Rogers is continuing it's strategy of gouging Canadian customers and making us the laughing stock of the wireless world. Today, Rogers announced their price plans for the iPhone, which they and their wholly-ownded subsidiary (once upon a time their only...
Technology Category Archive
Claire de lune
Clair de lune from musanim on Vimeo Gorgeous. More pieces here. From the Music Animation Machine, which isn't a machine at all. ;) This fits perfectly with a thought I had last week about time: how the past is...
Chessbot
IBM's Deep Blue beat Kasparov 10 years ago. I remember it clearly. Apparently, today the average PC has more processing power than DB had, which is simultaneously surprising and not. I mean, we're used to hearing stuff like "the Americans...
Télépatexto
I just sent an empty text message ("SMS") to someone. It happened because I was thinking the message as I went though the process of creating new message, adding contact... and send. woops. désolé Izo....
Crippled
Sometime while I was away this winter, IleSansFil, the Montreal free community wifi service, crippled all their hotspots, by disallowing any and all traffic without login. (Or so it seems, I've only tried at 4 or 5) The ISF service...
A place or a feeling?
Bruno throwing snowballs at me and TyOriginally uploaded by Shawna Nelles. Last night at Laïka, I had a brief conversation with Michael, founder of Ile Sans Fil and good friend, about various things, including how places are not just geographic...
What is code?
A picture is worth a thousand words... The premise of the linked article is to show how one can create a web browser in "one line of code" using a bunch of stuff that more or less comes with Mac...
So out of shape
(sorry about posting these... having fun ;) And the course I ran, mapped on GMap Pedometer. (Funny how mapping a jog like that brings the enormity of Tokyo down to a personal, human scale. If my lungs held out,...
Brainloop
Brainloop is an interactive performance platform that utilizes a Brain Computer Interface (BCI) system which allows a subject to operate devices merely by imagining specific motor commands. These mentally visualized commands may be seen as the rehearsal of a motor...
Running man?
Part of the premise of the movie "Running Man" is how the main character gets framed as a murdering police officer by manipulating video evidence. Now, Photoshopping images and AfterEffects-ing video is already possible but it's still a huge pain...
EcoBlack
How the colour of your website costs the earth Changing the background colour of Google from white (ffffff) to black (000000) would save an estimated 750 Megawatt hours a year globally, thats about half the full output of a dual-nuclear...
oh while we're on about mobile
Funambol Open Source mobile application platform. Funambol is open source mobile application server software that provides push email, address book and calendar (PIM) data synchronization, application provisioning, and device management for wireless devices and PCs, leveraging standard protocols. For users,...
"push" email, my Nokia N80 and a japanese SIM chip
It just works. Un.Believe.Able. Joi went out of his way on a busy day and got me keitai on his carrier's "friends and family" plan. Domo domo domo arrigato gozaimasta, Joi-sama! ;) It's a nice piece to be sure; sort...
disconnect
Every time I come to Japan, the biggest frustration is getting a mobile phone. This time it's not a phone I need (I have two I could use) as much as just a connection. It seems that will be just...
Cheaper behavior
Calling my mobile carrier just now to modify my services brought to the forefront some interesting considerations. My main purpose was to disable call messaging (voice mail): I haven't checked my voice mailbox, I am not exaggerating, in a year....
A consciousness
(get past the melodrama and the fact that it's an anime / "oh it's cheesy scifi" ;) Just as there are many parts needed to make a human a human there's a remarkable number of things needed to make an...
Vicious Interface
the above is a cheat sheet for the vi terminal-based text editor. it is evil in it's powerful complexity. amongst geek ideology wars, vi is often pitted again emacs. the emacs camp backronyms vi to mean "vicious interface" my...
Find teh kittens!
From a list of undergraduate projects available at the Center for Intelligent machines at McGill, "Content-Based Image Retrieval": 2. Finding Animals in Internet Imagery Using Learning Methods This project, based on a recently published paper, involves finding images on the...
facl
setfacl gets soooo much more useful after you realise you can also getfacl. facl. getfacl --access --tabular -R -P ... ah that's why you can't do anything on that server, Jer......
IRC logging, revisited
This afternoon I set up a "logger bot" which monitors and logs the GlobalVoices IRC channel. About an hour ago, Karl showed me the log he tweaked for the Semantic Web Interest Group IRC channel and mentioned how he structured...
Everything part II
continuation of previous post They say there is opportunity in chaos. The chaos they speak of exists generally outside, and on the fringes of, "The System". Humanity, for better or worse, seeks always to order, structure, the chaos and...
Well stated
Lucas Gonze puts into words what most iPod/iTunes users haven't quite become aware of yet: why you need more music from Wired -- The Day the Music Died: I thought at first I had misheard him. "... library of 90,000...
MIT Center for Collective Intelligence
Our basic research question is: How can people and computers be connected so that—collectively—they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before? Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated....
Use Case Scenarios
It is SO hard for me to write these scenarios without diving into "how I would build this." I keep going over and back over and having to edit out whispered pre-suppositions of "how." This is where "technological determinism" is...
"UK and US companies sold mobile phone tapping equipment to Vietnam"
Reporters sans frontières - Vietnam: Reporters Without Borders has learned that a British company, Silver Bullet, and a US company, Verint Systems (a subsidiary of Comverse Technology), sold equipment for intercepting mobile phone calls to the Vietnamese intelligence services. The...
Mobile Media Conference 2007 call for papers
My mobile, wireless, nomadic, policy, geo wonk friends... check it out. Various forms of mobile media have been imagined for sometime, and are now a reality: mobile Internet, new forms of mobile text, mobile music, mobile film and video, mobile...
Open Data Movement talk in Helsinki
For the last two weeks I have been dying for an excuse, any excuse, to be in Helsinki right now. The announcement of Matt Biddulph's Aula talk today comes a full 48 hours too late for me to do up...
I spot WiFi from the corner of my eye
I've toted around for years various WiFi detectors and sniffers, to find Wireless Internet access as I roam around. They ugly, clunky, totally utilitarian dedicated devices that resulted in my actually getting a connection only a small percentage of the...
Location Portals
Michael finally went and got himself a "this is not personal!" weblog where he will talk about something that is central to everything he hopes and dreams about (in a non personal way! hehe). If you're interested in location based,...
I have no mouth and I must scream.
The irony. I have not been able, yet, to "moblog" from my new Nokia N80. I am able to browse websites and use a chat program, via both my mobile provider's GPRS and my WiFi networks at home and at...
Rewiring
I've long been telling stories about how I seem to be quite aware of many of my thought processes, and often these stories take on computer jargon analogies. Stuff like "the scripts I have running in the background" to make...
I'll consider it when...
Foreword: I am a long time Apple user BUT ALSO have ALWAYS considered Apple to be far far more evil than Microsoft, and more recently Google combined. Apple's fascist streak has been showing ever stronger since the victorious return of...
Scenario of a Blogject
Poking around I came across a very nice scenario by Jan Chipchase, which sounded downright Blogject-y to me: With vehicle mounted (weather) sensors and positioning tools its possible to collect highly localised weather information - trucks, cars, motorbikes and bicyles...
Certifiable
Quick! Someone make a t-shirt for these people. It should say: "Non-conformity is the new conformity" or "zealotry is sexy again!" ("I'm with stupid"'s already been done.) Pride is such a terribly dangerous thing. And too often people confuse pride...
Musical Nokia
I'm poking around Nokia trying to decide between an N70 or N80, but that's not the point. I called up the Nokia main portal page, then moved my attention over to something else for a moment, and in so doing...
10 years on
I just came across this interview with Joi done in 1995. Reading it I am struck by a few things: - 10 years ago Joi was roughly my age. - He saw very very clearly what was going on, on...
No phone
For anyone trying to call me: no phone. I left my charger in San Francisco (!) and Aaron's apparently been busy. Perhaps now's a good time to get a new one... Update: Still no phone, and to make matters worse,...
Marvin! Robots!
My friend Marvin, whom I met at the Global Voices conference in London last december, sent me an email the other day. Amongst other things he shared this: I wanted to tell you of my success in being accepted...
Gentle brush past my shoulder
This is so close to me it's not even funny. Nokia and Yahoo! add Flickr support in Nokia Nseries Multimedia Computers You can upload your full size photos to Flickr directly from the camera or image Gallery application on your...
Dumb.
Some days, I tell ya. Here's an example of how sometimes, try as I might to do something smartly, I end up in a stupid situation. On my way back to the lab early this morning, I decide to turn...
David Suzuki
I've been meaning to write about David Suzuki for a long time, and haven't yet mainly because I have not done what I told myself I'd do first: actually get acquainted with "his stuff", knowing it would affect my life...
"America's Online Censors"
Rebecca does an absolutely great job of summing up many of the issues and thoughts and results of the U.S. Congressional hearings held last week concerning U.S. technology companies and their roles in Internet censorship regimes around the world. We...
On the success of weblogs et al
The success of all these things such as weblogs, websyndication, etc, is directly attributable, I think, to one basic fact: weblogs are basic, rudimentary Content Management Systems. At risk of over-simplifying, I say that human intellect, human intelligence itself, in...
Upon reading the back cover of "Diamond Age"
"The Diamond Age : Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" (Neal Stephenson) I thought: Nanotech will bridge cyberspace and "realspace". Why? Because if indeed in cyberspace anything is possible, it is so because anything can be created from scratch and...
The Mac OS Binder
Not Finder, Binder. Simple app, basic UI on top of a database and a few APIs. Allow me to manage all my tags, local and remote. Remote tags could be stored locally for apps like ecto, 1001, Cocoalicious; local tags...
Backchannel
Justin's made his backchannel experiments an official project at the USC IMD, where he is studying. Having experienced several types of backchannel setups myself, though never of the intensely focused and tweaked 14 screens of the ZML, I can say...
Tim Berners-Lee's weblog
TBL created the web. Now Tim Berners-Lee has a weblog. Good first post too! (I'd quote here but you really need to read the whole thing... to give you a little history lesson. ;)...
Expression Under Repression
Rebecca and Ethan and a few other of the Global Voices Online team were WSIS in Tunisia this week and today gave a workshop presentation on "Expression Under Repression", despite technically having been canceled "by the authorities". Very exciting, awesome...
Look! Up in the sky!
FlightAware. Wow. (ugly but ... hell there's alot of data, and it is blazing fast.) How live is FlightAware's tracking and status data? The data displayed on FlightAware is typically six minutes delayed from real time. How often does the...
Human hands
In the process of clearing up a misunderstanding, Ethan points to a great article by one Justin Mason about cellphone repair stalls in the streets of India. Amongst other things, it speaks to how most people in a consumerist culture...
Aperture
(This screen cap is from a demonstration of Keyword Hierarchies - a.k.a Tag Bundles, label pools, etc - and how you can apply selected keywords to multiple images at once. It also shows a surfer in a meta-hoola-skirt, surfing...
You say hello, I say goodbye...
Well, it's happened.The American-based internet giant, AOL, wholly-owned by Time-Warner, has formed a working partnership with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to permit unlimited surveillance of the millions of AOL online members, according to a report from the U.S....
Cross-platform collaborative text editor
Just found this which will make a few people very happy: Gobby is a free collaborative editor based on libobby, a library which provides synced document buffers. It supports multiple documents in one session and a multi-user chat. It runs...
I was worried but now I am relieved
This will sound like ass-kissing but I assure you it's not. Joi finally posted a really great entry after a long quiet period. (I know I know, research. Daijobu.) More than that, it runs parallel to my suspicions regarding "what's...
nano cry babies
What a bunch of total hyper-obsessive morons. 1- Cotton does not scratch hard polycarbonate. Besides which do you really think for one second after 3+ years experience producing iPods, Apple would suddenly use "softer" plastic? Which, contrary to reports from...
What we need is more McLuhan
I've been meaning to send some link love (daaah, cannot believe I used that phrase) to Mark Federman's new weblog. Mark's the Chief Strategist at the McLuhan Center at the University of Toronto. He used to write at their official...
Google swallows the internet whole, and you with it
First, it was about "indexing" all of the web. Then, it bought a small chunk of that web (Blogger). Then Google said "hey, there's more than the web out there!" and Google Mail was pushed out. Quickly followed by Google...
That was quick!
"Apple supports video podcasting" Seems they "turned it on" without telling anyone. Told. you. so. :D...
Relate
Slowly, they are learning. See, look! TagHop: Taghop allows you to relate categories on the web. If your "Technology" category is related to someone elses "Software" category, then link the two. Someone else may relate their category to the same...
Modernity | Hold -> Musak -> Static
As mentioned, I spent a "good" amount of time on the phone with various customer support lines over the last 2-3 weeks. This means alot of time on hold. In the evolution of phone-based services, "hold" was of course an...
Doing right
Well, Dell, I must say: wow. Wow. So I ordered this 2005FPW 20" TFT monitor from you over three weeks ago. I complained a bit about the fact that the website was essentially useless for tracking the status of my...
Safe travels gaucho
So, Steven's probably sitting on the tarmac at Pierre Elliott Trudeau Airport right now, beginning a 2 month trip to Cuba and, I suspect, to the core of himself. No, he's not going to go sit on the beach. He's...
Dude, yer waiting on a Dell!
Monitor update. So, they are out of stock and estimating another 5 days before they get them in. Then, if they do, it's a few more days to get it shipped to me. To make matters worse, this info is...
Break it down, build it up
(just a quick note.) Existant data-object storage and retrieval systems: - Hard hierarchialization ("taxonomies", "categories with parent/child relationships") - Analytico-synthetic ("Faceted categorization", "Semantic Web") - Unstructured labelization ("Tags", "Labels") - Statistical extrapolation ("Keywords") - Unstructured data ("Full text search") [Disclaimer:...
some pig
OMG... well.. videocasting is here and the predictable severely rapid decline of "culture" * may begin. ----------------------------------------------------- You should check out the Internet TV channel "some pig". If you don't have DTV, you can get it here: http://www.participatoryculture.org/download.php And then subscribe...
KhmerOS
Awesome We envision a country where Cambodians can learn and use computers in their own language, a country that does not have to change to a new language in order to use computers! Bravo. They're translating and localizing stuff like...
Judge a book by it's thumbprint
A few months ago I enabled a feature on Joi Ito's weblog which I called his "blog thumbprint". What it is, is a weighted list of the most frequently used words in the entirety of Joi's blog, with the text...
Tags in MT admin interface
It took a few hours but I've gone and done it. I hacked out the "suggested tags" UI goodies from del.icio.us and grafted it into the Movable Type admin's "Edit Entry" template. Now for my purposes, the "suggested tags"...
Getting the job done
CTIN511 - Larry Gertz, originally uploaded by JulianBleeckr. Super impressive backchannel setup at the USC IMD. While a visiting lecturer speaks, the class takes notes and group-edits a single document (using SubEthaEdit), one person acts as "Google jockey", searching...
Free Montreal WiFi Google mapped
Michael barked at me that "it's in WifiDOG CVS now!" the other night and I guess it's cause I haven't sparked my aggregator in a week that I missed it but... Here's a standalone GoogleMap of all Ile Sans Fil...
Bit Torrent Opera
Yahoo/AP reports: The upcoming Opera 8.0.2, now available in a test version, will try to make BitTorrent downloads seamless, just like any other download using HTTP or FTP for transfers. The exception is the appearance of a warning that users...
Remote backup script...
I've got an idea for a shell script/program that would be very useful to me, and probably countless others. In fact I bet countless others have already coded something like it up... Requirements: I don't care what programming language it's...
Can hate be good?
"Hate something, change something." That's what was on the mind of Honda engineers when they supposedly made a better diesel engine. Interesting. I think it is an all-out race to not only find any and all alternatives for fossil fuels,...
Holy map!
Mobile GMaps is a free piece of software that displays Google Maps and Keyhole satellite imagery on Java J2ME-enabled mobile phones or other devices. Apparently it is super slow, and I imagine it sucks up alot of limited expensive bandwidth......
Apple Podcasts
I wonder if the next OS X "Security Update" will include an updated spellchecker which will recognize the word "Podcast", seeing how Apple now pretty much 0wnZ it... ;) Hrm... lemme spark up GarageBand here and......
You don't need $ to make a hot video as long as you have the right moves
A few reasons why this is one hell of a music video:Decent tune. It's in the current not-totally-mainstreamed-to-death-yet bracket. Barely.DIY. Cheap home camera, on a tripod or picnic table. Looks like iMovie for post prod, what post prod there was...Real....
Public WiFi snoops
You can always tell the person running the network sniffer at public WiFi hotspots; the maniacal grin as he scans the room observing all the surfers one by one wondering "who was looking at *this*?"... "I read your email"......
Day of tech failures...
I awoke to find that my main email server was not responding. It still isn't, 15 hours later. Best guestimate is that Bell Nexxia will fix the line "sometime in the next 24 to 72 hours." Wonderful. As if that...
Now they've done it
del.icio.us adds filetype tags automatically to media files. I could go into boring things like implicit metadata, the coupling of a flat tag pool with a flat:hierarchical:organization... but really, there are more fun things that come out of this. Like,...
Parking meter hack challenge
Steven launches a challenge to local hackers and their friends: Hack the new Linux-running, GPRS-networked parking meters. Why? 1- Show that it can be done 2- Perhaps help improve the system 3- Perhaps send a message up: "hey, we KNOW...
WSIS, censorship & RSF
Michael is in Winnipeg participating in a UNESCO sponsored conference in preparation for it's presence at the WSIS summit in Tunisia in the fall. This is serious, big boys stuff. ;) He just reported something VERY disturbing: The Tunisian ambassador...
Rapid pen based text entry
This looks very interesting. Some 250 words account for over 50% of English usage. These words are mapped onto the AlphaTap layout so that you can type them with just one or two pen strokes. To become productive, you only...
Semantic File System and the U.S. Patent office
This is very very very bad. A data model represents semantic information associated with objects stored in a file system. The data model includes a first object identifier, a second object identifier and a relation identifier. The first object identifier...
The keitais are coming!
Slowly over the past year I've noticed a subtle transition in the mobile phone handsets that have been available here in my home market. But today it really struck me as apparent: the keitais are coming. Not in features or...
Graphical Command Line, precursory
I've been composing a post about "Graphical Command Line" interfaces, which what alot of "AJAX" enabled features on websites are, and what Quicksilver, a Mac application, is... but it's getting so long and involved and I just don't have the...
SMS training
I just received an SMS text message from my wireless service provider, Fido, asking me if I wanted to participate in a game-slash-contest. It provided the URL for more information: http://www.fido.ca/k/. In a nutshell, they've constructed a whole story whereby...
Situating a Google Map picture
I was just flying around over Montreal with Google Map's fun new satellite pictures. My actual neighborhood as well as the one I grew up in are sadly in more blurry sections. However I found this dreary patch of my...
Ten times more storage
Hitachi announced a breakthrough of sorts and expects to have 1 terabyte 3.5" hard drives on the market within 2 years, as well as 20 gigabye 1" "Microdrives". Mark Federman alludes to, without going into details mind you, the disruptions...
what daaa?
Jean Snow reports on something funny, yet inevitable, happening in one of his english classrooms: What's a Cassette? there was one kid (about 7 or 8 years old) who took the cassette box and put it up to his ear....
Funner
Steven dreams out loud about where he'd like to be someday: I managed to hitch a ride on the floating city 'GCS New Mosul' by agreeing to give my presentation 'Safeguarding your cyberprivacy - without slowing down your interface' at...
Mark my words
(pun title intended) Tags* are Frameworks for Describing Resources... It's gonna happen, oh it's SO gonna happen. Actually, it's happening now. It's not the big software companies, it's not the big media companies. It probably won't follow any current specifications,...
Sound familiar?
"Attention Deficit Trait" caused by the technologies of constant interruption: Clive Thompson via Techdirt has a fascinating post on Attention Deficit Trait, a related sydrome to Attention Deficit Disorder, according to Dr. Edward Hallowell. "It has basically the symptoms as...
Winzwhaas?
Jim: Do you know what the best RSS reader for Windows is? Me : ... Me : i haven't even SEEN Windows in... gees... YEARS... Jim: me either Me : hehehehe Jim: never used XP Me : what's that?...
Design today
If you cannot communicate at first (or at most second) glance how I am to use this and what value I may get from doing so, then ... Ooooo look cows!...
VoIP FUD advertising
Ed Bilodeau found this new ad campaign by Bell Canada: Bell has launched an ad campaign to make people believe that VoIP telephone services over cable are not reliable. "It's a food-chain ecosystem," says I, "introduce a new species and...
Screenology
The screen is really messing with my head. I don't mean just the screens of my computer.. I mean "the screen", as the interface to the network and my expanded mind... (Here he goes again...) Two examples. Last night, moblogging...
Area bagel
or "What do Amazon, A9 Search, Yellow Pages, 90210, and the Mile End of Montreal have in common?" Trying to see if I had a connection, I hit my A9 bookmark. It worked. Once there I noticed a prominent link...
Tokyo > Montreal in under a second
I'm sitting in the Good Day Café, just off Aoyma Itchome/Omotesando (search me how the street names work in this place...) in Harajuku, Tokyo. I spark my NewsReader, go to my folder of Montreal RSS subscriptions... and I am 100%...
Canadian public geo-data copyrighted and sold by the government
Some cool folks, working on a cool project, are looking for some reliable geo-data for Canada. Place names and GPS coordinates, mostly. So I turn to Natural Resources Canada of course, the governmental body that has this stuff. The first...
Boids
Do Android Crows Fly Over the Skies of an Electronic Tokyo? The Interactive Urban Landscape of Japan (Architecture Landscape Urbanism) 2001 - Akira Suzuki Picked this little gem up at the CCA bookstore the day I attended the Devices...
Relate
I want all my data to relate. I want to connect Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor to Cornelius' Wataridori (because played back-to-back they are a force of nature, IMHO). I want to relate that relation to a friend's...
Matt on Etech et al
Matt posted a rant about the upcoming ETech: It's just that the topics on offer: y'know - the copyfight, social software, bloody blogs, web services etc. might still be worthy topics for discussion, but I feel like I've been around...
As I was saying...
I finally got down to doing some work I've been putting off for weeks. I haven't received an e-mail or IM request in about two hours. Perfect. I decided to quit Mail, then iChat, then Proteus. Ok, I can DO...
Malaise
New environments inflict considerable pain on the perceiver The biologist Otto Lowenstein, is his book on The Senses (Penguin Books,Ltd.), has some most helpful observations on the problems that arise upon any change in sensory mode, such as a...
In a postpostmodern state of mind.
In order to avoid ambiguity, over- or false- interpretation, it is crucial that one properly contextualize every element, in relation to every other element in it's environment. Meaning can only be found in the relationship of each object with each...
Mobile Internet Radio
This afternoon an acquaintance sic'ed a local journalist on me for my opinion on digital/satellite radio. She also mentioned Internet radio and how I currently use it. My first thought went to those silly "Internet stations" listen in iTunes and...
Process through adaption
Continuing on my current theme of "data management", let me share with you an example from my own experience. I mentioned a few weeks back how overwhelmed I was by the size of my MP3 collection. McLuhanists, and others surely,...
Without you, am I nothing
Out of over 200 Gigs of data (not counting OS and application files), I would be hard pressed to find a single file that is not in one way or another associated to someone other than me. (Someone may represent...
Tags!
I want tags on everything. I want everything to be a tag. Or I could say, I want everything to be tag-able and want everything to be able to BE a tag. Any document, picture, file, bit of data... I...
email UI
email has been much on my mind again lately. The fact that no email reader (client, MUA, etc) does things the way I'd like is frustrating, and many powerusers I have spoken to agree... This evening I hooked up with...
Olympus iPod competition
I don't particularily care but thought I'd scoop this little item I found on a french gadget website out of Tokyo: Akihabara News : toutes les nouveautés High-Tech du pays des Sushis: Alors l√†, ils m'ont entendu ... la VACHE Olympus nous sort des produits de fou avec un design de feu, commen√ßons par le : MR-500i Qui n'est pas moins qu'un APN/iPOD/PMP de 20 Go avec un écran VGA de 3.7" et un APN de 1.2Mpix ...
Some of my favorite geeks
have been mightily busy![Apologies to anyone offended by that term...]Aaron finally fixed his "I-roll-my-own-thank-you-very-much" weblog and immediately posted about some of the wikkedly neat stuff he's been toying with over the summer.
LionShare
LionShare technology (which is currently under development) will provide tools for the exchange of academic, personal and work-related materials on an officially sanctioned and secure P2P network among participating groups and institutions around the world.... This will extend LionShare's capabilities to a global scale by creating collaborative networks that will enable individuals from a diverse range of institutions to connect to the same secure P2P system.Re-read that stripping out the focus on academia and institutional uses.
Creative Commons Activists and Activism
all VERY well done!), I can't seem to find a resources center and a community support network for people to get really involved beyond choosing a license and applying it to their work - provided they get it and they actually produce stuff. There are loads of people who don't read weblogs, or WIRED magazine, who not only don't know that they as creatives have options, but also don't fully realize the cultural lock-down they are living in. Ignorance of rights and responsibilities is the death knell for freedom, choice, democracy...
More thoughts on Björk, Medúlla and the music biz
Context: Previous Björk entry: Björk's Pirate Flag Björk.com Medúlla Interview This Blog Sits at the: Björk: Shapes, not patterns Voir.ca - Le chant des possibles (fr) First of all, Medúlla is still standing at the gates of my ear, ring the bell hoping to get into my head.... ;) Second, as far as being "Avant Garde" or "fresh and new", lest it be noted that many have done technically the same thing (produced music from "found sounds"), not least of all Björk collaborators Matmos.
"Surroundings Defend System"
The weapon against boring and weary surroundings With seamless vision diminishers, adjustable safetybelt, 40 Watt stereo speaker installation and standard compliant 3.5 mmm jack-plug for fully compatible audio-experience, you can totally shut yourself off from the surrounding world and...
LoMoSo?
Has cell phone blogging found its place? | CNET News.com This article makes no sense to me. It seems to be a jumble of keywords like "weblogs", "moblogs", and "Social Networks"... LoMoSo, "Location-based mobile social networks". Then they go on...
3.2 Megapixel cameraphone
Digital Chosunilbo (English Edition) : Daily News in English About Korea Samsung 3mp camera phone: Digital Photography Review Essentially, it seems they took a Pentax Optio S (the model of digicam I currently own) and built a phone around it....
Robosapien
A couple of weeks ago, Mie blogged about some "new office members" at 6A. "Neato" I thought, "cheap basic robotics hitting the market..." A couple of nights later, I walked into my usual hangout, Blizzarts, only to find 7 of...
Cory on DRM at MSFT
Cory Doctorow gave a presentation on DRM (Digital Rights Management) at Microsoft and shares the text with us. Beautifully explained in an accessible way... and of course in Cory's inimitable style. :)...
Doctor's appointment
Taking a computer in for repair, especially a PERSONAL computer, should be like going to your GP, family doctor, dentist or vet. Why can I not call up my local mac shop, tell em what's wrong, make an appointment, show...
Complexity visualization
Ben Fry doing awesome work on visualization technology for complex and evolving data sets. This stuff is getting more and more important....
Brits Going at It Tooth and Nail
Wired News: Brits Going at It Tooth and Nail "toothing," where strangers on trains and buses and at bars and concerts hook up for clandestine sex by text messaging each other with their Bluetooth-enabled cell phones or PDAs....
Busy busy
I use the excellent Codetek VirtualDesktop Pro. Without it I think I'd have gone totally insane ages ago. Some days, however, I think it contributes to my encroaching insanity. Nobody should have this many apps and windows open at...
Phillip Torrone goes Cyborg jogging
I was gonna write an entry today about how bored i am but Phillip Torrone has given me something to be excited about again. That's twice now... I think I'm gonna owe him! the portable geek gym... i was told...
More camphone info
I'm somewhat frustrated in my search for a mobile phone that will satisfy me. I've narrowed it dow to the Nokia 6600, Sony Ercisson P900 and Handspring Treo 600. Whichever one I end up getting (if!), I will have to...
Gimme gimme gimme!
Data Glass2とは? the Data Glass 2 from Shimadzu makes it seem as if you're you're looking at a 13-inch monitor floating in front of you. Stevey says: get 2 !!! one for each eye really fuck your head have a...
Canadian RIAA gets its way
For no good reason, I visited the canadian apple online store today. I like to go in there sometime, poke around and drool. Go figure... Anyways, so I click through to the iPod section and - what da heck, eh?!...
Why... I don't wear... the bow-tie
Why tech firms are out of tune While the above article is tucked away in the BBC's technology section, it speaks directly of something very political: democracy in the digital age. Ugh, can't believe I just said that, but it's...
Collapsing
We have relationships with every person we meet/know. We have relationship networks which connect all these people to us and to each other. We manage relationships by being nodes and establishing identities (identity facets). So if we think of ourseleves...
Talking to myself
Continuing on the cyborg theme, I thought to myself: I've been here on the sofa all afternoon, fumbling with my awkward iBook, and yet it is here, with this sub-par setup, that my thoughts flow most freely into the computer,...
Lawnmower Man meets the Puppet Master
Part of an e-mail exchange with Aaron: > I WANT what Kevin Warwick is working on! Hrm... Garr... :\ Ah come on, Boris. I know Kevin's all about thinking inside the body but try thinking outside the blog. You want...
"Here's to the crazy ones"
The Guts of a New Machine the publication of a pessimistic installment of The Wall Street Journal's Heard on the Street column pointing out that Apple's famous online music store generates little profit. The more interesting point, noted in the...
Edison
Kate over at Montreal City Weblog points to some film footage Thomas Edison took in Montreal in 1901. Watching it I thought to myself: "Could this genius, in his wildest dreams, for one second, conceive that here I would be,...
Semi-conscious
In Joi's posting today, he quips:I remember thinking in the dream, "oh, I should blog this... " Judging from the comments, some folks find this strange and funny. I don't find it either. I think it's perfectly natural. Whenever you...
Knowledge Navigator
Jon Udell's Radio - Apple's Knowledge Navigator revisited During my session at BloggerCon I referred to Apple's famous Knowledge Navigator concept video. I first saw that video in 1988. /.../ Presence, attention management, and multimodal communication are woven into the...
Move over, Rover
Sony's new QRIO humanoid robot. I never wanted the Aibo. I do want QRIO though. He's just too cool. I don't read kanji but I can make out that he seems to be able to shoot video, play MP3's,...
Wherefore art thou, cameraphone?
Japan Media Review -- Camera phones changing the definition of picture-worthy ... "camera phones capture the more fleeting and unexpected moments of surprise, beauty and adoration in the everyday" ... "they invite sharing that is more immediate, ad hoc and...
Turn your tongue one hundred times before speaking.
Smart Mobs - Cell Phone Recording May Breach Privacy Folks are going ape about cellphones with call-recording features. Privacy this and privacy that. On the above linked entry I commented: Very simple: never say anything that you will regret. What's...
Internet radio frequency patterns
Eigenradio - The top 20 singular values all day, every day! Eigenradio makes its optimal music by analyzing in real time dozens of radio stations at once. When our bank of computers has heard enough music, it will go to...
To want or not?
Ok... I *think* I *may* want one of these SCOTTeVEST things. I hate carrying a bag around and since nobody has made an acceptable cellphone/PDA/digicam/MP3Player yet, I find myself lugging all this crap around or worse: leaving it at home....
Stats - beautiful, scaleable - stats
history flowvisualizing dynamic, evolving documents and the interactions of multiple collaborating authors Aside from being quite beautiful, I find these rather fascinating. Context derived from patterns are central to how I think. Perhaps how we think? Hmm. More food...
BBC Creative Archive
Taped at the BBCCan the Beeb put its entire archive on the Web?By Paul BoutinFor those of us still debating whether to shell out the 40-odd bucks for Fawlty Towers: The Complete Collection on DVD, BBC Director-General Greg Dyke may...
GPS Address
After 2 weeks in Japan (and many many minutes spent lost), I'm back home (more on all that later) and have been thinking about GPS, which seems to be pretty advanced, useage-wise, in Japan. Now, the question is this: why...
Intel "messup"
Wired News: Why Centrino and VPNs Don't Mix Amazing. They are either total idiots or they did this on purpose. Somehow I don't think they are total idiots......
Power suit
Wired News: Shocking New Jacket Hits Street Sociological implications aside, what interests me here is the nod to the animal kingdom... To prevent accidental discharges, the wearer must arm the jacket before it can deliver a shock. A lock on...
ps -ax
For years I've been playing with the idea that man created the computer in his own image. Memory, I/O, software, hardware, etc. Most of my friends have heard about the "scripts" I've "written" and "run as background processes" in my...
Teenaged cyborgs, moblogging and Emergence.
Link found on Smart Mobs, and quotes below lifted from the Miami Herald article it linked to. ''[Cellphones] extend the spatial and temporal boundaries of a physical encounter,'' she said, explaining that cellphones are providing a way for young people...
EEG
Wired News: Brain Music: Not Much to Dance To Wired article about the DECONism events i also attended last weekend in Toronto. Update (2006-11-12): Mark Federman posted pictures (I was also at the Stellarc thing, featurd in the previos entry...
Cheap quick videocams
Here is why a videocamphone could potentially be a TON of fun. My friend Louis recently bought a $150 "webcam" with integrated Flash memory, which means he can run around with it. Here is his document of a trip to...
Toc toc toc drrrrr
This is a couple of years old but well worth seeing/listening: Symphony for Dot Matrix Printers - [The User] I saw a performance of this about three years ago. It was really quite something. A lineup of old dot-matrix printers...
Videocam Cellphone
Gizmodo : Japanese videophone This is one heck of an awesome gizmo. Anything that allows us to record and document and annotate our lives now digitally is wicked cool. IMHO....
WiFi nation
It is 7:15 pm, it is dark, the sky is menacing rain. Karl, another hard core geek and I are sitting on the sidewalk outside the closed Schlotzky's Deli on Congress St. In Downtown Austin. We are stealing bandwidth. Ah...
Free software & copyright
I attended the first presentation at SxSW. It was by Richard Stallman: the founder of the GNU (free) software, erm, movement. I left after about 45 minutes because I grew tired of his longwinded and really quite silly (with no...
There's a song in my head
DECONFERENCE This is somehow hugely interesting to me and I do think I'm gonna head down the 401 for this one....
Knowledge, language and cultural erosion
Steph forwarded me an email from the archive.org mailing list. It raises concerns regarding the degradation of global culture due to the alarming rate of extinction of many of the world's languages......
Telepathic cybernetics
(requires Wi-Fi and/or Bluetooth "wetware" antennas and the whole inexistent smogashbord of hardware-to-brain, software-to-mind technologies... let us dream...) Lying in bed. Close your eyes... and think: # access mind/dream engine/luciddreaming/gui-interface # access local wireless network # open IPSec VPN tunnel...
Way-out thinking
Thinking about future technologies, and how they could be made real today, i find it's important to follow a "way-out" process and then scale it back to the realm of the near-term possible and the presently possible. For example: a...
Index vs. Categorisation
The Fishbowl: Filesystem sacrilege This of course would be the extreme opposite of where we are now with filesystem management. I believe the best solution, as always, lies in-between. (merci Karl, pour le lien)...
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