Geekery

Late last night, the Senate passed the Victims of Iranian Censorship (VOICE) Act. Nico links to the presser just co-released by a number of senators, including leads McCain, Liberman and Graham, Casey, Kaufman and others. Important bits: • Authorizes $30 million to the Broadcasting Board of Governors to expand Farsi language broadcasting into Iran by Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty’s Radio Farda and the Voice of America’s Persian News Network. The funds may be used to develop additional transmission…

For the uninitiated: Haystack is an awesome, new, anti-filtering software that’s custom-designed for Iran. It’s run out of San Francisco run by my new friend and green hat hacker extraordinaire, Austin Heap. Haystack is moving along quite quickly — heck, they’ve even got a swank new website! — and in addition to donating money, you too can help in a really easy, but meaningful way, too: If you’ve got a spare USB thumb drive (at least 128MB or greater), send…

Dear Friends, I’ve been informed that my radio piece on Haystack and the Dutch Parliament’s new technological support for Iran is airing today. It will be available on any of these stations (and their Internet streams): NYC – 3 pm Eastern – WNYC – 820 AM – www.wnyc.org Washington, DC – 8 pm Eastern – WAMU – 88.5 FM – www.wamu.org Los Angeles – 12 pm Pacific – KPCC – 89.3 FM – www.kpcc.opg Boston – 4 pm Eastern –…

Since Iran has been going nuts since the election, I’ve found myself glued to Twitter much more than before. I’ve used it to send out articles that I’ve found interesting, and get a handle on what people are talking about. More recently, I’ve used it to experiment with sending out photos of what I see when I’m out in the world. I have my Flickr email address and my Twitpic address both in my iPhone, so that with a single…

The Iranophile blog “Is this Ta’arof?” shows how to use Greasemonkey and the new Google Translate tool to help better understand what’s being said in Persian on Twitter. Of course, Google’s translation ability is still in alpha, and likely isn’t 100 percent accurate, but it’s better than nothing. This should work on Windows, Mac or Linux equally well. If you’re not techy and don’t understand the difference between a cup of java and JavaScript, fear not! This takes about a…

In the last year, I’ve been to Finland (where I bought a temporary SIM card for my three-day trip there). I also have SIM cards for Iran, Estonia, the Netherlands, France, the US, Senegal and others. But once I get home, these SIM cards are useless to me — they sit in my desk drawer. I’m sure there’s hundreds if not thousands of other people worldwide who have a stack of SIM cards that they don’t use much, but keep…

Hey guys, as promised, here are the results of Salon’s Machinist Test Election 2008 President: * Abigail Adams: 2 * George Washington: 0 * Thomas Jefferson: 8 * Martha Washington: 0 Don’t believe me? Feel free to audit the tally or a ballot, here. Thanks to all those who participated!

AdRants has found a great way to get those WiFi freeloaders like me to start buying more coffee — advertise specials and guilt messages in the SSID of the network, like this café in the Netherlands. AdRants: By continuously changing the names of their store networks to such things as OrderAnotherCoffeeAlready, BuyCoffeeForCuteGirlOverThere?, HaveYouTriedCoffeeCake?, BuyAnotherCupYouCheapskate, TodaysSpecialExpresso1.60Euro and BuyaLargeLatterGetBrownieForFree, the chain is able to both promote items as well as guilt patrons into realizing free WiFi really isn’t totally free. Hilarity ensued…

I’m looking for a backup phone to take on an upcoming trip to Europe and as a phone to take while skiing. I’d like it to be new/used, under $100, quad-band, and ideally with GPRS/EDGE support that lets me download POP email from anywhere I want. Seems like the Motorola SLVR or the RIZR would fit the bill, but I’m willing to entertain other ideas. I ended up buying a Motorola RIZR for $80 on craigslist.

I just found this awesome Greasemonkey script, Autoprint 2.0, which automatically switches to the print version for a whole host of news websites.