Category: Resources

Here’s a series classes in NYC for the summer months that we can get behind – much better than macrame:

June 23, 2004 – Workshop #1

Micro-Radio Workshop with Neurotransmitter: This workshop brings together techniques, ideas, and histories of micro-radio technologies. The workshop consists of the following building mini-FM transmitters from both kits and everyday scrap materials, playing and creating experimental broadcasts and discussion of micro-radio and DIY broadcast methods.

July 7, 2004 – Workshop #2

Build your own microphones with Mike Rosenthal.: This workshop will teach how to make easy and affordable contact and binaural microphones.

Registration fee is $25 general public, $20 for Eyebeam members. Check out all the cool stuff and classes at Eyebeam.

They also have a class on blogging coming up in July, and who knows, we may just go. It’s not like we’ve ever taken any classes in it, so it might be useful…

It looks like Napster has decided to burn through another round of angel financing with a giveaway of a bunch of Rio MP3 players, including the 128 meg Chiba that made our holiday gift guide, and the highly-rated 1.5 meg HD Nitrus. The Nitrus will cost an extra $80 on top of the $120/year Napster subscription, but the Chiba is free, as in beer. Napster, incidently, is one of the worst DRM-restricted music services around: music you download is never really yours, since you can only access it while you continue to pay the subscription price. And they don’t even let you burn it to CD, instead recommending that “for less than $10” you can get a really long cable to connect your PC to your home stereo. So, to sum up, nice MP3 player but not worth getting Naptered for.

In related news, Audible is giving away an MP3 player with their service too — the Muvo that we panned more than a year ago. I hate to say I told you so, but I did predict these things would end up on the scrap heap pretty quickly. And if you’re even thinking about taking advantage of this deal, dont: there is no worse product for audio books than the Muvo. Audible’s a great service, but if you can afford their fees you ought to just buy a nice player with a higher capacity and an LCD.

Oops – the picture I used for the Chiba is actually the picture of the Rio Cali, which is the same internally, but has a slightly different design. This is the Chiba.

Posted on June 16, 2004

Joystiq: The Joy of Gaming Blog

For those veterens of the browser wars of ’97 still clinging to hope, Mozilla’s Firefox .9 has been released. Although I’m getting somewhat repetitive, I must sing the praises for this free browser that blocks pop-ups, is faster, more stable and secure, and more customizable than IE.

GMail fired the first volley, of course, hitting the long-entrenched Yahoo and Hotmail right on the keister. Yahoo’s returning fire today, expanding user’s accounts to 10 MB per email and 100 MB of overall storage. They’ve also cleaned up the interface a bit. Who’s colors will fly at the end of the battle remains unknown, but there’s no doubt that our kids will refer to us as “the second greatest generation” for surviving the Freemail Wars of 04-05.

There may be some glitches while Yahoo moves over to this new system – I’ve having some problems accessing my account at the moment. But hey, at least they don’t read my email!

One sure way to create a buzz around a new product is scarcity. Another is to violate standards of privacy. Both of these have been used to full advantage by the otherwise unremarkable GMail, the free email service from Google. The latest BS to come out of the ad machine at Google is this Wired piece about how some people are selling their Gmail accounts (or invitations to accounts?) on eBay or trading them on some new service called GmailSwap. It should be noted that all it takes to get “invited” to get an email account from Gmail is to have an active blog with Google subsidiary Blogger. I’m going to try to set up a few dozen accounts right now and see if I can’t raise enough money for next month’s rent, or at least trade some accounts for some chocolate covered cicadas.

“A vulnerability just found in the 802.11 wireless standard will allow a remote attacker to jam all wireless networks within a one kilometer radius using a standard Wi-Fi PDA or similar wireless enabled device….” – MobileMag.

Blogger, my long-time favorite tool for maintaining personal blogs, has just re-tuned itself a bit, adding some nice new features and a cleaner interface. In addition to the new interface and “user dashboard” Blogger now has better templates for easier blog creation. Most importantly though Blogger now includes support for comments on blog entries right out of the box, and supports email blogging.

Unfortunately, photo-blogging is still not supported. But a thousand words is worth a picture, so you’ll just have to type more!

If you’re planning on upgrading to an HDTV or other widescreen 16:9 format TV, you may actually be losing screen space when viewing standard video 4:3 signals. The simple math is that a standard picture on a widescreen monitor will be roughly .81 times the size of the overall display, but if you’re too lazy to do the actual math, C|Net has a handy calculator that can show you how much space you’ll be losing on a widescreen, or conversely, how much space you’ll be gaining when viewing a widescreen signal on a conventional monitor.

VisitorVille is a website administration tool that essentially converts your traffic data into a mini SimCity — visitors to the website arrive in buses representing the search engine that brought them to your site, buildings represent the number of pages you have and the little visitors go into the buildings as they visit different pages. Of course, there are a lot of power features as well, showing a full range of data about individual and groups of visitors. I like the idea a lot, since it communicates real-time information about your own site in a way that is as easy to understand as watching a crowd.