Despite my failure to register on time and my inability to afford the ticket price of the Berkman10 conference at Harvard Cyber Law next weekend, I’m still there, and for this handily-stated reason gleaned elsewhere:

Conference Agenda In A Nutshell

It has been argued that new information technologies and other online tools have the capacity to enhance political transparency and the accountability of government officials, processes, and institutions to their citizens. How does the Internet interact with, protect or endanger democratic engagement and trust? What can we do to push forward in a positive direction? Are there unintended consequences that need addressing? An invitation to a dialogue about the future of politics in the internet age.

Other sessions at the upcoming conference include:

• Anonymity, Privacy and Identity: Towards a Bill of User rights
• Democratized and Distributed Innovation
• The Dilemma of Games: Moral choice in a Digital World
• Framing the Net: What We Say is What We Get
• The Global Internet: Emerging Tech in Emerging Markets
• Internet Censorship and Surveillance: A Multi-Stakeholder Response
• The Musician and the Scientist Write the Code: Protocols for Compensation and Openness
• Netizenship: Engaging with Race and Diversity Online
• Networked News and Public Discourse
• Open Access: Problems of Collective Action and Promises of Civic Engagement
• Political Mobilization, the Internet and the 2008 Elections

Browse the full Agenda.

I digested the info presented at the Electric Equinox panel entitled Evolving the Network: Politics, Culture, and Consciousness on March 29th and want to cover the real thing. Updates will be posted here, and if all goes well, to the berkman10 Facebook group as well.

Let’s say you want to display a series of pictures onscreen for your friends over coffee. Or maybe you are showing holiday photos to relatives at a family function.

These are times when waiting for a slideshow screensaver or using a big bulky photo application will not

I’m do. I searched Google many times in vain for a suitable application and found nothing but shareware garbage.

I came across a couple of Flash offerings from airtightinteractive. My requirements—free, open source, stylish, straightfoward to use—these were all admirably met. They can be run on screen for fast presentations or embedded in a webpage with a few lines of code.

So without further delay, here they are:

• SimpleViewer http://www.airtightinteractive.com/simpleviewer/ (download here)

• AutoViewer http://www.airtightinteractive.com/projects/autoviewer/ (download here)

• PostcardViewer http://www.airtightinteractive.com/projects/postcardviewer/ (download here)

I’ll be using them for the NYE event tonight.

If you are searching for an application to mount un-burned CD images as drives, do not use shady software like Daemon Tools. Get a simple control panel from Microsoft that does the same, for free, without any viruses or spyware.

Get Microsoft’s Virtual ISO Drive

The installation and user interface are Spartan. Here’s a quick run through on how to install the control panel:

1. Copy VCdRom.sys to your %systemroot%\system32\drivers folder.

2. Execute VCdControlTool.exe

3. Click "Driver control"

4. If the "Install Driver" button is available, click it. Navigate to the %systemroot%\system32\drivers folder, select VCdRom.sys, and click Open.

5. Click "Start"

6. Click OK

7. Click "Add Drive" to add a drive to the drive list. Ensure that the drive added is not a local drive. If it is, continue to click "Add Drive" until an unused drive letter is available.

8. Select an unused drive letter from the drive list and click "Mount".

9. Navigate to the image file, select it, and click "OK". UNC naming conventions should not be used, however mapped network drives should be OK.

You may now use the drive letter as if it were a local CD-ROM device. When you are finished you may unmount, stop, and remove the driver from memory using the driver control.

note: You need to have a Windows CD handy for this operation. If you do not have it then you can download the Recovery Console iso image file which consist only those files required to use the Recovery Console. Download the image file from here. (7MB)

The Windows XP Recovery Console is designed to help pro-teks recover from situations where a Windows XP-based computer does not start. It allows you to perform a limited range of tasks using a command line interface and recover your system and your important documents and files.

It also requires you to boot from a CD, wait 10 minutes, and go through the process repeatedly to verify your changes. Its annoying as hell.

The good news is that you can manually install the Recovery Console.

To install the Recovery Console, follow these steps:

1. Insert the Windows XP CD into the CD-ROM drive.
2. Click Start, and then click Run.
3. In the Open box, type d:\i386\winnt32.exe /cmdcons where d is the drive letter for the CD-ROM drive.
4.  A Windows Setup Dialog Box appears. The Windows Setup Dialog Box describes the Recovery Console option. To confirm the installation, click Yes.
5.  Restart the computer. The next time that you start your computer, “Microsoft Windows Recovery Console” appears on the startup menu.

Whenever you want to use the Recovery Console select the “Recovery Console” option from the boot list.

I’ve conducted transactions on craigslist in cities on both coasts of the US. My subjective conclusion thus far is that NYC’s board is the sketchiest. None of the others bring together so many con artists, scammers, thieves, sexual perverts, and introverted net trolls.

Selling anything to a real person becomes an exercise in spamming. You are competeing against professionals who do nothing other than flood post their merchandise every hour. 75% of your responses will be con artists on faraway continents; 24% will be real people who offer  half the money and want you to bring it to them on a platter.

An elite tek from Romania, Ady, crafted a portable version of the Pidgin Instant Messenger.

For those who do not know, Pidgin is the non-commercial IM application for those with superior technical tastes. (For the record, I am also a frequent user of meebo. Pidgin is my choice when on an insecure network, or when I don’t want my chat logs stored on a corporate server.) You can send messages to any network — AIM, Yahoo, Google, MSN, Jabber, ICQ, and whatever other weird system you use. It can be customized with themes and plugins.

This portable version comes with the OTR encryption plugin built-in; a must have for elite users who care about privacy.

Consider this application a must-have on your elite flash disk.

Find the latest Pidgin Portable here.

New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority and New Jersey Transit, which together carry more than 9 million people a day, are working with the company to give users one place to go for maps, schedules and trip planners…

…New Jersey Transit plans to share maps and schedules with Google as part of a pilot program to post more information about the system on the Web…MTA spokesman Jeremy Soffin confirmed the New York agency is also working with Google Transit. He declined to give specifics.

The useless touchscreens appearing in NYC cabs could use a reason to exist, like this one. The agile companies who move quickly to provide information to the search giant when it comes will prosper.