Archive for August, 2005

Martha’s electronic ankle bracelet just came off.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune published only an online edition of today’s paper. Their site also has a growing collection of photos of Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans. And one blogger in Gulfport, Mississippi is getting out missives and photos of the destruction on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Also, don’t miss the latest from the nola newsblog.

The Solio portable solar charger costs about $100, fits in a shirt pocket, is waterproof and completely charges your cellphone or ipod in 1-2 hours. Very Cool.

Canadian filmmaker Simon Goulet makes hypnotic films showing paint flying. O

A group of German nuts, Spherical Robots, has created a water sculpture that uses 128 magnetic valves to create a wall of falling water drops that look like bitmap images and text. The sculpture can be tied to keywords from news websites and display words as a liquid information curtain. Check out a video of images or words.

The five-piece Austrian band The Handydandy makes music with their cellphones connected via Bluetooth. Download some songs or watch a video of Handydandy in action.

It’s a far cry from Hawkeye Pierce’s bathtub gin. U.S. soldiers in Iraq are bringing unprecedented amounts of creature comforts to the warzone. Never in the field of human conflict has so much stuff been acquired by so many soldiers in so little time. It’s not just plasma TVs and playstations either. Last year one Guardsman produced a record by a singer in New York using a keyboard, and mixing equipment in his room in Iraq, exchanging sound files over the Internet.

One of the best google map hacks out there is Paul Degnan’s Gmaps Pedometer. Just map out a course and it’ll tell you have far you’ve gone. It’s perfect for getting running distances.

From the latest Shuttle flight comes a nice self-portrait from space.

Heading to Dreamville is one of the nicer galleries among many fine ones from French photographer K

British researcher at the University of Southampton is hoping to start a pilot progam using RFID tags to track soccer balls and players to determine if they’re offsides.

The folks at COLOURlovers love colors and they’ve put together a site to view, rate and review colors and palettes. The idea is to create a place of color inspiration where a designer of any sort can see new and lovely colours… find out what colors are hot, what work well in other uses… and simply make some love with colour.