Category: Miscellaneous

I saw a comedian on TV the other night claiming that crime was up in many cities because, with the advent of the mobile phone, Superman has no place to change anymore. If artist Nick Rodrigues’ vision came to pass, Superman would carry his booth with him, as would all of us. As Rodrigues explained on SensoryImpact:

“The Portable Cellular Phone Booth provides a visual image of the social sacrifices and opportunities to interact with one another lost due to our own self-involvement. The sculpture is a retractable phone booth that is carried on your back and can slide up and over your head to completely isolate you from society, kind of like the way a cell phone does. The action is fast and slick just like the flip action of a cell phone.”

Another artist, Jenny L Chowdhury, has a similar concept, a booth you zip yourself into to give your call the sense of importance and intentionality that climbing into a phone booth used to engender.

As the links on this we-make-money-not-art posting show, there seems to be a lot of recent art nostalgic for that old street corner staple, the now mostly extinct phone booth.

Slate has come up with an interesting twist on podcasting. They’re now offering daily feeds of their popular “Today’s Papers” column as a podcast. But the cast is not in audio. The headlines and summaries of the day’s top news from papers across the nation are displayed as text within an iTunes audio file. Even on my nano, readability isn’t half bad. I may go ahead and subscribe so I’ll always have something to read if I get stuck at a bus stop, the doctor’s office, the county jail, with nothing better to do. Not really sure if this “textcasting” will catch on, but it might be a cool, albeit kludgey, way to get subscribable e-books on your Pod.

When the Xbox 360 was in initial short supply, with Redmond shipping stingy amounts to retailers, many of those retailers made a killing by selling the consoles on eBay at an inflatable price. According to a short item on Joystiq, mom and pop retailers are planning to pull the same stunt with the Sony Playstation 3 launch.

So the big retailers will screw you with bait and switch tactics and bloated bundle deals and the smaller stores will make you compete against fellow rabid early adopters for their precious few units. It’s times like these that I’m glad I’m not a rabid video gamer.

[Via Joystiq]

We all know and despise those torturous site authentication schemes that ask you to identify a series of numbers and letters floating in a swirling morass o’ crap. These are used so that spambots can’t get in. But soon enough, the bots solve the puzzle and we meatbots are subjected to an even gnarlier-looking visual lock to pick. There HAS to be a better, and there is: Kittens!

An enterprising chap named Oli Warner discovered that, while we humans have no trouble picking pics of furry little kittens out of groups of other similarly cute and furry critters (mice, bunnies, puppies), computers do. The result is KittenAuth. Implementers of this authentication scheme don’t HAVE to use kitties, but c’mon, look at that face! Why wouldn’t you?

[Via The Inquirer]

A couple of weeks ago, we linked to a report that CNet Labs had done that seemed to show that DRM (Digital Rights Management) technologies actually sucked up more battery life from portable players than non-DRM’d audio files.

DAPReview did some follow up tests and say: uh-uh. While the CNet tests suggested as much as a 25% difference, the DAPers think it’s more like under 3%. So, you can scratch THAT off of your list of reason’s to diss DRM.

[Via Gizmodo]

We don’t cover a lot of software here at Street Tech, but we like to respond to people’s enthusiasm and we got a very enthused email from our pal Alberto about Damn Small Linux, a Linux distro which is, well, damn small. How small? Small enough to fit (and boot from) a thumb drive, small enough to fit on a business card (one of those CD business cards, of course). And it’s smart enough to be bootable from WITHIN Windows. Hell, it can even run from a Compact Flash drive or fully within RAM! It also grows modularly, so it’s highly customizable/expandable. I’m planning on putting it on my wristwatch, just for fun.

Here’s something interesting. Blogger Josh Ellis, of Zenarchery, wants to go to the Trinity test site in New Mexico the next time they make the site open to the public (in early April). And he wants US to send him there to write a story about it. He’s taking donations via PayPal and BitPass. He’s looking for US$500. If he gets it, he’ll go and do a story. If he gets less, he’ll donate the money to Witness, an international human rights org. For the money, we get a minimum 2500-word essay on the site, the Manhattan Project, the Bomb, etc. from an “award-winning journalist,” many photos, maybe some video, all posted on his site under a Creative Commons license. He’s already up to $205. I love this. I hope it happens.

In trying to restore my faith in humanity after that whole robo-squirrel/talking stove breakdown earlier today, I bumped into this story from DC’s WTOP News. The Friends of the National Zoo are sponsoring a mobile phone recycling program.

Columbite-tantalite, or “Coltan,” is an ore, 80% of which is mined in the Congo, home to our hirsute brethren the mountain gorilla. Coltan (as in “Tantalum”) is used in the production of capacitors, which are used in cell phones (and many other electronic devices). So, the idea goes, by recycling all of our unused phones, the materials can be reclaimed, or still usable phones can be refurbished and sold in developing countries (with proceeds going to the zoo’s conservation programs).

So the next time you visit the National Zoo, empty that desk drawer of old phones and drop them off at the Visitor’s Center, and make Dian Fossey proud (actually, Dian Fossey would have probably ripped your head from your shoulders for having a pile of cast-off cellphones in the first place, but that’s neither here nor there).

[Via Textually]

Okay, this one is a little bit off our beat, but it ties in with our bamboo keyboard rant last week. See, we told you EVERYTHING can be made out of bamboo. How about a freakin’ bamboo sweater? Found this on Treehugger, a v-neck sweater that’s 70% bamboo, 30% wool. The seller (Shirts of Bamboo) claims it’s as soft as cashmere. Nice. US$65.

Not tech related, but I saw this on the American Dialect Society’s e-list and thought it was interesting — and scary. Please, dear Gopod, do not add this nightmare illness to the laundry list of ailments that already assail me, your humble cyborged servant:

If you don’t know what a cluster headache is, thank God or whomever or whatever you believe in. Clusters differ from migraines in that, in the case of the former, there is no aura, no increase in sensitivity to light and sound, no nausea, and no throbbing. A cluster headache is just pure, unadulterated pain that has to be felt to be believed. In any case, here is the tiny vocabulary of cluster headache-specific jargon:

Clusterhead: a person who suffers from cluster headaches

Cluster headache: a kind of pain that beggars description, generally affecting only one side of the head and face

The Demon: the personification of cluster-headache pain

The Dance: one’s physical reaction to cluster pain, whatever that may be

Shadow: a kind of premonitory pain that tells you to get ready, because The Demon is about to strike