Make magazine debuted its new TV show on PBS stations and online this week.  It was awesome, I look forward to next week’s episode.

The series encourages everyone to invent, revent, recycle, upcycle, and act up. Based on the popular Make magazine, each half-hour episode hopes to inspire viewers to think, create, and, well, make. Each episode can be viewed or downloaded DRM-free, in HD on makezine.tv - the show is also available on Vimeo, YouTube, blip.tv and iTunes - We’re pretty sure this might be the first TV show to launch in all these places, hopefully others will too!

Seems to me that Craft magazine could create a successful TV show, too

On New Year’s Eve many users of Microsoft’s Zune started reporting their devices became frozen and unresponsive.  This was quickly dubbed a mass suicide and the haters lined up to the left to poke fun of all the Microsoft users, who lined up to the right waiting for a fix.  No fix yet, but MS offered this work-around (a little too late) today:

Disconnect your Zune from USB and AC power sources.

Because the player is frozen, its battery will drain—this is good. Wait until the battery is empty and the screen goes black. If the battery was fully charged, this might take a couple of hours.

Wait until after noon GMT on January 1, 2009 (that’s 7 a.m. Eastern or 4 a.m. Pacific time).

Connect your Zune to either a USB port on the back or your computer or to AC power using the Zune AC Adapter and let it charge.

Why wait until after January 1, 2009? MS won’t say, but the popular assumption is tThere’s a bug caused by the 2008 leap year - here’s a wonderfully technical explanation and plain English translation of the bug.  For reals?!? I guess that means MS has four years to issue a real fix.

Elph spent time over the holidays running new patch cables in our server room at Mail Order.  It used to look like a technicolor octopus of CAT5 with 10-20 ft. tentacles.  Now it’s uniformly purple and decidedly better.

Al the Octopus

Tom Root sent this our way last week.  Ecofont reduces the amount of ink used to print by “omitting parts of the letter.”  At a large size you can see the dots of omission, but at 12 point or smaller the dots are unnoticeable.  With small bits of the font missing this in turn uses less ink.  It’s pretty clever, I don’t know how effective it is - Econfont claims you’ll use 20% less ink,  but I’m doubtful.  Nonetheless, I like the idea and it’s not a bad looking font either…Ecofont Serif coming soon?

From the Dumb & Doomed pile: Lenovo has released a new model of its popular ThinkPad series, the W700ds.  The “ds” stands for “dual screen.”  That’s right, the LAPTOP has two monitors: a 17″ primary and 10.6″ secodary that slides out from behind the primary.  The whole mess weights 11 pounds.  Peep Computer World’s article for more info.  Am I the only one shouting WTF at this???

Big enough to include the number pad.  Dumb.

I attach a 22″ monitor to my MacBook when working at my desk.  Having two monitors is awesome, helps manage applications and workflow.  But that’s the luxury of working at a desk.  When mobile, my laptop display is plenty, and Spaces (or other virtual desktop managers) helps  arrange apps.  And mobility demands a lightweight machine.  I was always impressed by IBM & Lenovo’s ability to keep previous models of the ThinkPad lean, but this…this just makes me embarrassed for them.

What happens when you trap a growing watermelon in a square box?

Works with tomatoes too!

More at Snopes.com

A recent slip and fall on some ice left a slight bruise, some embarrassment and inside a padded bag, a cracked macbook screen. The damage to the laptop certainly fell outside the limits of the Applecare warranty, so after looking at our repair options, we settled on Mission:Repair to do the job. Based on the UPS tracking information, the laptop was in their hands for less than half a day before it was shipped back to us. The new screen is perfect. As an extra mile, they gave the outer case a cleaning, making the whole computer look almost new. They also included a hand signed note.  

On a scale of 0 to 10, (0 being ‘not a chance’ and 10 being ‘in a heartbeat’), how likely am I to recommend service from Mission:Repair? 10.

Billie showed me this “Bacturducken” and just looking at it sent me into cardiac arrest.  That’s a turkey covered in bacon, stuffed with a duck stuffed with chicken.  Needs more meat!

Here in the IT office some of us are fans of todo lists. We’ve been using Vitalist as an online todo list but I recently found Toodledo. Though the name is not very inspiring (Remember the Milk is worse, in my opinion) it does a nice job of rolling a lot of features into a useable interface. They put together a nice comparison chart of the various web based todo lists.

They also put together a nice iPhone app. Costs a couple of bucks but does a nice job keeping everything in sync.

(Old news now, I know…)  On Monday Apple released the next update for Leopard, 10.5.6.  If coming from 10.5.5, the update is a meaty 169MB; if coming from any other 10.5.x release, you’ve got a 670MB (!) combined update to download.  The update improves Time Machine, Adobe CS3 printing, improved graphics, and a lot more.  I installed last night, first thing I noticed was the new Trackpad pane added to System Preferences.  I’ll have to check on a previous version, but now you can double-click the trackpad with 2 fingers to call up the secondary menu; a few other features, too.  Full info on the update available from Apple.