I think we can all agree that the iMac design is pretty darned tacky. I mean, plastic in those colors as a household applience pretty much went out around 1963 or so. With that, may I suggest Luddite Industries , fine grained hardwood (oak, mahogany, ash and cedar) cased computers.
This article is why I read /. , occasionally there's a gem. In this case two. Since the ditz in the delivery van took out Matilda, my BMW 528e, I haven't taken the time to put the CD player into Daphne the Nissan Maxima. I also miss some of the automation features Matilda had (mileage calculations, speed monitoring, stuff like that). It's not like I need another project, but in the "gosh, wouldn't it be cool" department, a mid-range Pentium with a couple of gig of hard disk space that played MP3s and to which I could add some measurement peripherals and eventually an LCD screen tied into a GPS receiver...
Anyway, http://utter.chaos.org.uk/~altman/mp3mobile/ describes the construction of such a system, including a power supply (with vibration control, the hard part of automotive engineering). http://cajun.current.nu/ is another car audio jukebox. http://www.bangsplat.org/autolinux/ is a project to build mapping software off a common data set.
Via Cameron , the Freedom CPU , a GPL'd 64 bit chip design. It uses a memory to memory architecture, rather than an extensive register set, for faster context switching, up to 4 FPUs per CPU, although the instruction set won't be compatible with x86 architectures, the idea is to be able to use cheap components by making it electrically compatible.
In Wired, no less, the definitive explanation of Godwin's Law .
J.R. Mooneyham wrote pointing me to http://members.aol.com/kurellian/spint.html , a set of predictions and forecasts. Most of his technical predictions seem reasonable, I'm not sure about his time periods and many of the social changes seem more hunch than anything. But I'll wander through it a bit more and see what clicks and what doesn't.
Steven K. Roberts is a technomad (One who travels the Earth propelled by human power using technology to render physical location irrelevant), back in the '80s and early '90s he was known for pedaling around a monster bicycle with incredible (for the time) computing power, now he's working on building some small boats for wandering the coasts.
It's really all about how we use our time, isn't it? Aging is such a gentle wake-up call that you can sleep right through it, watch the Simpsons, have another beer, idly dream of projects, graffitize a passing thought onto the TO-DO list, and call that progress.
Whoops: That doorbell connected to the web thing is http://www.icepick.com/
A little Pollyanna optimism to go off with that http://www.dieoff.org/ link below comes from http://www.overpopulation.com/
So some geek has connected his doorbell to the 'net . Ring the bell, appear on the web cam. Likewise his refrigerator door. The toilet flush is logged, but doesn't have an associated camera. But where it starts to get interesting is the bar code reader on the trash can, so he can get automated lists of items he's out of...
I'm sure I've linked to this before, but it's moved since last time: The Tamagothi .
Via Cameron , CAUGHT is the Consortium Against Unnecessary Graphics and Hypertext Tags. Okay, so I like
http://www.awaken.org/ describes itself better than I could:
If each of us were to catalog our own human experience and make it available on the web, we could lend to each other an omnipotence unattainable prior to the existence of the Net. We could take events in our own lives, which have mystified us since their occurrence, and search the web for similar encounters. We could compare and contrast other's experiences and draw deeper meaning into our own experience.
From http://quimby.gnus.org/jukebox/jukebox.html comes an Emacs based MP3 management system.
The main obstacle to achieving several hours worth of hacking in one go is the constant need to go and put more CDs into the ever-hungry CD player. To help obviate this need I've developed The Idiot Jukebox.
http://www.themoonlitroad.com/ Ghost stories and strange folktales of the American South, told by the region's most celebrated storytellers.
I mentioned going to see the work from the World Championship Great Arcata to Ferndale Cross Country Kinetic Sculpture Race . Awesome and inspiring, in a silly sort of way.
Damn, just when I'd thought that the archival inks from MIS and the Epson Stylus inkjet printers were the way to go for digital proofing, someone mentions the ALPS printers . Almost looks like 2400DPI continuous tone. Not sure about archival properties. Gonna have to go track down some sample prints and see what pops up.
Great list of Linux notes
LinuxCare provides technical support for your Linux systems. And at least one of the guys who started it is a really cool person.
From http://www.gu.uwa.edu.au/users/greg/ referenced below:
Zen-Master Greg: Do you know what the Buddha looks like?
Student A: No. Why?
Zen-Master Greg: Because it is said, "If you meet the Buddha travelling down the road, kill him".
Student A: And?
Zen-Master Greg: I also do not know what the Buddha looks like. So I am forced to guess. And you appear to be convinced of your own enlightenment.
Zen-Master Greg enlightens us with his tales of tech support.
I (Dan) have mentioned a couple of times that I'm enjoying photography, and see the future of photography as digital, but digital printing technologies have a bunch of problems. Well, MIS Supply has a start, they sell waterproof and UV resistant inks for the Epson Stylus Color printers and, for you black and white nuts, have a 4 shades of grey cartridge and a link to ISIS which provides image management software to use 'em.
So I've been looking for places to take the photography I've been doing recently, and rather than get involved in the whole optical reproduction cycle I've decided that I need to leverage my digital skills. Unfortunately, digital photography is still in its infancy and, for the most part, sucks. However, shooting on film and scanning gives reasonable data, and for certain types of output the results aren't too bad. The leaders in fine art output are Evercolor , and many of the landscape prints I look at are printed using their Luminage process. I'm not completely won over, I've found that for certain sorts of images I can identify a Luminage print at standard viewing distances, but they seem to be the state of the art right now.
Chris Crawford's The Art of Computer Game Design is at http://www.vancouver.wsu.edu/fac/peabody/game-book/Coverpage.html
via More Like This comes The Hyperbolic Tree , a way to overview large link bases. Turn on Java first, then go explore something big, like the Tripod pages. Rough, but there's the germ of an idea here that'd be worth pursuing.
The new PNG spec has been released. PNG is a Turbo-Studly Image Format with Lossless Compression. Not nearly as efficient or cool as the scheme that Andreas and the rest of the guys over at BitJazz have whipped up, but PNG is more widely accepted and free.
What happens when a carnivore marries an herbivore? How do their kids from previous marriages get along? How about the wolf boy challenging his new rabbit father for alpha male status? Kevin & Kell have the answers.
I hadn't realized that there's an alt.tech-support.recovery newsgroup. Associated with that is Tech Tales , or "The one that wouldn't go away". Excerpted from the "Quickies" section:
Caller: I am having trouble "cutting and plastering" words from the Information Superhighway.
Tech: You mean the Internet...sir?
Caller: I don't know this stuff! I'm only a high-school teacher!
On my recent trip to Yosemite I rented a camera that has a 4x5" image area. Normal cameras which use 35mm film create a 24x36mm image area, and APS cameras are even smaller. But the cool thing about the big cameras is that you can also alter perspective, play with the geometry, have both near and far things in focus by tilting the lens. And taking pictures like this, where each picture costs dollars rather than sense, is a slow, contemplative process. So I've looked around at a few cameras which interest me:
Bender Photographic makes a kiln-dried cherry wood kit camera that's lighter and folds up smaller than many commercial field cameras.
The Canham seems like the cadillack of lightweight field cameras.
There's nothing much here yet, but the logo is way worth checking out. The Chattanooga Unix Gnu and Linux Users Group (ChUGALUG) has started.
...and the geeks shall inherit the earth...
Excerpted roughly from a press release:
11th Annual Digital Be-In Implores the ''Digerati'' to Take a Stand Against the War on Drugs
[snip]
The DrugPeace Channel will begin operations on January 9, 1999. The Drug Peace Campaign is based in San Francisco: DPC, PO Box 78067, San Francisco, CA 94107, 415-971-3573, Julia Carter, Director. Be-In 11 Event Sponsors include Mind Books and the Drug Policy Foundation, and Associate Sponsors Alexa Internet, NORML, MAPS, DRCNet, California Institute of Integral Studies, Psychedelic Island Views, The Sacred Dance Society, SF Bay Guardian, Japan's Zavtone Magazine, A&R Partners and Graham Technology Solutions.
The Digital Be-In has been produced for over a decade in San Francisco by Verbum, Inc., an early multimedia developer which published one of the first multimedia CD-ROMs in 1991 and many educational products for creative professionals working on computers.
See the events pages at http://www.stopthedrugwar.org/globalcoalition/ http://www.legalize.org/events/
Archives of neat sites posted to Flutterby , notes to webmaster@flutterby.com