X

Buzz Out Loud 806: Battlestar Monk

On today's show, we reveal a huge spoiler: Monk is the 12th Cylon. (Apologies to any of you who don't watch that show.) This is vaguely related to the news that NBC's return to iTunes comes shackled with variable pricing.

Molly Wood Former Executive Editor
Molly Wood was an executive editor at CNET, author of the Molly Rants blog, and host of the tech show, Always On. When she's not enraging fanboys of all stripes, she can be found offering tech opinions on CBS and elsewhere, and offering opinions on everything else to anyone who will listen.
Molly Wood
3 min read
On today's show, we reveal a huge spoiler: Monk is the 12th Cylon. (Apologies to any of you who don't watch that show.) This is vaguely related to the news that NBC's return to iTunes comes shackled with variable pricing. In other news, RIM releases its first ever flip phone, and amazing space-based solar power arrives (bad news for birds).
Listen now: Download today's podcast

EPISODE 806

CERN’s big collider now in action
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-10037565-76.html

Flipping out: RIM BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8220 debuts
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-10036487-7.html

Congress questions high cost of texting
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10037221-38.html

Apple yields to NBC Universal on price, packaging
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10036785-93.html

New Marillion album free to share
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7606029.stm

Microsoft’s BlueTrack mice are here — laser bids a tearful goodbye
http://www.engadget.com/2008/09/09/microsofts-bluetrack-mice-are-here-laser-bids-a-tearful-good/

Open source seeks U.S. Congressional approval
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10037544-16.html

Space-based solar power breakthrough to be announced (thanks Shalin!)
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=26383

MP risks arrest for Segway use
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-10037672-76.html

Why e-mail has become dangerous
http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/09/10/1244215.shtml

VOICEMAIL

Anonymous
The real scoop on Steve Jobs health.

Tammy SC
iTunes hurt me.

E-MAIL

Downloaded iTunes 8 this afternoon to check it out, and it turns out Apple had a little treat in store for me. Every time I tried to sync my iPod after that I would receive the lovely and ever popular blue screen of death, (by the way, I'm running Vista Ultimate on a Dell XPS M1330). Every time I'd plug in my iPod touch, crash. So then I got to spend an hour and a half trying to get rid of iTunes 8 and getting back to 7.7.whatever, (which--knock on wood--seems to have solved the problem). Apparently I'm not the only one: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=8046500 . Just wondering if anyone else in Buzztown got this little bundle of joy as well.

Cheers,

Jeremy The Atmospheric Chemist

**********

C’mon! Can we stop complaining about the iPod’s lack of FM. Seriously!
I bought an iPod to get away from crap radio played over and over and
annoying, screaming ads from car dealers. If you need to listen to the
radio go out and buy one!!!!!!!!! Just leave me my iPod with the music
selection I like and the Best Buy Ads that are mildly amusing.

Sheala, GA

P.S.--It’s was nice to hear Remy’s dulcet voice again.

**********

Molly was just mentioning on yesterday’s show (805) that she has been
tempted to call radio stations to figure out what songs they’re
playing. Molly, let me save you some time and introduce you to a
magical Web site called yes.com. I stumbled upon yes.com a few years
ago when I was typing in random URLs to see if they existed, and found
a diamond in the rough. Yes.com somehow tracks every song (and
commercial) played by *almost* every station across the country in
real time. I really don’t know what they are doing, but it works. You
can just type in the call letters or name of your station, and look at
their top 100 played songs, or better yet, if you remember about when
you heard your mystery tune, you can look up their logs. Just go to
Monday at 11 p.m., and you see all the songs played in that hour. They
even have links to buy said songs in iTunes and Amazon, and chat rooms
for each station. It’s amazing. I work in radio and I am baffled by
their magic because they even track stations that, as far as I know,
don’t encode the track info into their signal. Check it out.

Love the show,
Gabriel Jordan
Raleigh, NC

**********

Kind of breaking news here. When you install Google Chrome, it also
installs a plug-in into all other Web browsers on that machine.

The file npGoogleOneClick5.dll does what the file name suggests: It sends
all URLs you click (not visit) back to the Google mothership. So you can
type URLs and be fine. But if you click on any link on any Web page, it
sends the information to Google.

Kind of creepy.

The plug-in cannot be disabled nor removed without breaking the Google
Chrome installation; which on my computer went into the trash along with
all the other Google-spy services.

Daniel in Norway