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EscapePod: Weekly Sci-Fi Podcast Shorts

Here’s a little gem I ran across (thanks to Cory) – a weekly podcast of original science fiction audio shorts called Escape Pod. They publish new stories about once or twice a week, each about half an hour long. All of their recordings are available from their website for direct download as MP3, or via any number of podcast systems.

All the stories I’ve listened to so far are quite good – and perfectly timed for my morning commute. Escape Pod apparently keeps quality up by having good editors and by actually paying the authors of the stories for the non-exclusive audio rights. What’s even more impressive is that Escape Pod then releases the stories under a CC license, which means you can share ’em with your friends as you like. And they support all this on donations alone.

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Networked Video Sharing via iTunes

The keeper of a blog called “Nicest of the Damned” has discovered that the latest iTunes (6.02) allows the streaming of videos over a local network from one iTunes client to another. Doesn’t seem to be documented, and it still appears buggy, but it’s there. As Make posits, it’s a short hop from here to an AV Airport Express that can stream network video to your TV(s).

[Via Make]

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“Digital Archeology” to Unearth Lost Gems

Gee, look how long it took a record company to connect the dots on this one. Universal Music Group has started a project (they’ve dubbed “digital archeology”) to assemble 100,000 downloadable songs from artists whose work is currently unavailable on CD. Artists include ’60s psychedelic bands, Marianne Faithfull, Fairport Convention, and (gulp) Englebert Humperdink.

[Via The Register]

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Treo vs. Treo

Yardena Arar, the “PDA Pundit” at PCWorld, takes a side-by-side look at the new Windows-based Treo 700w and the Palm-based Treo 650. Her conclusions (which we might have guessed even before reading the piece):

Overall…the Treo 700w…is fast; it’s got a few nice phone features; and if I have to use a Windows Mobile hybrid, I’d rather have a Treo than any of the other Windows Mobile smart phones I’ve seen. But do I feel any desire to surrender my Palm OS-based Treo? No. I’ll just upgrade when a faster version comes along. The best things about the Treo 700w have little or nothing to do with Windows Mobile.

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Peter Vallone Doesn’t Have a Posse (and other Subway Musings)

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.

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Time Wasting on a Timer Script

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.

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Street Tech’s Sucks Less Awards


We’ve been thinking for a while now about creating an official Street Tech Sucks Less Award to honor those tech companies who show some true design intelligence behind the products they foist on a gadget-weary public. We probably wouldn’t call it the “Sucks Less Award,” but you get the idea. Until we do the official roll out of such an award, we’ll be handing out some mini virtual trophies now and again.

Today we’d like to hand out a suitably handsome little statue to the HP Pavillion HD DLP TV. Not for the TV itself — we haven’t seen it in person yet — but for how they handled the A/V input/output. You can’t see it on this photo, but if you pull down the access panel at the bottom of the TV console, ALL of the A/V I/O is on THE FRONT of the set. The cables all come through a channel around the side of the TV and are connected through this hidden LIT console. No more needing to borrow the local rugby team to help you wrestle your gigantic TV set from the entertainment center so you can plug/unplug a component. What a concept!