Brian A. Paul

Bunnie over at Bunnie: Studios posted the answer to the name that ware November riddle, which I wrote about previously. I suggest you click through for a full explanation and photos but let’s just say that my “That must be some kind of MP3 player with Secure Digital expansion slot” was not only too simplistic but way off the mark besides. At least I know when I’m in over my head, which is why I didn’t hazard a guess in the comments.

Bunnie’s stated reason for these contests is to foster an interest in reverse engineering and hardware in general. I think that’s pretty cool. A lot of people, myself included, began the road to their technical skill set by looking at what those who came before us had done. I can’t help but imagine there’s some person out there just starting down that path and that fun, interesting challenges such as this will help them gain the passion and enthusiasm they’ll need to make truly great contributions. To me this is exactly the kind of thing that helps build expertise in an industry.

Bunnie Huang is giving away a Chumby, all you have to do is accomplish the next to impossible (for me anyway) task of identifying his piece of mystery hardware.. and be the first one to do so.

Bunnie is a cool entrepreneurial hardware guy. He came to my attention from all the fanfare around his company’s device the Chumby. I subscribed to his blog when he started running a very informative and enlightening series about sourcing manufacturing in China and all the requisite steps it has taken to bring the Chumby to market.

I’ve always been fascinated with the hardware side of computing and electronics but have next to no experience with it. I imagine that the complete lack of depth about hardware development I feel reading Bunnie’s blog or the Flylogic Blog must be what non-technical people feel when I babble on about writing software, tuning and optimizing MySQL, or scaling web delivery architectures.

As you may or may not know, Lawrence Lessig spent 10 years dedicating his life to fighting bad copyright law. He may be the most influential ‘copyfighter’ ever.

Last June (2007) Larry announced that he was shifting his scholarship and eventually his activism away from copyright. This isn’t to say he’s abandoned the copyfight, but you could say his primary focus is shifting to the problem of ‘Corruption.’ Specifically it seems United States governmental corruption.

This morning he posted the video of the alpha version of his Corruption Lecture.

Whether you agree or disagree with the often controversial Mr. Lessig his lectures are guaranteed to give you pause, make you think and still manage to entertain. To me, that’s worth the hour or so you’ll spend listening to what he has to say.