No, not male enhancements. That’d be a different post. So to speak.

Not that anyone asked, but I’d like my mail client to let me use the autocomplete feature within the body of an email. This is important because I’m stupid. Sometimes when I need to refer to an email address, I will use the autocomplete function in the “To” field, and then copy and paste it into the body of the msg. But sometimes (here comes the stupid part) I forget to remove it from the “To” field, thus sending to someone a msg about that person. Much mighty D’oh-slapping then ensues. So, imagine I were able to use the autocomplete feature within the body itself…

Last night, my friend Steve Baum suggested a feature he’d like: Type in the name of a mailing list and be able to expand that to a list of everyone in the list. That way you could delete people you don’t want to get that mailing. Sounds useful to me.

(I actually think both of these could be within my amateur programming capabilities. What’s stopping me is the lack of good, newbie, dumbass documentation that explains exactly – exactly – how to write and integrate Thunderbird extensions.) [Tags: email SteveBaum thunderbird]

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David Berlind has had an outstanding series of posts excoriating what he — following Dan Gillmor — refers to as Digital Restrictions Management.

Go, David! We need more champions and hellcats.

Speaking of Dan, he blogs about Bush’s staged “teleconference” with soldiers in IRaq: “Wouldn’t it have been more honest to use actual marionettes?”

And Eschaton comments, under the post title “Commander in Chief”:

He really said this today. Jeebus:

I wish I could be there to see you face to face and thank you personally. Probably a little early for me to go to Tikrit. Perhaps one of these days the situation will be such that I’ll be able to get back to Iraq.

Yeah, that must have made our men and women feel like he gets them.

[Tags: drm DigitalRights DavidBerlind DanGillmor iraq GeorgeBush bush]

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Pito Salas’ labor of love — the free, open source, multi-platform BlogBridge aggregator — takes a big step forward with its new release. Download the weekly build (2.4) to get the latest. [Disclosure: I’m on the board of advisors. But I wouldn’t lie to you.]

The new release has three features I like: First, you can hide the star ratings if you don’t use them. Second, it shows a small histogram of posts for each feed you’ve subscribed to. Third, and best of all, it now makes it easy to browse a list of headlines and expose the entire post with a click.

That’s in addition to BlogBridge’s existing points of pride, including keyword search, integration with del.icio.us tags, and query/parameter-based feeds.

Plus, if you knew Pito you’d really like him. BlogBridge comes straight from his big heart. [Tags: BlogBridge PitoSalas rss aggregators blogging]

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I’m fasting for Yom Kippur, although as always I don’t know why. And, as always, I’m amazed at how little it takes to knock me out – how narrow the parameters are, as David Isenberg said this morning.

I’ll eat in about four hours. Within seconds of eating some bread, my headache will go away and I will cease to feel that the beam of my attention has narrowed to 3 inches wide and five seconds long.

I’m very lucky.

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I’ve gone through five (5) Epson CX5200 and CX5400s in the past 2.5 years or so. They just keep breaking. In a variety of ways. And I don’t do that much printing.

So, when my latest CX5400 printer died, I decided to switch, after decades of being an Epson customer, to Canon. I now have a Canon MP780 multifunction printer and scanner. (From NewEgg, btw.)

One problem so far: The software doesn’t recognize that the system has a sheet feeder for the scanner. That doesn’t much matter to me, but it’s a bad sign.

Does anyone have any reliable, cheap-ish suppliers of Canon-brand ink? And any experience with off-brand ink that didn’t result in your junking the printer or your walls being painted with unintentional CYMB spin art? [Tags: printers canon epson]

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The Berkman Center has released the latest in its series of reports on what countries are keeping their citizens from seeing on the Net. The new report is on Burma. [Tags: DigitalRights berkman burma]

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Scott looks at the FCC’s decision about how to enforce wiretapping access rules on the Internet. Snippet:

The logic that the FCC uses is often rather tortured. For example, it says that a VoIP provider that uses gateways to direct calls to and from the public switched telephone network (PSTN) fits the switching requirement because it “must necessarilyuse a router or other server to do so.” Of course, this condition is true of all services offered over the Internet, not just interconnected VoIP. So where should the boundary be?

The Thou Shalt Wiretap mandate (the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA) is dead serious and potentially hugely chilling of innovation, since it may head us towards only allowing “authorized” applications on the Net. We need to be taking this boneheaded step towards totalitarianism — in the name of homeland security, of course — quite seriously. [Tags: DigitalRights calea ScottBradner voip fcc]

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That’s the headline of the BBC News item, and I find it hopeful and moving. [Tags: GayRights]

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Daniell Krawczyk from Digital Bicycle is giving a lunchtime talk at the Berkman Center. Here’s what Digital Bicycle says about itself on its home page:

DigitalBicycle is a project dedicated to making it easier for Community Media and Technology Centers, as well as independent media producers, to distribute media content amongst themselves. Using Bit Torrent, RSS, XML-RPC and web community software, we hope to simplify collaboration and cable access syndication.

Why the name? From the FAQ:

If a local producer wants to have their production shown in other communities they have to do two things. One, find a local sponsor. Two, arrange for copies of the show to be delivered to that sponsor or directly to the station for playback. The process of delivering tapes (either by hand or by mail) is known as “bicycling” in the cable access world.

Community media, Daniell explains, arose from telecom law that enables cities to negotiate franchises from the cable companies. The city takes a percentage of the fund to create an access point for members of the community. There have been national and regional alliances from just about the beginning. But because they were dealing with physical media, their efforts couldn’t scale. Now that it’s all digital…

“We’re trying to build connections and we’re trying to build community,” he says. They’re trying to build connections across distance and also trying to increase the connection between individuals and their communities. They’re trying to build a platform to make it easy for individuals to share their own media and easy for community media to use it. It’s built on open technologies: BitTorrent, Drupal, RSS, an open source version of mpeg4, Creative Commons licensing.

They are creating a site for PeerCasting communities: Once it comes out of stealth mode, you’ll be able to create a group for sharing content you’ve created. Prototypical user: A producer of content already showing up on local access channels who wants to share her content with other local channels. “We’re building this for an already-existing community.” It’s designed for content that’s “broadcast quality” in the sense that “viewers won’t think that it came off a computer.”

Tim Halle talks about the Project for Open source Media, describing a settop box they’re designing that will combine TV and Net streams.

Donna Liu talks about Princeton’s University Channel, a “collection of public affairs lectures, panels and events from academic institutions all over the world.” You can subscribe to particular content based on the available metadata. Same thing at Digital Bicycle.

Daniell says, in response to a question, that they intend to support enough standards that other services can aggregate content from the site. He hopes that local centers will aggregate and host as well. “We want to build the largest TV network but also a thousand community archives.”

In response to a question Daniell says they want to go global after they get it running domestically.

[Tags: DigitalBicycle media OpenSource berkman]