Category: Miscellaneous

I guess I missed this, but apparently some time early this month, Andy Cheung followed inspiration from a Gothamist thread and created a template to let people create their own subway service signs – the ones that are usually found tacked to the support beams in New York’s subway stations informing riders of the problems facing them that day.

The template, found at WhereAndy.com , creates mock service signs for any subway line in New York, with your own custom message. The signs have even started cropping up in stations for the past few weeks, with messages ranging from political (“Peter Vallone Doesn’t Have a Posse”) to pure mockery (“Not Running On Time. Ever.”).

New York’s own 24-hour news channel New York One covered the trend and found that most subway riders were bemused. Subway workers less so.

Coolest. 404 Page. EVER.

[Via Digg]

Gina Trapani, who writes the excellent “Geek to Live” column on Lifehacker, has created a nifty “Invisibility Cloak” Firefox script in Greasemonkey that blocks a list of websites you specify, giving you access to them only after a certain time of day (you know, like AFTER you’ve gotten some actual work done). You need the Firefox Greasemonkey extension to use it. Here’s a link to Gina’s piece.

Netflix Settlement Sucks has offiicially filed their objection to the settlement reached between Netflix and a law firm claiming to represent agrieved Netflix customers. The objection has more than 1000 signers-on, and there are other objections being filed as well.

If you’re unfamiliar with the hullabaloo, here’s the skinny: some bonehead named Frank Chavez filed a class-action lawsuit against Netflix for making false claims in its advertising, namely that the rentals were not “unlimited” really (because you can’t get an infinite amount of rentals into a finite 30-day period, I suppose) and because the company’s 1-day delivery wasn’t always 1-day.

The case was settled pending approval by the judge. Under the settlement terms Frank Chavez gets US$2000. The lawyers for the “class” get $2,528,000, and Netflix customers get one free month of “upgraded” service that is automatically continued (for a fee) if users don’t cancel in time. In short, customers get screwed, the lawyers make a mint, and Frank Chavez (whoever he is) is the most hated man in the Netflix community for a lousy $2k. Most folks I know who are Netflix subscribers object to this settlement, not because they themselves aren’t getting anything, but because a company that they like is getting railroaded and they are bearing the cost.

For the full-text of the settlement objection email, click “read more.” If you’re a Netflix customer who also objects to the settlement, go to Netflix Settlement Sucks to find out what you can do.

Our Street Tech Readers Survey is back up and running. PLEASE take a second to fill it out. Thanks!

ALSO: Nominations for the Weblog Awards closes at 10pm Eastern TONIGHT. Please nominate Street Tech. Here’s the link.

As part of our association with Federated Media, we’re running a survey to try and get a better idea of who our readers are. One of the things that Federated is doing is allowing its network members to have control over what advertisements are fed to their sites. By us choosing ads, we are, to some degree, endorsing the products and services they hawk. By understanding a little bit about our readership, we can hopefully offer ads from companies that suck less (as it were). So, please do us all a favor and fill out our survey. Thanks.

Have your No. 2 pencils sharp and ready and click here.

Update: The Survey is on hold for a few days. We’ll repost when it’s active again. Thanks.

Street Tech is thrilled to announce that we have been invited to become part of John Battelle’s Federated Media Publishing network. We had the pleasure of working with John during his editor stints at Wired and The Industry Standard and have the utmost respect and admiration for him. He’s a visionary, but he also has an uncommon amount of integrity and passion for what he does. All of this is reflected in this project, which brings together a network of really cool weblogs under one banner and is designed to let the blog authors do their thing (create great content) while the business team at Federated does theirs (find advertisers, forge partnerships, offer various support services to network members). We’re huge fans of the blogs that are already on-board (BoingBoing, 43 Folders, PVRBlog, MetaFilter, TechCrunch), so we’re really honored to be in such esteemed company. Look for more exciting announcements related to this partnership and Street Tech’s future in the coming months.

The Weblog Awards are now accepting nominations. PLEASE nominate Street Tech in any and all relevant categories, such as Best American Weblog, Best Tagline (“Hardware Beyond the Hype”), Best Computers or Technology Weblog, Best Writing, Best-Kept Secret, Weblog of the Year.

It’s nice to know that good won out over evil in ’05, as this Google search graph on “the Force” vs. “the Dark Side” clearly shows. Yoda also proved he still had more schoolin’ to offer than Luke “Skywalker,” and when it comes to magical realms, we’ll take “Middle Earth” over “Hogwarts” any ole day.

These graphs are part of Google’s Zeitgeist section, which shows search trends for the past year.

2005 can kiss my shiny titanium and cobalt-chrome implant!. Here’s to a MUCH kinder, gentler 2006… and to gadgets that don’t suck.

Thanks for all of your support for Street Tech in the past year and look for bigger and better things for this site (including some cool announcements soon) in the year ahead.

May all your battery and signal strength indicators stay maxed…

Your pals at Street Tech Labs