WOW...

From Boston Dynamics:



What's eerie is the emotional reaction I have to seeing this robot get kicked or slip on ice. Actual empathy.
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Get Some Nutz

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How to Look Like a Responsible Adult with Help from the Internet

If you're tired of forgetting things, then the internet can help you remember. Even if you don't have mobile web access. And it's slick!

This is what I've been doing for the past few days.

First of all I'll give you my device breakdown.

RAZR cell phone (Verizon)
iPod Touch 16GB
MacBook Pro
MacPro (Work)
Dell something (Home)

So, I can get to the internet from all of these devices but the phone. The downside is I have to find some WiFi to do it. I don't need WiFi for a cellphone. But I don't get web access from it.

I list my number of devices so you can understand my need for synchronicity. The way to get that is through the web, but if I can't to the web when I'm standing in the middle of the grocery store, what good is all the stuff online going to do me?

Well, I have solved the problem - and then some.


Two free services Jott and Sandy, provide me with exactly what I was looking for.

Let me give you and example:

I'm at the bookstore and I know there are a couple of books that friends have recommended to me, but I wrote them down in a note pad that I left on the dresser at home. So I wonder around, buy a magazine and go home.

Ever happened to you?

Now, let's look at another example.

I'm at the bookstore and I know there are a couple of books that friends have recommended to me, so I send a text message "lookup books" to the Sandy email address.
A moment later I get a text message that reads:

(Re: lookup books)
I looked up "books" and found:

#1 Books
*Anathem - Neal Stephenson
*Bloods a Rover - James Ellroy
*Motherless Brooklynn - ?

That was a text from Sandy. Neat-O.

Now let's say I'm driving down the road and I suddenly remember that I'm supposed to call my mother tomorrow and wish her a Happy Birthday. I don't trust myself to remember this at the proper time by sheer brain power.

So I hit speed dial on my cell phone and call Jott. Here's the way the call goes:

Jott: Who do you want to Jott?
Me: Sandy.
Jott: Sandy. Is this correct?
Me: Yes.
Jott: BEEP!
Me: Remember to wish mom happy birthday tomorrow at ten a-m tag with annually
Jott: Got it!

So here's what happens behind the scenes:

Jott records and transcribes my call. The text of what I said is sent to Sandy. Sandy sets up a reminder to text (or email) me tomorrow at 10 AM to wish my mom a happy birthday. And by saying "tag with annually" Sandy has set this to happen every year at the same time.

So the next day I'm at my desk and get a text message that says, "Wish mom a happy birthday."

And I do.

These are just two examples. Both of these services have full web interfaces so you can tweak and refine as you see fit.

And the best part: both are absolutely FREE.

Check them out here:

Jott

Sandy

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Neil Young on How The Man is Keeping Us Down

Neil Young slams Apple, iTunes

Folk and rock star Neil Young has issued sharp criticism of Apple and the iPod, Fortune reports. Speaking at a conference hosted by the magazine, Young said that the sound quality of recordings has been reduced to "Fisher-Price toy" levels in recent years, and companies like Apple are to blame. "Apple has taken a detour down the convenience highway," says Young. "Quality has taken a complete backseat -- if it even gets in the car at all."

Although providing faster downloads and more space on music players, Young believes that the prevalence of the MP3 format -- spurred in part by the iPod -- has resulted in a general lowering of sound standards. Music has become more "like wallpaper" as a result, he claims. "We have beautiful computers now but high-resolution music is one of the missing elements," he adds. "The ears are the windows to the soul."

The soul. Yeah, like, far out, man.

As expected, Mr. Young blames the evil corporation, rather than acknowledging that it's apparently what the consumers want and will pay for.

There are lossless formats widely available Mr. Harvest Moon, you stone-aged dinosaur. The problem is they are HUGE files, and nobody but the strictest audiophiles insist on using a terabyte for what they could put on 10 gigabytes.

The fact of the matter is anything at over 256kps on an mp3 is virtually the same (to humans, anyway) as a lossless recording. Anything at 320kps and above and only the most minute dynamics are lost. So when you compare the file size of a 320kps rip and a Lossless FLAC rip (roughly a 1:5 ratio) I along with 99% of everyone else in the rockin' free world is willing to make that trade off.

For those who aren't, they don't need an iPod to begin with.

It's not the format that's making your music sound like shit. That would be your whiny, crackly voice. But to make sound even worse is your record company's and producer's jacking up the compression levels. That's not the fault of a format.

I can't believe somebody thought this newsworthy. From you I mean. I can't believe I'm even responding. Oh, well. Done now.

(Hat tip: iPodNN)
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OmniFocus for iPhone or iPod Touch

So far the iPhone/Touch 2.0 firmware upgrade is everything I want it to be EXCEPT for the lack of sync in the apps and their desktop counterparts. Many syncs are coming, but we're having to wait a bit.

One of the most annoying things about the upgrade is that Apple is still not offering any sync between Notes and Notes or a sync for To Do List. WTF?

So anyway, for those of you who were debating on dropping a Jackson on OmniFocus's syncable iPhone counterpart, here's the Macworld Review.

I'm passing. Partly due to the fact that at $19.99 OmniFocus iPhone is a full 2x the price of any app in that category, and for that I want flawlessness and perfection.

The Omni Group’s getting things done (GTD) desktop application for the Mac, OmniFocus, has both proponents and detractors. Many people who buy into David Allen’s Getting Things Done workflow philosophy (and who take the time to learn more about how GTD is done) find OmniFocus to be a powerful tool for creating and organizing tasks. Others, confounded by OmniFocus’ occasional complexities, wonder if maybe they’d have more time to get things done if they spent less time trying to figure out how OmniFocus can aid their organizational efforts. It’s likely OmniFocus for the iPhone‚ although not as deep as the desktop version‚ will be similarly viewed.

Full Review.
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LifeHacker's Brillant Idea

Build a Headless Laptop System [How To]

from Lifehacker by Adam Pash

If you've got an old laptop with a busted monitor and nothing left on your warranty, don't trash it. Instead, consider the route taken by a user on the MacNN forums, who beheaded his laptop and turned it into a small-form desktop PC that fits on the underside of his desk—sort of like the under-desk gadget mount. Even if you don't feel like removing your laptop's LCD, you can still mount your laptop under your desk for the same super-clean effect. Be sure to check out the post for more details and to see the uncluttered finished product. If you're looking to have a little more fun with your headless laptop, check out how you can turn it into an arcade cocktail cabinet.

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Welp, That Settles That Then

From Wired:

Myth #10) The FBI has Nikola Tesla's plans for a "death ray."

Okay.
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For 650 (EUROS, I Think) The Slinky Chair

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Let the Arguments Begin...

I09's

Great Opening Sentences From Science Fiction
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Much Needed

Viscous keyboard-cleaning goop

Posted by Cory Doctorow, July 22, 2008 11:32 PM | permalink

This Swiss goop ("Cyber Clean") is a viscous slime that you roll around on your keyboard, so that all the food particles and fingernail parings are swept away, while the germicidal surface de-germifies your icky, filthy, disgusting keyboard. Link (via Red Ferret)

From Boing Boing.
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Note to MPAA: GTFO of My Living Room

The MPAA is petitioning the FCC to lard cable television with "selectable output control," a DRM system that allows broadcasters to specify which of your TV devices can decode which shows. With selectable output control, parts of your home theater would go dark as you flipped up and down the dial: this show won't play through your Dolby, that one won't go to your PVR, this one won't go to your DVD recorder, that one won't work with your DTV set. It's the digital TV equivalent of one of those absurd Bond-villain world-domination schemes -- the idea that every device that can plug into a TV (including PCs, game consoles, etc) will be designed to shut itself off in the presence of a flag saying, "This device may not receive that program."

Media fascists.

Full article.
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'War Games' is to Geeks as 'Gotcha' is to Paintballers

From Wired:

Over the years, WarGames has written itself into the cult lore of Silicon Valley. Google hosted a 25th-anniversary screening in May, where keyboard jockeys cheered Broderick's DOS acrobatics. (Imagine Rocky Horror, but picture the audience in Hawaiian shirts and mandals.) "Many of us grew up with this movie," Google cofounder Sergey Brin told the packed house. "It was a key movie of a generation, especially for those of us who got into computing."

Fun article. Read it here. They have the original trailer and everything.
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Should Be an Interesting Read

I saw this author interviewed on Colbert. The interview was good comedy, but as an interview, it sucked - par for the course. So I was wanting to see what somebody thought of it outside Comedy Central.

I've just finished reading Jonathan Zittrain's The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, a provocative, well-reasoned, well-informed and sometimes frustrating book about the power of the Internet to allow people to be more effective at taking action -- whether that action is good or bad.

Zittrain talks about the principle of "generativity" in technology: the capacity of some technology to allow its users to make new things out of it, things the designer never anticipated, and does a very good job in enumerating the characteristics that make a technology more or less generative. Zittrain is more-or-less in favor of generativity: he talks about all the amazing things that the human race has accomplished by using that most generative of technologies: the public Internet and the general-purpose PC.

But Zittrain points out that generativity contains the seeds of its own destruction, because it allows bad people to leverage their malicious intentions -- with malware, spyware, DDoS attacks and so on -- to the point that an average person using the Internet is at constant risk from creeps and thugs. And what's more, all average people use the Internet because it's been so thoroughly woven into our lives.

Zittrain fears that the power of the Internet to let creeps do bad things will lead to a regulatory backlash and a series of Draconian laws that take away all the social benefits of the Internet, and that this will be enabled by a consumer backlash against general-purpose PCs in favor of "tethered appliances" -- TiVos, iPhones, etc -- that grant a measure of security by taking away the user-modifiability that is at the heart of the principle of generativity.

Full post.
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Things in the Night Sky

From Boing Boing:

UFOCapture is a Windows application that helps you videotape meteors and other fast-moving stuff in space. You hook up a sensitive video camera to your computer, point it out your window, and while you slumber, the software saves all the good bits.

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For Sale: Douglas Adams's 'Hitchhiker' Typewriter

From Boing Boing:

There's something so appropriately surreal and disarming about seeing a literary cultural artifact like the autographed typewriter Douglas Adams used to write The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on a book reseller website and sitting right next to a huge red "Add to Basket" button. But there it is, the original Babelfish that translated Adams' own genius-madness into transmissionable form!

Current Bid:

$25,257.94

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Neal Stephenson: Do Genres Even Matter Anymore?

This is a 40 min lecture by one of my favorite authors. If you click on 'Open Tools' there are chapters you can skip to.


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Whoa!

Long lost Metropolis scenes found!

Among the footage that has now been discovered, according to the unanimous opinion of the three experts that ZEITmagazin asked to appraise the pictures, there are several scenes which are essential in order to understand the film: The role played by the actor Fritz Rasp in the film for instance, can finally be understood. Other scenes, such as for instance the saving of the children from the worker's underworld, are considerably more dramatic...

Can't wait to see this.

(Hat tip: Boing Boing)
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Hellboy vs Ghost Hunters

One of our favorite super heros in a spot with our favorite scifi channel duo.


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More European Street Soccer Insanity

Pub Fifa Street 3 (Foot Capoeira)
by mehzz

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LMAO!!

Awesome... probably old, but I just saw it.


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What I Watched in June

Slow month for movie-watching.

Evil Dead 2 (rewatch) |8| High-energy, mad-cap horror. Got to explain the term "Camp" to my daughter.

Semi-Pro | 5 | Without John C. Reilly, Will Farrell is only half as funny. Some hilarious moments. But only lukewarm overall.

Frailty (rewatch) |9| Excellent thriller. Great cast/performances. Wonderful piece of writing.

Mixed Blood |6| Gritty, ultra-low budget, drug-gang movie from the mid-80s. Even the New York Cops speak with foreign accents.

Army of Darkness (rewatch) |8| Third Evil Dead installment. I forgot just how great it was.

Homicide (rewatch) |9| Flipping channels and caught this on Encore. Highly recommended.

The Onion |8| Not really sure how to rate this. If you enjoy The Onion paper/website, you'll enjoy this movie. Or this stream of sketches. Or whatever. Funny offensive stuff. Pleasantly surprised.
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Heh.

From Boing Boing:

My latest Guardian column is up: "Warning to copyright enforcers: Three strikes and you're out" argues that if the entertainment industry wants the right to disconnect accused infringers after three accusations, then they should be prepared to have their corporate Internet access terminated if they make three false accusations. Thanks to Kevin Marks for the idea!

The internet is only that wire that delivers freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of the press in a single connection. It's only vital to the livelihood, social lives, health, civic engagement, education and leisure of hundreds of millions of people (and growing every day).

This trivial bit of kit is so unimportant that it's only natural that we equip the companies that brought us Police Academy 11, Windows Vista, Milli Vanilli and Celebrity Dancing With the Stars with wire-cutters that allow them to disconnect anyone in the country on their own say-so, without proving a solitary act of wrongdoing.

But if that magic wire is indeed so trivial, they won't mind if we hold them to the same standard, right?

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