Category: Playful or Cool
Zonbu: cares about the planet too
Zonbu is a environmental personal computer with some interesting features. It runs a version of Linux and comes with bundled applications. You buy it with a monthly plan that gives you off-site storage and maintenance. It has no hard-drive, just a flash card for local storage. All of this means it is extremely energy efficient (consumes as much as a light bulb) and that it is easy to run. They also promise to take it back and disassemble it for recycling.As interesting as the green aspect of Zonbu is, I’m also struck by their service model. You buy it for $99 (without keyboard or monitor) and then pay $13 a month or more for the storage and support. You don’t get root access and they manage the computer for you. It comes with all the basic applications. As some commentators have put it – the Zonbu makes for a good second home computer for the family (at least those who don’t want to run PC games.)
Guy sent me this after reading my Blog Action Day grumbling.
Put PowerPoint on your iPod – Engadget
I was asking myself how if I could use a PDA or iPod for presentations instead of a laptop and came across some articles like HOW-TO: Put PowerPoint on your iPod Photo from Engadget. The idea is that you export your presentation as a series of photos which can then be played out as video to a monitor or video project. (Note that they don’t go out as data.)
I was wondering about this reading about the now discontinued Margi Presenter-To-Go that works with the Palm line. They provide cables and stuff so you can run a data projector from a Palm PDA with enough memory. Alas they have given up on this. Will an iPod Touch version come along?
iKaraoke from Griffin
In the category of cool technology for your iPod has to be the Griffin Technology: iKaraoke. This microphone and iPod connector can be used to sing along to your favorite tunes. It apparantly “isolates the lead vocal track, then fades it, giving your voice room to make that favorite tune yours.”
Even better, they have software, the TunePrompter, that you can download and use to create a video with the lyrics syncronized to the tune. The free (and beta) software then creates a video for uploading to the iPod to work with the iKaraoke.
Very neat, even if I hate karaoke.
BookMooch: exchange books and trade them, like a book swap or book barter
BookMooch is another of those brilliant ideas you want to cheer on. The idea is to join a community that trades books. You post the books you have that you will send to others and then you can get books from others. A point system keeps it fair. What will this do to the library?
David McCallum: Warbike
Artist David McCallum has a cool project that was featured on the CBC radio show Spark. The Warbike Project is a bicycle with a device that creates a sonnification of wireless network activity it encounters as you bike around. Bells play as the device encounters a new wifi network and so on. You can sign out the bike now at Interaccess in Toronto.
The Warbike turns this wireless network activity into sound. As you cycle the streets, you’ll hear the activity of this invisible communications layer that permeates our public spaces. Who knew that so much was going on?
Locative Art
Following the last post I thought I would blog some locative text and art projects.
Hello, world! is a work mowed into a field that encodes in Semacode the universal programmers greeting, “Hello, world!”
Eternal Sunset shows you webcam images of the sunset wherever it is happening at the time you visit. (This one is from Norway.)
Grafedia is a site where people can send emails with a word they have seen written in blue and underlined on the street. They then get back images associated with those words.
About Google Maps hacks for Sonar is just one post from a group blog with a lot of posts on the category locative.
Gutenkarte is built on MetaCarta and lets you see a map with the locations important to a text as Google Books does. They process the text, identify locations in the text and then map them. It would be neater if they let users run a text through.
John Cleese Advertising Compaq Computers
I came across a collection of Compaq ads with John Cleese) of Monty Python) uploaded by YouTube by user CompaqVet. These ads were apparently shown in the UK only.
I love how he keeps on harping on how Compaq’s are made with “386 chips and 32 bits of a bus”.
Adobe Labs – Apollo
Adobe has developed Adobe Integrated Runtime (or AIR) as a web applications development platform. AIR was previously called Apollo and reminds me Konfabulator and OS X Dashboard applications. With it you can adapt web applications into desktop applications. AIR lets you take an application written in HTML, Flash, AJAX, and JavaScript and create a runtime desktop application.
So, why do the Dashboard widgets only run when you turn the Dashboard on? Why not let them run like other applications? Konfabulator did. And … regarding Konfabulator, they seem to have been bought out by Yahoo are now supporting Yahoo! Widgets.
Is there a name for these small, easy-to-program, networked applications? Niall Kennedy and others call these tiny tools “at-a-glance” applications. Kennedy has an Engadget story that talks about Dashboard and its history.
I’m thinking this would be a good way to teach interface design to students comfortable with web design. I also think we could do some neat stuff with web services like those from TAPoR.
Text in the Machine – Flckr Set
I recently was playing around with the pages of old books as matter and uploaded a photo essay to my Flickr account, see Text in the Machine. This started as a project for a JestShrift for a friend, but I thought I would document it after hearing Peter Stoicheff talk about Otto Ege’s “scattered leaves”.
The reactions I get to these images, especially Cutting Pages and Sawing off the spine, is a mixture of horror and nervous laughter. We feel books are sacred and should be cared for, not cut and ripped by saws. The image of sawing off the spine with a power tool teases this unexamined academic taboo.