Month: June 2004

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Yahoo Feels The Heat: Bumps Up Y!Mail

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!

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Sent: Phonecam Art Project Launches

Xeni over at BoingBoing is co-curating an online “art” project called Sent. The project aims to “test the limits of creative possibilities” of phonecam moblogging. Celebrity “artists” are contributing, but nobody you’re likely to be impressed by. Unfortunately there seems to be no difference between the project and any other foto moblog. There’s not even an interactive ranking system or anything to let you see the best of the “amateur” contributions — just random flotsam from the sea of bad photography.

We love you Xeni, and we’re all for the idea of moblogging, but at some point you need to ask yourself if this project is a tad over-hyped. I would think that a red flag would’ve been raised as soon as you saw the phrase “Phonecams are changing the way we see the world, and our place within it” on the website? And can you really be deconstructivist if you’re sponsored by Motorola?

If you want to participate, you can send your pics to submit@sentonline.com from your cell or PC.

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IBM’s Smallest Desktop: Exclusive Pics!

At CeBIT NY this past month IBM was showing off its new ThinkCentre S50 small-footprint desktop PC. While it wasn’t exactly a show-stopper, I was impressed with the design and took a few pics. Plied with liquor however, I agreed to keep them under wraps until today. The S-50 is impressive for its small footprint, which is 8% smaller (35% smaller by volume) than its predecessor. It’s quieter too — noise has been reduced to 39dBA. Despite its small size, the S-50 has an internal power supply and room for one PCI card, a slimline bay for optical drives, a 3.5″ bay for HD, and has 6 USB 2.0 ports for accesories and expanion. The best feature of the new design is the easy access to the internals: the S-50 opens up with all the grace of opening the hood of a Ferrari. Prices start around $600, with well-configured machines going for about $1000.

Click “read more” for the exclusive internal pics.

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Tivo News

You gotta love how people will sometimes miss things going on right now because they’re staring at a fuzzy picture of the future.

Lots of the tech news sites today are talking about Tivo’s announcement that soon they will be launching a new service where you can download TV content from the internet onto your Tivo. They don’t give any details as to how this works, or when exactly they’ll be launching it, or how much it will cost.

In the right now though, Tivo has changed their service a lot for the better, and hasn’t bothered to tell anyone about it unless you visit the website. Right now, the previously $50 (or $69 or $99, depending on the mood they were in) Home Media Option is free! Well, not free exactly – just not extra. All the features of the HMO – mp3 playback, photo browsing, online scheduling, sharing programs between Tivos on the same network – have been rolled into the basic Tivo service. On top of that, for households (like mine) with more than one Tivo, you now get a discount on the extra subscriptions. Additional Tivos pay only $6.95 a month, instead of the normal $12.95.

So – better, plus cheaper, plus NOW. Not bad.

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Robert Quine, Beyond Cyberpunk Artist Dead

Robert Quine, famed rock/punk guitarist of the Voidoids, who played with the likes of Reed and Eno, is dead at age 61 from an apparent suicide. One of his albums was called Beyond Cyberpunk, though the connection between the artist and Street Tech is unknown (Gar, care to explain?). You can read the Times obit for more details of Quine’s impressive career.

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Robosapian Reviewed!

If you’re more excited by robots than latte makers, you’ll find this review of the Robosapien pretty interesting. While we here at StreetTech haven’t got our hands on one of them yet, we were expecting it to be the best toy ever created. And after reading the review, we expect it to be the best toy ever. Start saving now — only $100 gets you one, but when you see them dancing a chorus line, you’ll want a whole gang of them.

Story submitted by Jason.

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AeroLatte for 2 bucks!

As you may remember, Gareth simply cannot sing the praises of the AeroLatte enough. It will froth the milk for your homemade lattes in seconds without steam or mess (if you use it right), causes a mild euphoria, and it probably cures cancer.

Well, according to the AeroLatte site’s currency converter, the genuine thing costs about 27 US$. Restoration Hardware carries it for $25 with a fancy stand.

If you happen to live near an Ikea store though, dig around in their kitchen department. They’ve got an identical gadget (minus the stand) for $1.99! I was obviously skeptical of the quality, since it looked pretty cheap, but for 2 bucks, what’s to lose? I am here to testify, ladies and gentlemen, that this tiny gizmo works as claimed! I too have felt the mild euphoria that is a fully mixed mocha that frothed up to the top of my coffee mug faster than I could say “hey, is this lump getting smaller?”

Sure, like I said, there’s no stand. Guess what? You can stand it on its butt for free.