Author Archives: iksib

Grab those jars of coins sitting in the kitchen/bedroom/kid’s room and head to the Coinstar machine at the supermarket! It looks like Amazon is the most recent company to strike a deal with the coin gulping bandit, and this time the arrangement is doubly in the favor of you, dear consumer: according to CIO Insight, people submitting their coinage will be able to get an Amazon gift card for the full amount of money they fork over. Amazon sells the gift certificates to Coinstar at a discount, letting the company greedily fill its pockets cover its operating costs without taking their typical cut of 8.9 percent. After counting the change, the machines then use a modem to call a central server, report the amount and obtain a gift certificate number from Amazon, which gets printed on the receipt.

Yeah yeah, so in the end it’s all motivated by greed: Amazon wants to get a piece of the lucrative “spare change market,” which apparently amounts to some $10.5 billion in the US alone. Yowza. I guess I’m just not smart enough. I’d never pay someone to count my change for me, but apparently a lot of people do.

Looks like our Google buddies just released another “beta” service: Google Blog Search. It looks like it’s designed to compete with Technorati, but my immediate reaction is “whoopee!” Yes, that’s right – I’m completely self-effacing when I say this. It has everything nothing to do with the fact that a search for “iksib” at blogsearch.google.com reveals all of my LIVEdigitally posts, while Technoriti shows me no love. Am I conceited? Please say no. PLEASE.

So get out there and search, ye, of blogly persuasion! Find stuff! Read! Learn! Or just laugh at all the completely arcane and ridiculous things you find…and then share them with your friends.

While I was in San Francisco last week I (obviously) did all of my computing on my laptop; it really got me thinking about the options that are out there when it comes to sychronizing stuff on different machines.

I found out about Portable Firefox this morning and spent a few minutes downloading and performing the steps required to get it working. Download the software, throw it on your flash drive and you have, as the name implies, a portable version of the browser with all of your bookmarks and extensions! Built on John Haller’s Portable Firefox 1.0.6 (for Windows), the latest version is cross-platform and requires a quick modification before being ready for the Mac. I’m still tinkering with mine, but it seems like a fantastic idea – I always have my flash drive handy and it’s so much easier than booting up both machines, connecting them and manually copying the appropriate files. Cross-platform compatibility makes it a no-brainer. If anyone out there has gotten it working and has any remarks, post ’em!

I know it’s not the most stunning bit of news to post since my return from San Francisco, but it looks like there may be one immediate casualty of Sprint and Nextel’s corporate union becoming official: the Sprint guy.

Sprint’s headquarters are in Overland Park, Kansas, and according to The Kansas City Star [free registration bypass can be found here], Brian Baker, a.k.a. Sprint Guy/The Man in Black actually found out about his potential state of limbo in the paper. The guy’s been in some 150 commercials since the late 1990s and, according to the article, “became one of the best-known pitchmen in the history of American advertising.” I’m not so sure about the accuracy of that statement, but he’s far superior to the fuzzy-haired, bespectacled Verizon dude incessantly blurting out his master’s mind-numbing catch phrase.

The article is full of random tidbits: Baker made People magazine’s 2001 list of the sexiest men alive, and a year later he married hottie Terry Farrell (Jadzia Dax on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine).

Anywho, Sprint Nextel peeps quoted in the article claim that Baker was never called about the news because he’s still under contract and will apparently stay that way until sometime next year. Until then, Baker’s online fan club, sprint.justmango.com, will apparently have to sate themselves on reruns. All I know is that if Sprint Guy returns, I better not hear the walkie talkie beep for the duration of the commercial. If so, I’ll wish he never came back.

So the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) just announced the two member list of companies participating in the next stage of its Walrus program, which aims to develop a part blimp, part jumbo jet monstrosity that can quickly (and relatively cheaply) ferry hundreds of tons of gear to the far reaches of the world. In reality show-ese: Lockheed Martin will duke it out with Aeros Aeronautical Systems in a 12-month battle to provide DARPA with a winning walrus design, using a budget of $3 million tax dollars each.

Who will be the victor?

According to Red Herring (they put it so eloquently): “DARPA wants the final product to carry 500 tons of war machine 12,000 nautical miles in less than a week.” RH spoke to Torrance, California-based Aeros, who claims that a 1-foot-wide hole in the fabric of a 140-foot-long airship would take more than an hour bring the thing down, meaning ample time for safe landings after hostile encounters. They also report asking about the potential impact of missles (war zones typically involve things more dangerous than pea shooters) – too bad Aeros wouldn’t cough up any details.

The article makes a valid point about the potential usefulness of such a vehicle in chaotic areas like New Orleans, where large quantities of supplies could be brought to a single area by one gigantic aircraft. To put it in all in perspective, the largest Boeing 747 cargo plane can only carry 400 tons – and it needs a runway.

I know this isn’t the same as forgetting to convert your units, but PLEASE don’t fill it with hydrogen…

As I sit at my desk and listen to the ongoing radio coverage of the situation in New Orleans, I have a hard time describing my reaction to what’s being said by regular citizens, journalists, emergency workers, mayors and our president. I feel shock, sorrow, embarassment, sheer confusion and I can’t get over the fact that learning more about the situation makes my mind swell with images and quotes when I hear the words “disaster area”. Coverage can be found everywhere, but I just wanted to toss out a link that’s truly compelling.

Mike Barnett’s aptly-named Survival of New Orleans Blog continues to pour out a constant stream of post-hurricane reports from his office on the 10th floor of an office building in the heart of downtown. Traffic to the site continues to swell as Barnett and fellow Zipa and DirectNIC (web hosting and co-location centers) employees make the most of what may very well be the only such site written and hosted by the city destroyed by hurricane Katrina. Hop to the site and read some of the posts…truly amazing.

Links to photos from the site can be found here and also here. Wired ran a nice article yesterday with some photos of the employees and more information about the blog.

Looting, shootings, murders, bodies everywhere, gas prices out of control, talk of the larger economic impact the storm will have…I just wish everyone out there the best and will continue to soak up as much news as I can.

This is great. All you cell phone camera addicts out there, take a moment to find a fellow photog and chest bump. The boys in blue caught up with the NY subway flasher who gained a certain amount of notoriety last week after a smart cookie snapped a pic of him with her cameraphone and posted on Flickr. The damn thing made it to the cover of the New York Daily News!

Mom and dad! See! See! Cell phones really CAN save the day…or at least enable those really hoping to get their very own misdemeanor. Throw another hash mark in the side of the board that reads “Reasons I Love The Internet.”

[Cheers to BoingBoing]

Some game news:

World of Warcraft’s success is well documented, but Blizzard just hit us with a formal announcement of how many subscribers the game actually has. According to Red Herring, it’s a cool 4 million, baby, making WoW the most popular online role-playing game in the world. Some analysts estimate that the cash cow is bringing the company more than $30 million each month just in basic subscription fees – parent company Vivendi reports its revenue up 61 percent from the year before.

The BBC has an interesting article profiling a series of online gaming addicts, building on my post from a few days ago about China’s pending restrictions on consecutive hours of gameplay. It feels like a text version of an AA meeting. The four “addicts” in the article justify their time hidden in their rooms, shut off from the outside world by saying things like “Gaming helps me escape from whatever happens to be bothering me,” and “playing games online means that other people are playing live with you.” As a former WoW player I can relate to these statements, but trying to rationalize your removal from the physical world is just that – rationalization. “Ever since I started playing, my physical condition has deteriorated,” one player says. “I get lots of colds as I don’t really exercise.” Still another has actually realized that there might be things going on in the real world that merit more attention:

“My wife is pregnant and needs a lot of attention. It wouldn’t look good if I put my energy into World of Warcraft.”

Really?

Ars Technica just published a nice system guide for those interested in a little do-it-yourself PC construction, and I think it’s worth mentioning here.

People have been building their own PCs for years, but Ars brings its expertise to the table in a nicely packaged article offering readers a choice of three machines: the Budget Box, the Hot Rod and the God Box. Using the site’s comparison shopping service (powered by DealTime), you can check the current price of each component yourself and read a nice paragraph or two explaining why it’s a good choice. Some specs on each of the machines, priced before buying an operating system:

•Budget Box ($787) – AMD Athlon 64 3000+, 512 MB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 6600, 80 GB HD
•Hot Rod ($1551) – AMD Athlon 64 3500+, 1 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT, 250 GB HD
•God Box ($12,213) – AMD Opteron 275 (x2), 4 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX (x2), 73 GB Maxtor Atlas 15k, 147 GB Maxtor Atlas 10k (x3)

Looks like they’re big fans of AMD and NVIDIA. A friend of mine did a good job of putting it in perspective, saying that he could cancel his plans to buy a condo, cash out his IRA and go for the God Box…or just snag the eight-monitored beast whose eBay auction is set to expire today. Ars DID say the God Box is beyond the range of mere mortals, but somehow that doesn’t placate me. What can I say? BYO projects like this are fun to think about. As soon as the first MacIntel machines ship, I’m seriously contemplating a run down do-it-yourself road, with help from the OSx86 Project, of course.

If you attended college at any point in the last decade, I’m willing to bet you knew SOMEONE who spent way too much time on thespark.com (now sparklife.com). From the love test to the personality test and everone’s favorite, the death test (their most popular one!!!), we all know the accuracy with which a short list of multiple choice questions can determine elements of our inner being we were never before aware of. Come on, people! The internet can do these things!

Fruitless ways of killing time online aside, it appears that researchers at the University of Manchester have developed their own internet test to determine our genetic disposition to depression. Hoping to recruit more than 1,000 UK volunteers for further tests as part of a five-year, EU-funded project called NewMood, the group invites potential volunteers (and anyone else interested) to visit their web site. There you can try out shorter versions of some of the tasks in the study, including a test to indentify emotions on people’s faces and a gambling test.

According to professor Bill Deakin, involved with the study, our brains are wired to see anxiety – it ensures we are safe. Depressed people are apparently more likely to see sadness or fear in a neutral face. Gambling tests are a way to stimulate people to work for a reward – depressed people are apparently less affected by reward stimuli and tend to give up more easily.

All of this leads to a more complete understanding of the forces involved in depression, which is a complex disorder involving genetic and personality factors, as well as life history.

[Kudos to Science Blog]

Yesterday Apple sent out a teaser announcing a special media event to take place next Wednesday, Sept. 7 at 10 am in San Francisco’s Moscone Center. Some, like Think Secret, think the portable music darling will likely release a much-anticipated video iPod. Others think we might find out about the perpetually forthcoming iTunes phone by Motorola, whose specifications have been causing chatter for months. Latest news on that front: Engadget reports that a source involved with making the commercials for the phone claim it will only hold 100 songs, so as to prevent the phone from cannibalizing sales of the shuffle.

Knowing Apple, we could find out about either, both or neither of these two things…or about something else entirely. That’s the joy of it!