In order to avoid another overwhelming linkdump, here’s a few that caught my eye recently, or otherwise. The endless beta, thanks to Matt. Using The Sims to learn a foreign language seems like a fascinating idea, though I’ve never played The Sims. I’d certainly like to know more than English and broken French. An annotated…

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Per my usual, I called home right before leaving work, so the family has a clue about my arrival time. Tonight, the boy came on the speakerphone and asked “Did you play with the football today?” The boy has visited the office a few times, and each time, we play with a small Nerf football,…

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Earlier this week, I raced to the end of Sharpe’s Triumph, by Bernard Cornwell. This novel is set in India in 1803, where the British General is Arthur Wellesley, whose fame as the Duke of Wellington still lies in the future. Our hero Sharpe saves the general’s life (of course) in a furious bout of…

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During the holidays, I finished Children of the Mind, another novel by Orson Scott Card in the “Ender Quartet.” This wraps up this half of the eight-part series. Honestly, I’m hoping the other half of the series is more even. The pages turned fast enough, but I didn’t enjoy this one as much as the…

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I follow the New York Times technology feed via RSS (feed link). For the last couple of weeks, whenever the feed updates, NetNewsWire is convinced by some change in the feed that all the items in the feed are new to me. Since, as of this writing, there are headlines going back 4 days, to…

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So the folks at Ludicorp have a hit with Flickr, as many have noted… more power to them. The interesting part, as I was reminded by this light-hearted post comparing Flickr to a MMRPG (via Jeff Veen) that Ludicorp was originally founded to create the Game Neverending. At this point, the folks at Ludicorp have…

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Dave Winer notes the introduction of podcasting by NPR’s On the Media, and cites the press release claiming this is the first NPR program to do so. I don’t know how long Future Tense has been podcasting, but it certainly didn’t start today. Future Tense is from American Public Media, which most of us here…

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TiVo is fighting to protect its name from generic usage (December 13, 2004 article from NYT… in the $ archive already, sorry). I don’t really care whether they are successful or not, but I imagine they are doomed to failure. In the long term, inventing a new word and creating a new category of service/product…

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I enjoyed reading Jeff Barr’s Syndic8 2004 retrospective. Jeff and I had lunch at Il Fornaio in Levi’s Plaza here in San Francisco (it was convenient… food isn’t that special) maybe three years ago, and I’ve kept in sporadic touch since then. I think Syndic8 is a resource, and I’m glad Jeff and his colleague…

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I installed WordPress (blogging software) with a new webhost today, and the testbed blog is up and running. It wasn’t five minutes, for a few reasons, but it wasn’t brutal. Still, not something I’d encourage anyone to try who doesn’t already know a little bit about FTP and databases. The host, TextDrive, was incredibly responsive…

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