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i’ve successfully converted my collection (2500+ songs) of 256 kbps mp3’s to 192 kbps aac. it’s essentially mp4 if you look at the standard, except that it’s more advanced thus it has more benefits. it has improved compression which means that i get the same or better quality as my mp3 and it takes up less space. typically, a cd of mp3’s imported at 256 kbps was taking up about 120 mb. with aac i get the same high quality sound in only 80 mb. that means i can fit more songs on my ipod. aac also supports mulitchannel audio, higher resolution audio (rates above 96 khz), and improved decoding efficiency (i.e. your machine isn’t pegged when you importing). i was able to take my collection from 18 gb of space to 16 gb. of course while i was reimporting all of my audio i found a bunch of cd’s that i wanted to add in so now instead of having 2500 tracks i have 3000 tracks in the same space. not to shabby if i do say so myself.

now this is cool, you have to check out this xul based rss news reader. if you don’t have a xul enabled browser like mozilla it’s not going to work though, sorry.

another one of those things to look into when i find time, wikis. check out wikki tikki tavi and moin moin. both of them are source forge open source wiki projects. i need a tool to gather my misc bookmarks, addresses, important information, thoughts, and blurbs that aren’t appropriate for posting here. i was thinking about using omni outliner when i got my mac but i’m not sure how good it is at indexing, cross referencing, and searching your knowledge base. anyhow, more thoughts for later investigation.

after reading a posting about the netfuture newsletter over at antipixel i decided to give it a read. what i’ve read so far has been really well written and more importantly it makes you question things. well maybe not question as much as it opens your eyes a little wider to the proliferation of technology on society, how it effects our growth as a people, stymies our progress, or any number of things. the writings aren’t just negative viewpoints on how technology is bad. they actually provide valuable thought provoking solutions and ideas that people should really think on. the editor of netfuture is steve talbott. he’s also one of the primary contributors but isn’t the only one. i plan on digging into the archive and i’ve already subscribed to the email newsletter.

well not quite yet, but as soon as it’s available i think it looks like the one for me. sony ericsson released the new t610 today. it has blue tooth, a built in camera, java, a big display, polyphonic ringtones, gprs, and supports synchronization (insert isynch here). it’s part of my goal to move toward a mac based lifestyle in case you were wondering why isynch would be important to me. about the time this makes it to market i’ll likely be starting down the road to getting a powerbook laptop computer. anyhow, the phone look sweet and has everything i’ve wanted out of a cellular phone with the added bonus of looking sweet.

i’m in the process of getting mysql installed on my machine at home. i recently installed apache2 and php. i’m setting up my machine to do some pro bono web design work for the northwest suburban astronomers. the site that is up there now is not my work. look for a new site to show up in about a month or so. anyhow, i’m close to getting everything set up to start working on it. the only thing remaining is mysql.

Are you looking for some good spam filtering software for your e-mail? Well if you like to live life dangerously you can download the nightly build of Mozilla with built-in spam filtering. It uses a Bayesian filtering system devised by Paul Graham. If your not into living dangerously you can either wait for the next major Mozilla release or buy an Apple and use their Mail application which introduced junk mail filtering in release 10.2.