Ocarina is an innovative yet somehow wrong, very wrong, application for the iPhone. You blow into the mic and use the touch screen to tap notes. Here’s the intro to Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven played with this, uh, instrument.
They compiled some video, they wrote a song, they put it on YouTube.
StarWars.com has a brief write up on two great tastes that taste awesome together. Lucas Online senior designer Craig Drake has created a Patrick Nagel inspired print of Princess Leia. It can be yours for only US $49.99. Also, check out the Leia slave girl outfit, which I had no idea you could buy up until I saw the very appropriately placed ad on this write up.
I remember downloading way to many Patrick Nagel prints on my 300 bps modem back in the day. Due to the limited color palette of his work, Nagel’s prints were easily compressed to the GIF format. This made them prevalent on every bulletin board around in the late 80’s and early 90’s. So basically Drake hit a bull’s eye here, combining two things many geeks are very familiar with.
I just got through watching this series of videos of Dean Kamen from the All Things D: D6 conference, where he talks about his team’s work on the mind blowingly cool prosthetic arm nicknamed the “Luke Arm.” Due to the increase in effectiveness of body amour and huge advances military field medicine, wounded soldiers are far more likely to survive serious injuries than they were even in the first Gulf War. Though more soldiers are coming home alive, they often do so with missing limbs. Kamen and his team were tasked to create a new generation of prosthetic arms that come as close as ingenuity and technology can to replacing a missing limb.
The results of Kamen and his team’s work shown in the videos is inspiring and a reminder of two things. Design is all about problem solving and due to that, design, along with engineering and a host of other disciplines, can make a huge difference in people’s lives.
I’ve known about Dark Side of the Rainbow for years, even saw it at the Alamo Drafthouse way back when, but up until recently I had never known about the mysterious connection between Pink Floyd’s Echoes and the final act of Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Wired’s Listening Post has a write up along with some YouTube videos of the film synced with Floyd’s epic psychedelic rock song. Talk about when worlds collide.
I’ve been both a Pink Floyd fan and a fan of Kubrick and Clarke for a while. I’ve seen the film a bunch of times and read the first three Space Odyssey books in high school, about the same time I got into Floyd via the live double album Delicate Sound of Thunder (I know, I got on the scene pretty late.) About six months ago I rented David Gilmour’s Remember That Night, which he, with the recently departed Rick Wright, performed Echoes in it’s entirety. Bands just don’t write songs like this anymore. If it can’t be condensed into a three minute top ten hit, the major labels won’t go near it. But I digress.
Forget about Dark Side of the Rainbow, Echoes and Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite sync up eerily well. And Pink Floyd band members won’t go on record as saying that it’s just a coincidence. I want more. I want Explosions in the Sky to create a sound track for the end of Solaris, Nine Inch Nails needs to score the end fight scene of Aliens, or how about Radiohead re-do the sound track to anything.
Now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to try and figure what sci-fi film Acid Mother’s Temple And The Cosmic Inferno’s half-hour-plus Starless And Bible Black Sabbath syncs up with.
The web is abuzz with Cuil, a new search engine that claims it’s gonna eat Google’s lunch. One problem I see right off the bat is the name “Cuil”, it does not work well as a verb. Though “Google” doesn’t really either, so who knows.
In the 90’s I was a serious Apple fanatic. I grew using an Apple IIc, which lasted me from middle school all the way through high school. In college I got one of the first PPC Macs, a Powermac 6160. From then on out I was a total MacHead. One of my earlier jobs was working for Power Computing, probably the most successful of the short lived Mac clone manufacturers. When Apple pulled the rug out from underneath the clone industry, and thus got me laid off for the first time, I became pretty disillusioned with Apple.
I bought myself a Dell PC and used Windows NT, then 2000 and now XP (sometimes even Vista.) I was a PC guy from then on, and over the years as I went from NT to 2000 to XP and Vista I’ve become pretty disillusioned with the PC platform and Microsoft. I tried various distributions of Linux which my experience I can only sum up with the phrase, Linux is pretty cool… considering it’s free. I still have hopes that Linux will someday be every bit as good as the Mac OS or Windows, but it’s just not there yet. And Abobe really needs to support Linux before I can use it as my main platform. I’m hooked on Photoshop, Fireworks and even Dreamweaver. Today I use a Mac at work and Windows at home. Occasionally I’ll check out the latest release of Ubuntu. I’ve become pretty comfortable in any OS, I’m not loyal to any particular brand.
I did break down and buy an iPhone though. My old smart phone was slowly dying and the price on the iPhone dropped so I jumped on the bandwagon. And pretty much immediately was reminded why despite all the hype, despite all the fanatics calling it the “Jesus Phone,” Apple is still just another electronics company. The iPhone lacked many of the features my three year old Windows Mobile smart phone had. The iPhone also had restrictions on it’s use that to me were unreasonable (you can only sync with one machine, you can’t use it as a drive, no MMS, no shooting video, up until yesterday no third part apps, etc.) and it cost more than my previous phone. Not that it didn’t do some things well, like web browsing and playing music and videos, but nothing that would make me consider it to be the best smart phone ever, or even a great smart phone.
And today, when I went to update my iPhone to the latest firmware, the long awaited and widely talked about version 2.0, and my phone was essentially bricked. In order to upgrade to the latest firmware, an iPhone owner has to reactivate their phone online. Apple apparently didn’t anticipate the load on their servers that millions of iPhone owners across the world would cause by trying to activate their phone all on the same day. Apple, a company that manufactures servers, apparently didn’t have enough servers. I’ve heard that those buying the new 3G iPhones are having to spend hours waiting in line, then hours waiting in store to actually purchase a working and activated phone.
Complain about Microsoft all you want, complain about Dell, HP or Sony, but you’re going to have to make a pretty lengthy and strong argument about why I should think that Apple is really any better, and in some cases not actually worse.
BTW, after about three hours my iPhone is working again, but I still can’t sync it to my computer.
Amazon has become my second favorite source for legal non-DRM MP3’s (Emusic is my first.) Everyday they have a special in their MP3 store and sell albums for as little as $1.99 (usually these specials carry over into the next day.) Today they are selling The Best Of Talking Heads for $3.99. I’ve been a fan of Talking Heads since the 6th grade and though I have to protest the “Best Of” title (my best of list would be a lot different) this is still a psychotically killer deal.
I was wondering how long it would take before a portable version of Firefox 3 would show up on PortableApps. The answer is about 24 hours. If you’ve never heard of PortableApps, you should check out their site. They host a multitude of useful standalone applications that can be run off a USB drive or the like. It’s a handy way for web coders like me to have both Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 installed on the same machine and not have them interfere with one another.
L337 h4×0rz have produced stand alone versions of Internet Explorer, also for web coders to test their sites on, but Microsoft doesn’t support them, instead recommending coders test their sites using Virtual PC disk images with different browsers installed on them. The disk images have an expiration date, so you have to re-download them every few months. Not exactly the most efficient solution.
This via BoingBoing, The US Postal Service has released Charles and Ray Eames stamps! From USPS.com:
In recognition of their groundbreaking contributions to architecture, furniture design, manufacturing and photographic arts, designers Charles and Ray Eames will be honored next summer with a pane of 16 stamps designed by Derry Noyes of Washington, DC. If you’ve ever sat in a stackable molded chair, you’ve experienced their creativity. Perhaps best known for their furniture, the Eameses were husband and wife as well as design partners. Their extraordinary body of creative work — which reflected the nation’s youthful and inventive outlook after World War II — also included architecture, films and exhibits. Without abandoning tradition, Charles and Ray Eames used new materials and technology to create high-quality products that addressed everyday problems and made modern design available to the American public.