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Google Backlinks

Hmm… Google introduced a backlinks feature in the last few days, but it doesn’t seem to work for me on the webmaster tools page.

Does it take some time to show up on older accounts?

UPDATE: Looks like there was a bit of a bug and it was disabled for a short period of time.

Treo 680 ROM Tool

I started looking into a Treo 680 ROM tool. Unfortunately, there is no longer a recovery bootloader on the Treo, making ROM upgrades significantly riskier.

There are some possible ways to proceed, but this will take some time to investigate. I’ll keep you posted.

If you have a Treo 680, would you be willing to build/purchase a serial cable?

Vista's anti-consumer design

Miguel de Icaze points us at an article entitled ‘A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection’.

In this article, you’ll discover all the wonderful ways Microsoft is making your next video card more expensive and/or less featureful, as well as removing the ability for certain functionality to continue to work in the presence of so-called “premium content”.

I find the whole thing vaguely amusing, considering that Prof. Ed Felton and others pointed out the flaws in HDCP, one of the lynchpins of the whole system. You won’t be able to get at the raw MPEG-encoded video when HDCP is cracked, but you’ll certainly be able to stream it into another high-quality encoder and get a pretty darn good approximation.

So, is this the “longest suicide note in history”?

Would you buy a music player from a guy in a suit?

Hmm… when I see Jobs talking about the iPod, he’s standing on a stage in a turtleneck, confident.

When I see Ballmer talking about the Zune, I see a red-faced, sweaty, 60-year-old guy in a suit trying to sound like he is somehow in touch with what “the youth want”.

I think they need a new face for Zune PR…

OLPC has a "View Source" key

According to LinuxWorld, the OLPC is going to drop the caps-lock key in favour of a key named “view source”. The purpose of this key is to allow the children to figure out how the current webpage or application is written.

I’m not sure why this key appeals to me so much. Maybe it has something to do with typing in BASIC games on my old computers and being able to edit the source of GORILLA.BAS and other interesting programs to make them do what I wanted. I think it is a fantastic way for the children to get to know how things work. Think of it as a transparent case on an engine or an analog watch.