Geekery

Paul Boutin astutely observed that the NYT buried the lede when it said that there are no less than 16 American spy agencies. My favorite? The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency — in other words, map spies! Speaking of maps and puzzles, check this: WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The only surviving copy of the 500-year-old map that first used the name America goes on permanent display this month at the Library of Congress, but even as it prepares for its debut, the 1507…

The interview went awesomely! MC Hammer was a gentleman and was happy to let me monopolize his time for the better part of an hour. After the interview, we totally geeked out, comparing our iPhones — he was giddy over the Labrnyinth game for the iPhone. He was cooler than I ever could have imagined.

Booya! I finally got my iPhone yesterday and spent last night and this morning figuring out how to GSM unlock it — letting me use my T-Mobile SIM card with ease. How’d I do it? I’ll have a forthcoming article for Macworld explaining soon, but until then, you can read this guide and thank the good folks at ModMyiPhone.com. I followed their instructions — but after three failed tries, I installed AppTapp before doing the faux activation, and that seemed…

SF Bay Guardian: But after the 1989 Loma Prieta quake and after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York City, residents found there was still a way to reach their loved ones and let the world know they were OK; they used an old-fashioned communications tool that’s low tech, securely grounded, publicly accessible, and reliable. It’s called a pay phone. NYT: There is a reason for their survival: Public telephones are one of the stranger cash cows in…

And thoroughly destroyed the first four opponents, which was an awesome feeling. The entire concept of the Wii is a lot funner than I had thought it would be.

So here’s the deal: Apple France and French ISP Orange are hooking up to provide French consumers with a rented MacBook and 1 Mbps DSL for €60 ($79.50) a month. That works out to about €2 a day. (You can upgrade to 8 Mbps DSL for an additional €5 per month.) The catch is that you have to sign up for three years, but that includes three years of Apple Care. Louis-Pierre Wenes, executive director of France Telecom’s domestic operations…

Apparently for the last 18 months Scott Adams has been suffering from Spasmodic Dysphonia, a disease that affects the larynx, making ordinary speech extremely difficult. Somehow, he figured out how to hack his own brain to figure out how to speak again: My theory was that the part of my brain responsible for normal speech was still intact, but for some reason had become disconnected from the neural pathways to my vocal cords. (That’s consistent with any expert’s best guess…

Best thing about Parallels Workstation? My Gameday Audio (which I paid good money for) finally works on my Mac — well, Engadget’s Mac, to be precise. For the life of me I can’t get it to play natively on my MacBook.

In what may be the geekiest literary matchup I’ve ever seen, I just found out that Tim O’Reilly wrote a biography of Frank Herbert in 1981. The bad news is it’s out of print, but the good news is that Tim’s put it up on his website, in its entirety.

I ran into this problem tonight, but Dan Moren of MacUser had the answer: Dan Gillmor’s Blog. Thanks Dans!