Archive for the ‘culture’ Category.
21st April 2005, 09:25 am
Red LEDs to Grow Lettuce better: “
This is pretty neat- using red LEDS to grow lettuce is 60% more efficient than fluorescent light when growing vegetables hydroponically. The red LED technology produces 7000 heads of lettuce per day all year round in a 10-floor building on just 1000 square meters of space. The lettuce matures more than three times as fast under the LEDs than outdoors. The Metaefficient site also has a lot of other interesting products that are just, better. Maybe when we’re all done with our POV projects we’ll grow plants.”
(Via MAKE: Blog.)
Riiiight, “lettuce”. I’m sure lettuce is the only green plant that grows better under red LED light.
4th April 2005, 02:57 pm
TIME.com gets it wrong as well: “
TIME runs a story on new iPod killers - but their story shows that complete lack of research happens in traditional media as well as in blogs - just look at the following L
TIME.com: Attack of the Anti-iPods — Apr. 11, 2005:
What about iPod’s notorious lack of endurance between recharges, the sealed case that means you may have to scrap the thing if the internal battery dies, and the proprietary digital-music format that joins you at the hip to Apple’s iTunes online store?
How wrong can you be?
- Battery life on my iPods - 5 hours or so. Maybe some of the others are better, but then again my iPod is extremely easy to recharge.
- Scrap the thing if the battery dies??? Hey - even Apple offers new batteries, and if you go to Amazon they sell batteries!
- Joins you to the hip with Apple’s online store???? - I have never bought a song there, and I have still managed to fill my iPod.
TIME - your journalists disappoint me. Employ someone who do their fact checking.
”
(Via Tor’s weblog.)
Boy oh, man, did you ever hit the nail on the head. This is the reason why blogs will overtake the world… Why give your money to a traditional media publication when the quality of the work is this bad? If you want badly fact checked stories, you can get them all online..for free, got it?
28th February 2005, 11:13 am
The Joy of Tech has a great panel on Jef Raskin. Thank you Jef.
Category:
Dreams,
art,
culture,
design,
events,
geek,
ideas,
programming,
psychology,
spirituality,
weird,
you had to be there |
Comment
23rd February 2005, 09:43 pm
will someone please wake me up when there’s some good detroit/bangin’ techno on a podcast feed?
Otherwise, a podcast is an inherent content protection mechanism that reduces your interweb visibility as a contributor, unless you’re famous (in which case the inverse is true), and is currently un-indexable by any search engine… unless you have some kind of voice-transcription software going while you’re recording your program… and make that available on your site.
Is it great new technology for talk-radio kinds of content? Maybe. If the content is high-quality. For niche-market music? Yes, definitely. I think once the novelty of receiving early adopter talk-radio style content from a feed wears off, music is where podcasting will see it’s greatest application. Ok, maybe movies, someday… and tv shows. Although, the Konfabulator “new widgets feed” does send the actual widgets to me with rss attachments. That’s pretty freaking cool.
One session of Adam Curry and Dave Winer spending a couple of hours saying “Wow, this is a podcast! We have technical glitches just like a radio program! Let’s talk about podcasting some more!” … well.. that was enough for me. And, I’m sure every talk-radio-podcast will spend a couple of sessions doing that. “dude! we’re on the air! But it’s not on the air! But we’re podcasting! Dude, is it recording?”
like I said.. wake me up when the little-known musicians start finding this delivery mechanism.
11th February 2005, 12:15 pm
I’m noticing how many communications start with the word “So… ” IM and voice, mostly. I’m going to try to break this pattern.
Update: deeje says “you know what? I agree.”
7th February 2005, 11:20 am
We all got promised one, and last week I got my shuffle. It’s really great. Dare I say… insanely great? It’s just shocking how your music is with you, but with some sort of ESP kind of power. Like your computer is beaming music to your head without needing to be tied to it. It’s virtually weightless, and hands free. Also, I’m noticing, it’s less figity than my big iPod.
Oh, sure, when I want to be specific about what I’m listening to, the big iPod is the way to go, but… throwing all your new music on the shuffle is fast and easy. I gave it to R, and she’s using it, yay 
… My parents checked it out last weekend, and they were both really impressed.
I noticed that it’s instantly recognizable when you see one in public. Great brand building stuff! I saw while at dinner out over the weekend that someone had gotten one… it’s so easy to spot if it’s out in view. I also noticed that when the shuffle is on the lanyard and it’s turned backwards, the green indication area looks like a smiling mouth 
While it’s not a new concept, it brings the concept home into reality. Sure, there’s lots of MP3 players out there, but this is the one. Seamless integration of my music on my computer when I’m there, all my music on my iPod, my new music on a near weightless shuffle when I’m away from my computer, and the best music buying experience. We were talking about buying music the “old fashioned way”… I take the new way for granted now. Not having to buy a whole CD of crap for one good song… well.. DUH, why would you spend $15 for $0.99 worth of music??
When you go on the other side of the equation, to the music creation side, you’ve got GarageBand, which I’ve used somewhat extensively. It’s great. Dare I say again, insanely great?? Stepping up from there is Logic Express, which I’ve used less extensively, but the time I have spent with it has been pretty magical. The gain in control is shocking. It’s everything I need in a music composition tool. The final step up from there is Logic Pro. I tried out version 6 about a year ago and had a hard time getting my head around everything you can do with it. Logic Pro is just mind bendingly powerful and tweaky. I’m sure version 7 is just that much better with Apple Loops Format inclusion and the new instruments and pitch bending stuff (and all the other stuff I don’t even know about!)…
Apple is firing on all cylinders for music.
21st January 2005, 01:03 pm
5th January 2005, 12:04 am
cnn.com
SAN FRANCISCO, California (Reuters) — Motorcycle daredevil Evel Knievel cannot sue a Web site that published a photo of him with two women above a caption reading “You’re never too old to be a pimp,” a U.S. appeals court ruled on Tuesday.
The term “pimp” was probably intended as a compliment, the court said. But Knievel said, “What good is law in the United States of America if five or six goddamn bimbos are going to rule against it?”
I’m sure he probably intended “goddamn bimbos” as a compliment.
Informed of the decision by a telephone call to his home in Clearwater, Florida, Knievel responded angrily.
“They disregarded the goddamn law and they ought to be discharged, they ought to be ashamed of themselves,” he told Reuters.
Knievel, 66, added that he would ask his lawyer to appeal the case to the Supreme Court.
You know, one time back in the 80’s, when fat laces first popped up, I of course had some… I had a lot, actually, but I had this one pair that were super bright blue and magenta. Ugly as sin, but I liked them at the time. Anyway, we were on vacation in England, and a group of 3 kids around my age saw my fatties and started pointing and calling them “Fresh!!” which hadn’t caught on yet in the US… or not much where I lived anyway. I was pissed because I thought they were dissing my style, but in fact, they were not. Quite the opposite. Later in life, I saw that they were paying me a compliment.
To hear of Evel Knievel, once a bastion of ultracool daredevilness, be so… fucking… square… ah well, it’s kind of sad.
Evel, guess what: I guess the caption author was wrong. You are “officially” too old to be a pimp. You will never again be a pimp in my eyes.
21st December 2004, 12:52 pm
This probably won’t last long, but this is the best mashup album I’ve heard. The beastie boys and the beatles… The Beastles!
thanks for the headsup boingboing
13th December 2004, 05:02 pm
Japanese band uses old 8-bit Nintendo to make music: “Mark Frauenfelder:
justin007 sez: ‘Found this link to an 8-bit band out of Tokyo that uses a Famicom (8-Bit Nintendo) to create some very cool tunes. The next evolution of Shibuya-Kei. Click on the links to listen to their MP3’s.’ Link“
(Via Boing Boing.)
Yeah.. when are we gonna get to an emulation point where we can totally emulate even hackery and circuit bending on electronics? Aren’t our computers fast enough to give anyone who wants a speak and spell one to mess around with in emulation? Most laptop track pads are touch sensitive like a tablet, so, the interface would allow for that kind of entropy in the data input. The sound of the famicon is pretty unique, and actually does some interesting things with sound beyond the classic “normal” sounds. Rather like the Roland TB303 or the Moog… highly hackable.
6th December 2004, 10:09 am
So awesome. XL for me… an excellent holiday gift.
4th December 2004, 02:30 pm
has anyone but me and jono noticed the sudden parade of transformers all over the place? Perhaps we’re reaching the age when the kids who grew up watching the transformers are in charge of creative departments now, and have the desire to see the idea explored in a more realistic looking visualization. I love it, so, I couldn’t be happier if a whole bunch of macross or other transformer/mecha movies came out. That would be totally awesome.
30th November 2004, 02:17 am
We just got Dish Network, and with it a bunch of new educational channels. We got the DVR version of the receiver, and I’d not yet spent time to learn how it works. I saw “Noam Chomsky: Manufacturing Consent” in the dish guide at a time about an hour after we’d have left for thanksgiving dinner, so I figured I’d see if I could just move the cursor over to that block and hit record. Yeeep so I watched it this morning. Wow. I can’t even begin to redigest it for a simple blog entry. key points I took away from it were:
- Professional sports are designed to make you care about things other than the stuff that matters, like civic duty and the welfare of your childrens’ future.
- The western cultural power structure is based around getting the relatively uneducated 80% of people in it’s reach (that’s me) to obey, follow, not question, and be limited in scope of thought and ability to question anything, essentially.
- many many many other things that I should probably go and watch again and take notes on.
if you can find it, rent it, or in a striking display of irony, buy it.
18th November 2004, 01:15 pm
My old artist friend Ken Farkash (HEY, I’d love to reconnect with you, first to probably tell me I forgot how to spell your name, sorry man!) once told me about Too Much Coffee Man. Jono triggered that memory for me this morning.
still at it. Funny as ever.
17th November 2004, 04:25 pm
Wow, Wendy just showed me (thanks Fred!) Delicious Library. Wow. So cool. Now you too can be a library. And loan stuff out. And know where it is. Scan in your books, cds, DVDs, whatever, using your iSight (so cool!!), and Delicious Library goes out and grabs amazon.com info for you automatically. Deeeeluxe.
