This blog now has an RSS feed, as per the suggestion of someone on the guestbook. It's still experimental, but works well enough to get the last 10 posts without having to go to the trouble of coming to the site.

I'm trying it out with the actual post in the <description> element instead of a summary, since these posts can't be summarized automatically. So if you use an aggregator you can read the whole post in it. (Depending on your software, the images may be broken as I have been using relative paths for them instead of URLs.) Of course, this makes the XML file somewhat large (~30 Kio currently). If this arrangement if too unwieldy, let me know.

Also, RSS 2.0 insists on an email for the <author> element in order to be valid. Since I haven't implemented per author emails yet, all posts will have my address on them, but with the actual author name listed in parenthesis. Don't worry, I will forward all your philately-related queries to the Philatelist.

Feedback on improvements is welcome.

The December issue of Wired magazine, which is guest edited by a dripping wet James Cameron (the man behind the reverse-psychological propaganda movie called the Terminator), has plundered ZPi for story ideas. On page 046 they have an articlette entitled "When I Grow Up, I Wanna Spy on the Neighbors!" that's about Government propaganda aimed at kids using cute mascots. Sound familiar? Four sites are mentioned, two that I covered (NRO and NSA) and two (FBI and CIA) I didn't because they were too obvious and others have pointed them out in the past.

Mere coincidence, you say? Consider this: Digital hipster central Boing Boing, which includes a number of correspondents who write for Wired, posted a piece about the NRO Jr. site on Aug. 29th. They cite a piece on Joi Ito from the 28th, which in turn cites some Livejournal entry with a cut-n-pasted IM dialog linking to it on the 20th, with no further citations. My piece, which resulted from specifically looking for governmental kids sites, was posted on the 19th.

Clearly something fishy is going on here involving the upper echelons of the fashionable technorati conspiring against my blog by stealing my low-effort shtick. What's in the next issue of Wired? Xeni Jardin presents a series of slapdash artworks of people wearing foil hats? The technology behind the McLuhanator Mark XI? Push Belgium?

UPDATE: here's the online version of the Wired article.

For all you Lyle Zapato aficionados and stalkers out there, you can read a rare interview of me on Absolute Write, which contains scant new insights and something lazily copied out of the guestbook.

Much has been made of Google's new email service, Gmail, which promises a gigabyte of free storage. Although true paranoids have already rejected the service for important reasons, many are excited at the idea of getting all that free storage space.

But will you really be getting as much as you think?

According to the Gmail FAQ, that 1 gigabyte is actually 1,000 megabytes (and presumably by megabyte they mean 1,000,000 bytes -- otherwise, this way madness lies). Consider: if the current mailbox on your computer is reported by your OS as having an even 100 megabytes in it, you might naively think you could store ten times that on a Gmail account. Unfortunately, you would be wrong by 48,576,000 bytes (about 46 megabytes by your OS's reckoning -- quite a lot of email).

This is the sort of confusion and sneaky business practices that results when the kibioctet standard is not in wide use, as it should be.

To address this issue, as well as others, ZPi is proud to announce ZPiMail. Unlike Gmail, ZPiMail offers infinite gibioctets of storage space by leveraging the transcendental irrationality of nature itself:

Every email you have stored can be expressed as a mere string of digits (in fact, it's already stored as such on your computer). Since the number π has an infinite number of essentially random digits, the string of digits that represents one of your emails can be found within it, as can the digits representing your entire mailbox, no matter how large it may be. Instead of storing all those gibioctets of digits on your computer, why not just store the offset of the expansion of π that matches them? With ZPiMail, now you can!

(NOTE: ZPi does not currently offer software to facilitate reading your email from π, however you can rest assured that everything in your mailbox is already safely stowed away in there, as well as any future email you may receive and hypothetical emails to you from Jimmy Carter explaining all the mysteries of universe in Farsi. I apologize for this oversight, but I have been forced to prematurely announce ZPiMail in order to head off my archnemesis, Dr. Ernesto, who is attempting to steal focus with his derivative EeMail.)

The index page was getting musty, so I redid it. As you've no doubt noticed, since you are reading it right now, I have added a mini-blog. And next week I'll start a grunge band and enter a roller-disco competition. Anyway, this isn't really a real blog (it's just some static text with no back end yet,) but I thought I should have a place on the site for general anouncements and musings, should I have any, and the blog Bauplän is the path of least resistence. Plus, I needed something to help balance out the sidebar which is now taller than it was before.