Most of my music collection has been encoded in OGG Vorbis because Oggs are patent-free, are smaller, and – most importantly – they sound better. I was thinking I was stuck with using my Zaurus PDA for taking my music with me, since there aren’t many portable Ogg players out there.

Then I found the iRiver, a 40GB portable player, with MP3 and Ogg support and an integrated FM transmitter.

Oh, and it runs Linux, too. Pretty cool.
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My buddy Mike sent me a good article on technologies that printer and copier companies use to watermark every color print you make. While I’ve known for a while that such counterfeiting countermeasures were there, this PC World article is the first I’ve read which tells how to find the countermeasures (use a blue LED light and magnifying glass).

It also warns that there is no easy way of disabling the electronics which print the encoded serial numbers. Not that it won’t stop people from trying.

The companies have been very helpful to law enforcement, and that is a good thing. Counterfeiting is a serious crime. But some companies added the features at the request of foreign governments in order to sell their products in those countries. Thus, this criminal-catching measure could easily be used to track down dissidents in unfriendly countries such as China (or is China our friend now? I lose track).

Here are a few more links to sites describing printer watermarking.

Travis had his four-week checkup this morning and I had the privilege of tagging along. Turns out Travis has been a very productive eater. He weighed in at 9 pounds, four ounces, measured 22 inches, and has a head circumference of 37.5 (sorry, I’m not sure what the units are).

Anyway, he’s in the 50% percentile for everything but height, where he’s 75%. His weight gain amounts to over an ounce a day. Pretty impressive!

A few more ounces might get him to the point where he sleeps through the night.