This month’s issue of Wired magazine ran an article about MegaPhone - turning big-screen billboards into giant game screens, your cellphone becomes a game controller, and all you have to do is call the phone number posted on the screen and you’re playing video games on the side of a building.
Recently, Palo Alto based product engineering firm MindTribe has placed a 65″ plasma screen in a front window with the same idea in mind. You dial the phone number on the screen and you are now playing a version of Tetris while standing in the middle of the sidewalk (and it’s free). Bonus: if you get a high score, your snapshot goes up on their website.
Coming soon to a phone near you: Scanbuy’s Scanlife software, which allows users to create and interact with 2 dimensional barcodes, which serve to link the physical world with the virtual world (and no, I don’t mean Second Life).
All you have to do to interact with a 2D barcode (like the one below) is install Scanbuy’s software (free) and then take a picture of any 2d barcode with your phone. Because the square barcode is made up of a lot of smaller squares that are either black or white and nothing in between, the crossword-like barcode is essentially a graphical depiction of the binary numeral system, and can contain as much or more information than a hyperlink (like http://www.blogadilla.com). Not to mention that they can exist and be interacted with in the physical world.
2-D barcodes are already widely deployed and used in Asia and in parts of Europe, but have yet to hit the US market because our mobile landscape has been comprised of 4 companies that together hold a monopoly on what we can and can’t do with our phones. But times are a changing with the advent of the iPhone, which I’m told, with the new firmware set to release in June, will be compatible with Scanbuy’s software. If your phone is already compatible, try it out! Otherwise, be on the lookout.
PS: HAPPY 1st BIRTHDAY BLOGADILLA!! (you’re growing up so fast!)
South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius has won the right to compete for a place in the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The AP reports that the “Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled that the 21-year-old South African is eligible to race against able-bodied athletes, overturning a ban imposed by the International Association of Athletics Federations.”
As part of the overruling of the ban, Oscar Pistorius asked to have independent testing done at MIT. This story is special to me because I was living in Cambridge when random (able-bodied) people were bouncing down the street wearing the now-infamous cheetah blades. I can only assume that those people were either involved in conducting the tests or out for joyrides on blades of their own. While this story is certainly a departure from what I typically contribute to Blogadilla, the ruling marks an important day for both disabled people and able bodied people as well. Check out the story on ESPN.
Charles Babbage designed computers in the mid-1800’s - though operating with gears, many were effectively digital. He designed (yet never successfully completed building) the “Difference Engine no. 2″ - designed to do complex polynomial equations (necessary at the time for navigation reference tables, etc.).
In 2002, the “Babbage Engine no. 2″ was finally built (London Science Museum), and in March 2008 a second one was built, and as of today the second one is on display at the Computer History Museum (Mountain View, CA) for the next year. Went to the opening event today.
Bonus Round:Babbage Groupies
(photo courtesy of Dana Chrisler)
This is an actual Ada Lovelace tattoo (a mathematician and colleague of Charles Babbage) - perhaps the only one of its kind in existence. Its owner was at the exhibit opening today.
Oh man . . . my creativity gland is sore from spending the day at the 2008 Maker Faire. I don’t even have the energy to make a video of it; below are some photo highlights.
If you live in the Bay Area: GO!
It’s happening tomorrow (Sunday) also.
GO! . . . and be crafty.
There is a great misconception that complex society breeds violence and that simpler societies live harmoniously.
Like Ewoks.
Next time you have to listen to some crunchy hippie going on about making with world a better place by living in a tee-pee, beat them over the head with this one:
Steven Pinker’s talk on “The Myth of Violence” (TED Talks, 2007):
If you love pranks, or are just an a$$hole and want to piss off/lose your friends, you may or may not want to check out CalltheFuture.org, a unique service that until April Fools’ Day, I had never heard of. Sure, I’m a little late bringing to the site, but this is still worth addressing for all y’all Dillas out there.
Before I get started, however, let me state that CalltheFuture makes it clear that their service is not to be used for pranks. I personally would never do this, nor advocate it, but that doesn’t mean my buddy (who will remain nameless) wouldn’t… So again, I’m not advocating this– just bringing some interesting knowledge I happened across to the Dillasphere.
CalltheFuture’s service is marketed as a tool to help people remind themselves about important future engagements, from meetings and appointments to other responsibilities, allowing users to schedule “courtesy” calls in the future to any phone number they choose at any given time. In theory, this could be very useful, such as if I have to pick up my buddy from the airport at 3pm a week from now and I’m worried I might forget– I can just schedule a call for 12 noon that day to remind me. Sweet, right? Just type in a string of text you want read to you, plug in the phone number you want to call, type in the number you want to show up as the caller ID(!), and choose one of 7 voices (male or female, aged 30-55) you want to read your text. The rest, as they say, is magic.
Sure, CTF can be useful, but the possibility of tomfoolery is large. My advice is this: don’t not not pull pranks on your friends, such as setting up calls to your roommate at 5am daily, or programming nasty calls to your ex-girlfriend every hour on the hour.
It has a nice iTunes Store feel to it, but without having to buy anything - TV shows, podcasts, movie shorts, all free and all playing smoothly. I recommend you download it (it’s free!).
Also, this is perhaps the smoothest-running 1.0 version of anything I’ve ever used (apparently bug-free).
2006: As some of you may remember, Chevy trucks thought they’d create a cyber-hip-20-somethings ad campaign where you could make your own Chevy Tahoe commercial . . . and it backfired in a major way.
I planned on submitting this fine Photoshop project below, until I discovered that you have to use stupid Facebook Graffiti to do all of your artwork. Dammit!
The up sides to Muxtape:
• You can make a virtual mixtape, to let everyone know that you have better musical taste than they do.
• It’s free.
• It is elegantly simple, super-user-friendly, and setting up an account is free of ass-pain.
The down sides:
• To create a Muxtape, uploaded music must be in mp3 format.
• I miss putting stickers and homemade artwork all over mixtape cassettes.
• If you were born after 1980, you won’t truly understand the nostalgia of mixtapes.
Bonus Round: The book “Mix Tape” by Thurston Moore.
Earlier this month, researcher/historian David Giovannoni (at First Sounds) discovered the earliest recording of a human voice, from the archives of the French Academy of Sciences. According to records, this sound recording was made by inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville on April 9, 1860 - 17 years before Thomas Edison. The recording was made on Scott de Martinville’s “phonautograph” which records sound onto a carbon (smoke)-blackened paper. Though his machine successfully recorded a human voice, Scott de Martinville had no means to play back the recording. This recording was scanned, processed, and converted into an audible clip at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
HERE IS THE AUDIO CLIP of Scott de Martinville’s recording - it is a 10 second passage from the French song “Au Clair de la Lune” (I also added a modern recording of the song for comparison).
Once again, technology is put to good use: Atlanta bar owner Rufus Terrill has created the anti-vagabond “Bum Bot 2000.“
It has a 2,000,000 candlepower floodlight and a water cannon capable of 200 lbs of pressure. The object of this robot is to chase away vagrants, prostitutes, and pushers in his neighborhood. Many of Terrill’s targets are the “sort of people” drawn to a local emergency homeless shelter - he hopes to let them know they aren’t welcome to plague his public streets anymore. The camera feed on the Bum Bot 2000 is projected onto a big screen TV in Terrill’s bar, so patrons can watch prostitutes and hoboes get sprayed with water. This unstoppable security droid may have only one weakness, that hopefully the swarthy homeless will never discover: pushing it over.
Suggestions for a better name for this robot:
•Hobotron 2000
•The Roomba Wet T-Shirt Machine
•BumFighter X1
•Bigot-tron 4000
•The Hobo Soaker
•Go-Starve-Somewhere-Else-O-Matic
•The Hookernator
•Ho-Bot
•D!ckhead with a Watergun 9000
I want to invent “Drunkbot 3000″: it will regularly cover the floor of Terrill’s bar in vomit.
