technology

Chris Knight's avatar

It’s 2:53 a.m. in the morning and I’m up making tea and working on a new website and some other stuff at this way late hour. Thought I’d make a post to chronicle the past few days developments…

Ever since Friday night a wazoo-load of e-mails and phone calls have been coming in from good folks who caught my school board commercial on E! Television’s The Soup. I’m still a bit overwhelmed by the attention the ad seems to have gained lately, now over a year since it ran (for only a week and a half on WGSR Star 39 in Reidsville). One neat thing that has happened because of it is that I’ve been hearing from a lot of people that I’ve somehow lost contact with over the years. I honestly had no idea that The Soup was so popular! I’d heard of it before but until now ...

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I might have to get an iPod now after all.

Numerous times on this blog, I’ve written about how the biggest thing keeping me from getting an iPod is that they don’t have user-replaceable batteries. Which is “bass-ackwards” ‘cuz Apple could be making a fortune by selling spare batteries. Because especially with a power-guzzling thing like an iPod (especially in video mode) it makes sense that consumers should be able to slap in a freshly-charged battery during a long plane ride or elsewhere that a power socket isn’t readily available. But Apple still seems loathe to take this simple, yet potentially very profitable, measure. Oh sure, Apple does have a battery-replacement program… but it charges around $70 and then they don’t even guarantee that you’ll get your original iPod back!

Then I happened to find this news story about a company called iPodjuice.com. For $29 you send in your ...

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According to this story on Wired (which I first found via Slashdot), a robotic cannon being tested by the South African military went haywire last week and started shooting at everything on its own. Nine people died and fourteen others were wounded.

Here’s some of the account…

SA National Defence Force spokesman brigadier general Kwena Mangope says the cause of the malfunction is not yet known…

Media reports say the shooting exercise, using live ammunition, took place at the SA Army’s Combat Training Centre, at Lohatlha, in the Northern Cape, as part of an annual force preparation endeavour.

Mangope told The Star that it “is assumed that there was a mechanical problem, which led to the accident. The gun, which was fully loaded, did not fire as it normally should have,” he said. “It appears as though the gun, which is computerised, jammed before there was some sort of

...
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Chris Fettig found something really kewl. It’s a 2006 story from National Public Radio about a special high-frequency sound – which most teenagers can hear but not most adults – that storekeepers in Great Britain have been using to keep young people from loitering in their stores. Well, now the kids are using that same sound as a ringtone on their cellphones… which lets them know while in class that they’ve a text message. The teachers can’t hear it but the teens can!

Well, supposedly adults can’t hear this. Because I’m in my early thirties and I’ve heard it clear as a bell every time that I’ve played this: it’s a very high-pitch buzzing sound that might give you a headache if you listen to it for too long. Want to try it for yourself? Take a listen to it right here!...

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Eric Wilson passed along this… strange… story: apparently there are teeny-tiny robotic cameras that are flying around disguised as bugs. And they seem to have already begun to be deployed…

Vanessa Alarcon saw them while working at an antiwar rally in Lafayette Square last month.

“I heard someone say, ‘Oh my god, look at those,’ ” the college senior from New York recalled. “I look up and I’m like, ‘What the hell is that?’ They looked kind of like dragonflies or little helicopters. But I mean, those are not insects.”

Out in the crowd, Bernard Crane saw them, too.

“I’d never seen anything like it in my life,” the Washington lawyer said. “They were large for dragonflies. I thought, ‘Is that mechanical, or is that alive?’ “

That is just one of the questions hovering over a handful of similar sightings at political events in Washington and New York. Some

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You’ve probably heard about how some people are taking their new iPhones and hacking them so that they can use carriers other than AT&T, run “third-party” software not approved by Apple, etc. Many or most (maybe all) of these folks are suddenly lugging around very expensive “bricks”, because this week Apple released an update for the iPhone that is disabling such modified phones.

I took a looksee through the licensing agreement for the iPhone. The thing is Digital Rights Management from Hell. From my understanding of the agreement, buying and using an iPhone is lifetime indentured loyalty to AT&T, if you want to keep using it. That’s beyond the initial two-year service agreement.

In light of my own recent experience with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it sure looks like Apple saw the rights afforded to people by the DMCA if they attempted to circumvent the software and contract, ...

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Many lab animals that have been given microchip implants have developed cancerous tumors, according to newly published research.

“The transponders were the cause of the tumors,” said Keith Johnson, a retired toxicologic pathologist, explaining in a phone interview the findings of a 1996 study he led at the Dow Chemical Co. in Midland, Mich.

Leading cancer specialists reviewed the research for The Associated Press and, while cautioning that animal test results do not necessarily apply to humans, said the findings troubled them. Some said they would not allow family members to receive implants, and all urged further research before the glass-encased transponders are widely implanted in people.

I thought this was pretty fascinating, in light of how there’s a push from several sectors to start putting these chips in humans. And since some people are associating these chips with the biblical “Mark of the Beast”, it kinda makes you ...

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We bought a 37-inch LCD high-definition television set last November. It’s specifically an LCD screen because when I was doing research before we went out to look at sets the widespread consensus was that LCD screens don’t “burn-in” like plasma screens do.

Well, guess what?

I can’t show what this looks like because it doesn’t show up well in photos, but there are two very fine vertical lines running down the entire height of the screen: one line running equidistant from each of the left and right sides of the image. They are exactly where the borders of the “pillars” are when you watch a standard (not high-def) image without “stretching” it to fill the screen. Since most of the interesting programming around here is standard definition and I don’t like distorted images, the tendency is to watch television “pillarboxed”. I guess that’s how the lines got in there: ...

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Let’s get what I’m obviously going to say out of the way. The thing that I always mention whenever the subject of They Might Be Giants comes up. Namely, that Flood from 1990 is the greatest musical album ever produced.

I dare anyone to try and tell me otherwise. Not when every single song on this album is nothing less than a work of freakin’ genius.

I’ve owned a copy of Flood in one form or another since 1992. It’s easily the most-played album on my MP3 player. So many good memories associated with this album. I sorta feel a duty to shamelessly pitch for it 🙂

Anyway, yeah I’m a huge fan of “the two Johns”, Linnel and Flansburgh. These guys have always been on the cutting edge not just of music but of technology. And now Gearlog has an awesome interview with John Flansburgh in two parts ...

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