displays the temperature of each sensor on your Mac (CPU, hard disk, memory, graphics card, etc.). Temperature Monitor has an option to run right from the menu bar, so it doesn’t take up much screen real estate. It’s free as well.

(These are the sensors on my mac, different models will vary.)

Created in Photoshop CS2.

Update: Fixed them up a bit and made it available for download (if ya really want it :P).

[download]

Writely (now acquired by Google) is a wonderful web-based word (alliteration galore!) processor. The interface is very similar to Microsoft Word, the only difference being is that it allows for collaborative editing (similar to SubEthaEdit- except it’s free!).

I’ve been working on my papers lately in Writely as opposed to Microsoft Word and everything has been going great. Haven’t run into a single problem so far. I like how it’s online (with backups every 10 seconds and unlimited space) so I never lose my documents and if I happen to forget a paper, I can open up Writely and print it out, or download it as a Word .doc.

As of now, it’s invite-only, but I have plenty of invites to give away. Just post a comment and I’ll send one your way (make sure you put the correct e-mail in the e-mail box in the comment form though).

Update: Writely is now open to everyone, so invites are no longer necessary!

With all the talk the Apple Stores are receiving, it seems like Dell wants to get in the action as well by constructing two 3000 square foot stores in the North Park Center in Dallas, Texas and the Palisades Center in West Nyack, New York. The Dallas store will open in late summer and the New York store will open in the fall of this year. The store won’t actually sell computers directly (they will not stock sellable computers in their inventory), but instead, will allow customers to get a feel for the Dell products a make a custom order in the store and receive the order in the mail (essentially a typical online Dell purchase). They will also be offering a Genius Bar (Apple Store) like environment where Dell users can get their computers repaired.

Electronic Gaming Monthly
Computer Gaming World

No guarantees on how long this will last. This should extend my EGM and CGW subscriptions to 2012 (never ever paid for EGM or CGW).

This morning (right before working on a project, mind you) my internet adventitiously turned off on me. I called Comcast up and they told me four other people in my area were having a internet problem as well. The earliest they could send out a tech to examine my problem was Wednesday.

One and a half hours later my internet was back! I called them up to cancel the tech and joking asked them for my 8.4 cents back ($42 a month/31 days in May/24 hours a day=5.6 cents per hour). I told them I’d make them a deal; I’d round it down to 8 cents and wouldn’t even charge for the lost work reparations. Shockingly, they agreed to credit back 8 cents.

Those 8 cents add up- 8 cents today, 8 cents tomorrow, maybe 9 cents next week. Soon, I won’t even have a bill to pay. Good idea to call them if an outage occurs and get your money back.

If you’ve got a Powerbook or MacBook with the built-in motion sensor, you can turn it into a lightsaber with MacSaber- just swing around your Mac! Authentic lightsaber sounds included.

Update: I found a video!

Honestly, if this doesn’t kill your hard drive, I’m not sure what will.

The BBC meant to interview Guy Kewney, a computer expert about the Apple Computer versus Apple legal case, but accidentally picked up Guy Goma, an economics graduate who was waiting in a different reception area for a job interview. Check out his expression when he first finds out what he’s being interviewed for.

On the website of the new Apple Store on 5th Avenue in New York City there are time lapse movies of the each hour for the first 24 hours.

Check out the 5AM movie, some guy is proposing a marriage in front of the camera.

It’s still chugging along and it’ll get finished in a few months I hope! I know I just said a few months, but for God’s sake, don’t ask me for a release date!!
#

Yes, straight from the horse’s mouth! I’ve been waiting for this game since 2003 and they’ve finally released an estimate (the guys at XGenStudios have NEVER released a estimate date for this game, so this is good news). I know it’s just a flash game, but it’s a DAMN good one!

For those who have no idea what I’m talking about, play StickRPG, the best flash game ever made.