Links for Saturday July 30^th, 2011

• American vs. European broadband: Must-watch, 15 minute video from Rick Carr comparing the state of broadband in the US versus Europe. I don't see how you can argue that America isn't way behind in broadband, and we don't appear to be on the right track in terms of catching up. (Via The Engadget Show, which hosted a shorter segment of this video, followed by some discussion)

• HOWTO create an encrypted TimeMachine Backup on an Apple software RAID using Lion FileVault2: Looks like it is possible to encrypt an AppleRAID set in Lion, but the process wipes out all of the data on the RAID volume first. :(

• Twitter: From Ruby on Rails to the JVM: Interesting video from OSCON 2011 by Raffi Krikorian of Twitter, about some of the issues that Twitter has to deal with in order to run their service at scale.

• Old Mac of the Month: Performa 578: Great nostalgia piece about the Mac.

• OpenSearch for Safari: Safari Extension that makes it easy to search with alternative search engines. Not as easy as if these search engines were in the Google search bar to the right of the URL bar, but this is better than nothing.

• YouTube embraces Google+ Hangouts for live streaming: Hangouts could be Google's killer feature for their new social network. It's definitely the feature that I'm most curious to play with.