Category: Legacy
Got back from Cinema Electronica + afterparty (great set by Amon Tobin). I voted for We Want Your Soul (dir by happy) as the best of the bunch, although a couple of the others were also quite good.
Roman Coppola’s Funky Squaredance had a few great moments (the blinking on the up/downbeat is brilliant) but overall didn’t quite capture my imagination.
Hmm, sorta sorry that I missed the Videos That Rock! – a bunch of those I know are great.
I just discovered videos.antville.org, a blog which aggregates/tracks links to cool vidoes.
Soon on DVD: Director’s Label
Building a Balancing Scooter – apparently not hard (of course, that’s coming from a who works on walking robots for a living)
See also: SMU nBot, Ted Larson’s Balancing Robot
So, I spent most of my time today reading about John Titor. I’m almoster certain I’d come across this a while ago, but not in the bloog, so here we go:
- The Story of John Titor – Was he a brilliant fraud, or an ordinary soldier from 2036?
- John Titor – Time Traveler
- Other links – fun links to some real and not so real stuff
- dmoz: science: physics: relativity: time travel – wackiness
While it’s highly unlikely to be true, Titor’s postings do make you go hmmm… (as in considering all that we take for granted) and if nothing else, makes for a great parable.
Does the civil war start in such a way that with this foreknowledge those willing will have time to remove themselves to safer locations.
Yes. You will be forced to ask yourself how many civil rights you will give up to feel safe.
Will you readily be able to identify the enemy.
They will be the ones arresting and holding prople without due process.
So wait, did the civil war already begin?
(it’s occurred to me that the Titor posts could quite possibly be an art project of some sort. if it was a student project, I hope he got an A, it’s quite more effective and smart than that whole mess of stupid e-bay tricks projects)
Russell posts about Palm’s future on Mobitopia. I too share Russell’s concerns, but well, yeah, the new Treo 600, w/ a BT of WiFi SDIO card is gonna kick so much ass.
And the question is really whether Palm is really even making a “smart phone” right now at all. Or whether the Treo 600 is actually more of a small “PDA Phone” and thus not anywhere near the sweet spot in the mobile phone market. In my mind the Treo is actually competing with all the PDAs and PDA phones like the P800 and other UIQ-based phones. With Nokia pushing one-handed smart phones like the 3650/6600 it’s hard to think that Palm is going to be able to compete in that area at all. I’ve said it before, but despite having a great brand, Palm is not Nokia.
Palm seems to want to change this by repackaging PalmOS 5 as the mobile version of their OS. But *why*!?! That’s not going to be able to compete with Symbian and Windows Mobile 2003, both 32 bit multitasking OSes with real file systems. Why would Palm think that? Why waste developer resources on this sort of thing? Better a mobile version of PalmOS 6.0 than old tech. Unless they’re targeting *really* low-powered devices (think about how little power is in the Zire 71, and that gives you an idea), but then they’re directly competing against J2ME and BREW. *That* to me is a *really* bad idea.
Related blogs:
- Mobitopia
- moblogging.org
- textually.org
- Josh Rubin’s Techetiquette, Cool Hunting
- Chinese Characters and Culture – it took me a second to realize the ‘Zhongwen’ romanization.
Zhongwen.com
contains the complete text of Amazon’s
best selling, best reviewed
Chinese-English
dictionary,
: Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary,
which uses the new
(zipu) system of character trees.
Distributed exclusively by Far Eastern Publications at Yale
and available from
Amazon.com.
On the mobile-tech end, I’ve gotten the latest Hiptop OTA updates. Some nice features added, but it doesn’t change the fact that I can’t load my own apps onto my own system and that I don’t have an SSH terminal.
- Handspring NYC Treo 600 Launch Coverage
The big news out of the event is the official announcement of four US wireless carriers. Sprint, AT&T, Cingular and T-Mobile have signed on to carry the Treo 600 in the US. Orange was announced last week in Europe. The smartphone should be available in the US in early to mid-October. The specific price will vary by carrier and plan, but is expected to be in the $600 – $449 range.
- Mossberg loves the Treo 600
- Treo 600 Mailbag
- Treo 600 Coming to Four U.S. Wireless Carriers
treocentral.com is reporting that Sprint will begin offering this smart phone on October 13 for $399, T-Mobile will also begin carrying in October 13, while Cingular expects begin offering it on October 20 for $549 before rebates, with the final cost expected to be $449.
This should probably be taken w/ a grain of salt, an eWeek article from the day before gives much longer timelines for the other carriers
Update: confirmation on dates @ bargainpda
Now the question is, do I stick w/ Sprint or T-Mobile…
I’ve been looking a bit at hardware recently w/ the slew of Athlon 64 reviews coming out. I’m going to hold out for a bit. As I’m doing all my video editing on my Mac right now (what I really need is a dual-G5), the main reason I’m going to need to upgrade is going to be for Half-Life 2 (and yeah, it’s delayed). Hopefully if/when I decide to upgrade, prices will come down, and more motherboards will be available.
I’ve also been taking a second look at building a terrabyte file server. If I combine that project with an Athlon 64 upgrade, i could save some parts money. Most of the price will be the cost of drives. Seagate is introducing its Barracuda 7200.7 SATA drives, which besides having 100GB platters, will also have SATA native command queuing (scheduled to ship in November)
- Wikipedia Phase III Features
- Tricster – Proffesional fireart and poi performance artist
- Trance Music Videos, Singles, Live Sets
- Maaz’s Genre Map, a sub-genre discussion
- Wikipedia: Electronic Music
- linked before, but always good: The Electronica Primer + Timeline
CIA Seeks Probe of White House – I remember the mainstream news not picking up on this earlier (ahh, permalinks would be useful)… I’ve found it interesting how easily distracted and lazy the media has been on covering these types of major, serious wrongs by the the administration (compare to the ridiculous bruhaha’s surrounding Clinton). In my book, compromising national security, walking over the bill of rights, destroying our international good will relations, and the budget are far worse than getting a blowjob, but what do I know?