Updates — No comments
16
Feb 10
Woot had a great blog post about several failed olympic imitators. Fauxlympiad!
Enter Ted Turner, with his uncanny ability to wrap self-promotion in a crunchy shell of idealism. The Goodwill Games was born. With two major cable networks at his disposal and no political axe to grind, perhaps only he could’ve brought together the two sparring superpowers, although having Gorbachev in the Kremlin probably helped, too. So American athletes finally scored that trip to Moscow for the ‘86 Goodwill Games, along with 3,000 other competitors from 79 countries. For the first time since 1976 in Montreal, U.S. and Soviet athletes would compete on the same international stage.
link: Woot : Fauxlympiad: Four Failed Olympic Imitations
Personally, I had completely forgotten about motoball. That should have been much better than it was. Maybe if they had to wear spikes on their shoulder pads and flames had to shoot from the exhaust of their motorcycles it would have been cooler.
Despite all of this, it is actually a good read about the turmoil that has surrounded the olympics in the past because of the cold wars, world wars, and stalin.
Technology — No comments
12
Feb 10
Sales of CJ Corporation’s snack sausages are on the increase in South Korea because of the cold weather; they are useful as a meat stylus for those who don’t want to take off their gloves to use their iPhones. It seems that the sausages, electrostatically speaking, are close approximations of the human finger. Here’s the not-entirely-useful English translation of a Korean news article about the soaring sausage sales. (via clusterflock)
link: Meat stylus for the iPhone
Science — No comments
08
Feb 10
Those who reported feeling a great deal of boredom were 37 per cent more likely to have died by the end of the study, the researchers found.
link: ‘Boredom can kill you’ – Yahoo!
This doesn’t surprise me that much. Every calculus and trigonometry student in the world knows this. I nearly died before I got to the end of the article.
Updates — No comments
05
Feb 10
If you’re stealing a car these days, there’s a good chance you’re not bothering to actually pick the locks, but if you are, your job is about to get a little easier. A device called the Electronic Key Impressioner is inserted into a car door and scans the position of the tumblers inside. It feeds information back to a PC over USB which then, when told the car’s model, can provide the necessary information to cut the perfect key on the first attempt. Right now it only works on Fords with simple metal keys (like, say, a 1967 Shelby GT500), but the hope is to expand the device to support other manufacturers and, possibly, electronic keys in the future. It will be available to locksmiths and authorized security professionals in 2010.
link: USB Electronic Key Impressioner could help you be gone in 60 milliseconds — Engadget
Technology — 1 comment
05
Feb 10
The iPad is nothing more than a large iPod Touch. It’s lacking a 16:9 screen and while the bezel has to be of a reasonable size to allow for holding the device with your hand without your thumb poking the screen all the time, it’s simply too big. Finally those few people who’ve already used it are saying that having a standard keyboard on a device that you can’t rest easily on your lap and that is intended to be used one-handed is lunacy. Just look at the curved corner keyboards Microsoft introduced with the tablet editions of Windows to see how they should have done it.
link: Why the iPad will fail and help Windows 7 to succeed | Windows 7 News
I feel like OS 10.0 just came out again after reading this article. Way to go d-bag and be completely biased, but wait, no, you’re a journalist, so this was clearly not opinion but just the facts.
I don’t remember anybody calling it ugly, but you did, so lets talk about that. You call the iPad ugly, but you would rather use a netbook? Did I miss something?
Sorry, I read the article, and then just had to write down EXACTLY what I was feeling. I don’t want an iPad because I don’t think it will ever fit any purpose I may have for it. I think it does have a purpose and I certainly don’t think this will help Windows 7 adoption, I mean really, what the hell kind of comparison is this? That isn’t a comparison, this is a comparison… http://visitmix.com/Opinions/Kindle-vs-iPad-vs-Weimaraner
Technology — 2 comments
04
Feb 10
Well done sir, you have harped on a particular piece of the puzzle that was starring at me the entire time.
The iPad isn’t the future of computing; it’s a replacement for computing. It’s the payoff to all the work done by multiple industries over the last 20–30 years. It’s the subtraction of 20lbs of textbooks in my son’s backpack, and the device I finally feel comfortable buying my parents. That’s why I was surprised by the reaction the iPad got the day it launched. Following along on Twitter I was seeing things like ‘underwhelming’, ‘meh’ , ’it’s not open’, ‘it’s just a big iPhone’, etc. And most of this stuff was coming from people who design and build interactive experiences. As designers, and technologists we’re very much aware that the interfaces we build are for people who are “not us,’ but we still haven’t made that leap about the concept of “computing.”
link: Mule Design Studio’s Blog: The Failure of Empathy
This device isn’t for me… This device is for my parents. This device is for the person that wants nothing to do with the complications of modern computing, rather would like the damn thing to just work.
They could honestly give a shit whether it’s a closed or open system. And, let’s be really honest, they probably care as much about DRM as they do about baseball players juicing; by which I mean not very much at all. They want things to work most of the time, and be easy to fix when they don’t. And if the process by which it happens is “magic” they are totally cool with that.
I was wrong in my initial assumption about the device. I can see this really taking off under these circumstances.
Updates — No comments
03
Feb 10
I am using two online music services today, both of which I have been a member of in the past, but as completely different things. Lala.com was something I joined years ago as a CD trading service. I loved using it because I could trade hard to find CDs with others, but I guess they figured CDs are a little outdated and have changed to a music streaming service.
Last.fm is something I used several years ago as well, but not as Last.fm, but as audioscrobbler. Its idea was that you played your music and it would keep track of what you played, compare it to others that played similar artists, and based on the social network you created would recommend tracks from artists played by others with similar taste in music. Now last.fm does a similar thing, but is much more refined
Right away I can tell Last.fm is in the lead, it was able to scan all of my music and send it with stats within seconds. Lala on the other hand, is taking forever. It currently has over 13 hours remaining.
Hopefully later this week I will be able to have an actual comparison between the two.
Personally, I had completely forgotten about motoball. That should have been much better than it was. Maybe if they had to wear spikes on their shoulder pads and flames had to shoot from the exhaust of their motorcycles it would have been cooler. 
