Unsought Input

A couple of weeks ago the esteemed Mr. Wallz mentioned that Radiohead was giving their next album away for free - sort of. The deal is that you can pay any amount you want for the MP3 version, from $0 on up. They are not going through iTunes or Amazon or anyone else and are selling direct from the album’s website.

I went, I bought, I listened. The verdict? Good album, incredibly terrible website. Seriously, the site looks and acts like something that crawled from the depths of 1998, escaping some doomed graphic artist’s college portfolio and wreaking havok on unsuspecting downloaders everywhere.

Here’s a screenshot of the registration screen. Too many fields, and too many required fields. Do they really need my mobile phone number?

Yes, the entire web site looks like that. It’s like someone asked their 4-year old to draw a rainbow in Microsoft Paint and then saved and re-saved it as a jpeg 100 times.

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Before you read on, spend a minute to take a look at this site using Firefox.

I’ll wait till you get back…

Okay, so the basic theory is that Firefox (and Mozilla Foundation and its Commercial arm, the Mozilla Corporation) allows and endorses an extension named Adblock. Adblock allows users to block ads (or other content) while surfing the web. According to the creators of that site, this is wrong. Horribly, horribly wrong.

It is “no less than stealing,” and a by some astute legal analysis, Firefox is a “Contributory Infringer.” Yes, you heard me: Firefox (with Adblock) is a grave threat to capitalism itself. In fact, FIREFOX === COMMUNISM.

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This awesome music video is made with dice.  And probably computers too, but dice.  How nerdy cool.  There needs to be a name for something that is nerdy cool.  Someone should make one up. Oh, leave me a suggestion in the comments!

The band is Fujiya and Miyagi, the song is called Ankle Injuries. (more…)

Here’s my unsought input for you today. I live on a street with a lot of duplexes. It’s a nice neighborhood, the houses are in good shape, and generally speaking it looks like the sort of place you would like to live.

But not all the houses are owner-occupied like ours, and some owners are out-of-state investors who maybe care a little less about upkeep. Some of the residents are elderly and have a hard time with gardening and yard work. And with the huge subprime mortgage problem looming over the country, houses here and there are going into default and sitting neglected.

You’ve probably seen all the dramatic headlines about the Dow decline today, in part because of the weak housing market. Well, I’ve got an idea that will get the market up and running again. Okay, probably not, because I’m not a financial genius and I know relatively little about real estate. Still, I have an idea and thought I would share.

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Firefox is a great web browser. If nothing else, the large number of people switching from Internet Explorer to Firefox convinced Microsoft to finally update IE. When Firefox added inline spell checking with version 2.0 they boosted the writing quality of every blogger, wiki contributor, and forum post on the Internet. What more can you ask for?

Actually, the best thing about Firefox is its extensibility. Anyone with some programming skill and some free time can add features and functionality by building plugins and extensions. There are well over 2000 extensions listed at Mozilla.org, so where do you start? You can find a lot of “top 10″ lists around the web, but I thought I’d add my two cents as well. Here is a list of some of the best Firefox extensions.

1. Adblock Plus - Adblock is a controversial choice because it allows users to block out the advertisements that many websites rely on for income. This website, for example. But again and again I find myself thanking the Flying Spaghetti Monster for Adblock. Some sites fill their pages with flash-based ads that flash, flutter, crawl across the pages, etc. And those are the ads I inevitably block.

2. StumbleUpon - StumbleUpon lets you channel surf the web. Click on the Stumble button and you’ll get a new web site - give it a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down and StumbleUpon will suggest sites more to your liking. I should warn you, though, that this extension is very addictive and a terrible time-waster.

3. Procrastato - Now that I’ve ruined your productivity with StumbleUpon, I’ll give you a little bit back. Procrastato watches for notorious time-wasting sites like Digg, MySapce, and YouTube and reminds you every few minutes to get back to work.

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You are far from any beaches, or the ocean for that matter. But the sun is out and you’ve got your surfboard waxed — how can you get your surfing in? Head downtown, grab a friend and a few sticks of dynamite, and surf the river:

It looks like this is an ad for Quicksilver who sell surfing gear, so I have no idea if it’s a real video they picked up or something staged. But I’m impressed.

Dynamite isn’t the only way to surf a river. If you’ve got some predictable rapids, you can surf the waves formed where the water flows over submerged ledges and rocks.

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How awesome would it be to have one of these to play around with for a while?

Back in the day, I was huge fan of Sim City, Sim City 2000, and even Sim City 3000. So much so that I put up a small fansite and was constantly bombarded by emailed requests to download Sim City for free.

Sim City was a great game but it never was a completely accurate city simulator. In Sim City 2000, for example, filling every square of land with high-rises would only get your population to 100,000 or so. In order to reach the millions, you had to wait past the far-flung future year of 2000 and build arcologies.

Now we are seven years past 2000, so where are the arcologies? On their way. There a number of projects being proposed and built that could qualify.

First, there’s this huge pyramid proposed for Tokyo Bay. Shimizu Mega-City Pyramid is obviously an arcology, just take a look at this clip from Extreme Engineering:

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If you have missed the first two articles on this topic you can read them here and here. In this grand finale, if I may call it that, I will show you the best of the best (in my opinion) of the concept cars recently reported on on yahoo.com. These I thought were either really cool looking and futuristic or had really cool ideas or that I just kind of liked more than the others. Anyway, without further ado, let’s start the “Hey, that’s cool” category.

In third place we have the Toyota Volta:

This car looks like it could go very very fast. It also looks like the maximum height you could possibly be to drive in this vehicle is 5′5″ and that is pushing the limit. I don’t know if this is the fastest electric hybrid on the market but with dual electric engines (one for each front tire) this car boasts that it has a 408 horsepower hybrid engine, the safety of all-wheel drive and can do 0-60 in just four seconds. Look at those desert dunes. This car is ready to climb them, but I am a little worried that the hills are too steep and those don’t really look like tires that get the best traction. So, maybe it’s not good to drive in the desert, but since no one really off roads their vehicles like they do in the commercials, I think this car might be OK. (more…)

So yesterday our cars of the future article was on “Didn’t they do this already”. I think today’s category is “Wouldn’t be Caught Dead in This”. You can try to persuade me that people buy cars based on power and performance all you want but I am pretty sure that the look and style of the car is pretty important, too. Just like no one will ever want to be seen in the environmentally friendly Hummer, I can imagine the same will be said of most of these vehicles.

In third place we have the Ford Mercury Meta One.

You may argue that this car isn’t necessarily the ugliest car you have ever seen, in fact it’s okay. Work with me here for a minute, if you please. Think back to that movie about the cars that try to kill people. You know the one, the really bad Stephen King movie, Maximum Overdrive? This car will eat you. And your children. And then your neighbors and their families until it runs out of gas, which will take a little longer than a normal SUV since this runs on nice and clean ” hybrid transmission with a twin-turbocharged V-6 diesel engine calibrated to run on a bio-diesel blend”. You can see how I feel this is potentially hazardous to everyone, right? Just look into those headlight “eyes”. Those are the headlights of a killer. (more…)

So a recent article on yahoo.com’s main page is all about green concept cars. It has some of the main players and a lot of pretty pictures. Here are the cars listed with a brief description as to alleviate you having to go to another site to read all about them. I am saving you time, thus saving you money as well so you can save it up to buy one of these awesome cars when the time is right.

I am going to break these down into three categories: Drivable/hey that’s cool, Wouldn’t be caught dead in this, and Didn’t we already do this?

Um, Alex, I would like to start with Didn’t We Already Do This for 200 please.

Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to introduce to you the 2010 VW Microbus, um I mean Chameleon. So, yeah, apparently the late 60’s are back and we are all going to be peace loving pot smoking patchouli smelling hippies. At least we have the perfect vehicle for it, I mean this “new” vehicle is all electricity powered with 10 count them 10 30v batteries in the floor to power the vehicle. Oh, the surf boards are thrown in free of charge, they are fitted with solar panels for recharging the batteries. This is the vehicle for those fifty somethings to relive their youth in a perfectly environmentally friendly manner. (more…)

As I write this, Google has a market cap of about $148 billion, compared to Verizon at $124 billion and AOL parent Time Warner at $82 billion. Google might rule the Web search market, but Verizon’s $88 billion and Time Warner’s $44 billion in revenue last year dwarf Google’s $10 billion.

Why would a smaller company that makes less money be worth more to investors than larger competitors? Are they just being irrational? Maybe so, but I think there is at least one good reason why Google has been so successful: it has focused on providing services, rather than content or infrastructure.

Why is this important? Think about it this way: whenever you do anything on the Internet, chances are you can break it down into three layers:

1) Infrastructure - your connection to the Internet, whether it’s Cable, DSL, dial-up, FIOS, etc.
2) Service - the application you use to get what you want done, for example the search engine you use to find things or the mail client you use to read you email.
3) Content - the stuff you read, watch, listen to, or create yourself for others to see.

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Scenario: you are in a restaurant in an unfamiliar town. You’ve been seated for just a minute when the waitress walks up. “What’ll you have to drink?” It’s too early for an alcoholic beverage and you’re not in the mood for coffee or tea. Water is for cheapskates and juice is for hippies. But what do you call those sugary carbonated beverages that go perfectly with a burger and fries?

Depending on where you are in the country, asking what kinds of “pop,” “soda,” or “coke” they have on tap has a 66 percent chance of earning you a dirty look. Don’t call it pop in Massachusetts. Don’t call it soda in Toledo.

And now you can see what to call it no matter where you are in the nation:

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Lately we have been uber-enviro-nerds with the talk of wind turbines, deep lake cooling and environmentally friendly roller coasters. I just felt the need to put up another nifty energy saving device that was invented by a Bloke from the UK named Peter Hughes. He has created a ramp that absorbs kinetic energy from breaking or slowing down while driving your car over regular roadways. The idea is simple, use the cars wasted kinetic energy to power the streetlights and stoplights. There are a series of plates installed under the road which the cars will drive over, more than likely around stop lights or other areas where the traffic will be slowed. The weight of the car slightly shifts the plates, causing kinetic energy to be created. The energy is stored and then used to power whatever. It is better described on the official site, so I will just do you a favor and quote it here.

The ramp is unobtrusive, silent in operation, causes no
discomfort to the vehicles occupants and is entirely safe in
operation. The Ramp is designed to require the minimum
of maintenance and may be used for generating electricity
to power street lighting, traffic lights, road signs, with
the surplus being fed into the national grid. It also has the
capability to store electricity within a storage battery
facility.

I also found a video that you can watch that shows this in action.

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In the past we’ve talked about some things that you can do to make your house more energy efficient. Some things are easy, like putting in Compact Florescent light bulbs, while others are on their way in the near future, like your own personal wind turbine.

There’s only so much you can do at home, though, and many of us live in large, air-conditioned office buildings. How could a glass-covered skyscraper possibly use less power for cooling in the summer? If you live in Toronto, it’s easy - just tie into the Deep Lake Water Cooling System.

The system, by Enwave, draws water from Lake Ontario, deep below the surface where it’s always a chilly 4 degrees Celsius. The water runs through huge heat exchangers before making its way into the city’s normal water supply. A separate cooling loop transports water chilled by the incoming lake water to various buildings in the financial district where it is used in the air conditioning system. Here’s a diagram of the system at work.

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