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Bill Gates Taking Heat Over Va Tech Shooting

It’s not often that I feel sympathy for Bill Gates. This would be one of those times. Anti-gaming nutlog Jack Thompson is suggesting Gates may be partly to blame for the VT massacre and that MS could be potentially liable. I heard the kid read books, too. I think Amazon should watch its back. Here’s a snip:

“Mr. Gates, your company is potentially legally liable the harm done at Virginia Tech. Your game, a killing simulator, according to the news that used to be in the Post, trained him to enjoy killing and how to kill. You knew five years ago that your on-line game, Counterstrike, so clearly figured in the massacre by a student in Erfurt that the event and the game impacted the race for Chancellor in Germany at the time!”

This guy seems to have ripped a page from the Ann Coulter playbook. Say any crazy-ass thing to garner yourself plenty of airtime.

Read the rest on Gizmodo.

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“Beginner’s Mind” and The Stovetop Website

As Bruce Sterling put it in Beyond Cyberpunk!: “Inspiration knows no baud rate.” I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of creativity recently. Last weekend, I went to this year’s Art-o-Matic, an amazing everyone-can-play art orgy held in DC most every year. It’s a great event that I always look forward to. But I’m always struck at how derivative, and well, BORING much of the art is. Now, I’m a firm believer in creativity being our God-given right and responsibility, and that we don’t serve that impulse nearly enough. So I don’t want to harsh anybody’s creative mellow. If it feels good, DO IT!. But in being creative, so many seem intent on painting inside the lines, parroting what others have done. If it were up to me, art school’s major job would be beating all of the rout and mimicry out of students.

The brilliance of beginner’s mind (in the Zen sense) can be seen in the website Miranda July did for her new short story collection, No One Belongs Here More Than You. The entire site is written on the white tops of her kitchen appliances in dry-erase marker. It’s one of the coolest, most refreshing sites I’ve seen in a while. And it just goes to show you how right Chairman Brucie was.

[Via Boing Boing]

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Insane Archive of Retro-Tech Creations


Attention circuit-benders, hardware hackers, techno-antique collectors, control panel enthusiasts, analog synth and Theramin fans, and marvelers of magnificent and mad machinery in general. This link will rock your world.

Tim Kaiser is a performance artist and experimental musician. He’s built dozens (and dozens) of crazy instruments and other sound-generating gadgets, many of them housed in antique Geiger counters, old telephones, Oscillator boxes, and other retro equipment cases. His site features page after page of amazing DIY tech art. I was swooning by the time I was done, and I don’t think I even exhausted the site. It seems to go on forever. Some of the machines have MP3 files attached to them so you can hear what the devices sound like.

One of the most linked-to pieces on Street Tech is the Gallery of Homebrewed Headphone Amps. This is an equally amazing collection of homemade audio gadgets. We can only hope that Tim Kaiser’s work generates a similar buzz.

[Via Brass Goggles]

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Review: Bose SoundDock

Street Tech co-founder, and resident cranky ol’ d00d, Peter Sugarman, gets all uncharacteristically warm ‘n fuzzy over the Bose SoundDock Digital Music System for iPod. Okay, so this isn’t the newest, sexiest piece of gear on the shelves of your local Circuit City, but we’re not about what’s new, we’re about what works. And if Peter’s heartwarming testimony is any indicator, this speaker system rocks hard. Alright, we might be exaggerating a bit about Peter’s effusiveness, but we just don’t get to see Mr. Cranky with this big of a smile on his face every day, especially about tech!

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House That Follows the Sun

Bucky Fuller had the idea some three-quarters of a century ago to build houses that follow the sun, adjust to the wind, and otherwise move with their environment. The Dutch Situationists also had ideas about houses that could move, change their shape, their scenery, etc. But sadly, this type of both design smarts and creative whimsy rarely makes it into the marketplace. The only time we see anything like this is in show houses that pop up from time to time, like this one, designed by Rolf Disch, and built in Freiburg, Germany. It’s actually not new. It was built in the mid-90s, but is making the rounds of the blogosphere, thanks to a growing interest in alt.energy and “green” building.

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Most Hardcore Unboxing Pr0n EVER!

At Apple, even the swag packaging is pretentious! And the Applecore cares enough to lovingly detail the unboxing of a freakin’ Apple Store T-shirt. Now, we’re all for good design and smart packaging here at Street Tech, and we admit to several swoony Apple “out-of-box” experiences ourselvees, but this IS a bit on the obsessive side, don’t ya think?

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Amazing Cardcraft Robot Goes Up in Peeps Conflagration

Bunny Burn is an annual event that a group of friends (location unknown) organize.The purpose of the party is the spectacular immolation of marshmallow bunny Peeps, centered each year on a different theme. This Easter, the theme of the crime was Robots. One participant, Sengkelat, built this incredible six-legged cardboard robot piloted and crewed by oodles of Just Born Bunnies. Sparked up, the gooey treats achieve a Napalmy intensity unmatched in kitchen pyrotechnics. Sengkelat documents the construction, display, and destruction of the bunny hellbot in three Flickr sets.

[Via Brass Goggles]

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Belkin In-Desk Hubs and Docks

Here’s an interesting new product line from Belkin. Maybe inspired by a number of the projects that are floating around, where people either use the cable hole (a.k.a. “Grommet Hole”) in their desk or cut their own to build in-desk iPod docking stations or USB hubs, Belkin is now selling the same thing ready-made. They have several models of the USB port, designed for different size grommet holes (2″ or 3″) with four USB ports, and an iPod model that fits all Pods. They all sell for US$40 each.

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Oscilloscope Clock

You may have seen this on MAKEzine already, but it was too freakin’ cool to pass up. This guy in the Netherlands is selling a kit that turns the X and Y inputs of your oscilloscope into a clock. The kit uses the AtMega8515 microcontroller. It sounds like you can use it either on a scope that’s in active use, or an old one that you want to dedicate as a clock. I laughed at the idea of dedicating a working oscilloscope to a clock (I don’t even have my first scope yet, let alone one lying around!), but a quick peak at eBay shows a few old banged up (but working and cool-looking) models in the US$40-60 range. The clock kit costs $92 (69 EUR).

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