I’m back from Italy! It was a great two weeks, and the tour we took kept us busy every step of the way. I’ll try to post some photos in the next few days, but I don’t want to bore you. I know I hate it when people make me look at their vacation pictures. Unless you’ve been there yourself you just don’t have the right frame of reference to appreciate them!

We started and ended in Rome. Here’s the path we took:

The espressos were good, the limoncello was great, and the absinthe was interesting. Watching TV at 50hz was flickerific, but I managed to make myself watch an episode or two of Star Trek Voyager in Italian. I spent my birthday in Italy and Switzerland!

I will never fly on an airplane without noise-cancellation headphones again. Inside each one is an elf who works around the clock to filter out the roar of the plane and boost the clarity of whatever you’re listening to. They really are amazing, those elves.

Here’s a bunch of interesting news that I would have probably posted if I had been around during the last two weeks!

The Pirate Bay was raided and had all their servers siezed before promptly returning to service just three days later. Those guys are like lawsuit teflon.

The Xbox360 Spring update happened and the complete list of 125 changes is here.

Devil360 turned out to be a still-in-progress 360 modchip. Some jerks in Greece decided to steal the name to release their own unrelated product called the “Devil Mod 360” which is nothing more than a DVD drive firmware switcher.

DevHook 0.41a lets your 1.5 PSP emulate firmware 2.5, enabling you to play games that require 2.5 without having to upgrade. It’ll let you play both ISOs and UMDs.

Epsilon is an in-progress third-party firmware for the PSP. Combined with the still-unreleased Undiluted Platinum modchip you’ll be able to run pretty much anything you want on your PSP eventually. UP’s price has been rumored to be as much as $95, so that convenience will cost you.

Site 5 looks like they’re trying to copy our ‘hip/edgy/irreverant’ blog posting style with every new post they make.

Pixar’s Cars came out and with it came the Ratatouille trailer.

Cory Doctorow is a buffoon. At least I’m not the only one who recognizes it. The script needs more self-righteous indignation, though.

Anyhoo, that’s about it. My two-weeks of unread email just finished downloading, so it’s time to get back in the swing of things!