Photos from RC Planes

So, OK, this one is like a 10 out of 10 on the geek-o-meter but I still think it's really cool. Photos from around the world taken from cameras mounted on radio controlled airplanes.

Link.

Mobile and Open: A Manifesto

Howard Rheingold wrote a great manifesto for TheFeature outlining what he thinks it is going to take to create a healthy and diverse mobile mediasphere. He invites your comments at the site.

"The devices that most people on earth will carry or wear in coming decades could become platforms for technical and entrepreneurial innovation, foundations for industries that don't exist yet, enablers of social and political change. However, it is far from certain that mobile media will go the route of the PC, where teenage dropouts like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and millions of others actively shaped the technology, or the Internet, where search engines were invented in dorm rooms and innovators like Tim Berners-Lee gave away the World Wide Web for free without asking permission or changing any wiring.

Powerful interests recognize the dangers such a world poses for business models that depend on controlling and metering access to content, conduit, or services for a mass market, and they are acting to protect their interests. That's what digital rights management, extension of copyright laws into what formerly had been the public domain, the broadcast flag, spectrum regulation policies that favor archaic technologies and incumbent licensees, trusted computing systems that bake all these rules into monopoly silicon are about".

Link via BoingBoing

Professor Felton's 2005 Predictions

Here are Ed Felton's predictions for 2005:


(1) DRM technology, especially on PCs, will be seen increasingly as a security and privacy risk to end users.

(2) Vonage and other leading VoIP vendors will start to act like incumbents, welcoming regulation of their industry sector.

(3) Internet Explorer will face increasing competitive pressure from Mozilla Firefox. Microsoft's response will be hamstrung by its desire to maintain the fiction that IE is an integral part of the operating system.

(4) As blogs continue to grow in prominence, we'll see consolidation in the blog world, with major bloggers either teaming up with each other or affiliating with major news outlets or web sites.

(5) A TV show or movie that is distributed only on the net will become a cult hit.

(6) The Supreme Court's Grokster decision won't provide us with a broad, clear rule for evaluating future innovations, so the ball will be back in Congress's court.

(7) Copyright issues will be stalemated in Congress.

(8) There will be no real progress on the spam, spyware, and desktop security problems.

(9) Congress will address the spyware problem by passing a harmless but ineffectual law, which critics will deride as the "CAN-SPY Act."

(10) DRM technology will still fail to prevent widespread infringement. In a related development, pigs will still fail to fly.

(11) New P2P systems will marry swarming distribution (as in BitTorrent) with distributed indexing (as in Kazaa et al). Copyright owners will resort to active technical measures to try to corrupt the systems' indices.

(12) X-ray vision technology will become more widely available (though not to the general public), spurring a privacy hoohah.

Link.

Real Jumps The Shark

A fairly accurate analysis and an interesting prediction from Christopher Carfi on where Real is headed:

"Here are my predictions on where this story is going to go. Real is going to continue to swim upstream against not only Apple and Microsoft, but also a host of others such as Buy.com in the downloadable music and video space. They will continue to attempt to cut deals with "last mile" intermediaries such as Comcast, Earthlink, and others to get automatically installed on desktops in the gaming space. They will work with Vodaphone, Nokia, Sprint and others to get their players as the "default" media and game players on mobile devices. And maybe this "ignore the customer, but focus on the intermediaries" strategy will be successful for them, which will only happen if they are able to get complete lock-in, which is increasingly unlikely as other alternatives become available."

Link to "The Social Customer Manifesto".

Tsunami: Satellite Photos

Banda Aceh Shore (Before Tsunami)
Link to high resolution image.


Banda Aceh Shore (After waters recede)
Link to high resolution image.


Many more photos on the DigitalGlobe QuickBird Image site.

Link to DigitalGlobe.


UPDATE:
Someone from Denmark (I think) has synch'd up some Satellite photos of before and after the Tsunami here.

@U2

Whether you like them or not (I'm more a fan of their earlier stuff) this is pretty cool.

Link to Wired's Cult of Mac blog.

Extreme Whale Watching

At Chicken on the sea, we filet by hand...

Link to an MPEG video stream.

BBC on Blogs

Americans are becoming avid blog readers, with 32 million getting hooked in 2004, according to new research.
BBC sites the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

Link.

WSJ on Video Blogs

I happen to agree with the Wall Street Journal on this one.

I watched at least 6 video clips on Boxing Day in both the Quicktime and Windows Media formats that appeared in my RSS news reader (Shrook for Mac OS X). They arrived via Feedsters RSS Video feed found here.

Link to The Wall Street Journal article.

To fly...

"To fly is everything!"

A museum of early aeroplane history. Includes galleries of movies of aviation pioneers (watch an early flight from Wilbur Wright's point of view), and links to early aviation patents.


Link via MeFi.

RIAA and spyware

Professor Ed Felton points to and comments on an interesting story asserting that the RIAA has released intentionally infected music files onto P2P file sharing networks.

Link.

Digital Media Predictions

Some interesting predictions on media trends in 2005.

Link via Filmoculous.

Seals with Lawyers

Yikes! Could there be anything nastier?

The Navy Seals are suing AP for disclosing identities (publishing photos) of six Seal team members.

Link

on Creativity

Hugh "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards" Macleod is a creative director who writes about the new, happy, fun, grim meathook realities of marketing and advertising.

Link via Creative Commons.

2005

Some of my 2005 "Food for Thought":



"The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature."
-- Joseph Campbell





"Stop leaving and you will arrive. Stop searching and you will see. Stop running away and you will be found."
-- Lao Tzu (ancient Chinese sage)

Headless iMac?

Rumors are flying about a $500 monitor-less iMac that may be announced at the January 11th MacWorld in San Francisco.

This makes sense and would be very cool but there's been lots of bad rumors flying around lately (like last weeks Spanish rumor/hoax that Apple was setting up a cell phone service).

Target Market for a sub-$500 iMac: Windows users (switchers), iPod users and me! I'd simply hook one up to my 42" gas plasma display and run a wireless keyboard, mouse and WiFi net connection :-)

If this comes to be and Apple has done their homework it should include some type of KMV switch or switchbox to accomodate monitors & keyboards people already own.

Apple says: "it'll never happen".

Link via Gizmodo.

Tsunami

Link to an animation of yesterdays Tsunami.

Link to update on the disaster from bloggers.

Additional update here.

Via BoingBoing.

UPDATE: The Turkish press is now reporting that the wave has claimed 55,000 lives from all effected countries. Link.

UPDATE: By the time you consider recovery / discovery efforts and the devastating effects of disease over the next couple of weeks this thing could claim 200,000 plus lives. One of the worst natural disasters in history.
I'm saying prayers for the lost souls and the devasted ones left behind.

UPDATE: Jesus. I hate being right.

Frankly, I'd be just as happy spinning at the same old speed for a few more thousand years.

UPDATE: How bloggers are helping.

SCIENTIFIC SUMMARY HERE.

UPDATE: As of (1/17/05) 170,000 souls lost and UN relief/recovery agencies have been finding 2-3,000 bodies per day... and think they will be for the next several days.

"Tell us about your balls Pete"

In spite of the wonderful Holiday tie in I think this is one of the best SNL skits of all time.

There's was a great follow up "NPR Delicious Dish" skit on a subsequent Baldwin hosted episode. The topic: "weiners" :-)

Link to MPEG video (57Mb).

A big mother

UPDATE:

Link to interior schematic
(see if you can find where they're going to keep the peanuts).


The world's biggest plane has started rolling off assembly lines and is expected to take its first flight in March 2005. The quarter-billion-dollar, twin-deck, four-aisle plane can carry 555 passengers. Thanks to its design's outsized wings, future versions of the economical plane may carry as many as 800 passengers.

Link to Airbus site.

Link via MeFi.

Ole! Santa

Deliciously bad... but I love this kinda stuff :-)

Link to MP3's (via BoingBoing)

Scared by Santa

Well, as the Church Lady used to say: "if you rearrange the letters what do you get...."

Link to the photo contest winners.

Happy Solstice

(AP photo from Time Magazine)

Let me be the first to wish all my pagan, Druid and other friends a Happy Solstice!

364 longer days ahead.

Holiday Mashup

Video mashup of Pulp Fiction with vintage Rankin-Bass holiday animation. Link (Thanks, Perry E. Metzger, also spotted on Adam Fields)

Link via Xeni's posting on BoingBoing.

iPhone Update

(Design Concepts)


Rumours that Apple is making their own phone (dubbed by the pundits the "iPhone") are flying around the net, backed up by reports that they're showing prototypes around to their partners. These rumours are probably true -- for one simple reason -- the iPod.

Link to Mobilewhack article.

Sky High (1/2 mile high to be exact)

A mind bending 160 floors, a half mile high (or 8/10ths of a kilometer, for math-challenged metric types) skyscraper, dwarfing Taiwan's current record holding Taipei 101 (1,671 feet) and making a mockery of the Sears Tower's 108 floors.

To be built by Samsung in Dubai, UAE.

Link via Gizmodo.

Westfalia concept

Scheduled to be an entry in the 2005 Detroit Auto show.
I suppose Philip Stark will be designing the bong for it.

A total "BoBo" mobile.

Montreal Design firm website here.
Great animation here.

What's a blog?

The Honorable Richard Posner chimes in with his answer:

"It is a fresh and striking exemplification of Friedrich Hayek's thesis that knowledge is widely distributed among people and that the challenge to society is to create mechanisms for pooling that knowledge."

Link via Corante.

Sea Legs

"Honey! I'm going to the Tim Horton's Drive Thru, you want anything?"

Link via Gizmodo.

Cartoon bones

Betty Boop, Pikachu, Fred Flinstone and many more! :-)

Link.

War

...is hell.

Poodle Fitness

This is (at the same time) scary, sad, a little disturbing and one of the funniest things I have ever seen.

Link to video.

Farewell Pierre

A truly great Canadian.

I loved the way he pronouced Andrew Onderdonk's name in the CBC documentary film "The National Dream".

He will be missed.


A rather interesting video link here. (NSFW)

Transform This!

A very compelling and demograhically "spot on" car ad.
and the motion capture really kicks ass.

Link to video here.

"Let me be the first to welcome our new anthropomorphic rock star over lords"

"In designing GuitarBot, our goal was to create an electrified slide guitar that was versatile, responsive, capable of fast and slow playing, easy to control, with high-quality sound, modular and portable. We also wanted to extend, not simply duplicate, the capabilities of a human guitarist."

Now if we can just find a robot to replace Brittany....


Link via MetaFilter.
Link to video.

Corgi Art Gallery

Very cool Corgi Art Gallery.

Link via BoingBoing.

Rudolph at 40

A great story on NPR by Steve Inskeep on the Rankin Bass stop motion TV production of "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer" (a Canadian production I belive). The longest running, highest rated TV show ever. It took 18 months to create the 50 minutes of stop motion animation.

A link to the audio stream can be found on this page.

"Please Don't Eat The Daisies"

As long as these things don't grow up to become Killer Tomatoes this could be a very cool application for genetically modified plants.

When the plant roots come into contact with landmines... their color changes.

Link via BoingBoing.

Apple iPhone

This really does make a lot of sense.... I sure as hell would want one.

Link.

George Orwell or Woody Allen?

you decide.

Link.

How NOT

to pull a car out of the water.

Tune Backpack

I actually bult (or should I say "McGuiver'd") one of these for myself over 5 years ago using a North Face backback and a set of SONY sports Walkman speakers (probably around 5 watts each). I still use it... but exclusively for Skiing. I always felt that headphones on the slopes were dangerous. People on the chairlifts or Gondolas are usually very receptive... if not, the remote volume control is never far away :-)

Link via Engadget.

Geek Chess Set

but you’re not seriously going to waste money buying a chess set at a store when you could just make one out of whatever spare 50 ohm BNC, SMA, and N terminators with various BNC, SMA, N, APC7, F, UHF connectors and inter-series adapters you have around the house, are you?


Link via Engadget.

John Cleese TV

John Cleese is now performing at his ranch in California via his
web site which charges $50 a year for the privilege (though some of the content are free.)

Fed up with television executives, travels and studios, the Monty Python star set up the website as a vehicle for his humour and personal philosophy. He updates the site every day with new sketches, pictures of his home life and biographical information.

"It's like having a tiny TV station or a magazine. The simplicity is delightful," said Cleese last week.

Link.

Digital Video still too hard

Kinda what I thought, just based on talking to friends...

Link via Engadget.

Music Industry Business Models

Doc Searls on Mark Cuban's ideas about Music Industry business models.

Wireless iPod (patent)

Engadget has the scoop here.