Comte writes "About three hundred charter members, local sci-fi cognoscenti and assorted geeks got a sneak peek last night of Paul Allen's $22 mm Science Fiction Museum prior to its official grand opening this Friday." Comte peeked, and contributes his impressions of the museum -- read on below to see what it's like. If you're in Seattle with a few hours, he says it's worth dropping in. (The rest of the text is his.)

Lucasfan04 writes "Apparently a few clips leaked out from the upcoming Star Wars Trilogy DVD. They're from George Lucas' audio commentary, and you can hear him talking about the films. Five 3-minute or so clips are featured."

Sex, liquor and gambling are not Las Vegas' only tempting vices -- there are electronics, too. The 2004 Consumer Electronics Show is in full swing. Below is a informal report from the show floor: I've been walking around the place ogling flat screens of all varieties (plus one close-to-flat screen, details below) and seeking the elusive perfect portable music player I'm after. Read on to learn about some of the interesting products being hawked, and about some things for which you'll have to wait.

Several folks noted that you can now see the first trailers for Spider-man 2, provided you have some broadband action going on. It's nice to know that there will be something to look forward to after RotK comes out.

atkulp writes "The convergence of PC media with the home entertainment system is something that has been promised for several years now. Tech-savvy computer users can easily have gigabytes of music, images, and video on hard drives, locked away from the living room setup. Many of us are looking for a simple solution that will allow our stereo/TV equipment to simply become network devices so they can consume any shared content. On the surface it sounds like a simple proposition - yet few devices can achieve this goal, and of those even fewer do it well. Some people resort to just plugging a computer into their setup so they have all of the features and media support, but finding good 10-foot interfaces can be challenging." Read on for atkulp's review of Oritron's networked DVD player to see how well it meets the all-in-one ideal.

Dark Paladin writes "I just got done watching Bubba Ho-Tep . Lucky for the viewers, the actor, Bruce Campbell was there afterwards answering questions. He was quick of wit, rather forgiving of the fans who kept wanting to ask Evil Dead questions, and even made fun of his own career (such as big budget movies like Congo that flopped -- not his fault, in my humble opinion)." Read on for the rest of Dark Paladin's review.

chuckpeters writes "An astronaut friend told us about how the nuts out there seem to think that Mars is going to collide with the earth or the moon, or the gravitational forces are going to rip the earth apart or cause massive earthquakes. While in a co-workers office listening to a co-worker take a call about the possibility of such calamities, our astronaut friend yelled "Quick, duck! It's Mars"! No longer welcome in that office, he's back worshiping launch complex 39A. The true gravity of the situation is much less benign. The fact is I have never seen Mars look so bright or red as the other night, it's definitely time to gaze at the red planet. NASA isn't going to be worrying about Mars colliding with Earth, but they will be keeping a close eye on Mars. During this close approach, NASA will be inviting the public to help decide what areas on the red planet to photograph." More information below about the unique position of the red planet - take advantage of this once-in-a-3x-lifetime event.

Officially, the theme of this year's Open Source Software Convention (OSCON) 2003 is "Embracing and Extending Proprietary Software," and to that end approximately 1,500 attendees (and companies including Apple, Active State, online book-seller Powells.com and MySQL) are sharing space in three floors of Portland's downtown Marriott, and will until the conference's close on Friday. (Representatives from Microsoft are along for the ride, too. Lunch on Wednesday is Microsoft's treat.) An unoffical theme of ubiquitious connectivity and creative collaborative in much in evidence as well: besides the conference-furnished wireless access points throughout the classroom area, numerous other base stations (like the one I'm connected to right now) have popped up. What do you expect with more than a thousand laptop-toting programmers in one hotel? There's also a "semi-unofficial" wiki (applauded by Tim O'Reilly), an ongoing web log of the conference, and an irc channel filled with conference attendees. Read on for more.

LinuxLasVegas writes "SuSE announced a new release today titled "SuSE Linux Desktop 1.0". The distro is built on SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8.x technology and comes with Crossover Office 2.0. Mad Penguin has the first review of this release. From what I read, it seems like a good release, but for the $600 price tag, I'm not sure if it would be worth the jump..."

An anonymous reader writes "Being a long time TiVo-head and a talk radio junkie, I've been waiting for the first commercially available PVR for radio (PAR?). PogoProducts finally released just such a product, which they call 'Radio Your Way'. After seeing the announcement on Slashdot I quickly placed my order and have now been using it for about a week. The following is a quick rundown of the good and the bad."

Daniel_Staal writes "Apple's recent release of their music download service created quite a discussions here on /., with a lot of opinion and speculation. In light of this I thought I'd poke around, kick the tires, and see how it actually works." Staal's review follows. The Wall Street Journal also has a review.

With TiVo's release of the much anticipated Home Media Option (anticipated by me, anyway), I renewed my quest to find a way to integrate my computer's media files with my TV. TiVo's solution is not an option for me, because I don't have a Series2, and even if I did, the TiVo solution doesn't work with DirecTV units (for now, anyway). So I looked into something I saw a few months ago on ThinkGeek: QCast Tuner for PlayStation 2.

On Saturday night, Virgil and Acidus, two young security researchers, were scheduled to give a talk at Interz0ne II on security flaws they'd found in a popular ID card system for universities. It's run by Blackboard, formerly by AT&T, and you may know it as OneCard, CampusWide, or BuzzCard. On Saturday, instead of the talk, attendees got to hear an Interz0ne official read the Cease and Desist letter sent by corporate lawyers. The DMCA, among other federal laws including the Economic Espionage Act, were given as the reasons for shutting down the talk (but -- update -- see the P.P.S below). I spoke with Virgil this morning.

Obiwan Kenobi writes "Online Journalism has an excellent article on video game reviewers and the ethics of such a position. It includes comments from the editor of gamespot and insights from well-known movie critics who are subjected to the same junkets that try to influence reviewers into writing good things about terrible products (or just mediocre ones). Inside I talk about my limited experience in video game reviewing and the influence free stuff can have."

Obnoxio The Clown writes "The Register has an article on breaking technology which will (theoretically) allow roaming between WLAN and GPRS (and presumably 3G when it gets here)." At long last, I'll be able to delete my spam from everywhere!

Fans of the excellent Cowboy Bebop anime series have been eagerly awaiting the movie, released on Friday in major U.S. cities. The critics seem to like it overall, and, skimming through the reviews, the ones who dislike it seem to do so for the usual reason: it's a cartoon.

Pink Daisy writes "When it comes to modern consumer electronics there are a lot of choices to be made. Choosing the right gadget for you can be difficult, but a good decision has tremendous rewards. A bad one can doom you to Boring and Uncool Gadget Hell until your wallet recharges. Today I will help you decide whether your next portable device should be a Nintendo Gameboy Advance SP or a Canon Powershot G3. Since I'm a scientist, I will make this review as objective as possible. Where subjective judgements are required I will make note so that you can evaluate the evidence for yourself." Read on, or you won't know where to open your wallet.

Donald Scott sends in this short yet resonant tale about doing tech support... for your family.

shiroi_kami writes "I finally received my long-awaited (and pre ordered) CD-ROM and immediately loaded the game up on my IPAQ (I didn't even look at the PC Extras)." shiroi_kami has written some other PC game reviews; here's his first of a Pocket PC game. Read on below for his thoughts on Sorcery PDA.

Niels Provos would like you to help create the perfect lure for crackers. In the style of similar challenges presented by the Honeynet Project, Provos, a doctoral candidate at CITI (a research institute at the University of Michigan) has announced a public competition for contributions to his honeyd project, which the project page describes as "a small daemon that creates virtual hosts on a network." Honeyd does more than that terse description implies, though: read on to see how you can contribute to creative cracker snaring.