Some may ask, why not use del.icio.us? Well, del.icio.us is more of a social site, and a site for archiving links. Go through your del.icio.us history, I bet you’ll find in the archives, upwards of 75% dead links. That’s what I got. Instapaper marks links as read when you visit them, and lets you easily delete something you’ve read.

Others might ask, why not use your browser’s bookmarks? Well, I’m a man who doesn’t like clutter. In fact, my bookmarks consist of what’s in my bookmarks bar, for sites I access frequently and thus want to get to with a quick key command, and that’s it. Nothing in the menus. And those links are only available in that browser. Not in another browser if I happen to be using it. And not on another computer, so something I save on my MacBook isn’t available on my iMac or my iPhone, or the computer at work. So Instapaper works well for me. Granted it’s not for everyone, but it’s awesome for me.

And as an added bonus, it works well with Safari’s webclips feature. I have an Instapaper widget on my dashboard for quick glance/access to my saved for later links.

All in all, it’s a simple, no nonsense web app. To use it, all you need to put in is a user name. You can put in an email address if you want. You can set a password if you want. But you don’t have to. I like it.

Disclosure: DB of White Roof Radio fame is a good friend of mine, and once let me stay in his garage for a few months while I was a hobo in southern California.

The world-famous White Roof Radio is a podcast. A podcast with one primary focus. 50/50 Weight distribution Matte BRG paint The MINI Cooper. I know what you’re thinking. “How can they do a whole show about a single car?” But they do do it. In fact, they just posted their 150th show last week. The show is hosted by DB from SoCal, Todd from KC, and Gabe from Chicago. Robert from Toronto is an occasional contributer to the show, the Neil Young to their Crosby, Stills, and Nash.

The show got its start nearly two years ago, when DB was toying with the idea of doing a podcast. Podcasting at the time was a new frontier on the internet at the time. Todd was thinking of doing such a thing as well, and so after a few solo flights, the two collaborated. Gabe was brought in later to do the news, and completed the trifecta. The early shows were troubled by low quality audio, but that was soon rectified when the lads were able to get professional level recording equipment. They eventually settled on their current format, two shows a week with news on Sunday and a topical show on Monday. Robert occasionally contributes a “soundseeing tour” in the middle of the week, where he takes a guest along for their first ever ride in a MINI and records their thoughts about the experience.

The show isn’t just about MINIs though. Other topics often include talk about other cars (sometimes derrisively, sometimes approvingly), the latest Apple release (both Gabe and Todd are habitual Mac users and DB is a recent convert), the weather (to the annoyance of some listeners), and, once or twice a year, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald. These tangents are some of the best parts of the show, lending a lot of humor and fun to what can occasionally be a dry subject.

The show started gaining sponsorship from various MINI parts retailers as it became more popular. Currently the show has nearly 500 regular subscribers to the RSS feed, coming from far off countries such as Greece, the UK, and Australia, and is distributed through North American Motoring, MySpace, and Digg as well as through the main site. The boys hit the big time just recently, when they announced the MINI International had invited them to Amsterdam to cover MINI United, a huge event that happens about every other year attracting over a thousand people. That’s kind of a big deal for a homebrew production to recieve validation from a major corporation. And it’s just plain pretty sweet.

The first thing it does is track your music. Pretty much every audio player under the sun is supported (I use iTunes), and a little background app quietly submits that information to Last.fm. Last.fm then takes that information and parses it into charts tracking top artists, songs, albums, everything else. It can then recommend to you stuff that you might like. There are songs for free download, with no DRM. There’s a radio app that lets you listen to just about every artist available. There’s a wiki-type system for each artist, for bios, pictures, tagging, etc.

There’s the social aspect too. You can befriend people, recommend music too them, discuss on forums, track other people, all sorts of stuff. Last.fm shows you your “musical neighbourhood”, people who, based on their listening habits, have the same tastes as you. There’s a quilt thingie, similar to the flash-based Flickr badge but with album covers. And there’s the chart publishing tool, like what’s in the sidebar there.

There’s a lot to explore and find on Last.fm, and it’s a cool way to find music, negating the argument that mp3 players are killing people’s ability to discover new music. It might not change your life, but it’s a fun site to use. And if you do sign up, be sure to add me.

Joanna Rutkowska is a security specialist for COSEINC, a Singapore-based IT company. She has long been interested in the inner workings of operating systems, and has been involved in Linux kernel programming. She now works on dectecting and developing stealth exploits that can attack XP and Vista via rootkits, network backdoors and covert channels. You can check out Rutkowska’s work at Invisible Things.

(Photo courtesy of Hackinthebox.org)

It really is a great site, with a good group of players. Anyone can sign up and begin posting there, as I do occasionally, and so do many others. The comments are a great place to hang out, you can tell when I have a particularly slow day at work because I’ll be checking out BoK’s site all day long, and I’ll put in at least five or six comments a day. And that’s about the highest recommendation I can give. It’s a fun lot for sure.

There’s so much stuff there that you can always just click around and find something new. Lincoln stuff, girlie galleries, Ubuntu depositories, christ knows what else is there. It’s definitely a place worth checking out, posting comments to, and signing up to write for. Go to it now