Colin@sinisterfluid.com writes "The most-hyped line of movie-themed merchandise in history -- for the still unreleased ``Star Wars: Episode I -- The Phantom Menace'' -- finally went on sale just after midnight Sunday on a studio-imposed schedule,and fans and retailers weren't wasting a minute. Toys R Us stores around the country decided to open their doors at 12:01 a.m. Monday for an all-night selling marathon of toys based on the movie. Wal-Mart and K-mart called in extra staff for their 24-hour stores to handle the post-midnight crowds. Many stores planned to limit the number of items a customer could buy to prevent immediate sell-outs. Fans had been waiting for months to get a glimpse of the vast array of goods -- from action figures to wigs to body lotion to snack food -- tied to the movie, which opens May 19. But LucasFilm Ltd. had signed strict licensing deals that prevented manufacturers from releasing virtually any information about their products ahead of time. As a result, people had been speculating for months, especially on the Internet, about what the toys and other merchandise would be. To see the famed toys for yourself, surf to Toys 'R' Us or E-Toys "

Things have been a bit crazy: server troubles, spent some quality time in the ER after the gf got in accident (she's fine), and unusually stressful 'biz stuff (note:in utopia everyone pays their bills ontime instead of leaving us with a nearly empty checking account, a massive looming bandwidth bill, and all these unpaid invoices? I seem to be balding at an accelerated rate :) As for the images on port 81 of flotsam, I'm sorry about that- those of you behind firewalls will be glad to know that the new server will be in soon and hopefully the dust can settle. Allright, some quickies already: Toddius Maximus wrote in to tell us that Performance Computing has started a bi-monthly Linux Section Anthony Fuentes sent us an Interview with John Carmack webslacker sent us a nice little article on Pixar if you're curious what Steve Jobs' other company is up to. Wouldn't be quickies without Star Wars: James McP sent us linkage to a wired story about a Star Wars fan site featuring toy based mini movies, webslacker noted the new 12" Star Wars figures, and Dave Lowe sent us Star Wars Parody Music More cool movie stuff: patowic noted that Bruce Cambell (of Army of Darkness/Evil Dead fame) has his own web page, which features a sound bite archive And some Slashdot media sightings: Duke of URL noted that the recent Katz/Littleton stories got a mention on Suck. RKemp noted that The Economist noticed too. nene noted that an article about Slashdot appeared in Der Standard (although, with a name like that, its no surprise that it ain't English :)

Since Littleton, the cost of being different has gone up. Thousands of powerful e-mail messages have chronicled an educational system that glorifies the traditional and the normal, and brutalizes and alienates people who are or who are perceived as different under various names -- geeks, freaks, nerds, Goths and oddballs. One of the powerful messages coming out of Colorado is that so many of these "different" kids say they find school boring, oppressive, and utterly hostile, feelings echoed by educational survivors, many of whom are now parents. The hysteria over Littleton has only made things worse. It's time geeks defined and lobbied for some new rights. From their own messages, here are some places to start.

ShadoWolf sent us one of the more creative uses that I've seen for Lego Mindstorms. This one is a 3D Plotter that makes use of Legos, GNUPlot, and a Netwinder. It can make a 3d model of any surface. Not bad for a toy, huh?

SEGV has returned with a review of Kernighan and Pike's latest effort, The Practice of Programming This book has both practical and method aspects, including exercises. If you're serious about your programming, read below to get the skinny on the book.

An Anonymous Reader writes "Well, this is not really news, but I've been playing with these things all day and they are so neat. Inxight Has a couple Java demos of a Hyperbolic tree. A New(?) UI concept from Xerox PARC. " requires Java, and mine is busted. But maybe I'll fix that and toy with that sorta thing for comments or something. Hmm.

An anonymous reader proved what happens when you combine to of mankind's greatest achievements (Legs Mindstorm and Star Wars) into one excellent geek toy. I want that lego R2-D2. They've also got a digital camera lego mindstorm. Hope your German is better then mine though. Update: 02/17 06:04 by CT : Web site go boom. Anyone have a copy in their cache?

NutBat writes "News.com has an article about Toys "R" Us threatening legal action against a guy named Gus Lopez who runs a site with the domain toysrgus.com for his Star Wars toy collection. It seems that he will be backing down." It appears that Gus' website did not sell anything despite the .com suffix, although I have not been able to confirm this. The letter sent to Gus is on his website, and is worth reading. Ajax.org and veronica.org were resolved due to public pressure. Perhaps this one will be too? Toys R US has a customer service page

SEGV, the old faithful of reviews, has sent in one of his latest reviews, this one of Edward Yourdon's latest book Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer. For those of you who remember, several years ago, Yourdon wrote a book about how the American programmer/developer was doomed. Recent years have changed his opinion, and in this book he talks about the change that he says across the landscape. Fascinating idea-click below for the review.

mindedc writes "ITU makes a small module that takes text from an RS-232 serial connection and displays it on NTSC. It can also overlay an existing video signal... It would make a nice menu for a dedicated stereo rack MP3 Player! They also have a cool Caller ID > RS-232 widget.. Just need a WM dock APP to recieve caller id now." Interesting toy. Especially dig the BASIC example code.

An anonymous coward came forth and wished to query all on this issue: "Has anyone ever painted their computer? I know you can buy some really cool cases on the net; but I have a Toshiba Libretto (running Linux of course) so getting a new case is out of the question. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to go about changing my little toy's colour (while not accidentally painting the screen, keys or anything else that is important)?"

Harris Vaegan-Lloyd writes "Cobalt networks have just released the Qube2, with a whole lot of new features to make everyone's lives easier, so why would you want a netwinder now huh? New features are modem control, scheduled backup to remote servers, DHCP server, better email alias handling & better mailing lists and too much to type here.. Hardware is now 2 ethernet ports, a serial card and a new 250Mhz mips chip (Qunatum Effects Dynamic.). And a new power connector to replace the old one that kept falling out! Yay! ;). " An anonymous reader also sent us a link to a review of this new toy.

My new C'T arrived this week with an interesting review of the Orb, a removable MR medium which boasts 2.2 Gig per $29 cartridge, and should cost around $200. While that does make it more expensive than writable CD-Roms in bulk (400 for 338 on Pricewatch today) by a factor of 10, it would make a pretty neat backup-device, or linux-hacking-disk. Indeed with a 10-12 millisecond seek rate, burst transfer rates of 20Mb/s and 12.2Mb/s sustained, it's in the hard-disk league. S: Oops... repeat. Sorry.

jjohn asks: "It seems simple enough. You want a new linux toy. You find the source and download it. You do a 'configure', you type 'make' and then ... poof. You're missing a library file. Is there a good text on upgraded system libraries? Is there one or two places, besides old sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux, that are "main" repositories for Linux libs? I prefere to compile source rather than get binaries. For the record, I'm looking to upgrade the libs on my old Slack 3.0 box...Thanks"

On the Net and the Web this year, we saw one kind of revolution after another: the Web helped elected a governor, saw the spread of new kinds of messaging communities like ICQ and Hotline, the rapid spread of politicized movements like OS and Free Software, the storming of the digital world by retailers and big cornporations, and oh yes, we were shocked by the sudden and highly pornographic appearance here of the Kenneth Starr report one day. But it's easy to be online for days and not quite grasp what's going on out there, which is a full-blown constitutional crisis. The differences between the old and new information cultures have never been more clearly defined than by Linda, Monica, Ken, Bill, Sam, Cokie and the members of the House Judiciary Committee.

When I put out my call for Geek Christmas Gift ideas, I had no idea what I was in for. But after the storm of email that followed was washed away, I was left with a list of toys that any geek would be excited to give or get this year for whatever holiday it is you celebrate this time of year. Hit the link below and read the list if you're curious.

As is my habit, whenever I go outside, I tend to go see movies. And when I see movies, I tend to post reviews here. So I saw A Bug's Life last night. If you wanna know what I thought about it, hit the link and read my ramblings.

ZeeC writes "Here is a cool new web toy for anyone that wants to surf anywhere anytime. I wish I had this instead of my Etch-a-Sketch when I was a kid" its not an actual product, but it might be kinda cute. And did I mention that its wireless?

Alex Tosheff writes "Hey, came home today and my Rio MP3 player was waiting for me on the doorstep! It's smaller than I was expecting (about 2x the size of a pager but weighs only 1/2 as much). It comes with a grey parallel pass-through with a pcmcia-type connection socket on top. It really feals like a toy :) Although the pictures have shown a fold-up pair of headphones, it really comes with the ear-bud types and a note explaining the change. As for the quality, it depends of course on the bit-rate, but the songs (ahem) I own on my system are sampled at 128Kbps and sound way better than a tape. There is an interesting chart on the box thaty I will scan and post if anyone is interested..." Those buggers look pretty sweet. Still not enough memory, but its a good step in the right direction.

miket wrote in to send us a link to a page or Oracle's website where you can read about Oracle Lite. Versions will be available at the end of October for both Wince and the Pilot. It's only the client (duh) but it still might be a fun toy- if you can access your server wirelessly.