Today's Cool News

What I've Been Doing This Week Instead of Blogging

Does Your Toilet Paper Have to Be More Reliable Than Windows Vista?

Those crazy Japanese, they sure know how to have a good time.

For instance, if you believe Windows Vista is a piece of crap, now you can wipe the memory away.

From Tom's Hardware:

If there is one place in the world that any gadget-electronic freak should go to, that is Akihabara district in Tokyo. Numerous stores bring on fascinating number of products, often first in the world. There are also products which are not so usual, nor you can find them in retail or e-tail in western world.

One of these unavailable products is Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 Toilet edition. Yes, you’ve read it correctly. If Vista is leaving a aftermouth taste like a crappy burger in *insert the name of franchise you hate the most*, you can always clean yourself with this appropriate piece of paper.

Service Pack 1 for Vista Ultimate Edition is an elite piece, three-layer toilet paper that will leave that comfortable feeling. In order to improve the experience, unnamed Japanese maker also printed the list of all new Vista features. Sadly for us westerners, the list of features is listed in Japanese kanji, and calling translators from AltaVista or Google will hardly help.

By the Whiskers of My Robotic Rat

Do you smell a rat?  Well, it just may be that the rats around this place were recently oiled.

Such a conversation could be in our futures now the scientists are trying to develop robotic rats for dangerous missions like rescue operations and deep space exploration.  Why does the world need robotic rats?  The answer is in the whiskers.

From TFOT (The Future of Things):

Scientists from Europe, Israel, and the USA are developing 'robotic rats' that will be able to aid in rescue operations and carry out planetary research missions. Nine research groups from seven countries are collaborating on this initiative, which was recently set up with the aim of imitating nature.

Active sensing is widely common in the animal kingdom. For example, rats’ whiskers function as active sensors. A multinational team was recently assembled in order to develop a series of innovative tactile technologies, including a 'whiskered' robotic rat, which will be capable of quickly locating, identifying and capturing moving objects. "The use of touch in the design of artificial intelligence systems has been largely overlooked, until now," says Professor Ehud Ahissar of the Weizmann Institute of Science’s Neurobiology Department, who is taking part in the project.

(snip)

Why is the sense of touch in a rat’s whiskers so much more efficient than that of the average person’s finger tips? The consortium’s teams have managed to provide some answers to this question. One of the explanations relates to the way in which the sensory system works; whiskers actively sweep back and forth repetitively, accumulating information about their surroundings. The sensing begins in the neurons at the whiskers’ bases, which ‘fire’ signals to the brain. Further experiments have shown that the way in which a rat uses its whiskers is context-dependent. For example, the seemingly simple act of feeling out a 3-D object requires three different types of code, each encoding a different dimension and calculating the horizontal, the vertical, and the radial distance of the object from the whisker base. 

TFOT has some great links to the world of robotics... if I do say so by the hair of my chinny chin chin.  Oh, that's right I shaved it off.

Where the Hell are My Glasses?

If you know me personally, chances are you've seen me walking around for the last few days wearing my back-up glasses, you know the ones with masking tape holding the entire contraption together?  Well, yesterday I found my regular glasses so I am back to just looking like a dork, not a retarded one.

Of course technology is always at the rescue for people like me who keep losing things... but as the Daily Mail reports, this new gizmo will help me find everything BUT my glasses:

Those frustratingly frantic searches for mislaid car keys or mobile phones could soon be a thing of the past.

Japanese scientists have invented a pair of intelligent glasses that remembers where people last saw their keys, handbag, iPod or mobile phone.

The spectacles - which come with a built in camera, display screen and computer brain - can even identify unfamiliar plants or faces.

In fact, the only thing it can't help you find are your glasses.

(snip)

The Smart Goggles contain a compact video camera which films everything the wearer looks at - and a viewfinder which fits snugly in front of the right lens.

The glasses are connected to a small, but smart computer processor worn on the back which can learn to recognise shapes extremely quickly.

To use the glasses, the wearer first wanders around a house or workplace for an hour or so, looking at the objects he or she may later want to find in a hurry.

Each time the camera focuses on a object - such as a set of keys, a mobile phone or a purse - the wearer says the name aloud. The name is then recorded and stored into the memory.

Once the names have been programmed in, the glasses will try to find the right name for any object they come across. The names appear in small type on the viewfinder.

If they are unable to recognise an object they make a guess and - if they get it wrong - learn from their mistakes.

At some point in the future, if the wearer is trying to find their keys in a hurry, they simply name the object.

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GPS Run Amok on Small English Country Roads

I love my GPS but recognize that it could lead me astray.  Fortunately, I don't live in a town with roads built for horse and cart.

From the Christian Science Monitor:

With its winding country lanes and parish church, its 18th-century cottages and sleepy allotments, life is gentle and agreeable in this bucolic southeast English village. Or at least it was until the truck drivers started coming through.

First there was the Slovenian driver en route to Wales with a load of paper who took an improbable detour and ended up wedging his juggernaut into a tiny lane. It was stuck for two days.

Then there were the 10-wheelers that wheezed their way up Butcher's Lane, a thin ribbon of a road constructed with horse and cart in mind. One made a mess of the roof on Ena Wickens's cottage, which lies flush to the lane. No sooner had it been repaired than another truck snorted its way up the roadway and crumpled part of the roof again.

"It's such a worry," says Ms. Wickens as she putters around the garden behind her cozy Jane Austen cottage. "This last time, it was lucky I was in, otherwise he would just have driven off. There is a sign at the bottom of the road saying 'Unsuitable for large vehicles,' but still they come."

Why, exactly, do they come? The answer is to be found in the satellite navigation kits (satnav for short) that are handy for getting motorists from one location to another, but not always judicious in selecting the most appropriate routes.

(snip)

Satellite navigation has turned one country lane in Wales into a virtual gill net, ensnaring almost every truck that comes along: One could only be set free recently by knocking down a stone wall. And last month, a Lithuanian lorry driver was stuck for four days after his vehicle became wedged on a rural roadway more suitable for sheep than trucks.

Feel Free to Call Me at 415-637-7389

Yeah that's really my phone number.  I bet a lot fewer people want to call me than want to call Robert Scoble.  Still every now and then someone gets surprised when they find out they can call Robert with the number right there on his blog. 

Robert feigns surprise at their surprise:

What’s ironic is that I’ve shared my phone number for more than two years on my blog and on my Facebook account. Hey, feel free to give me a call. If I’m open, I’ll take the call.

I’ve actually had people be irate at ME for posting my phone number. There seems to be this weird idea that if you post your phone number you’ll have your identity stolen, or worse.

Sorry, can't resist the urge to re-post my profile of Robert from last summer:

A New Year, A New Day, The Same Ole War

Ever think of how the world might have been different if George McGovern had won the presidency in 1972.  We might be living in a world of free love, free pot, and universal brotherhood.  More likely we would be a much less free satellite of the Soviet Union.

Well, George is still with us... and like many before him... has concluded in a column Sunday in the Washington Post... that that piker Dick Nixon was an amateur when it comes to high crimes and misdemeanors compared to our current pres and vice.

As we enter the eighth year of the Bush-Cheney administration, I have belatedly and painfully concluded that the only honorable course for me is to urge the impeachment of the president and the vice president.

After the 1972 presidential election, I stood clear of calls to impeach President Richard M. Nixon for his misconduct during the campaign. I thought that my joining the impeachment effort would be seen as an expression of personal vengeance toward the president who had defeated me.

Today I have made a different choice.

(snip)

Bush and Cheney are clearly guilty of numerous impeachable offenses. They have repeatedly violated the Constitution. They have transgressed national and international law. They have lied to the American people time after time. Their conduct and their barbaric policies have reduced our beloved country to a historic low in the eyes of people around the world. These are truly "high crimes and misdemeanors," to use the constitutional standard.

(snip)

I believe we have a chance to heal the wounds the nation has suffered in the opening decade of the 21st century. This recovery may take a generation and will depend on the election of a series of rational presidents and Congresses. At age 85, I won't be around to witness the completion of the difficult rebuilding of our sorely damaged country, but I'd like to hold on long enough to see the healing begin.

There has never been a day in my adult life when I would not have sacrificed that life to save the United States from genuine danger, such as the ones we faced when I served as a bomber pilot in World War II. We must be a great nation because from time to time, we make gigantic blunders, but so far, we have survived and recovered.

Andrew Olmsted can't say the same.  The U.S. Soldier and blogger submitted his final post from beyond the grave.  Just don't use his death in one of your slogans on either side in this war.

This is an entry I would have preferred not to have published, but there are limits to what we can control in life, and apparently I have passed one of those limits.

(snip)

What I don't want this to be is a chance for me, or anyone else, to be maudlin. I'm dead. That sucks, at least for me and my family and friends. But all the tears in the world aren't going to bring me back, so I would prefer that people remember the good things about me rather than mourning my loss. (If it turns out a specific number of tears will, in fact, bring me back to life, then by all means, break out the onions.)

(snip)

I suppose I should speak to the circumstances of my death. It would be nice to believe that I died leading men in battle, preferably saving their lives at the cost of my own. More likely I was caught by a marksman or an IED. But if there is an afterlife, I'm telling anyone who asks that I went down surrounded by hundreds of insurgents defending a village composed solely of innocent women and children. It'll be our little secret, ok?

I do ask (not that I'm in a position to enforce this) that no one try to use my death to further their political purposes. I went to Iraq and did what I did for my reasons, not yours. My life isn't a chit to be used to bludgeon people to silence on either side. If you think the U.S. should stay in Iraq, don't drag me into it by claiming that somehow my death demands us staying in Iraq. If you think the U.S. ought to get out tomorrow, don't cite my name as an example of someone's life who was wasted by our mission in Iraq. I have my own opinions about what we should do about Iraq, but since I'm not around to expound on them I'd prefer others not try and use me as some kind of moral capital to support a position I probably didn't support. Further, this is tough enough on my family without their having to see my picture being used in some rally or my name being cited for some political purpose. You can fight political battles without hurting my family, and I'd prefer that you did so.

On a similar note, while you're free to think whatever you like about my life and death, if you think I wasted my life, I'll tell you you're wrong. We're all going to die of something. I died doing a job I loved. When your time comes, I hope you are as fortunate as I was.

Read the entire entry.  You'll be glad you did.  And sad too.

They Ought to SWAT These People

911: "911. What is your emergency?"

Me: "I'm freaking out on acid.  I have an AK 47 in my house and I've just shot my family. I live at 1234 Maple Street."

Doesn't it sound like just the greatest hoot to make a call like that and PRETEND to be your friend?  Just imagine the fun you'll have watching as the SWAT team shows up and surrounds your buddy's home.  Maybe no one will get shot before they figure out it's just a prank.  Wow, too bad we weren't smart enough to think of acting like this when we were young and irresponsible?

From The Register:

Three more individuals have admitted they participated in a series of phone phreak hoaxes that prompted raids by armed special weapons and tactic police teams on the homes of unsuspecting victims.

Jason Trowbridge, of Louisiana and Texas, and Chad Ward of Texas pleaded guilty to multiple felonies, including conspiracy, access device fraud and unauthorized access of a protected computer. Each faces maximum penalties of five years in prison, fines of $250,000 and costs for restitution.

(snip)

Swatters, as the malicious pranksters are referred to, use a combination of social engineering, phone phreaking prowess and computer hacking to spoof the phone numbers of individuals they want to harass. They then make emergency calls to police departments and report crimes in process, in many cases prompting a response from SWAT teams who conduct emergency raids on the homes of people whose numbers were spoofed.

(snip)

In one case, they posed as an Alvarado, Texas man whose daughter was a party line participant. They told a police dispatcher that he had shot and killed members of his family and was armed with an AK47 machine gun. The caller, who claimed to be high on hallucinogenic drugs, then threatened to kill his remaining hostages unless he was given $50,000 and safe passage out of the country.

Police responded by sending police to the residence of the real man.

In September of last year, Ward himself was swatted by members of the gang. But just a month later, as he admitted in court documents filed last month, he offered money to anyone who would carry out a Swat attack on the Alvarado family. Ward, who went by the name "Dark Angel," also confessed to obtaining personal information on victims by socially engineering telephone company employees.

Apparently one of these guys got the phone service cut off for a woman who refused to have phone sex with him.

SWAT

New Troubles for Wordpress

I really like Matt Mullenweg as a person having met and interviewed him a couple of times... so I tried to launch this blog and White Noise Metal on Wordpress.  Eventually though I just wasn't geek enough to pull it off so I sprang for the Typepad account.

Now it appears the bad guys are targeting Wordpress.

From Alistair Croll writing in GigaOM:

Designers bundle up stylesheets, PHP code, and sometimes plug-ins, into themes. A WordPress theme isn’t just cosmetics: It’s code. If you change a theme in Powerpoint, you’re just changing fonts and colors. But when you change a theme in WordPress, you’re also modifying the underlying structure of the site, including database queries and PHP execution.

The tremendous flexibility this offers gives us the rich variety of blogs available today. WordPress distributes some of these themes through its own theme browser, but themes are also offered by many sites and by individual developers. And WordPress has worked hard to make enabling a new theme as easy as copying it to a blog and clicking on a thumbnail.

With any successful platform, the hackers aren’t far behind. Apple’s Mac is widely regarded as more secure than a Windows PC, but that security may also be a result of fewer people attacking it. So as WordPress grows, it becomes a prime target for attack.

(snip)

One approach proposed by Matthew Mullenweg, founding developer of WordPress, is a marketplace consisting of certified, GPL-licensed themes.”This is no different from malware, and in many ways much worse,” says Mullenweg. “All 2000+ themes in our official directory are vetted for this kind of thing, and it’s obviously dangerous.”

Whatever Happened to "Just Spell My Name Right?"

I didn't plan to do back-to-back posts on Media 1.0 companies that just flat out REFUSE TO GET IT but here goes...

I love Jan Wahl as a person (I've even seen her sans-hat!!) but in general I disagree with most of her movie reviews.  This doesn't make me right and her wrong or vice versa... it just means we have different tastes in flicks.  That said, watching a Jan Wahl review is useful to me if only in reverse.

While is one reason why traditionally movie studios haven't really minded bad reviews all that much.  They figure that if you show clips, even if the reviewer is prattling on about how much it sucks, someone in the audience will ignore the commentary and say "That looks Cool!"

So what the heck has gotten into 20th Century Fox over an online movie review?

From The Movie Blog:

Just when you think studios couldn’t act worse… they just keep on surprising you! I’ve just been notified by YouTube that 20th Century Fox has just filed a copyright infringement notice with them to have our review of the ass awful film “Reno 911: Miami” taken off their site and deleted.

And before you ask… yes… the review was a negative one.

It is curious that they are claiming copyright infringement. As most of you know, in our video reviews we will cut in clips from the trailers of the movies we’re discussing. Trailers that are made publicly available by the studios for anyone, anywhere to download at anytime.

This does seem to me a clear case of Fair Use, since as John points out in the post, the copyrighted material is used for commentary and criticism.  It's a review for crying out loud!

Rupert's lawyers need something better to do, it seems to me.

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