The Invisible Library catalogues books that have been referenced inside of books. Indexed by real author, real title, fictitous author and fictitous title, there is an eclectic mix of sources. The Harry Potter series is of course referenced with all of his schoolbook titles. Also, there’s the lovely self-referential “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” from “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”.

Via MediaNews, the Chicago Tribune’s restaurant critic writes about keeping his identity safeguarded so he can dine anonymously. He goes over the tricks: using credit cards with his dog’s name, making reservations on a phone without recognizable Caller ID, making sure the baby sitter can still reach you when you’re dining under an assumed name. Ruth Reichl, the former NY Times critic, gave a Salon interview a few years ago that goes into even more detail on what life is like for a high profile restaurant critic. “I change my credit cards every six weeks or so. But, you know, they fax the names of the credit cards around to each other.”

I have fond memories of gleefully reading Byte Magazine‘s April Fools jokes way back in the ’80s. But the only specific one I could remember actually was not a joke. It was a real product that people assumed was a joke. The MacCharlie, reported on by Byte in 1985, was a device that you plugged onto your Apple Macintosh (now you have to picture one of those old boxy Macs, not the new fruity ones) in order to run IBM-PC applications (well, DOS actually). Externally it looked like a set of two 5.25″ floppy drives that plugged onto the Mac box and a keyboard extender that sat around the Mac keyboard to provide function keys and a numeric keypad. Internally, it had that good ol’ 8088 processor. I don’t know how well it worked, but it certainly was a creative concept for the time. Some actual Byte April Fool’s products that I’ve hunted up were the MacKnifer, a knife-sharpener that fit into the Mac hard disk drive, edible floppy disks made out of soybeans (sensitive data? eat it), and a 5MB hard disk for the Timex/Sinclair 1000. Yes, 5MB was considered a very big joke back then.

Oh my goodness, there’s finally an image file on this site. Whatever possessed me to do that? Seems that when I have no time for them, the creative urges strike. And when I’m (rarely) unoccupied, I can never think of anything to do, or the lists I have of things to do don’t appeal. By the way, though I did write it, that’s not my actual handwriting. Oh, and there are now only 14 days worth of posts on the main page.

Iridium Satellite, LLC relaunched phone service on Friday. Old handsets will still work and new phones and features are available. An interesting fact from the press release, there are 7 in-orbit spares for the 66 satellites, and they plan to launch 7 more next year. As I reported in December, the Pentagon is getting the best deal in saving Iridium from crash & burn: $3 million a month for unlimited airtime for 20,000 users.

One of my favorite albums is The Juliet Letters which is a collaboration between Elvis Costello and the Brodsky Quartet, a classical string quartet. I had always wondered if/when sheet music for it would be released and it looks like Schirmer has obliged. That makes me wish I was still in college so I could easily grab a few friends and a practice room and have at it (not that it is completely impossible for me to get a quartet + vocalist together now, but the logistics and timing are significantly more challenging). Via Robot Wisdom, the Irish Times has an article on Elvis’ latest collaboration with mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie Von Otter. They’ve released an album called For The Stars.