Hardware Beyond the Hype
I added another screen to my PC, and it turned out be ridiculously easy (YMMV) under Windows 2000. (stop giggling, Mac people!).
This is perfect for info junkies to get more screen real estate, using spare screens and any old PCI card.
What better way to achieve the paperless office than to fill it with monitors?
A security company called iDefense has announced that they have discovered a vulnerability in the Linksys BEFSR41 EtherFast Cable/DSL router. The vulnerability allows someone to crash the router by simply typing a URL into their browser. If remote management is turned on, then this can be done from anywhere on the internet.
Upgrading the firmware to a version newer than 1.42.7 will fix the problem.
Dell has two new PDAs just about ready for release in mid-November — the new Axim line will include models with 300MHz and 400MHz chips running PPC OS, and 32 or 64 megs of RAM resprectively. The unit is slightly big-boned for a Pocket PC, but considering that they’ve got both CompactFlash and Secure Digital slots, it’s undersandable. The units have a 3.5″ transreflective screen, which allows readability outside without sacrificing color or battery life. Both have a five-way D-pad and a scroll wheel for navigation. The biggest innovation in these units? Price. US$199 and $299 after rebate.
Intel appears to have licensed their QX3+ toy microscope to a company called Digital Blue. It is now available at Toys-R-Us for about $39.99.
Drivers now abound for this little gadget. You can find software for Mac OS X 10.2, drivers for Mac OS X, and drivers for Linux.
While I’m not Canadian, there are many things I’ve always respected about our neighbor to the north (or, as I like to call them, the 51st state) — they have a good human rights record, a good attitude about guns (see Michael Moore’s new film Bowling for Columbine) and they make a mean Cafe au Lait. But some things are not as good up there as down here in the good ol’ US of A, and here’s one example; the Copyright Board of Canada has proposed a tax on recordable media that would add $0.021 on every megabyte worth of digital media. That means $21 per gigabyte on hard-drive based MP3 players, and for something like the Lyra Jukebox, the tax alone would be $400 or more. Now, sure, that’s just those Canadian Dollars, not US Greenbacks, but that’s still alot of scratch to be paying the feds, even if they pay for your healthcare. Read the proposal at The Copyright Board (pdf).
Here’s one from the “Who the hell is their market?” department:
Xentex has a fold-out laptop computer. It starts out life as a 12-pound, normal laptop-sized bundle, but them folds out in four sections into a…ah…VastTop with a 20″ dual TFT screen.
Um…kinda cool and all, but where the hell would you use it? Not on a plane, train or in an automobile. It’s hard enough finding space for a regular desktop-replacement-sized laptop on the go, let alone, this big-boned boy. I also wonder about the dual screens, which they make a big about, like it’ll greatly boost your efficiency. To me, it smells like they tried to make something positive out of a design problem (how to deal with a bi-folding screen). C’mon, there can’t be a sustainable market for this thing, can there? Oh yeah, this baby’ll put ya back five Gs.
[Thanks to Sean Carton]
Infosync has some great news on Nokia’s latest phones. Nokia will be releasing the 2100, 5100, 6100, 6800, 7250, and 8910i, all with a wide variety of features, including MMS, J2ME, GPRS and color screens. 
The one pictured here is the 6800, which according to Infosync has all the above plus SyncML and an integrated FM radio. Most radical of all though is the physical design, which has a numeric keyboard on the outside that when fliped up reveals a full (split) QWERTY keyboard with the screen in the center rotated. Go to Infosync for all the specs and pics.
Years ago, when I was reading up on the Situationist International (a loose confederation of brilliant, pretentious, cranky European avant garde artists/radical-types from the ’60s), I was fascinated by their ideas about urbanism, antic architecture and “psycho-geography” (the personal, emotional, libidinous sides of living space). They were fascinated by maps and the ability to use them to re-map a route (what they called the “Northwest Passage”) to a possible city: a better city, an ideal city. They would cut up maps, creating collages of psycho-geographic landscapes (usually mappings of their drunken wanderings through French cafes and bistros). Years ago, when I ran a culture club in DC, called Cafe Gaga, we experimented with some of these ideas (including the stumbling drunk part) in new urbanism and it was extremely fun and enlightening.
Now a group of artists has combined some of these ideas of emotional urbanism/the “poetry of place” into a PDA-based public art project. Participants download the PDPal software and then use it to create and annotate maps of their experiences of and ideas arising from their urban wanderings. An “urban park ranger” an avatar within the program, prompts you and encourages you to share your maps with others. You can beam to other PDPal users or upload to a “Beaming Box” at kiosks (as shown in the pic). The idea is to remap a “city of grids” into a “city of experiences.” The project will launch at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in summer ’03 and then in NYC where they’ll be ten beaming stations available.
It’s a really cool idea. The website content has that sludgey pomo artspeak I have little patience for these days, but hopefully, one can cut through it to get to the idea, which sounds like fun.
[Thanks to Jim Leftwich]
When I was a kid, people did whacky things like put neon tubes on the bottom of their hand-me-down Japanese import cars. Today, it’s all about customizing your computer to equal levels of refinement. On this site, which caters to the customizing crowd, you can read all about the latest mods in the Mods Dictonary. Heard of Appliqués, Fan Grills, Case Windows, Electro-luminescent cable (EL cable), or the infamous Hard Drive Mod (where you open up the sacred dust-free “skull” of a hard drive to replace the top plate with transparent plastic)? Totally destructive in terms of drive life and data security, it’s done for the sheer beauty of it. You can also get a drive bezel painted to match the rest of your case for a few bucks.
Heavily tweaked PC cases — the muscle cars of the 21st century!
Tablet PCs — Microsoft’s next big thing — are due to debut next week in New York and points around the globe. The tablet PCs are “powered” by a special version of Windows that adds handwriting recognition and touch-screen compatibility to allow users to skip the keyboard for taking notes. Many manufacturers are getting into this biz, with either a laptop version like this one from Acer with a flip around screen (pictured right) or the sans-keyboard version like this one from Electrovaya (pictured under “read more”) that’s more like a very large Pocket PC. Click “read more” for my predictions on tablet PCs…