Category: Geek

The good folks at Extremetech have a story about a cylindrical PC case called the Piston, built by Taiwanese company First International Computer Inc (FIC). It supports an Intel Prescott series P4 processor up to 3.8 GHz, has a pair of DDR 333/400 DIMM slots, and can take a mini-PCI card. Stereo speakers are built into the case, which should retail for about $400.

Dave Zat has a short n’ sweet guide to using the new TiVoToGo feature and how to “free” the TiVo files from their proprietary format so that you can edit, burn, play them on the device of your choice. Yay choice!

The popularity of the iPod and the iTunes/iPod ads as cultural icons is truly impressive. This guy, an artist named Tomi, created a LEGO-like figure carrying an iPod. His limited edition of 300 figs sold out immediately. He’s making more (at least until Apple and LEGO’s IP police come a-knockin’).

I don’t know what the designers of this site were smoking (moldy barn-hay, apparently), but this is one of the weirdest and most wonderful virtual storefronts I’ve seen in awhile. I’m not really sure what the connection is between hillbillies and high-tech gadget bags, but who cares? There’s even “tasteful” nudity, as a woman models one of the laptop bags in the buff. Maybe she’s a-fixin’ to check her Yahoo! account on the way down to the crick for some skinny dippin’ Again, who cares? All in good fun. Oh, did we mention what the product was? It’s easy to forget. Crumpler sells a very cool-looking line of laptop, messenger, and gadget bags, all made out of something they call “ChickenTex.” Maybe we’ll try to get some products for review.

It’s amazing how many geeks I know who are shaved- head over Chuck Taylor’s for the personal information and time management system detailed in David Allen’s book Getting Things Done. I figured that the very systematic/structural nature of it appeals to a certain programming mentality. This post I found on 43 Folders (a GTD-focused blog) sums it up beautifully:

I think Getting Things Done appeals to nerds for a lot of reasons. Overgeneralizing for effect:

* nerds are often disorganized or have a twisted skein of attention-deficit issues
* nerds love assessing, classifying, and defining the objects in their world
* nerds crave actionable items and roll their eyes at “mission statements” and lofty management patois
* nerds like things that work with technology-agnostic and lofi tools
* nerds like frameworks but tend to ignore rules
* nerds are unusually open to change (if it can be demonstrated to work better than what they’re currently using)
* nerds like fixing things on their own terms
* nerds have too many projects and lots and lots of stuff

I’ve been playing around with the system this week, reading 43 Folders, online excerpts of the book, and other related material, and have found a lot that’s useful for my own organizational style. I have the book on order. Have other Street Techies read GTD and/or use this system?

Other GTD resources:
Online excerpts from of the book from BusinessWeek Online: Part 1 & Part 2
PDF Workflow Chart that summaries the GTD method.
A summary of the book in outline form.

Boing Boing, the greatest geek culture blog in cyberspace, is five years old today. Happy birthday to all our pals over there. Keep that perpetual novelty brain jack wired to our collective crania.

There are two coincidences about BB’s birthday that I love. Street Tech was the first item blogged on this day, five years ago, and it also happens to be my birthday. Getting a linkhump from BB every January 21st is a nice little present.

The Society for HandHeld Hushing (or SHHH!) has a fun PDF file of little cards to print, cut up, and hand out to those cell phone users who seem to want ALL of us in on their scintillating conversations with their mother-in-law, cheating boyfriend, drinking buddy, bookie, etc. I like the cards that have check boxes:

DEAR CELL PHONE USER
We are aware that your ongoing conversation with:

[ ] YER FRIEND
[ ] YER MATE
[ ] YER MOM
[ ] YER THERAPIST

About,

[ ] LAST NIGHT
[ ] THE GAME
[ ] “HIM”
[ ] “HER”

is very important to you, but we thought you’d like to know that it doesn’t interest us in the least. In fact, your babbling disregard for others is more than a little annoying.

This message brought to you by a concerned member of: SHHH! Society for HandHeld Hushing.

“Egosurfing” was one of the answers on Jeopardy tonight. This term was coined by Street Tech co-founder Sean Carton. The rather embarassing thing about it is that it was sorta coined in reference to ME! Years ago (1997?) Sean called me up and asked: “What are you doing?” I told him I was on a search engine looking up my own name. He laughed and said he did that all the time too and that there should be a word for the practice. He called back later and had come up with “egosurfing.'” A few months later, I used it in Jargon Watch. I usually don’t use made up words like this, but egosurfing was just too good to pass up. It has proven to be extremely viral, finding its way into the OED of Slang, and other places, and now, Jeopardy.

It’s dead.

If the Associated Press says it, it must be true:

“Like the penny, the floppy drive is hardly worth the trouble, computer makers say.”

It seems just about everything else you can use to store data is faster, more reliable and holds more data than the venerable floppy disk, which isn’t even all that floppy anymore.

Hey, did you know that today is SysAdmin Appreciation Day? Well, it is, and we owe a high-bandwith pipe’s worth o’ gratitude to OUR guy, Tim Tate, a.k.a. Tatertot, a.k.a. Timmy Tuner, a.k.a. the Potentato.

Thanks for all of the great VOLUNTEER work on Street Tech, Tim. You r00l!

[And readers: Don’t blame Tim for the site downtime. That part ain’t his fault and we ain’t ‘preciatin’ those whose fault it is (no offense or nothin’). You just ain’t getting the bouquet o’ red roses.]