Lifehacker pointed me at the free MP3s from Amazon. Pretty sweet – download away! There’s some good stuff on there.

Well, this is pretty big news in the tech world.

This is pretty funny. Amazon accidentally listed a computer with a 10 GHz processor and a 3 terabyte hard drive (30,000 Gigabytes). As a result, they got a lot of sarcastic reviews on the typo-laden product listing.

“I hooked up my scanner to this beast and now there are two of me…. and my copy (no – really – the COPY) is getting me into all kinds of trouble.”

If you happen to install Visual Studio, make sure you make no mistakes in your product key. If you don’t, it won’t tell you until after installing the multi-gigabyte beast. Then when you run it, you get an error. How do you re-enter the key? Simple, according to the knowledge base article you just remove and re-install the whole thing. 3 hours later, you’ll find out if you got it right or if you have to reinstall again.

I started using Flickr last night because I’d read so many good things about it. Fil and I had started writing something like this back in the day, but then we moved across the country from one another and found better [paying] things to do.
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This is pretty cool – Google SMS. For nothing more than the cost of sending and receiving text messages on your phone, you can do some pretty cool things like find local restaurants, do price comparisons, and look up definitions of words.

A site I stumbled on a little while ago really brought me back to my college days during the Internet boom: freeafterrebate.info. Most of the stuff they link to, after rebates, is free. The “catch” is usually that there’s a shipping and handling charge. Some sites offer free s&h for big enough orders though, so I may look into ordering tons of free stuff so I can earn the free shipping. After that it’s all about filling out forms and mailing UPC’s (giving your personal information to companies, etc) but I’m fine with that if it scores me a free network switch, 100 blank cds, and a few wireless LAN adapters.

Not sure how serious this is, but the most-commented story I’ve seen at Slashdot in a long time just came in yesterday about portions of the Windows 2000 and Windows NT source code being leaked to the Internet.

Predictions are flying over what this all might mean. Including somewhat crazy theories that if you look at it, then work on a project of your own, you could get sued for stealing their intellectual property. There are slightly less crazy theories that a closer investigation of the source code will allow hackers to discover and create more viruses.

I personally don’t think that anything really damaging is going to happen (each virus seems more serious than the last, even before the source code leaks). That doesn’t matter as much as public opinion however, which only needs theories and fear in order to create a wave of news stories. It will be interesting to see what this all results in (I guess there’s an investigation taking place).

If you’ve envied the cool taskbar they have in Mac OSX, you’ll be pleased to find out there’s a free one available for Windows, called ObjectDock. It does the same fisheye thing, and looks quite nice with high-quality icons. Other than the fact that it hops the the foreground when I move my mouse over it, I have no complaints. It seems quite nice and has a decent set of features. A coworker introduced me to it.

I missed this story when it came out on Slashdot, but it’s pretty amusing and the video is worth watching.

Brothers Casey and Van Neistat, who collaborate on video projects using Mac editing software, said they were told by a technical support representative at Apple Computer that the cost to replace the dead battery in an 18-month-old iPod would be $255–comparable to the cost of a new device. Irked at what seemed to be the early obsolescence of the music player, the brothers trekked around New York City stenciling the words “iPod’s unreplaceable battery lasts only 18 months” on all the iPod posters they could find.

Apple’s web site says it costs $99 for battery replacement, but it’s not clear if they started doing that before or after hearing complaints. $99 still sounds like a lot of money. I’m fairly certain I can get a car battery for cheaper than that (and I am certain I can get entire mp3 players for less than the cost of an iPod battery.)