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Category Archives: Technology

I, For One, Welcome Our Robot Overlords. And Here’s Tom With The Weather.

Friday, March 21, 2008

Those cats at The Onion occasionally knock one out of the park.

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Phone Update

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

When I get paid, I’m gonna set up a new Skype In account, so I’ll be able to get phone calls whenever I’m in WiFi range. (A friend gave me his old Nokia e61i, and I’ve got Fring running on it, so I’ll get calls that way.) So if you have my GrandCentral number, you […]

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MacBook Air: Not Massively Impressed, In General

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

So the MacBook Air debuted today. Aside from the multitouch trackpad and the 802.11n, I’m not really very excited by this.
Why? Because I don’t care how thin it is. After a certain threshhold, thin doesn’t matter. My MacBook Pro is plenty thin at, what, 1.5″ wide?
The Air has one USB port, no FireWire, a relatively […]

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Simple Useful Technology

Saturday, November 17, 2007

Here’s what technology is actually good for: I found an excellent site with information on how to get from the airport in Istanbul to the area with the cheap, good hotels. I copied this into a text file, and sent it via Bluetooth to my new Nokia e61i. Also a Turkish PDF phrasebook.
I leave in […]

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One Laptop Per Child — XO Giving

Saturday, November 10, 2007

One Laptop Per Child — XO Giving
I’ve actually played with the XO (or at least, an earlier prototype) and I’ve got to tell you, these things are the coolest gadgets since they invented digital Cheez-Whiz. (There’s no such thing as digital Cheez-Whiz. That’s my point. Think about it.) They’ve got a lot to recommend them […]

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Go ahead — tase me, bro

Friday, November 9, 2007

New Scientist Last Word Blog: Counter-taserism
[From the comments:]
An EFFECTIVE taser proof vest consists of any conductive surface where both probes attach creating a (dead short)
There are special clothes that are made from fabric that has a high dialectric strenth that stops tasers in their tracks but is very expensive due to the fact they contain […]

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Twitter is my mook

Monday, November 5, 2007

I had an idea for an application a while back, inspired by something from one Bruce Sterling novel or another. The Mook was going to be a chatbot that you could install, which would pretend — in a very limited fashion — to be you if you didn’t want to / couldn’t IM but wanted […]

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New Wacom Cintiq — 12 inch!

Thursday, October 25, 2007

Oh, my God, I really, really, really want this badly. This is the new smaller Cintiq, which — if you’re not familiar — is a pressure sensitive LCD drawing tablet. You draw right on the display, and the stylus is both pressure and angle sensitive, which makes digital drawing as natural as real drawing.
Probably a […]

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Fucking Ha! Ha Ha Ha!

Tuesday, September 4, 2007

My friend Mike Bernstein emailed me to tell me that big chunks of the ZA archives are available on Archive.org. While hunting around, I discovered this entry from October 8, 2003.
I told you I was ahead of the game on multitouch systems.
Which reminds me of a question I’ve been wanting to ask for a while: […]

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Working Perlin Flow Field

Monday, September 3, 2007

Working Flow Field # 1 from jzellis and Vimeo.
I’ll post a simple explanation of how I made this work in the next few days; the code that keeps the particles within a certain radius of the control particle is actually totally simple, and done in something like five lines of code.
I’m so stoked! Months of […]

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