Archive for September, 2007
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Saturday, September 22nd, 2007
Nothing gets your day going like a batch of bad RAM. After a rousing morning of test driving a BMW 540i with Brien I sat down for an afternoon of writing, both for some personal projects as well as for Gear Live. Sadly I was greeted with the above kernel panic screen shortly after I sat down and the problem re-manifested itself immediately upon reboot.
Several reboots later and it was kernel panicking on boot, and wouldn’t even boot from the OS X install DVD to try and re-install the OS. A quick trip to the Apple store revealed that my RAM was bad, and worse yet since I bought 3rd party RAM rather than upgrading with the Apple RAM it would not be covered directly by Apple so I have to take the issue up with Kingston. I was immediately faced with the unpleasant thought that I would either have to spend $300 on new RAM tonight, or face n days without iChoad waiting for Kingston to RMA the old RAM, and get new RAM out to me.
Luckily my friend Mike came to the rescue and is loaning me 2Gb of RAM for iChoad for the next couple of days until I can get everything sorted out with Kingston and get replacement RAM to last the rest of iChoad’s expected life-span. Thank you Mike for saving my life on this one! I’ve got too many projects juggled in the air to lose my primary workstation!
links for 2007-09-22
Saturday, September 22nd, 2007-
Typographic art! Justin uses old typwriters (heavily modified I’m assuming) to create beautiful images that have surreal and organic qualities.
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My favorite author Cory Doctorow’s short story on Salon.com about what would happen if Google and Homeland Security teamed up for the ultimate in invasive personal search.
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Great tips for anyone who gets involved in an unfortunate run-in with the police. Particularly if you are innocent remember to follow these simple rules and it will help things go much more smoothly.
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Remotely deliverable pain, now in a convenient jeep mounted form factor. The Raytheon people seem rather short sighted to not get how something like this is just plain and simple a bad idea.
Blogging Gear Live
Friday, September 21st, 2007I am pleased to announce my triumphant return to the professional blogging scene at Gear Live. I’ve been busy with other things in my life the last 6 months or so and haven’t had a chance to write up articles and reviews, but now that things have settled down a little bit I plan to be writing weekly columns again and reviewing more gadgets and technology. I’m close to finishing up some final details to confirm I’ll be going CES again next year with the Gear Live crew - yay!
The re-launch of my Gear Live writing career starts with an in-depth review of the V-Moda Vibe Duos. There are a lot more exciting things coming to the site (including a fantastic new site design launching soon) so bookmark Gear Live and stay tuned for more announcements! If you just want to see the posts I’ve written you can always look at the filtered view of my posts on Gear Live.
Site re-launch: Bulimia Resources
Friday, September 21st, 2007I’m proud to announce the re-launch of Bulimia Resources, my very own sadistic satire of the wonderful wide world of beauty. It’s likely the most tasteless thing I’ve ever done and boy am I proud.
links for 2007-09-21
Friday, September 21st, 2007-
A new study shows that 1 in 3 American’s would rather have the internet than sex! The study also dives into what is more important to people: TV, their cell phones, or the internet.
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Discover the Power, Speed and Efficiency of Induction Cooking With New GE Profile™ Induction CooktopOK - this is cool: cooking food with magnets. This new induction range from GE allows you to cook food in cast iron and magnetic stainless steel pots without heating up the surroundings, or even the range itself. I wonder what this kind of magnetic field
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Neat! Typography control at a very granular level on the web - it’s very cross browser compliant, downgrades gracefully, and generally is a web designers dream!
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An iPhone derived Intel prototype of what looks like the ultimate portable device. It looks a bit too long for my tastes, but I certainly wouldn’t mind a slightly larger all-screen iPhone!
McHorrible
Thursday, September 20th, 2007I had a few errands to run on my way home today and I happened to pass by a McDonalds, only to be stricken with a horrible craving for a Big Mac. I semi-reluctantly stopped in for dinner, and I do have to say for the record that my Big Mac Extra Value Meal was salty, fatty, and delicious.
Now three hours later I remember why I haven’t eaten at McDonalds in the last 3 years: I feel like absolute shit. My body is rebelling in the face of a giant lump of fat, salt, carbs, and preservatives is now slowly working its way through my gut, sapping me of every last shred of vibrancy and humanity.
Remember folks: when the craving comes just say no!
links for 2007-09-20
Thursday, September 20th, 2007-
The folks at Navizon have created a 3rd party application for the iPhone (jailbreaking required) which using cell phone tower latency and triangulation to approximate your location and pass it to the iPhone Google Maps application. Not quite as accurate a
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A nice writeup on lifespan as compared to the physical size of the organisim. I need to get bigger if I want to live forever!
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Lifehacker links to both an article and a great diagram on packing for vacation via the wrapping method. These claim that this makes for more compact packing, less wrinkles, and from the looks of it a great way to protect a laptop or similar equipment in
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NYT blog post about the iPhone, it’s cost’s, and the kickbacks Apple is getting from carriers. The point that the iPhone price could drop further is an obvious one, but some of the details are interesting.
Of advertising and social commentary
Wednesday, September 19th, 2007Advertising is an interesting world - companies invading the psyche of the consumer, introducing products and messages with a singular goal in mind: profit. Many companies (AtlasDMT, Google, Yahoo, etc) have been quite successful on the web in finding ways to make contextual advertising automatic, targeted, and easy for both publishers to implement and consumers to use.
That being said I decided to experiment a little bit with advertising on Futurist Now. I’m not really doing this with a financial goal in mind (although having my hosting bills paid for every month would be nice) but more to see how the various contextual algorithms handle my content and what kind of companies they select to place advertisements on.
Obviously they have a vested interest in pushing companies they think my visitors are likely to click on (as their revenue is entirely click based) so seeing the products and services selected provides an insight into the web-browsing consumer, although in a statistically averaged way.
Provided the random nature of my content, and my wide range of topics this experiment has already led to some very interesting results. For instance the Amazon.com contextual advertisement script decided that linking the name Jack Thompson to a product in their catalog which contained a director of the same name as shown by the image below:
Now on the surface this not only makes sense from a technological perspective, but also from that of delightful social commentary. In the post in question I was referring to the now infamous Jack Thompson, legal attack-dog on a crusade against violence in video games. Jack Thompson the ex-attourny (the State of Florida BAR association pulled his license to practice law last year) has spent the last few years trying to ban violent video games as he perceives them to be the cause of almost every ill that threatens society.
Amazon was kind enough to link his name to the movie Feed, which starred an entirely different Jack Thompson, and yet somehow seems fitting. Feed is one of the best trashy C rate movies I am proud to own. The movie revolves around a murder detective who crosses continents in search of a serial killer who lovingly fattens feeds his victims to death. Upon their deaths he liquifies their fat to feed to his next victimlover, thus closing the loop on the food chain and completely disgusting the movies audience.
There is justice in advertising!
links for 2007-09-19
Wednesday, September 19th, 2007-
The New York Times has long been famous for it’s walled garden of content requiring users to pay to access it. They have finally wised up to the ‘net and will be opening up their content (ad-supported of course) to search engines and the consumer market a
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Mozilla is spinning Thunderbird off into MailCo, a $3m startup aimed at making Thunderbird the worlds most powerful open source mail client. Hopefully this move will see Thunderbird upgraded to be more of a competitor to Outlook and other corporate messag
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For once I agree with the oft-outspoken Dan Savage - this gay restroom sex sting business is getting out of hand. I’ll be the first to agree that sex in a public restroom is just plain wrong - but a proposition of another man clearly isnt.
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Our dear friend Jack Thompson is at it again - this time saying that the latest Grand Theft Auto game is a specific threat to his physical security.
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Brow beating and chest puffing aside this may mean that CS3 won’t work with Leopard out of the box. I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in feeling that I’ll have to wait for this to be addressed prior to upgrading to Leopard - as cool as Apples OS 10.5 looks I
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I need this so badly my spleen hurts. Not only does the guy have the coolest looking home theater setup ever, but he’s stocked to the gills with Meridian gear!
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Some interesting comments by the big Steve himself shortly after he officiated over the UK iPhone launch with O2.
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I’m an IMAP fan myself, but webmail is here, and it’s obviously here to stay. Lifehacker’s write up on the two providers and some analysis on what each one gets right.