Archive for August, 2007
SOLVED — The Case Of The Fake Steve
Posted by Joe on August 5, 2007 · Comments Off
Fake Steve Jobs unmasked as Daniel Lyons, a technology writer for Forbes.
“I’m stunned that it’s taken this long,†said Mr. Lyons, 46, when a reporter interrupted his vacation in Maine on Sunday to ask him about Fake Steve. “I have not been that good at keeping it a secret. I’ve been sort of waiting for this call for months.â€
Mr. Lyons writes and edits technology articles for Forbes and is the author of two works of fiction, most recently a 1998 novel, “Dog Days.†In October, Da Capo Press will publish his satirical novel written in the voice [...]
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In Defense Of Selling Out and Web Ads
Posted by Joe on August 5, 2007 · Comments Off
On GigaOM, the rather tired argument that Club Penguin has sold out to Disney, because the Disney home page has (get ready to react in horror) advertisements.
First of all, Club Penguin’s owners did technically “sell out”. Good for them, they are now fabulously wealthy — their reward for bringing entertainment to hundreds of thousands of kids.
Second of all, given all that children can be exposed to on the Internet (omg!), this idea that “advertising” is somehow a great scourge on the world’s youth is just stupid. Despite the probably excessive amount [...]
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The Ultimate Blade Runner
Posted by Joe on August 5, 2007 · Comments Off
The Blade Runner (Five-Disc Ultimate Collector’s Edition) will show up on a lot of geek Christmas lists (including mine).
Product Description from Amazon:
In celebration of Blade Runner‘s 25th anniversary, director Ridley Scott has gone back into post production to create the long-awaited definitive new version. Blade Runner: The Final Cut, spectacularly restored and remastered from original elements and scanned at 4K resolution, will contain never-before-seen added/extended scenes, added lines, new and improved special effects, director and filmmaker commentary, an all-new 5.1 Dolby® [...]
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World Wide World Of Webs
Posted by Joe on August 5, 2007 · Comments Off
Here’s an interesting article on something called the “World Wide Web” from 1995. Excerpt:
It is the new rage of Cyberspace, and with it comes a facelift for the “text only” Internet, new horizons for information storage and retrieval, a new set of acronyms and more confusion than United States Tax Laws. It is the World Wide Web.
Even the name is confusing. It is called the Web, WWW and even W3, but rarely by its full name. To describe it is almost impossible. For instance, my favorite definition to date is, “It is kind of like Gophers only completely different.”1 [...]
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Apollo Image Archive
Posted by Joe on August 4, 2007 · Comments Off
Apollo flight films are available online.
Nearly 40 years after man first walked on the Moon, the complete lunar photographic record from the Apollo project will be accessible to both researchers and the general public on the Internet. A new digital archive – created through a collaboration between Arizona State University and NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston – is making available high-resolution scans of original Apollo flight films.
You can browse or download the films at: http://apollo.sese.asu.edu.
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Explore Strange New Sites
Posted by Joe on August 4, 2007 · Comments Off
This is something new:
Me.dium is like being given a piggyback by someone surfing the web. The interface sits as a sidebar on your Firefox browser (a version for Microsoft Explorer will soon be released) and at the top of the window, you can see which sites other Me.dium users are currently looking at. If anything takes your interest, like Frogger you can leap from your surfing session to theirs, and follow them as they explore the web.
I haven’t tried me.dium, but it’s an interesting idea.
Vist me.dium.com if you’re looking to explore a bit.
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The Future Of The Mobile Web
Posted by Joe on August 4, 2007 · Comments Off
The WSJ looks at the future of mobile web surfing.
Ever since wireless companies began offering Internet services on cellphones, users have shared a similar complaint, largely because the companies want to control which sites their customers visit. Phones come with browsers designed to go mainly to the Web sites the carriers chose — usually the ones they have revenue-sharing deals with. It is possible to go to sites outside this “walled garden,” but the experience is so slow and cumbersome that most users don’t try. And some of those outside Web sites won’t work with [...]
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New World Of Warcraft Expansion On The Way
Posted by Joe on August 4, 2007 · Comments Off
Second WoW expansion is official: Wrath of the Lich King.
Blizzard has gone and made it official today: the second expansion to its staggeringly-successful MMO World of Warcraft is titled Wrath of the Lich King. Yes, it may have been this week’s worst-kept industry secret, but that didn’t dampen Blizzcon attendees’ rabid excitement for what was revealed. What was surprising, however, was the extent of its presence at the show. Personally, I was expecting an announcement, and perhaps a guided demo. In actuality, the game was present in the realest sense: running on a gang of [...]
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Second Hand Geek
Posted by Joe on August 4, 2007 · Comments Off
My wife hit area rummage sales this morning. Big geeky score: an unused T-Mobile RAZR V3 with cable, car charger, Mobile Tools 4.0 cd, and leather case for $25. My son claimed that one with some birthday money. He’s using my SIM card, since my phone tends to get very little usage (almost none). 2nd place find: a set of wireless headphones my daughter bought for 50 cents.
Non-geek find: 3 boxes of hand made imported Nicaraguan cigars for $5 each.
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Adventures In Hardware — DVD Burner Edition
Posted by Joe on August 3, 2007 · Comments Off
The new Sony NEC Optiarc DVD Burner arrived today.
The drive was destined for installation in a PC we call Altair on our network. It’s a modest box: Athlon XP 2200+ with 512mb ram. But it’s easily good enough to handle DVD burning chores. I took the opportunity to reinstall Windows XP on Altair — much needed as it hadn’t been done in a number of years and that’s the computer my daughter surfs the web on. In other words, lots of junkware has been installed and uninstalled over the years. After Windows got done reinstalling itself (not a fast process), it took [...]
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No EEE PC For Thee…Yet
Posted by Joe on August 3, 2007 · Comments Off
The eagerly awaited Asus EEE ultraportable may have been delayed, says engadget:
Granted, nothing was set in stone in regard to the Eee PC’s release date, but those hoping to snag one before heading off to college may be out of luck. According to a user who inquired to Asus about the launch status of the diminutive machine here in the US, he was informed that current estimates show the device “hitting the market in mid-September to early-October.”
That’s a bit of a bummer.
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Get The Hose
Posted by Joe on August 2, 2007 · Comments Off
Slashdot Firehose is a digg-like site that lets users vote on stories:
The Slashdot Firehose is a collaborative system designed to allow users to assist our editors in the story selection process. The hose contains submissions, RSS Feeds, journals and Slashdot stories, each color-coded along the color spectrum to indicate popularity. Red is hot, violet is not. Try tagging and voting on the entries below, and by using the ‘feedback’ menus. Please send comments to hose at cmdrtaco dot net but be forgiving of beta code!
Digg’s usefullness and content quality seems to have faded somewhat [...]
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Save A Buck
Posted by Joe on August 2, 2007 · Comments Off
We all love bargain shopping sites like Dealnews.com. There’s a list of the 20 Most Popular Sites for Bargain Hunters on eBizMBA. Definitely bookmark-worthy.
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Office for OS X Delayed
Posted by Joe on August 2, 2007 · Comments Off
Is Microsoft dragging its feet on Office 2008 for OS X?
Microsoft will delay the release of Office 2008 for Mac until mid-January 2008, representatives of the company’s Macintosh Business Unit announced Thursday.
The long-awaited Intel-native Office, featuring programs such as Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Entourage, was originally scheduled to be released later this year. Instead, Microsoft said it hoped to release Mac Office 2008 to manufacturing in December, which would allow it to release the product at the January 2008 Macworld Conference and Expo in San Francisco.
There are other options [...]
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Neo 1973 Portrait
ComputerWorld has a detailed look at the unlocked, completely open, and totally cool Neo 1973 smartphone.
“Initially, data speeds won’t be anything to write home about,” Moss-Pultz acknowledged. “But we’re working on 3G versions.” Beyond that, the Neo 1973 should be an eye-grabber with its 2.8-in., 640-by-480-pixel resolution and a touchscreen display, Moss-Pultz said.
“It’ll be like reading something printed on paper,” Moss-Pultz said. The device will be fast, sporting a 400-MHz processor, and it will have significant graphics acceleration [...]
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Summer Reading List – The Book Of Three
Posted by Joe on August 2, 2007 · Comments Off
I just finished re-reading Lloyd Alexander’s classic fantasy novel, The Book Of Three, and I was struck by how much the writing style was like J.K. Rowling’s in the early Harry Potter books. It’s a much lighter approach to story telling than the one taken by J.R.R. Tolkien in Lord Of The Rings (but not unlike the prose found in The Hobbit). Which is a long winded way of saying read The Book Of Three if you haven’t already, especially if you’re a Harry Potter fan. And then read the rest of the Chronicles of Prydain books. The five book series, now more than 40 [...]
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Amazing Computer Deals From The Past
Posted by Joe on August 2, 2007 · Comments Off
State of the art portable computing circa 1976:
Look at that totally sweet acoustic modem!
Computerworld has posted a gallery of old ads from their magazine. Best pitch? How about 80 Mbytes of storage for under $12,000?
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I Suddenly Feel Old
Posted by Joe on August 1, 2007 · Comments Off
I’m the oldest person on facebook willing to admit to going to my high school. This is more funny than depressing, since I’m just in my mid 30s (assuming a sufficently liberal definition of “mid”). There’s one other guy from my class and we didn’t get along back then, so I’m strangely hesitant to invite him to be a freind (it’s odd how we carry all that high school crap around with us in adulthood).
Isn’t there a social network out there for us aging geeks at the upper end of generation x?
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Sir Elton Barks At Internet
Posted by Joe on August 1, 2007 · Comments Off
Elton John wants to shut down the Internet:
“Hopefully the next movement in music will tear down the internet.
“Let’s get out in the streets and march and protest instead of sitting at home and blogging.
“I do think it would be an incredible experiment to shut down the whole internet for five years and see what sort of art is produced over that span.
“There’s too much technology available.
“I’m sure, as far as music goes, it would be much more interesting than it is today.â€
It could be easily argued that the Internet is the greatest tool [...]
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PS3 Transforms Into DVR Next Year
Posted by Joe on August 1, 2007 · Comments Off
Sony’s lagging PS3 game console may get a big boost next year when DVR functionality is added:
Sony’s “next generation” video game console, the PlayStation 3, could become a device for all the generations in a household — as a TV tuner and digital video recorder.
On Tuesday, the marketing head of Sony Computer Entertainment New Zealand told that country’s The Press that Sony was hoping to release a digital tuner for the machine next year. The executive, Warwick Light, called the PS3 an “incredible transformer” and said the tuner would turn the console [...]
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Club Penguin Bought By Disney
Posted by Joe on August 1, 2007 · Comments Off
Disney has bought popular pre-teen web hangout Club Penguin in a deal worth up to $700 million:
The combination of Disney and Club Penguin seemed to make sense all along but Disney’s seemed to be more inclined to growing its own communities—ToonTown, the Fairies Experience, the upcoming Pirates in house. Iger said the company is still committed to that strategy and thinks it will be successful but sees in Club Penguin a successful standalone business. With the exception of changing the name and supporting the company, Iger promised: “Club Penguin is going to continue to exist [...]
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Hack The iPhone Into A Wireless Modem
Posted by Joe on August 1, 2007 · Comments Off
iPhone Hackers have created a method to allow a laptop (or other Wi-Fi device) to use the iPhone’s EDGE connection for Internet access. It involves installing a SOCKS proxy server on the iPhone using Jailbreak. A laptop can then create an ad-hoc Wi-Fi connection with the phone and use the proxy server to gain net access. Apple makes it harder than it should be — and if AT&T catches you they won’t be happy — but this is major progress towards opening the iPhone. More details from cre.ations.net.
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Mechanical Milk Maids
Posted by Joe on August 1, 2007 · Comments Off
Robots are using a “high-performance teat visualization system†to milk cows without human assistance. We don’t exactly know what a “high-performance teat visualization system†is, but it sounds pretty amazing. Plus, we like typing “high-performance teat visualization system.”
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New Pics Of Via NanoBook Ultraportable
Posted by Joe on August 1, 2007 · Comments Off
jkOnTheRun has new pics of the upcoming Via NanoBook ultraportable notebook. The VOIP USB module that plugs in next to the screen is cool.
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The NextTen From NetFlix
Posted by Joe on August 1, 2007 · Comments Off
There’s a nearby video rental store that offers $1 rentals on all movies. It’s great for new releases, but not so much if you want an oldie. Which is why we just returned to NetFlix. Here’s a glimpse at our Queue:
Teen Wolf / Teen Wolf Too (Double Feature)
Young Sherlock Holmes
The Infinite Worlds of H.G. Wells
The Illusionist
The Lost Boys: Special Edition
Silver Bullet
Dragonslayer
Cloak & Dagger
D.A.R.Y.L
SpaceCamp
There’s a lot of good 80′s cheese represented there. In fact, eight out of ten are 1980′s flicks. It’s fun to force our children [...]
Filed in: SL
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