(Credit: Suck UK)
(Credit: Suck UK)Wanted: good-looking fella seeks book-loving gal; easily flattened by all the attention.
If he’s your guy, meet Dead Mark, the only man you’ll ever need in your life. Never mind the ominous-sounding name, Markie here’ll never give you grief. Instead, he’…
This is a tale of geek kindness that will warm your heart. It also shows clearly that Twitter isn’t a breeding ground for mouth-breathing idiots — for that, you need to visit the YouTube comment threads.
David Pogue (the NYT tech journo) was testing out Google Voice, the search giant’s new voicemail and SMS management service. To check out the text messaging features, he of course needed text messages and so turned to Twitter, sending a direct message out to a handful of selected followers (a direct message is a message with a D at the front, and it doesn’t hit the main feed).
Instead of whittling down the message into the required 140 character maximum, Pogue split his message in two. Here is the second part:
So would you mind sending me a text message right now? My number is [and here I put my number].
Do you notice his rookie, 3AM mistake? That’s right. No "D". Pogue panicked and sent out another tweet, this time asking for mercy. There’s no way anybody would want 21,000 text messages to come flooding in.
The early responses were good. Twitterer Tom_Baker (Dr.Who?) replied “We’ve all made mistakes like that.” Pogue went to bed, presumably in a cold sweat and with his phone set to silent.
The morning result? Almost nothing. No calls, five messages sent before the follow-up request and one YouTube member who apparently texted thusly: "Haha, you tweeted your number… FAIL! :)"
Who said nerds aren’t cool?
A Do-Over on Twitter [NYT]
Photo: tosha/Flickr
This table pretty much speaks for itself as a snapshot of the year in smartphones that was 2008 (according to Gartner) — a breakout year for the category particularly in the US. As you’d expect from the smartphone device tallies we saw yesterday, RIM and Apple have the momentum largely at the expense of Symbian’s declining market share and the stagnation of Windows Mobile in an otherwise growing market segment. Palm’s also a bit of a surprise showing 42.2% growth for the year. With any luck, Palm could turn this table upside down in 2009 with a successful global launch of WebOS. Regardless, you can bet that developers are paying particularly close attention to these numbers as they decide where to best align their resources for maximum financial gain.
Filed under: Cellphones
Gartner posts worldwide mobile OS numbers for 2008 originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 13 Mar 2009 06:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Anton Grimes’ rent-a-scooter design makes fantastically practical use of infrastructure, but would likely fail in real life. The electrical scooter stations are retrofitted to street lights for charging, and patrons of the scheme can make short hops from station to station at up to 16 Km/h (10 mph). And because the scooters fold flat, they take up almost no space when docked.
But Grimes’ scheme, concocted for the Australian Design Awards competition, fails in a few ways. First, it’s a scooter, and therefore has tiny wheels. Grimes’ has limited the speed and also added a mandatory requirement for a helmet to prevent damage when the rider takes a spill, but this means the user needs to carry a helmet — hardly conducive the the impulse travel that is the point of these rental systems.
Second, the biggest problem with point-to-point bike rental schemes is that the bikes either run out or the station is too crowded to return them. And this is for large stations holding up to 40 bikes at a time. To think that a four-bay station will be enough is rather optimistic.
Oddly, the thing which most concerns other people reporting this story is that the scooters might be stolen. I’m assuming they think that these scooters will be free to take, like the hippy White Bicycles of the 60s. They won’t, unless the organizers are morons. Most schemes require membership, which means the scooter company will have your name, address and credit card number. Good luck getting away with that. Not that the scheme will be in service for long anyway — The first time a dog relieves itself against one of these electrical lampposts and is fried to death, the whole network will be shut down.
Urban Scooter System [Student Design Awards via Tree Hugger via Slippery Brick via Coolest Gadgets]
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British adventurer and bank dynasty heir David de Rothschild plans to sail from San Francisco to Australia–in a boat made from discarded soft-drink bottles.
No sharp epoxy smells greet us on San Francisco’s Pier 31 when we go to visit de Rothschild on a sunny weekday afternoon. Instead, popping sounds from bottles being re-inflated echo like a huge popcorn machine in the northern end of a hangar. This is where the strange vessel, called “Plastiki,” is being built.
In part of this hangar the size of a football field, 12,000 recycled bottles donated by the Waste Management company are being washed, cleaned, and pressurized for their new role–acting as flotation devices in the two pontoons of the 60-foot high-tech catamaran.
“If we really want to move from Planet 1.0 to Planet 2.0, we need to really start taking action and stop just talking,” de Rothschild says as he arrives at the construction site.
The tall, bearded 30-year-old–a charismatic scion of the British Rothschild bank dynasty and the youngest British person to ever reach both the North and South poles–demands attention as he circles the busy site.
He runs the Adventure Ecology educational organization and is the mastermind behind the Plastiki project, which, among other things, aims to change people’s perception of garbage. Today, most plastic bottles in the U.S. are not recycled, according to environmental organizations, and instead end up in the world’s landfills and oceans.
“Thirty-nine billion plastic bottles are consumed in the U.S. every year,” de Rothschild says. “Only 20 percent are recycled. Imagine what that is in terms of resources.”
The lofty goal of a voyage to Australia has spurred a number of inventions. The skeletal hull, decks, and cabin of the boat, for example, are made of composite Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) plastic panels consisting of layers of self-reinforcing PET skins, a woven fabric made of reused plastic.
“What we have been exploring with is biocomposites, bioglues, biopolymers,” de Rothschild says, “things that are not just going to be positive for this project, but have ongoing implications.”
…
Originally posted at Green Tech
The only thing more certain about an Apple fanboy than his unwavering trust in the infallibility of Steve Jobs is his affinity for the Apple logo. You’ll see it prominently displayed on the bumper of his VW or on the backside of her MacBook where it glows in the conspicuous brilliance of latte-superiority. So it’s no surprise to see said logo modded yet again, this time, with a fully functional LCD display thanks to the efforts of Eddie Zarick. Honestly, seeing the iTunes Visualizer pumped through that Apple mask looks pretty sweet. You seeing this Jonny Ive?
[Thanks, Chris T.]
Continue reading Video: Apple logo modded as secondary LCD
Filed under: Laptops
Video: Apple logo modded as secondary LCD originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 13 Mar 2009 05:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Don’t worry, we’re not about to bring you yet another hackintosh with a glowing Apple logo. This mod is altogether smarter and more elegant. It’s a real MacBook with another display within the Apple.
Eddie Zarick was actually responsible for the MSI Wind with a glowing logo we showed you last month. Since then, he’s been busy opening up his black MacBook and wiring a second LCD behind the Apple. This is recognized as a proper secondary display by the Mac and can therefore show anything.
The video starts out with screen saver but quickly gets more spooky when Ed switches on the iSight camera. It looks like there is a hole in the case when he starts waving — albeit a reversing, reducing hole, but still. Then the iTunes visualizer fires up and we realize the whole point of this hack. It might be pointless, but it looks amazing. Way better, in fact, than a stupid Splashtop weather widget.
Apple Glowing Logo as a Secondary Display with LCD! [MacMod Forum. Thanks. Eddie!]
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The new iPod Shuffle is so tiny that we knew there couldn’t be much inside. What is a surprise is that there is just one screw holding the whole thing together — clear evidence that Steve Jobs is still influencing design despite being on leave, doing yoga and drinking mango smoothies.
The folks at iFixit (who else?) have opened up the new model and splayed its tiny guts like a quail on a butterfly board. Other interesting points are that the shiny, mirror-finish clip weighs as much as the rest of the iPod put together and that the battery is tiny. Really tiny, giving less than half the juice of the battery in the older shuffle (now just 73 mAh). That Apple managed to only drop 17% of battery life (12 hours down to 10 hours) shows that this new shuffle has some serious power management going on.
The final surprise is the weight, proving that simile is indeed a great way to make us understand things. With case removed, the battery and electronics inside weigh only 4 grams, or less than a sheet of paper. Even more fascinating — the headphone cord is the exact same length as a piece of string.
iPod Shuffle 3rd Generation First Look [iFixit]
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Filed under: Peripherals
Fish USB Hub looks like something the cat dragged in originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 13 Mar 2009 04:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Astoundingly enough, we haven’t actually seen a barrage of MacBook Air clones. Which is pretty remarkable given that, you know, it’s a Cupertino-designed product. With such a huge opportunity staring it in the face, China’s own TESO decided to see what it could whip up, and what it whipped sits pictured above. Iconic glossy white Apple coat? Check. Impossible to miss MBA styling? Check. One single lonely USB port? Check. Too bad it threw in some low rate keyboard and a mismatched battery cover on the underside — we were almost totally digging this. Sike.
[Via PMPToday]
Filed under: Laptops
Keepin’ it real fake, part CXC: TESO starts aping MacBook Air, quits early originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 13 Mar 2009 04:36:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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