I’ve been trying to keep political posts off the site recently, but there were a few things yesterday I wanted to link to:

The Daniel Pearl Foundation: January 23rd marked the first anniversary of the abduction of Daniel Pearl in Pakistan. A month later he was brutally executed for being Jewish and American.

Venezuela: It seems to be getting worse, although I now understand why the Bush adminstration was so quick to recognize last years’ failed coup.

Lastly, a definition of moral equivalence:

Two men watch an old woman crossing the street. One man pushes the woman in front of an oncoming truck. The other man pushes her to safety.

Both men are guilty of pushing the woman.

Bunch of hits today from the links page of a Yahoo! Group mysteriously titled 132C. It looks like a DV editing group, anyone care to let me know anything else about it? Just curious…

Amazing. Phoenix for OS X seems even faster than Chimera OR Safari. This might be the fastest browser for OS X, and it’s just an experiment, built by Kevin Gerich because he “was curious to see if [he] could cobble one together.” Phoenix is an open source offshoot of Mozilla, designed to be fast, lightweight and cross-platform. I now have four browsers in my Dock.

I’ve switched back to Transmit as my main FTP tool for two reasons:

1. It’s really good.
2. I like reading Steven Frank’s blog. (Steven is one of the authors of Transmit and co-founder of Panic Inc.)

Six states still aren’t using Joe’s Filters: Arkansas, Idaho, Maine, Montana, South Dakota and West Virginia.

This video makes me want to build robots. (2MB mpeg)

From David P. Anderson’s nBot Balancing Robot site. The Segway is amazing, but this is more inspiring.

Update: Michael Buffington wrote to remind me about the LegWay, a two-wheel balancing robot built from Legos. Also neat, but there is something about the videos of Mr. Anderson watching his little robot move around that’s just a fantastic display of everything I love about making stuff.

And I was seriously considering switching over to half-gig flash cards… 4Gb Microdrives later this year