aphexddb.com

This is what I’m talking about! Haptic head sensor goodness. Mediate your reality by extending your highly adaptable senses. Sounds similar to the belt with vibrations which helped you know where magnetic north was.

Ever wanted some cat’s whiskers or insect antenna? Probably not, but check out this head-mounted haptic device developed by researchers at the University of Tokyo in Japan. It lets a wearer “feel” their surroundings from a distance, roughly as if they had several long whiskers sticking out of the head. At least, that’s what the researchers say.

Terrible police brutality caught on tape AND a new internet meme! Do you smell perfection?

Don’t Tase Me Bro on Youtube

There have been over 100 automated Twitter digest blog posts and only about 25 actual.. well blogs. No more will I use the crutch of Twitter to supply my blog with freshness. From now on it it’s up to me, the lone blogger to suck it up and write original content.

Thus, expect non-too frequent updates.

Good lord! No more overly crappy theme overloaded with every single plugin known to man.

New Hotness:

• A real K2 theme based on Vino Tinto
• Photos on my motorcycle page
• A nice standard sidebar with no stupid widgets
• Groovy new header image with a fun CSS overlay
• OpenID login if you care to comment
• Most importantly I can login to my own blog with my OpenID account. Scratch one more stupid standalone internet account to manage!
• Stuff

Brought to you by Adobe Photoshop CS3 and a desire to get better at CSS.

Cory Doctrow, I much admire your ability to verbally express so many things that fly around my gray matter. Stealing a number of lines, some modified from a 2002 article:

I consume, digest, and excrete information for a living. Whether I’m writing code, architecting information systems, business plans, or interacting with early 20th century technology via hand tools, whether I’m speaking at table to hungry minds or yammering down the phone at some poor techno-wannabe, my success depends on my ability to cite and connect disparate factoids at just the right moment.

Thus I need to eat roughly six times my weight in information every day or my brain starts to starve and atrophy. I gather information from many sources: print, radio, television, conversation, the Web, RSS feeds, email, chance, and serendipity. I used to bookmark this stuff, but I just ended up with a million bookmarks that I never revisited and could never find anything in.
Theoretically, you can annotate your bookmarks, entering free-form reminders to yourself so that you can remember why you bookmarked this page or that one. I don’t know about you, but I never actually got around to doing this — it’s one of those get-to-it-later eat-your-vegetables best-practice housekeeping tasks like defragging your hard drive or squeegeeing your windshield that you know you should do but never get around to.

Until I started blogging. And using Twitter. Blogging gave my knowledge-grazing direction and reward. Writing a blog entry about a useful and/or interesting subject forces me to extract the salient features of the link into a two- or three-sentence elevator pitch to my readers, whose decision to follow a link is predicated on my ability to convey its interestingness to them. This exercise fixes the subjects in my head the same way that taking notes at a lecture does, putting them in reliable and easily-accessible mental registers.

Without my electronic blog, tweet trail, gmail search, etc. I would be utterly useless. A portion of my intelligence has been externalized and can never be put back in. Bring on Intelligence Amplification!

We are Tribal. Cory Doctrow’s Eastern Standard Tribe gets at this in a humorful way. I like this much better:

Only a few minutes ago, I had the delightful opportunity to read the comment of a fellow who said he wished that white, middle-class, racist, conservative cocksuckers like myself could have been herded into the Superdome Concentration Camp to see how much we like it. Absent, of course, was the fundamental truth of what he plainly does not have the eyes or the imagination to see, namely, that if the Superdome had been filled with white, middle-class, racist, conservative cocksuckers like myself, it would not have been a refinery of horror, but rather a citadel of hope and order and restraint and compassion.

That has nothing to do with me being white. If the blacks and Hispanics and Jews and gays that I work with and associate with were there with me, it would have been that much better. That’s because the people I associate with – my Tribe – consists not of blacks and whites and gays and Hispanics and Asians, but of individuals who do not rape, murder, or steal. My Tribe consists of people who know that sometimes bad things happen, and that these instances are opportunities to show ourselves what we are made of. My people go into burning buildings. My Tribe consists of organizers and self-starters, proud and self-reliant people who do not need to be told what to do in a crisis. My Tribe is not fearless; they are something better. They are courageous. My Tribe is honorable, and decent, and kind, and inventive. My Tribe knows how to give orders, and how to follow them. My Tribe knows enough about how the world works to figure out ways to boil water, ration food, repair structures, build and maintain makeshift latrines, and care for the wounded and the dead with respect and compassion.

Thats the kind of stuff I am made of. My friends are made of. The tribe my parents hail from. The tribe my co-workers hail from. It’s a tribe based on standing together and doing the right thing, because that’s always the best reason.

I read about some neat software awhile ago. In order to bring better signal-to-noise meaning to email, the software gives email users a fixed number of points each day. Then people assign point values to emails they send, effectively weighting them. This way you can assume that when someone spends 20 of their daily 30 points on an email for you, its super important. And you can see based on trends that you may need to spend 5 points to have someone even notice your email. It’s definitely available as an outlook plug-in/addon as well.

Problem is I never bookmarked it and I can’t freaking find this product on Google! Ahh! 1 hour of searching and the signal to noise ratio is off the charts when searching for email, collaboration, etc.

Help.

This Slashdot article really got me thinking. 1.4 Terabytes for $2,000. Then you can start adding drives at will to increase your storage without incurring any penalties.

Get a CoolerMaster Stacker enclosure like this one (just the hardware not the software) that can hold up to 12 SATA drives. Install OpenSolaris and create ZFS pools with RAID-Z for redundancy. Export some pools with Samba for use as a NAS. Export some pools with iSCSI for use as a SAN. Run it over Gigabit Ethernet. Fast, secure, reliable, easy to administer, and cheap. Usable from Windows, Mac, and Linux. As a bonus ZFS let’s me create daily or hourly snapshots at almost no cost in disk space or time.

Twitter is a way of life. It’s living with a publicity policy. It’s friends, Romans and country people the world over engaged in timely snippet conversations that fit into 140 character chunks.