Metafilter: My god, it burns! It burns!. On the wonderful nightmare of the Hasselhoffian Recursion (maybe NSFW, definitely not safe for western civilization).

This would have been a good point to note the addition of folksonomy tags to Metafilter, except that after this post I’m desperately afraid to investigate any of them.)

Hard to believe I was laughing a year or so ago about the surface of Mars being warmer than the surface of much of New England. Today it maxed out in the low teens—I think it was about 7° F when I woke up this morning and it’s that again now. It would have been a nice day to go skiing, rather than just hanging out in the house.

Following my weather-reporting father’s example, I’ve ordered the Oregon Scientific Cable-Free Thermometer, an indoor-outdoor thermometer that combines an indoor console with one or more wireless remote stations. The idea is you could have the inside temperature, the outside temperature, and maybe the temperature from your wine cellar all on one device. Mostly I’m just interested in finding out how much of my body will freeze before I stumble out the door with the dogs at sunrise on cold days.

(Source for the title, though the specific track, “Plainsong,” isn’t on the iTMS at present.)

When I was working at Microsoft, I had Windows envy for something like the first time in my life when I looked at what my coworkers were doing with Media Center PCs that they built themselves. That was a cool use of hardware. To fill that envious void, a couple veteran Mac bloggers have stepped up to start a Mac Home Theatre PC blog. The impetus behind the blog was the launch of the Mac Mini, which is certainly the most living-room ready Mac to date, but the blog is tackling other issues as well.

One hack that I’m looking forward to trying is the one that uses software included with Apple’s FireWire SDK to record HD programs off a Motorola DCT 6200 HD cable receiver. Of course, my 3 free GB of hard disk space would be exhausted by about 2 and a half minutes of HD programming, so I might have to wait for a while to really try out this hack. Still pretty cool, though.