Some say it's a hoax or part of a Terminator ARG, but others say it's legit. UK-based dot com millionaire Ben Way has purportedly launched a new startup called Weapons Against Robots (WAR), "the world's first defense company solely dedicated to weaponry against robotic entities."
(via io9)
This past Tuesday on EPIC FU we featured Marius Watz as our artist of the week. I don't remember exactly how I came across the impressive work that was exhibited as part of the 5 Days Off festival in Amsterdam, but I'm sure it caught my attention because of the brilliant melding between art and technology.
Watz, a Norweigian artist, had been working on a project called Generator.x, investigating computational models of creation. An exhibit titled "Generator.x 2.0: Beyond the Screen" brought together artists and architects to contribute their own creations to his project. These works used audio analysis and custom-created software to take audio data and map it to fabrication processes such as rapid-prototyping. In essence, we get to see what sound "looks" like.
Ask and ye shall receive! On one of my last behind-the-scenes videos, Kurt Snieckus asked "Can you do a behind the scenes where the computer systems are explained? I see two dells under Steve's desk and am itching to know what they are doing." Penguinator wondered the same thing: "I saw a lot of computers too under there. I wonder what they are for."
Thanks for asking! :)
In case you missed the crash heard round the world -- John was having a problem with his iTunes crashing, so he filed a wordy crash report prefaced with the phrase "John Mayer here." He then took screenshots of said report and posted it on his blog.
Apple quickly responded to the report (I've never heard of a major software company personally responding to what is typically an anonymous bug report) and the world cried out in jealousy. "Why should he get special service just because he's famous?"
The complaints didn't last long, however, once people realized they could simply pretend to be John Mayer when in need and similarly receive 5-star service.
Week in Review offers weekly hand-drawn images of the week's top news stories -- created by groups of local correspondents who gather at bars and talk about the stories that are important to them. The illustrations are informative, charming, and 100% unique. They offer a great deal of insight into the collective mindshare of participants.
Right now 4 editions are being generated from chapters around the world: Los Angeles, Cincinnati, Ireland, and Singapore. Unfortunately, those last 2 seem out of date.
Video on Flickr has only been active for a day, and already a subset of the Flickr community has banded together against it. The We Say NO to Videos on Flickr group has 20,000 members and has submitted over 1,200 photos to the group's photo pool -- most of which carry an anti-video sentiment like the one above.
The introduction of 90-second video clips has many members worried that their beloved photo site will turn into a YouTube clone.
Personally, I like the idea of videos on Flickr -- especially considering the ultra-short nature of the clips. But I wonder if they should have a better way of distinguishing between the 2 types of media (e.g. video clips still have the word "photos" in their URL's).
What do you guys think? Will Flickr be forever changed?
I saw Andy Carvin link to this little trick on Twitter and I thought it was pretty damn cool. It's a script that matches regular characters to their flipped equivalents. Unless you're a web coder, you might not realize just how many tons of characters can be generated on a computer.
There's another script here, in case the one I linked to (above) goes down in the future.
[Via Andy Carvin on Twitter]
This week Zadi talked about a few of the personal aggregators out there that let you pull your feeds from services like Twitter and Pownce so all your updates show up in one centralized location. If you use an aggregator like FriendFeed, Socialthing, or iminta it doesn't matter which networks you use and which ones I use -- we can keep up with each other on the same website.
An alternative approach sort of accomplishes the same thing by doing the exact opposite -- instead of pulling from multiple places, it lets you send to multiple places, and it's causing a bit of controversy in the social space. I'm talking about "status blasting" services like HelloTxt, which let you to ping multiple services with the same message simultaneously.
The first computer I ever had was a Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer 2. Along with a crummy little joystick and a cassette tape drive, this little machine introduced me to computers. I would sit and code BASIC programs for hours, and then I would try not to shut off the computer because I had no way to save them! I think the most complex thing I ever coded was a graphics piece that made a blocky train move across blocky tracks.
Anyway, for a lot of people the TRS-80 was their first machine, so I thought this was a cool picture set. It has about 10 images of the machine cracked wide open. It looks so simple compared to today's home computers! More after the jump, and all of them are here.
[Via News.com]
Maybe you've heard the controversy surrounding Google's Street View feature in Google Maps. Check out this funny yet poignant video by The Vacationeers that gives us a glimpse into what our Google overlords might be planning next.
Check out the web trends map for 2008 by Information Architects. They've taken about 300 of the most influential web sites and mashed them up with the Tokyo train map. Check out the clickable online version. You can get a large poster size PDF for your home or office and they're coming out with the desktop wallpaper soon.
[Via informationarchitects.jp]
We have some amazingly interesting friends. Take our friend Bre Pettis for instance... who else of all the people we know would laser the 2008 calendar right onto their thumbnail? No one we can think of - except for his friend Martin apparently.
I could see this being useful for a personal countdown... difficult to forget something when it's etched on your fingernails... And if not that, well, it's definitely a conversation starter. :)
