Category: Geek

I don’t know too many gadget weenies who aren’t also caffeine freaks. Surfing a universe of ones and zeroes while pegging the meter on your central nervous system just feels…right. Now, for all you BlackBerry-tottin’ joe-junkies out there, there’s a way to never be more than a few clicks away from a bean shack. Greystripe offers Caffeine Finder, a BlackBerry app that displays location info and reviews of some 45,000 US coffee shops (a couple of them NOT Starbucks). For Berry owners with GPS service, it’ll even guide your crashin’ ass to the closest re-fueling station.

I personally don’t play Katamari Damacy, but I know other Street Techies are crazy about it. But I still might buy me one of these cool KD T-shirts. I’m lovin’ all the nerdy tees people are selling online these days. I wish I had more gold pieces to spend on further geek-pimpin’ my wardrobe.

[Via Boing Boing]

UPDATE Apparently, ZeStuff has pulled this item from its stock. Not sure if it’s sold out or what.

The release of Stephen Young’s port of Beyond Cyberpunk! has created a spike of traffic to Street Tech, numerous blog items, and many emails from fans of the stack. It’s been quite exciting. As my multimedia guru, and BCP! programming mastermind, Peter Sugarman put it: “We’re famous again.”

In doing a search on what cyberspace was currently saying about BCP!, I unearthed a couple of reviews from when the stack was first released:

Hypertext and Science Fiction This piece, by Brooks Landon in the academic journal Science Fiction Studies, was the most in-depth look at BCP! and its larger import.

Tidbits Review Pioneering tech journalist Adam Engst reviewed BCP! in his early Mac-oriented e-list Tidbits.

The Mondo 2000 review Our pal Jon Lebkowsky reviewed the stack for Mondo 2000. This reprint is courtesy of The Well Gopher. Jezuz, who the f*** remembers Gopherspace!?

Hypermedia scholar Stuart Moulthrop’s “Personal Chronology of Cybertext and Electronic Text Art.” Shows BCP! in the context of hypermedia history. Note that the release date is incorrect (it was actually 11/17/91) and Peter Sugarman should get full credit as a creator. Email sent. Would love to know the month-dates of the other hypermedia milestones for ’91, to see where we fit in.

We’re hoping to put up the remaining pieces of the BCP! archive, including Darick Chamberlin’s amazing “BlipVert Zone,” Mark Frauenfelder’s and my BCP! comic book, Jim Leftwich, John Bergin, and Mark Frauenfelder’s BCP! ads, and other material ASAP.

Here’s another treat for the “lipstick geeks”* in our posse: it’s a handbag made out of recycled keyboard keys. Nice. Does it come in a man-purse?

[Via Boing Boing]

* Thanks to Street Techie Laura Z. for the awesome coinage.

Everybody knows about the geek’s love/hate relationship with ramen noodles, hell, we’ve even started to worship our noodly overlords. So, it’s somehow appropriate that the first ad from the International Space Station will be for the instant Asian pasta.

An ad agency representing Nissin Foods is sending a hi-def camera to the station so that cosmonauts can be filmed cavorting with the company’s product. The camera will be left on the station to shoot future ads. C’mon Dominos, get some “Code Pie” up there and make every troglodyte and LAN partier proud.

[Via we-make-money-not-art]

We love the scooters here at Street Tech, and we love appropriate technology/ renewable energy. Put ’em together and what’ve you got? A very goofy-lookin’ ride. And no, you don’t drive down the road with the panels deployed, but still…

It’s the thought that counts tho, right?

You asked for it, a lot. We wanted to do it, really we did, but we have lives, jobs, kidz in college. And so, Beyond Cyberpunk!, the “classic ” HyperCard ebook that I, Peter Sugarman, Mark Frauenfelder, Jim Leftwich, and a cast of tens, created in 1991, was…well… Beyond Cyberspace. Until now. And, in the end, we didn’t even do the conversion (see sorry excuses above). In the true DIY spirit on which BCP was built, a fan of the project, Stephen Young—whose uncle bought him the stack for a birthday present when he was 11 or 12—took it upon himself to port it to HTML (on a Linux box, using Basilisk II). Thanks so much, Stephen. You rawk! A copy of my robot book is on its way to you as a small token of our appreciation.

Before StreetTech, before BoingBoing.net, before Wired (before the World Wide Web, even), there was Beyond Cyberpunk!, a desktop-based “universe of interconnected hypermedia documents,” created by many of the same people who went on to help create these cybermedia ports of call (among others). Take a trip “20 minutes into the future,” a future that has long ago been overtaken by the present.

It’s amazing to see all of the diverse, sometimes silly, sometimes profound, othertimes useful ways in which the Flickr photo sharing service is used. In this photo cluster, users upload (and annotate) images of their laptop bags, gadget carry-alls, purses, and the like. First thought: Fascinating. Second thought: Man, you people lug around too much crap!

This fashion statement combines several of Street Tech’s interests, Dead Media, here in the form of transport tubes, and making cool, desirable stuff out of junk. Design team Carrie.Scott (Carrie Glista and Scott Power) offers a line of handbags (handtubes?) made out of old bank transport tubes.

[Via TreeHugger]

How goofy is this. Amazon has a page up already for the PlayStation 3, even though it won’t be for sale until spring of ’06, if then. And there are even reader-reviews of it, thirteen at the moment. So, Amazon is selling a product that’s maybe a year away from the marketplace and “purchasers” of the vaporous product are already reviewing it. Hey, can I sell my used virtual PS3 on eBay?

The interesting thing about this is the price: US$299. This may or may not be an honest number, and if it isn’t, it’s a clever move on Sony’s part to tweak buyer’s expectations for an affordable PS3, maybe leading them to hold off on buying an XBox 2…er…360 this holiday season. Your move, Microsoft.

[Via Gizmodo]