ephemera: save the bunny …
Bloomberg: Egypt to Improve Museum Security After Van Gogh Theft.
”Egypt plans to set up a security control room to monitor all museums after the theft of a $55 million Vincent van Gogh painting in Cairo, Zahi Hawass, head of the country’s antiquities agency said today.” Routing everything to one place, allows for a single point of failure to radiate outwards. Not wise.
FFFFOUND!: Typeface Terrorism.
Slate: Why e-readers like the Amazon Kindle will soon cost less than $100.
Yes, we’ve known for a while that the ‘inkjet printer sales model’ would be best for e-books. $12.99 for an e-book? Ouch.
Yahoo News: China milk powder blamed for ‘baby breasts’.
”Parents and doctors in central China fear that hormones in milk powder they fed their infant daughters have led the babies to prematurely develop breasts, state media reported Monday. Medical tests indicated the levels of hormones in three girls, ranging in age from 15 months to four years and who were fed the same baby formula, exceeded those of the average adult woman ...” Looks like these products are not repackaged or outsourced by any American companies, thank goodness.
Spiegel.DE: Logging Off: The Internet Generation Prefers the Real World.
“They may have been dubbed the “Internet generation,” but young people are more interested in their real-world friends than Facebook. New research shows that the majority of children and teenagers are not the Web-savvy digital natives of legend. In fact, many of them don’t even know how to google properly.”
CNet: Google’s Schmidt: Society not ready for technology.
“At a conference here Wednesday, Schmidt noted that using artificial intelligence, computers can take 14 pictures of anyone on the Internet and stand a good chance of identifying that person. Similarly, the data collected by location-based services can be used not only to show where someone is at, but to also predict with a lot of accuracy where they might be headed next.” Puts a whole new spin on the concept of ‘cyberstalking.’
ars technica: Hardcovers fall behind Kindle sales at Amazon.
If so, I wonder where they are. I’m not seeing them at coffeeshops here yet. Anyone else?
Gizmodo: Soon Eye-Tracking Technology Will Reveal If You’re Lying.
”The researchers determined that lying requires more work than telling the truth, so they look for indications that the subject is working hard. For example, a person who is being dishonest may have dilated pupils and take longer to read and answer the questions.” Completely stupid and assinine. Why? It means stutterers like myself will be assumed to be lying. We work damned hard to be fluent ALL THE TIME — you IDIOTS.
With my luck, Homeland Security will adopt this, and I’ll end up in Guantanamo.
Gizmodo: Intel Supercomputer Predicts Gulf Oil Spill’s Path.
Encanto, our New Mexican supercomputer, makes the news.
Daniel Lemire: The five most important algorithms?
Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox: iPad and Kindle Reading Speeds.
For reading, the printed book is still best.
Installed Ubuntu on my old Toshiba laptop.
You hear stories of how it’ll make an old laptop seem like new. It’s true. The poor thing would take fifteen minutes to boot up Windows XP with all current security patches and antivirus crap. Ubuntu launches, if not as fast as our Mac laptop, pretty damned close. Still looking at what programs to use as ‘replacements.’ Chrome is wonderfully fast on this old clunker. I used the Wubi installer so I could keep Win XP, just for website checking. Everything worked [works] wonderfully.
PilotHandwriting.com.
Cute concept. Cleaning up my handwriting, though, will likely be the work of hours.
Geekpreneur: The Rules for Working on a Plane.
Pffft. I remember when the first laptop user (should I say, suitcase-user) sat down on a NJ Transit train car, opened his machine, and hooked it up to a box-like cellphone in an attempt to modem his spreadsheet back to his office on Wall Street. In a mass movement, every single person on the car got up and moved to other locations on the train - even if they had to stand up for the rest of the journey. This guy’d broken the ‘time to unwind’ rule on the commute. That interstitial era is long, long gone I see.
YouTube: Chase Jarvis TECH: Complete Workflow for Photo and Video.
It’s all about easy multiple backups. Impressive setup!
TechShout: Toshiba’s libretto W100 and dynabook RX3 notebooks to grace Japanese market.
Here comes the first of the iPad competitors. A little different form factor.
NY Times: A Night at the Electronics Factory.
”His task is to help complete 1,600 hard drives — his workshop’s daily quota — and to make sure every one is perfect. Seated in the middle of the assembly line in his black Foxconn sports shirt, cotton slacks and company-mandated white plastic slippers, he waits for the conveyor belt to deliver a partly assembled rectangular hard drive to his station. He places two plastic chips inside the drive’s casing, inserts a device that redirects light in the drive and then fastens four screws with an electric screwdriver before sending the drive down the line. He has exactly one minute to complete the multistep task.” Read the whole thing.
The Atlantic: 11 Jobs Most Likely to Be Outsourced.
In Character: Awe and the Machine.
“Henry Adams’s dynamo has been replaced by Everyman’s iPod, and awe has given way to complacence and dependence. Your computer’s e-mail program doesn’t inspire awe; it is more like a dishwasher than a dynamo. Nineteenth-century rhapsodies to the machines that tamed nature, such as the steam engine, have given way to impatience with the machines that don’t immediately indulge our whims.”
Mashable: Tablets Will Be Outselling Netbooks by 2012.
When I think about it, the number of netbooks I’ve seen out in the wild in Santa Fe is ... exactly ... one. I think iPads will be more popular here, much more quickly.
Lifehacker: Turn Your Old Router into a Range-Boosting Wi-Fi Repeater.
FFFFOUND!: Cable organization on the cheap.
Ain’t that just a kick in the head. I’ve got some laying around. Done.
NY Times: Women and Technology and Myth.
”Women face a challenge that is similar to the one Indian immigrant entrepreneurs — at least the male ones — have overcome. In the early ’80s, talented, well-trained and entrepreneurial Indians came to the United States to fill positions created by our shortage of I.T. professionals. Back then, they were viewed as cannon fodder for tech start-ups, typically holding junior, low-level engineering positions but rarely sitting at the controls. That’s changed dramatically, particularly in the last five years.”
