[stars: 4] Nokia 5300 MP3 phone. I love the form factor, display, and the menus are a solid extension of Nokia’s previous phones. The camera and MP3 player are uninspired, but the FM tuner is surprisingly good. The phone also comes with a mSD slot, a USB2 cable, and supports USB2 FS. For $30 this is a great geek phone.

Inside Parrot’s compiler tools, an O’Reilly blog post about the Perl-inspired VM tool chain.

[stars: 5] Primer. Absolute brilliance on a shoestring budget. A solid reminder to geeks that you can make anything, given 6 months of hard work.  They paint the life of engineers in a believable way, wrapped around a twisted sci-fi plot.  This movie will leave you inspired and confused–and trying to figure out wtf actually happened.

[bombs: 2] Nacho Libre. Almost total crap, almost brilliant. And yet somehow it missed both extremes. Solid cinematography, a reasonable script, but horrible, horrible casting. Imagine an uninspired Napoleon Dynamite. Don’t waste your time unless you really need to see Jack Black in tights.

What do you think about self-published books?
Well, I like to think of myself as a self publisher who grew up into a real publisher. So I’ve seen the world from both sides. I never thought when I printed my first run of 100 copies of Learning the Unix Operating System in 1985 that it would go on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies, and start me on the path to being one of the largest computer book publishers in the country. It’s been a long and fruitful ride, which took me in many unexpected directions, and with a huge number of mistakes, some of which turned out to be inspired!