Rob Beschizza

Introducing the Kindle Gutenberg Bookreader

The end-user license agreement is up at McSweeney's:

Congratulations on purchasing the newest iteration of our electronic readers, the Kindle Genius Browser. We have made this new device compatible with all previous versions of the e-book, but there are some new features we'd like to introduce.

Rob Beschizza

No, you don't need a new one

I love Anil Dash's website, "Last Year's Model," which reminds us that the best gadgets are most likely the ones we already have.

Rob Beschizza

Power On Self Test: Watermark

Rob Beschizza

SEED awards

Via Inhabitat.

Rob Beschizza

Phone audio quality sucks

Seth Godin says what we've all been thinking: "Am I the only person who wants a Hi Def telephone? A headset that sounds better than the handheld receiver"

It's true. Twenty years ago, a hard-wired phone line sounded just fine. After a bumpy start with the 40-50 Mhz bands, cordless phones started going places at 900 MHz in the 1990s, too.

Then our local EM fields got too busy, supposedly, for this wavelength to work well. Cordless phones moved to higher frequencies, which meant less interference--but the quality never seemed there, notwithstanding the cascade of technobabble printed on the boxes. I've owned at least a dozen 2.4 GHz and 5.8GHz models, but none have ever matched the audio quality of a Panasonic 900MHz model I still own to this day. In a house packed with strange EM fields, it sounds just fine, too.

Thence to cellphones. I thought Sprint was bad, but then I tried to make calls on my wife's iPhone. AT&T voice quality is just abysmal: it turns Apple's amazing handset into a joke about the inverted priorities of futurism.

So what do we do with this stuttering, fading echo of the human voice? We pipe it through BlueTooth, just to make sure it sounds as bad as it possibly can.

Rob Beschizza

Gadget Fiction: The Winners!

Your response to our Gadget Fiction contest was amazing: there are so many good stories that it's gutting to have only three prizes to give out.

A few interesting trends cropped up throughout the entries.

• You like bad sex and bad coffee.
• You are ambivalent about your relationship with consumer electronics.
• You have read William Gibson a lot.

Winners after the jump.

READ THE REST

Rob Beschizza

Old media tech coverage is stupid. Time to stop biting its ankle and rip out its throat

Old media coverage of cutting-edge toys is increasingly hapless. If you ever have trouble sleeping, just read the gadgets column in a lifestyle mag. The big newspapers' gadget blogs are phoned in, too: they want to beat techie sites like Engadget and Gizmodo, but they stick with a stuffy approach at odds with the enthusiast subject matter. This blurring of "blog" and "newspaper" also makes mistakes look like journalistic misrepresentations.

A great example of all this is at Digits, the WSJ tech blog. The Journal's Ben Charny writes about a dinner hosted by the people who run the Consumer Electronics Show. Slipped into a post so perfectly unexciting that it reads like an AP news item, Charny offers an amazing fact: "Apple plans to attend the show's 2010 version, marking the first time in memory the Cupertino, Calif., consumer-electronics giant will be there."

Wow! But there's a problem.

READ THE REST

Rob Beschizza

"Just Let Me Use My Gadgets"

Gizmodo's Brian Lam rebuts Lisa's scourge against iPhone use at the dinner table and beyond.

Times are changing and the reality is that the social conventions that define when its appropriate to use gadgets in person are going to change, too. But for now there are nay sayers. To them, I'd say that I see these glimpses of work and fun intermingling as a gift; a chance to cheat a job where where work never really stops.

Just Let Me Use My Gadgets [Gizmodo]

Rob Beschizza

Sarah May Scott is not a cyborg

If you missed yesterday's interview with Sarah May Scott, it's a must-read. As the result of a terrible injury, she is a heavily tech-augmented person:

I am not a cyborg, but I am getting closer and closer to being a terminator. My back is already full of titanium, and I've got a radio-controlled device in my abdomen that feeds medication into my spinal canal. If the trials go well, I hope to get my chance at being the female Hardiman with the ReWalk system. You can start calling me Ripley when that happens.

Sarah's blog, Tumblr, Flickr, Twitter, Etsy, and service dog training blog.

Joel Johnson

Goodbye

This is my last week at Boing Boing. I've several projects that I've been dying to do for several years, and as much as working with everyone here is a dream job, there comes a point when you have to take a leap and commit to those ideas.

I'm bummed, of course. Working with everyone here has been a real pleasure, and if I have any regret it will be that I won't be working with everyone on a daily basis in the future. Yet I'm proud of what I've accomplished here in the last couple of years, starting two new brands in a very crowded space that I think do something very different than their competitors, and helping to grow Boing Boing into something broader and weirder than it was before.

I leave BBG in the ridiculously able hands of Rob Beschizza, who already does the yeoman's work on the site. He'll be leading the BBG and Offworld teams toward greater things, I'm sure, and I look forward to seeing how they evolve without my meddling.

And thanks to all of you in the community, even those of you are total cocks: there's nothing I love more than to get into a good scrap in the comments and come out feeling like I've learned something. (Even if the lesson is simply "Man, that guy is a total cock.")

I'm going to be sticking around for another week metaphorically cleaning out my desk, finishing up the reviews I have stacked up and handing over my responsibilities. I'm putting this announcement up now so that anyone who needs something from me with regard to Boing Boing has a chance to contact me before I fully disengage.

Thanks to Ken Snider, John Edward Campbell, Dean Putney, and Terry Thurlow for all the help you've given behind the scenes; thanks to Brandon West, Lea Franco, David Culberson for helping with links and tips and generally just being model community members. And of course thank you to the Offworld and BBG team of Brandon Boyer, Lisa Katayama, and Steven Leckart—if I can pat myself on the back for anything, it's that I know how to hire people that are more talented than myself.

And thank you Xeni, Mark, David, and Cory—best job ever.

If you need to get ahold of me for anything, the information at the top of the someday-to-be-updated JoelJohnson.com is always current, and you can certainly follow me on Twitter. And I wouldn't be surprised if I pop up now and again on Boing Boing, as well, if they'll have me.

Rob Beschizza

Surveillance video of botched Apple Store robbery

Unfortunately, the villain wore a hat. [WaPo]

Rob Beschizza

Follow us at GDGT

Peter Rojas' and Ryan Block's new social network/gadget database is pretty cool. You can find us at it here:

Lisa Katayama, who wrote up a great first look for those unsure if it's for them.
Joel Johnson
Rob Beschizza
Steven Leckart
Dean Putney

GDGTRS, add your profile pages to the comments so that we may follow you.

Rob Beschizza

Tanked

CNBC says this:

Apple's stock had tanked in January, falling as low as $78.20, when Jobs said he had a hormone imbalance.

The chart, pulled out by John Gruber, says this:

Bravo, CNBC! So sly.

Rob Beschizza

Plane lands safely

When people ask why the media only covers bad news, a traditional way of illustrating why good news usually isn't newsworthy is to reply "When did you last read the headline, 'Plane lands safely?'"

Here's a sign of the times: a few hours ago, an airline captain died over the mid-atlantic, apparently of natural causes, and the world knew about it immediately. The co-pilot, and a third qualified pilot who happened to be aboard, have taken the reins, and CNN is covering the landing live.

Condolences to the friends and family of the as-yet unnamed captain. Is it doubly cynical that coverage of good news here is merely the opportunistic result of something awful?

Rob Beschizza

The Banality of Fail

If a broadcast flag is not implemented and enforced by Summer 2003, Viacom's CBS Television Network will not provide any programming in high definition for the 2003-2004 television season.

Xeni Jardin

BB Video: "A VOLTA" from NASA Project: Narco-Cholo Game Ultraviolence

(Download MP4 / Watch on YouTube || Warning: NC-17, cartoon-cholo ultraviolence)

Boing Boing Video proudly presents the world-premiere of a third video, above, from the N.A.S.A. music project (here was our first, here's the second) -- "A Volta," featuring Sizzla, Amanda Blank & Love Foxxx.

Video by Logan, with art by The Date Farmers.

NASA, short for "North America South America," is a music collaboration project assembled by Squeak E. Clean (aka Sam Spiegel, brother of film director Spike Jonze) and DJ Zegon (Ze Gonzales, professional skateboarder).

Buy the album, The Spirit of Apollo, here.

More than 40 music artists are featured, including David Byrne, Kanye West, Ghostface Killah, Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Karen O and Nick Zinner, M.I.A., Santogold, E-40, Tom Waits and Kool Keith. Music videos for the project involve a similarly diverse team-up of visual artists and directors.

Logan, the folks who directed the video for this track, create TV commercials and music videos, content for video games, and experiment with animation and visual effects. We caught up with Alexei Tylevich of Logan for a conversation about how this unusual music video -- kinda like GTA: Juarez -- came together with the Date Farmers.

The text of our interview follows (+ more after the jump).

Video #2, embedded below (Download MP4 / Watch on YouTube): Logan's mockumentary web-film about the making of this NASA video.

Video #3, above (Download MP4 / Watch on YouTube): A soft rock introduction to the Coachella Valley, CA-based art duo of Carlos Ramirez and Armando Lerma, better known as the Date Farmers .

(Interview continues after the jump...)

READ THE REST

Rob Beschizza

Psychic predicts Jobs will return to Apple as scheduled

From Cult of Mac:

Speaking by phone from her home in Redwood City, Courtney said Jobs will return to Apple in June as promised -- but he won't stay long.

"My feeling is he will come back," said Courtney. "I'm not seeing June as too soon."

...

A "corporate psychic" for more than 30 years, Courtney claims to have consulted with scores of tech companies, including Apple, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Motorola. She says politicians in local and federal government have also consulted her.

How odd that a psychic would divine the most unremarkable outcome possible! She does this for $200 an hour.

Steve Jobs will return... [CoM]

Rob Beschizza

A New Kind of Search

Joel Johnson

We may or may not have refreshed BBG

So it looks considerably different, but in many ways this refresh is just setting the scene for a whole mess of upgrades we've been waiting to unveil. Not to say I'm unhappy with the new look, complete with our sterile new logo (thank you) and the retro-modern background by the talented (and annoyingly handsome) James White of SignalNoise.com that looks like something we'd have found on the cover of a science textbook in 2070.

It's not all just twerpy looks. The page should load much faster than before, thanks to endless hours slashing through Movable Type templates by our own Rob Beschizza. (Who really did 99% of the heavy lifting, bless him and keep him.) There's also less metadata cruft on the front page, although we make up for that with even more metadata on the permalink pages.

The "Stars as comments" thing might be irksome, and to be honest I could be persuaded that they're dumb—maybe. I like the way they look, for one. I like the implication that comments are a sort of positive vote, or at least an indication of activity. But I'm certainly open to discussion, provided you don't get upset when I decide to just stick with it.

We really are trying to build the site around providing more content to you with a minimum of hassle. Images and videos can now be even larger, while tiny reblogs posts, when we simply want to pass on a link or embed an MP3, can be done without taking up a whole lot of space. Scannable, but readable.

We may end up putting less posts up on the front door, however, because larger pictures mean larger pageloads—and we're already pushing it. If it were up to me, we'd just make it so we loaded more content when you scrolled to the bottom (and we may!), but there are issues with that, too. In the meantime, the headlines-only block at the bottom will continue to be fleshed out. It's been my dream for five years to try to figure out how to get people to click on to read Page 2 of a blog. It's one of the great mysteries of blogging.

Anyway, welcome back, and thank you very much for reading.

Best viewed with Netscape Navigator 3

Xeni Jardin

BB Video: IFTF, Sun, and Boing Boing Launch Digital Open Youth Innovation Expo

Download MP4 for this episode. RSS feed for new episodes here, YouTube channel here, subscribe on iTunes here. Get Twitter updates every time there's a new ep by following @boingboingvideo, and here are blog post archives for Boing Boing Video.

Boing Boing Video is teaming up with Institute for the Future and Sun Microsystems to launch The Digital Open, a global expo for youth innovation.

Above, a video we produced with IFTF and teen 'web talent Charis Tobias, to invite young people around the world to join in.

Here's a snip from the launch announcement:

"What can you make with technology that will change the world, invent the future--or even just make life a little easier or more fun?"

Institute for the Future, in partnership with Sun Microsystems and Boing Boing, invite youth worldwide, age 17 and under, to join us as we explore the frontiers of free and open innovation. Running from April 15 until August 15, 2009, the Digital Open: An Innovation Expo for Global Youth will accept text, photos, and videos documenting projects at DigitalOpen.org from young people around the world, all licensed under one from a list of free and open software licenses.

Youth can submit projects in a variety of areas, ranging from the environment, media, and community, to the more traditional open source domains of software and hardware. Additionally, the Digital Open will provide resources and links to help them learn more about free and open technology movements, from figures like Richard Stallman to organizations like Creative Commons.

(...) Marina Gorbis, Executive Director of the Institute for the Future emphasized the participatory nature of the project. "The Digital Open is more than just a competition," she says. "It's about recognizing and encouraging kids to follow their passions while giving them community experiences that further encourage or challenge their best thinking."

Winners receive a tech prize package including a PeeCee mini laptop running the OpenSolaris operating system, a video camera, a solar-powered flashlight, and other goodies.

The Digital Open.

Joel Johnson

This is the type of fruitless anonymous comment I will now be binning

"Yay I just thought "I wish I could spend my moning watching ads" and boing boing has delivered! Now if only I could find a blog which is all ads all the time. ...seriously boing boing, why are we posting ads? Are they a 'wonderful thing'? Hell, you don't even have any editorial copy to go along with the ads in this post. Weak." – Anonymous

First of all: Ha ha. Get bent.

Second of all: I'm all about letting the idiots have their say in the comments, but from here on out if you want to being snide or criticize, you're going to have to register. I don't see why I have to put up with drive-by douchesniping on my site when someone doesn't even care enough to put their name on their comment.

Rob Beschizza

LOL

The world's inventory of lols, according to Google.

No matches were found for 100 lolols, effectively disproving the existence of the loololol. The internet contains 2,050,000 lulz. At no point is equilolbrium reached.

Joel Johnson

Themes

We're trying something a bit different today for the first time. Once or twice a week, BBG will have a "theme", and the majority of the posts during that day will be variations on that theme. They might be overtly techy (today we're starting with "Printers") or they might not (Friday we're going to go with "Gardening"), but we hope they'll be a fun way to explore our chosen subject matter perpendicularly to the way it is typically presented in a blog.

It'll be a muddle-til-we-make-it sort of thing (what's new?) but I think you'll enjoy it. I don't plan on always doing any introductory post announcing the theme, but may when it seems appropriate. But I do want you guys to feel free to send in any links to things old or new that you think would fit well into the theme, as well as questions you want answered, so we'll have to figure out some good way to announce it early in the day.

Joel Johnson

Welcome Lisa Katayama and Steven Leckart to BBG

Join me in welcoming Lisa Katayama and Steven Leckart to the Boing Boing fold. They'll be coming aboard with Rob and I to work on BBG, although I wouldn't be surprised to see them contributing to Boing Boing and Offworld just every now and again, as well.

You'll get to know them through the blog-o-squawk soon enough, but it'd be a shame to waste such bona fides as our two new contributors have collected.

Lisa you guys will know as a former guestblogger at Boing Boing, as well as her blogging about Japanese culture and tech at her blog Tokyo Mango. She's also contributed to WIRED, Popular Science, and the The New York Times Magazine. (There's a big feature coming up there, isn't there, Lisa? Can you talk about that yet?) And of course she's the author of Urawaza: Secret Everyday Tips and Tricks from Japan. She has two min-pins named Malcolm and Ruby (no relation to my car), as per the requirements for BBG contributors. She's @tokyomango and will be her first name at boingboing.net once I figure out how we actually do our email forwards here.

Steven's work has been seen at WIRED, DVICE, GOOD (and was the founder of ALL CAPS MAGAZINE*), as well as the editor of our friend Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools. He also helped Chris Anderson with the books The Long Tail and the upcoming Free as a writing assistant. He has a pug named Gus, as per the requirements for BBG contributors. He's @stevenleckart on Twitter and will be his first name at boingboing.net once I get off my ass and set up that email account. [photo by Jonathan Snyder]

Welcome, you two! I'm stoked to have you aboard our undulating tanker ship of bubbling mutant goo.

* NOT REALLY.

Rob Beschizza

The Consumerist's guide to things you shouldn't buy during the recession...

... doesn't include consumer electronics. Buy!

Rob Beschizza

British ISPs revolt against the self-appointed censors who ordered blocks on Wikipedia and The Internet Archive

Internet service providers in the U.K. have rejected a website blacklist maintained by the Internet Watch Foundation, a private charity notorious for its bungled attempts to censor pages at Wikipedia and the Internet Archive.

From The Register:

ISPs have rejected a call by childrens' charities to implement the government's approved blocklist for images of child sexual abuse, because the list does not stop anyone who wants to accessing such material.

On Monday a coalition including the NSPCC and Barnardo's sounded warnings that 700,000 homes could access websites hosting images of abuse because small ISPs do not filter their networks. The charities aimed to put pressure on the government to force them to implement the Internet Watch Foundation's blocklist, pointing out that in 2006 ministers said all providers should do so by the end of 2007.

In January, internet service providers blocked access to the Internet Archive at the IWF's say so, and last year, British users were blocked from Wikipedia's editing functions after it flagged a Scorpions' album cover as child porn.

Letting a cabal of unaccountable, self-selected net nannies bully ISPs into blocking swathes of the internet serves no credible end: the IWF admits its system is easily circumvented by criminals. The whole thing is a game of moral panic, intricately patterned around the British belief that you can prevent bad people from thinking about a bad thing simply by removing the suggestion of it from public view.

Small ISPs reject call to filter out child abuse sites [The Register]

Joel Johnson

Driving from Brooklyn to Oregon next week; What weird should I espy?

I am moving to Eugene, Oregon, because I am in love with a girl.

I'm also in love with my dog Porter who, as an English Bulldog, has a not-impossible chance of dying in the cargo hold a jet (even one heated and pressurized; bullies have breathing issues). So I'm gonna lash him in to the passenger seat of a rented minivan, test out my new awkwardly large Pioneer GPS unit, and bop across the country from Brooklyn listening to my first audiobook ever. (Ender's Game, which I've never read. I know.)

Along the way, I'll be doing the things one does when hauling ass on the interstates—gulping coffee, then slathering umeboshi plum paste on my teeth to try to counteract the acidity; asking truckers where to find the best chicken-fried steak with cream gravy, America's perfect food; falling asleep in the mountains to die in flames at the bottom of a ravine, my organs shimmering on my outsides like a grotesque Nudie Cohn suit—and I'll be recording them all on the video machines.

I have to cut through Kansas City to drop off an old Kustom amp that my buddy Jason had to leave when he moved back home. And I hope to be rolling into Oregon by the weekend. But along the way, I've got a little time to sightsee and visit. What should I see? Want to meet up?

Joel Johnson

Welcome our latest guest blogger: Mat Honan

I'm pleased as can be to welcome our latest guest blogger, Mat Honan. Mat is a San Francisco-based reporter, blogger, ex-fatty, infamous twitterer and all-around good egg. He's a contributing editor at Wired magazine. He got his hair cut before I did so you can call me the poseur. You may also know him from Barack Obama is Your New Bicycle or that time he borrowed your pen and never gave it back.

He's going to write about stuff. Welcome aboard, Mat!

Xeni Jardin

COPPAKIDS: blog of excuses kids make for getting around website age blocks

Boing Boing reader Arlo Rose points us to something beautiful:

It's a web site by someone that's a community manager at a very large website. They post the ridiculous pleas of kids under the legal age set forth by COPPA (thirteen). Pure hilarity.

"COPPAKIDS: Born too late. OMG YOU GUYS LET ME ON."

Rob Beschizza

Mundane Gadget Spam of the Day: Bellshit

Here's one from the non-euclidean spamiverse. The subject line is "Little iPod Shuffle, now with discount prices." The content of the mailing, however, is this:

Product association!