Changing you MAC address isn’t something you’ll be doing everyday (well maybe it is…), but from time to time it can be useful. Say, for example your machines gets blacklisted from some network. This being a erroneous blacklisting, of course. Often blacklisting is done via a machine’s MAC address, so by simply changing this address, the machine can again gain access to this proscribed network. Here’s how.

sudo ifconfig <interface> lladdr <new MAC address>

For example:

sudo ifconfig en0 lladdr 4a:74:00:b5:f8:3c:17

PantherModem is now GeoRSS enabled thanks to GeoPress, the GeoRSS plugin for WordPress!

This post is coming to you from InfoVis ’07 at the Hyatt Regency in Sacrament, CA:

Update: For those RSS feed readers out there, you’ll notice that the above map is from Yahoo! Maps, yet via a web browser you’ll see a Google Map. I emailed GeoPress about this peculiarity and Andrew Turner got back to me (in two minutes after I sent my email), saying:

“The reason Yahoo is used is because it is the only service that provides an API for grabbing static images. This is so that the RSS doesn’t require embedding Javascript.”

Today at the “InfoVis for the Masses” paper session here at IEEE InfoVis 2007, a particularly interesting application was mentioned that provides meta data about your computer usage. Here’s their plug:

“Truth is, digital life is redefining the landscape of our social interactions, our activities, the meaning of community and even who we are. We build software products that explore new ways to help you understand, visualize, express and share your digital life. Some people like to describe what we do as ‘personal analytics’. That’s pretty good actually.”

The application is called Slife. Cool. A visualization of computer usage; in particular my usage. Over the course of the year/month/week/day, when was I spending the most time on my machine? How much time am I spending on what applications? and what I’m doing within those applications? What sort of insight can I discover into the computing activities that occupy so much of my time? Slife provides this kinds of “personal analytics” and visualizes this data. See, cool.

The crew at Slife Labs didn’t spot there. Enter Slifeshared, integrated with Slife:

“…[it] is an activity network for you and your friends where you share your live computer activities, such as videos you watch, music you listen to, web pages you find interesting and much more as a way to stay in touch.”

Slifeshare puts an Facebook-esque spin on an already exciting application. Again, cool.

Currently Slife is only available for OS X, but looks like a Windows beta version is available.

Flare is a visualization toolkit written in ActionScript 3 based on the Prefuse visualization toolkit which is written in Java. An alpha version of the library was released on October 22, 2007. Although there is no affiliation mentioned on the site, Jeff Heer is likely behind this one…

Earlier this year, my girlfriend at the time and I undertook a 30 day yoga challenge at the Bodhi Tree Yoga studio here in Calgary. It was an intense thirty days, during which I, well, did a lot of yoga, didn’t get much sleep yet felt physically and mentally vitalized. After successfully completing the challenge my practice ceased to a halt, as the howling demands of graduate school became harder and harder to ignore, and the acknowledgment that the yogic intensity of the last month wasn’t sustainable at this time in my life. Spring and early summer buzzed by and I hadn’t made it back to a steady yoga practice. By mid-summer though I had begun to pick things up again and by mid-September yoga was a regular part of my life once again. To maintain this positive flow of energy, I decided to essay upon another 30 day challenge beginning on October 15th at the same studio. Today is the ninth day into the challenge and I’m experiencing the same vitalization and acuity, however without the dearth of sleep (that’s what living downtown versus south Calgary gets you). Needless to say, the challenge is going wonderfully. There is an aura of sustainability that wasn’t present back in February during the previous challenge, which is beautiful. My only lament is that I won’t be able to complete this challenge, since I’ll be heading down to the States next week to attend a conference. Looking at the schedule for next week, I think I might be able to get in the old yoga class here and there, but practicing everyday cannot be done. Alas. On the bright side, the classes that I will be attending while away will hopefully be through a Bikram yoga studio. I’m really interested to see if there is any differences in a explicitly “Bikram” studio which practices Bikram‘s copyrighted sequence of asanas. Calgary doesn’t have a Bikram studio anymore, although Calgary Hot Yoga use to be one (notice that Calgary Hot Yoga’s URL is bikramcalgary.com, a relic from the Bikram days). Once I’m back in Calgary, I’ll continue with the remainder of the challenge and with luck the momentum will continue past the thirty days.

Last week I was tipped off about an interesting web app called We Feel Fine. This app crawls blogs looking for posts that include the statements “I feel” or “I am feeling” and records these sentences. Age, gender, and geographic location of the blogger is also stored and through a nifty interface the databse of these records can be accessed and browsed.

Here’s an example of what I came up with for posts from ages 20-29 living in Calgary, Canada on October 2007 with no restriction on feeling, gender, nor weather:

After over a year of waiting, trolling the official site (RSS anyone?), signing up for mailing lists in the sheer hope of hearing some shred of possible news on a non-theatrical release (but in the end no such luck), the long anticipated fixed gear bicycle film from San Francisco, MASH by Gabe Morford and Mike Martin, is now available. For pre-order that is. On a November 15th release date. Well, after waiting this long what’s another month right. Here are the details on what a $40 USD pre-order will get you:

MASH DVD Pre – Order Ships Nov 15th – The dvd contains the 1 hour feature film as well as 1 hour of bonus features. It is packaged in a 120 page hard back book featuring the production of this project.

For those who have had the privilege to see a screening of MASH, the reviews are coming in. MESS NYC offers some particularly good commentary on the film. I’ll post my thoughts once I see this infernal film.

For those who’ve been watching the MASH trailer incessantly over the last year like I have, the song from the trailer (which is likely now ingrained in your conscious, like all those inane Star Trek facts from junior high), is by a San Francisco band by the name of The Mall. The song on the trailer is “Friends And Family” is from their thirteen track album (Emergency at the Everyday), with the longest song clocking in at two minutes and fourteen seconds, titled “(|||||||||)”. And yes, those parentheses in both the album and song names.