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Sharon writes- Hi. I’m an American, living in Europe. I like to buy my DVD’s from America because they are in my language. I made sure that my DVD player is codefree so that I wouldn’t have a problem. Suddenly the American producers have added a new technology called RCE, whose sole purpose is to make it impossible to play American DVD’s outside of America. Anybody know how to modify a DVD player to get around that little bit of corporational nastiness? Any advice for Sharon while I research this?

Another story on music companies using SunnComm’s technology to “rein in copying by the everyday music fan” (EMI and Sony BMG executive). If you have a Mac you don’t need to worry about this, they only do this to Windows users- if you’re on Windows just hold down the Shift key before you insert one of these new CDs. So far I’ve seen a Velvet Revolver CD and a Dave Mattews CD do this, shift key easily defeats them. Link.

This is sorta like a how-to if someone wanted to take a stab at making bootleg Harry Potter books- turns out, as expected it’s a lot harder to make pirated books. For about $30,000 you could get a unscrupulous printer to make 10,000 copies of the 672 page Potter book. The author of the article called a bunch of places to get pricing and speculation on how this could be done. [via] Link.

Make reader Ben made us a MAKE search engine for Firefox! I learned how to do it from here and using that I made one for a few sites before creating one for you. if you decide publish it: great. if not: it’s fine by me, as it was more of a fun project that I just wanted to try and pull off. I attached the (short) code and the icon that should appear with it, which is the same one from the make blog. (that white square with the two little red squares inside it) Link and click here to download the zip.

Sean writes- Brickshelf a site which hosts space for LEGO builders to post their creations. It’s organized into different themes for easy browsing. Under the “Member search” try “Legomaster” (you will want the first one listed and look at his Jamocklaquat folder first!) and also look for member “Klaupacius”. You should do a story on these guys, plus a group of others building giant LEGO robots. Link.

Neat pages about the myths in our kitchens. We’ve all heard of urban legends, those plausible sounding but false stories that circulate so widely on email and news groups, such as the old lady who microwaved her cat or the Nieman-Marcus $250 cookie recipe. There are several web sites devoted to researching and exposing these fake stories. The same sort of thing happens in the world of food and cooking, although on a much smaller scale. This page is my answer. Link.