www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jXz7NrfzsI

Meet the man:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEjX0qUj6VQ

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If you’re looking for more recent books but hate to spend money, The eBooks Bay will hook you up with torrents for your Kindle, Nook, or whatever else you’ve got. They’ve got a fair amount of recent fiction posted up in all manner of formats, but the site is dominated by technical manuals and computer books. Fiction Books Bay is a little more focused.

ePubBud also has a bunch of books – mainly for children.

Calibre is an indispensable tool for eBook owners, supporting more than two dozen different eBooks as well as every file format (there are at least 18,) enabling you to read anything on anything. It’s got a great metadata editor too.

If you’re the type who likes to be read to, LibriVox might be interesting. Volunteers read books from the public domain and make their recordings available free of charge, kind of like a free books-on-tape thing. You get what you pay for with LibriVox though, because hearing Ethel from the Bronx read Shakespeare is not as engaging as you might think.

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This comic has helped me to discover the magic that is TheOatmeal.com.

This is his story.

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Here’s the original video that made him a star:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzNhaLUT520

The auto-tuned remix (which is #31 and climbing fast on the iTunes charts)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMtZfW2z9dw

Antoine now has a blog, a Twitter account, and a YouTube channel.

Antoine overload.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xY_maiLj07k

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During that month I decided to stop using the Internet. The extent of my Internet use was basically Facebook on my iPhone to keep people in the loop with photos of Clare and push out some token status updates.

But for the entire month I didn’t check any email, personal or work-related. I think I spent a grand total of 30 minutes all month skimming through RSS feeds and posting here, and that was about it. I really cut the cord.

It was one of the happiest months of my life, and I really didn’t miss the the Internet at all. Which is good because I think that means I’m not addicted.

Computers are fun too, but nowadays they’re just a tether to something that, in the grand scheme of life and family, isn’t all that important.

I don’t usually read essays masquerading as blog posts because they are dumb…but I found a good one. Some guy I’d never heard of, Paul Graham, wrote a short one called The Acceleration of Addictiveness which basically sums up my feelings about technology these days. It’s a quick read and it uses a word I’d never heard of before – abstemious. He basically argues that, in general, technology (not the Internet specifically) is progressing so quickly these days that it’s enabling new addictions at an unprecedented rate, and that now – more than ever – people need to be cautious when they latch on to something.

I’d just add that spending time with people who matter is kind of the whole point of life. Everything else should just be a means to get you to that point.

I think I just solved the meaning of life. It’s a pretty simple concept to grasp, but it doesn’t really make sense until you have kids.

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www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQSNhk5ICTI

I suspect this fellow is high on mushrooms. At least I hope he is.

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It’s got a touch-screen, for starters. It also comes pre-loaded with a dump of the Radio Reference database making setup ridiculously easy for anyone not well-versed in such matters.

You turn it on for the first time, tell it your zip code, and in less than two minutes you’re auto-programmed and listening to whatever’s around you. Regular updates will be made available online and you can of course program in your own systems if they’re not already included.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3AFlGTh7G8

Form factor and interface aside, this is just another digital trunking scanner, basically an audio-recording BCD396XT:

It certainly looks slick with that fancy LCD touchscreen and should be a big hit with the Wal-Mart crowd, especially if they can do something about the 396XT’s sky-high pricing, which generally hovers around $500.

The “HomePatrol-1″ is pending FCC approval and should hit retail this October.

This is much more interesting than some new iPhone!

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