Here are some interesting links from today:

• E-Passports Can Be Hacked and Cloned in Minutes
  Tests have concluded that new e-passports can be hacked within minutes. A researcher cloned the chips in 2 passports and then implanted images of Osama bin Laden and a suicide bomber. Both passports passed as genuine by UN approved passport readers.
• Google Search Provides Olympic Event Schedules Inline
  Find out when events in your favorite sport are going down in a single Google search: Simply enter the event name and “Olympics” into the Google search box to see upcoming dates and times, like tennis Olympics, or diving Olympics.
• SlingPlayer 2.0 beta goes public | Crave, the gadget blog – CNET
  The beta version of the SlingPlayer 2.0 software is now available for Windows users as a free download from Sling Media’s Web site. The software, which allows owners Slingbox products to access their TV programming via any broadband-connected PC…
• Watch the Olympics Online
  The 2008 Beijing Olympics will happen while most Americans are sleeping. While NBC will be providing thousands of hours of content on the web, the only way to truly ensure you won’t miss any action is to take advantage of the many video outlets online.

As I posted on Friday, the Wordpress Postalicious plugin broke on Friday when Delicious launched their redesign.  Thankfully, the plugin author, Pablo Gómez Basanta, quickly cranked out the changes and updated the plugin to v2.6 which fixes the issue.

I’m not a full time blogger or anything so I rely heavily on the Postalicious plugin to keep my blog active.  All I have to do is bookmark interesting sites/pages/articles using the Delicious Firefox plugin and the links are published automatically for me on whatever interval I choose.

Features

• Automatically create posts in your blog with your bookmarks
• Works with delicious, ma.gnolia, Google Reader, Reddit and Yahoo Pipes.
• Complete control over how often your bookmarks are posted and how many bookmarks should appear on each post.
• If the post is not ready for prime time, Postalicious creates a draft with the pending bookmarks which you can publish any time.
• Full customization on the look of posts created by Postalicious.
• Integrates with WordPress tags.
• Filter the bookmarks that are posted to your blog depending on how you tagged them.
• Logs all the activity so that you know what Postalicious did and when.

Popular bookmarking site del.icio.us has updated their site to a sleeker version and also changed their name to delicious.com.  Doesn’t sound like a big deal right?  Might be for me.

I use delicious to bookmark sites and articles I think are noteworthy almost everyday.  While bookmarking still works for me looks like the Wordpress plugin (Postalicious) that automatically pulls my bookmarks out and makes a post here on my site (like this one from yesterday) has stopped working.  It’s generating an error now and won’t update.  I haven’t really looked into it too much but if it’s not broken I find it highly coincidental to be throwing errors on the day delicious did a major change.

If I’m lucky, it’ll just start working again… if not, I’ll have to wait for an update to the Postalicious plugin.  Lots of bloggers use this plugin so it shouldn’t be long before an update comes out.

Anyway, in the meantime, here’s a delicious video of the site redesign showing the transformation.

You can also see a list of all then new features on their site.

Is Postalicious broken for anyone else or is it just me?

Yesterday there was a Microsoft Ad showing on my site. I captured it in the video below (chances are it’s running on the page today since I’m writing about it).  It’s about their new ad campaign, The Mojave Experiment (I first mentioned Mojave in an earlier post July 25th), which takes people with negative preconceived notions about Windows Vista and lets them test out Microsoft’s new beta operating system Mojave.

The catch is… they are really testing Vista!  The Mojave site has some pretty funny videos with the users bashing Vista then doing a 180 when they get to test Mojave. Microsoft has posted some really interesting before and after survey numbers from the experiment.

• 94% of respondents rated Mojave higher than they initially rated Vista
• 0% rated Mojave lower than initially rated Vista
• Average pre-demo Vista score: 4.4
• Average post-demo Mojave score: 8.5

It’s about time Microsoft is finally attempting to dispel the Vista sucks rumors. I’ve been using Vista for two years now (since beta 2).  Ever since RC1 it’s been pretty good except for some compatibility issues.  Since the RTM release though it’s been solid.

Is it too little, too late?  Can Microsoft turn around the reputation the Mac commercials gave to Vista? We’ll see.

Unbenonced to me, I’ve apparently been thrust into the political arena.  My phone has been ringing off the hook today with calls from reporters and aides from the B. Hussien Obama Campaign as well as the McCain Campaign.  I’m not sure how it all happened but, as of today I accept the will of the people and announce my candidacy for President of the United States of America!

Both parties should be afraid because now there’s a true conservative in the race.

Here’s the latest news report detailing how it came to be.