At work this morning, I was having trouble reaching one of my servers at home. A little investigation revealed that my upstream DSL bandwidth was full to capacity.

What had happened? It turns out that Linux Today had put a link to my bash stuff on their front page. Instant Slashdot effect.

Anyway, the net effect was great. It put a lot of people in touch with bash completion who wouldn't otherwise have known about it. Not everyone reads Freshmeat and few people visit my home page.

My Malata N996 DVD player turned up yesterday. This player is code-free (will play DVDs from any region), dual-standard (converts PAL to NTSC and vice versa), and operates at multiple voltages.

In other words, this player can be plugged in anywhere in the world, connected to any kind of TV, and used to play any DVD. It even handles RCE1 discs. (Hmm, I wonder what it does with SECAM TVs and DVDs.)

This really makes a mockery of the MPAA and their heinous region encoding scheme.

I can't wait for my order of region 2 European DVDs to get here. All those old episodes of Minder and The Royale Family. No way they'll ever see a region 1 release or even end up on American TV. (I wish we could get BBC America in our building, though. They show some great stuff on there.)