Ben’s Weblog

Hey, someone realized that a decent GPS navigation system doesn’t need to cost you $1000… The iQue (nytimes.com free registration required) Just take a PalmOS device, load it up with GPS maps (and provide detailed ones you can load into memory with gas stations, restaurants, etc), and you’re set. I don’t travel enough to unfamiliar [...]

How to resolve all those messy downloading music issues for only $2 million: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20030724.html Basically, you have a company which buys one copy of every CD, and then you, as a shareholder of the company can pay a nominal fee ($0.05/song) and download it. Great thing is that under curent copyright law, it’s apparently actually [...]

Apparently, it’s true. Kansas really is flatter than a pancake. Kansas Is Flatter Than a Pancake (Annals of Improbable Research) Actually, I’m not surprised – if you condensed the width of Kansas to a 6″ pancake, most of the variation would be gone. I’d bet Illinois is flatter than a pancake too, Mississippi River bluffs [...]

The following is a description of how I was able to install my new iPod into my 2001 Honda Civic EX. Edit 2003-07-20 13:07 – added the pictures

Ladies and gentlemen, reality has left the building: Upload a file, go to prison This is another example of failing to learn from history. If you think about it a little, this is really no different than Prohibition back in the 1920s – we’re turning a large portion of the American people into felons. It’s [...]

I’m at the Apple Store on Michigan Ave. Bill Gates is quaking in his billion-dollar boots.

I have a wonderful girlfriend – she bought me an iPod this past week! So, I’ve been loading it up with a whole bunch of my CDs. If I’ve listened to any track on the disc or even thought about it in the past year, it’s going in there. I’ve got 893 songs (~4.8GB) loaded [...]

I noticed in my logs that I’ve been picking up a stream of visitors from the search engines about my bit on the forged check endorsement. Unfortunately, the search engines only got the index page, and the article’s moved off, so here’s the stable link to it: Forged check endorsement? Here’s what to do…

This one is pretty funny. One of those small South Pacific island systems (Vanuatu) has privatized their postal system, and as a money-maker set up an underwater post office… Underwater Post You can even fill out the information on their site and have a waterproof postcard mailed from their office (about 10ft / 3m underwater [...]

…for good makeout music now? Barry White died on Thursday.

Nice work if you can get it! Chuck Cramer at Underwriters Laboratories

Don’t ask me how I got so high, but if you do a google search for ben s johnson, I now show up on the first page. Google must not like my apostrophe, so I’ve adjusted the title of my page.

Ok…now the permalinks are a little more friendly to your neighborhood search engine. Enjoy!

Just had to do a little surgery to my blog – something somewhere got hosed, and the post author name was never showing up. Not that it’s a huge deal (since I’m the only one ever posting to this thing), but whatever got hosed was in the guts of WordPress – because I couldn’t edit [...]