iTunes is now available for Windows. Now I can see what I\’ve been missing out on. Two sweet new accessories too: a voice recorder and a card reader, which would\’ve been very handy on my China trip. Both of them only work with the 3rd gen iPods, unfortunately.

Things I like to hear about: Martial Arts Expert Kills Two Raiders

Investigators found the body of one man, who had been stabbed in the heart, sprawled on the staircase and another man bleeding to death in the street from a wound to his leg. A third man is recovering in hospital from a punctured lung.

This is such a badass case mod. The guy built a computer into a plastic ammo box and made custom plugs for everything (keyboard, mouse, monitor, etc.) so that it looks like an old school radio set. He was very thorough too, as everything has an evil green glow (even the headphones!).

DVD File reviews the long awaited Indiana Jones trilogy on DVD, due out Oct. 21. They cleaned up and restored each frame of the series, and they remixed the sound to modern Dolby Digital surround. The fourth disc has a big making-of documentary and four other featurettes.

The Atget Rephotographic Project aims to rephotograph sites in Paris originally photographed by Eugene Atget between 1900 and 1926. It\’s really fascinating to see how things have changed (or haven\’t changed) in the past 90 or so years.
[ From Kottke.org ]

The Director\’s Label is a new DVD series devoted to music videos created by several of the best directors. The first 3 discs feature videos by Spike Jonze (Beastie Boys\’ Sabotage, Weezer\’s Buddy Holly, and Fatboy Slim\’s Weapon of Choice), Michel Gondry, and Chris Cunningham (Bjork\’s All Is Full of Love). The movies also have the usual DVD extras: makings-of, alernate versions, and behind the scenes stuff. More info here.

The site also has a cute little Stick Figure Ninja version of Weapon of Choice.
[ From Scrubbles.net ]

Slate has an article on poor voting ballot design and why it\’s time for a change. Bad design was responsible for the confusion in Florida during the 2000 elections, not the voting machines themselves. The ballots are put together according to a state\’s election code, not by designers, so we end up with ballots that are cramped, confusing, and hard to read. The article also presents 3 redesigns created by professionals as an example of what good design can do.
[ From Magnetbox ]

Interesting article about listening to recordings at high speed. Apparently humans can comprehend speech at much faster rates than the usual. Using new technology that can speed up recordings without that high-pitched \”chipmunk\” effect, a 1-hour lecture, for example, is condensed down to 40 minutes. So students that are hard pressed for time can listen to more lectures in less time.
[ From Slashdot ]

More about the Half-Life 2 source code theft. Looks like someone actually broke into Valve\’s internal network and installed various programs to steal passwords and transfer files.

Newell, who started Valve after leaving Microsoft, believes keystroke recorders for collecting passwords were installed remotely. He believes this happened through a hole in Microsoft\’s Outlook personal-information management application.

They should know better than to use Outlook though.

The source code for the highly anticipated Half-Life 2 was supposedly leaked onto the net. Bad timing, the game was supposed to be officially released on Tuesday but was delayed until the holidays. So there might be compiled versions floating around out there. I was gonna buy the game anyway though, it looks really good.
[ From Slashdot ]