I just finished hooking up voice over IP so it services all my house phone ports, with the Motorola Voice Terminal hiding in the closet along with the house’s patch panel, DSL modem and firewall router where it belongs. I can’t say it was totally painless, but most of the effort was just gathering the right tools, connectors & knowledge. Useful resources included this general phone wiring primer and this one specifically on how to distribute VoIP throughout a home. Since I was starting kinda from scratch, I also found this basic page on how the heck to use a punch-down tool useful.

DocBug Exclusive — Google revolutionized the internet. Now it is hoping to do the same with inter-galactic communication.

The company behind the US-based internet search engine looks set to launch a service that turns unused bandwidth into a powerful signal generator capable of sending advertisements to the far reaches of space. Thousands of miles of fiber-optic cable laid during the boom of the late 90s now lies dormant, and this so-called dark fiber capacity is available at a price that industry experts say is ripe for being turned into a giant planet-sized billboard.

Some believe this is the future for Google

Jules Hewlett, senior analyst at a company that talks to reporters about technology, said: “From an intergalactic advertising perspective there is a big appeal in the fact that Google is a search operation — and of course the Google brand is a huge draw.” We’re not sure what he means by this, but he’s very smart so we’ve quoted him anyway.

Though the project is hush-hush, Google spilled the beans about their new project by posting a job advertisement on their website that calls for a “strategic negotiator” to help the company to provide a “global backbone network” — in other words, an Earth-sized Light Bright.

By investing in capacity, Google could reroute packets to certain parts of the world, lighting up the dark fiber to spell out words or even full phrases that would be visible against the darkness of space for light-years.

Although Google is reluctant to talk about its plans, off the record people close to the company have called reports of the plan “mere speculation,” “baseless rumor” and in one case “the biggest load of malarky I’ve heard since The Times reported we were coming out with telephone service.”

Media Lab Europe is closing its doors after just 5 years (here’s the NYT article, subscription required). I know folks who were there, but I don’t have any deep knowledge of what went down (besides the obvious problem of opening just before the tech crash in 2000), so I’ll just raise a Guinness wish them all a happy landing wherever their next gig lies.

I still think the MP3 player could become a satellite-radio killer, but in the meantime Trax Technologies is coming out with a satellite-radio-to-iPod dock…

Some time ago I posted about the ongoing debate between David Hockney and our Cheif Scientist, David Stork, about whether the great painters of the 15th century “cheated” by secretly using optical devices like the camera obscura. Hockney thinks the realism one suddenly sees in paintings around 1430 proves that such devices were used, even though no record of them can be found (they were secret, remember?). Stork thinks it’s hogwash, and has both proposed numerous ways the realism could have been acheived using technology known to exist at the time and pointed out reasons the optical techniques Hockney proposes wouldn’t have worked anyway.

Now the New Scientist is reporting that evidence of one alternative technology Stork suggested has been found:

Separate findings will be published in March by Thomas Ketelsen, a curator at the Museum of Prints, Drawings and Manuscripts in Dresden, Germany. Hockney has argued that the similarity between Jan van Eyck’s drawing Portrait of Niccolò Albergati and a larger oil painting of the same name could only have been achieved using optical projections. But using a microscope, Ketelsen has found evidence of previously unseen pinpricks in the drawing – suggesting the copying method was mechanical, not optical. He suggests that a type of reducing compass called a “reductionzirkel” might have been used.

Falco points out that the pinpricks could have been made 50 years after van Eyck’s death by someone wishing to copy it, or even 500 years after. “Holes can’t be carbon dated,” he says. But Stork thinks the mounting evidence can’t be ignored. “The evidence doesn’t support Hockney,” he says.

“The debate is fascinating,” Hockney says. “But it cannot end just because someone found pinpricks.”

Hockney’s argument was never strong to begin with, but it’s starting to sound like he’s join the ranks of creationists, alien abduction followers and conspiracy nuts. If so, he may as well have ended his last sentence after the fourth word…