Two strange Star Trek-related tidbits:

1. The short-lived cottage industry of Y2K survival books and videos probably isn’t doing so well these days, but the materials are still available if you’re interested. These ranged from the alarmist Y2K Millennium Meltdown: The Silent Bomb (“science fiction has become a science nightmare”) to the outright paranoid Y2K: Hidden Dangers of Martial Law and a Police State (“Will President Bill Clinton use the Y2K computer bug crisis as a pretext to declare martial law and usher in a brutal Gestapo police state?”). Compared to others in the genre, Leonard Nimoy’s Y2K Family Survival Guide seems almost rational. Almost. Anyway, I uploaded the short introduction video that I found on Usenet (6 meg AVI). If you want to see the rest, you can still buy it on Amazon. ($7.50, cheap!)

2. Another recent Usenet discovery is the little-known album recorded by Brent Spiner, most famously known for his role as Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation. (Maybe he was jealous of Spock and Kirk.) Ol’ Yellow Eyes Is Back, released in 1991, features everyone’s favorite android crooning his way through twelve Tin Pan Alley standards. “It’s A Sin (To Tell a Lie)” features backup vocals by fellow cast members Levar Burton (Geordi La Forge), Jonathan Frakes (Commander Riker), Michael Dorn (Worf), and Patrick Stewart (Captain Picard). The album is long out of print, but you can hear “It’s A Sin” here (4 meg MP3).

Continue reading “Spock and Data” →

The Usenet alt.binaries.* newsgroups have been a haven for file trading since 1993, but never received much attention because of the learning curve and limitations of ISP’s Usenet feeds. Even if you manage to install a newsreader, locate your news server and figure out how to decode multipart attachments, there’s no guarantee that your ISP carries the binary newsgroups or has anything more than a day’s worth of files.

Easynews provides a web-based interface to the Usenet binaries archive, with roughly 40 days of retention for all groups. A staggering number of albums, software, movies, and images are posted daily to Usenet, decoded by Easynews, and placed for download from the Easynews website. $10 gets you six gigs of downloaded files per month, and it’s the best $10 I’ve spent in a long time. The free trial gives you a one gigabyte quota and three days to play around with the interface, which I highly recommend. My comments are inside.

July 26, 2003: The free trial is no longer available. They’re up to 10 GB/month for $10, though their retention is closer to 21 days as Usenet traffic increases. Still highly recommended.

Continue reading “Easynews” →

Tom Jennings, the creator of Fidonet and all-around renaissance guy, will be speaking this Saturday in downtown Los Angeles. This Wired article from 1996 gives some background on the man that made my first taste of the Internet possible (indirectly, through a Fidonet news/mail gateway). He’ll be speaking about his Story Teller project, an experiment in obsolete computing that prints and vocalizes text and symbols stored on punched tape. Time and directions inside, if you’re interested.

Continue reading “Fidonet creator Tom Jennings in Chinatown” →

The film adaptation of Po Bronson’s The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest is slated for a limited release on June 28. Originally written in 1995, it sounds like the screenplay was heavily changed to avoid being horribly dated. The story now takes place after the bubble burst instead of during the long short boom, and the product has changed from a sub-$300 computer to some sort of “hologram machine.”

They should have tried to create a snapshot of the era instead of hopelessly modernizing it. I mean, who funds hologram machines these days?

Well, this is depressing. Meaty.org, the real-life event organizer for online communities that I started developing last August, is now completely pointless. Today, Meetup.com launched. Designed by some of the most talented people in the industry, it’s exactly what I envisioned, with a couple extra neat features I didn’t think of.

They finished the entire thing in three months of dedicated work with a full staff, while I worked alone in my free time for the last eight months. I was totally outgunned. Note to self: Next time you have an idea like this, quit your day job and devote yourself to it full-time.

But, on the lighter side, it’s an outstanding site. The interface is perfectly designed, though I wouldn’t expect anything less from 37 Signals and Eric Costello. Kudos to the Meetup crew on a successful launch, you bastards.