And now they have a sister site called “Marumaru Rabu” (まるまるラブ, constant love) which displays Twitter posts in animated galleries (below). Users comment by clicking 投稿 (”post”) at the top and log onto their Twitter account through the application. Depending on the monthly theme (December’s is of course Christmas) and the category you chose (family, work etc), you can Tweet what you are doing and how you are showing your love.
Tweeter blackpeel (above) says how he is going to take his dog to a canine cafe for Christmas because the curry is delicious.
Barnes & Noble might be pitching the Nook to the literary set, but it turns out the Android-based dual-screen reader is pretty hacker-friendly as well: both the OS and filesystem are stored on a microSD card. That means the newly-formed crew at nookdevs has already managed to root what they describe as the “generic” Android 1.5 build that’s hidden under the Nook’s navigation UI, and they say the device can do “everything a rooted Android phone can do.” That’s certainly intriguing, especially since the Nook has a data-only AT&T 3G modem and WiFi to go along with that capacitive touchscreen and E Ink display — can you say “potential”?
Hey, we’ve been getting a ton of reports that Verizon’s network has been down for several hours in Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and California, possibly as a side effect of merging in the Alltell network. We’re hearing a six-hour ETA on things being restored, but we’re wondering if anyone else is being affected — hit us up in comments!
The last time we bumped into MSI’s 15.6-inch X-Slim X600 we were unimpressed with the build quality — it just seemed like too much plastic in too thin of a form factor to be trusted. Well, the X-Slim X600 Pro seems to have addressed some of the perceived quality issues, with a new scratch-resistant surface and silver inlays, but we’ll have to play with one before we really know if these refinements are merely skin deep. The largest hardware tweak is the new chiclet keyboard, while inside the laptop has scored “the latest” Intel Core 2 Duo CULV processor, matched with the same ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4330 graphics from last time. There’s no word on price or availability, but we’re sure we’ll be seeing and hearing more at CES.
Thomas Edison was known for his wacky publicity stunts, but during the Christmas of 1880 he went for the sentimental rather than shock value. That year, instead of electrocuting an elephant, he brought us the first electric Christmas light display.
The Wizard’s Light Show
By the time 1880 rolled around, Edison had his incandescent light bulbs pretty well figured out, and was on the lookout for a way to advertise them. To display his invention as a means of heightening Yuletide excitement, he strung up incandescent bulbs all around his Menlo Park laboratory compound, so that passing commuters on the nearby railway could see the Christmas miracle. But Edison being Edison, he decided to make the challenge a little tricker by powering the lights from a remote generator eight miles away.
Two years later, an Edison crony named Edward Johnson displayed the first electrically illuminated Christmas tree at his home in Manhattan. The then-impressive 80-light display girded a very unimpressive Charlie Brown Christmas tree (I mean really, look at that thing). And as you might expect, Johnson’s feat was also intended as an advertising tool.
The tradition of stringing electric lights may have started as a Christmas thing in America, but now it’s a global phenomenon used for all kinds winter festivuses (festivi?). It’s a practice we take for granted—come December, they’re everywhere. The evolution of the Christmas light parallels that of the light bulb, with some remarkably ornate—OK, tacky—variations. But regardless of how they look, one thing’s for certain: They’re a much better option than sticking a candle in a tree.
In the Beginning, There was Fire
Today we look at Christmas lights and think “Oh, those are pretty.” But the tradition of lighting lights in the winter months didn’t start off with aesthetics in mind. December is the darkest month of the year with the shortest days. People living without central heating in the 12th century were understandably unhappy when the sun went down and plunged them into the cold depths of night. Way back during the winter of 1184 was the first recorded lighting of the Yule Log [PDF] in Germany. The burning log was seen as a symbol of the sun’s promise to return. It probably didn’t hurt that a big burning hunk of wood makes for a pretty good heat source.
The Christmas tree has a whole story behind it that we won’t get into here. (Fun Fact: they were originally hung upside down from the ceiling—hilarious!) Long story short, Christians had lights, they had trees, and in the 17th century, they decided to put the two together.
Unfortunately, the only way to add Christmas lights to a tree back then was with candles. Obviously, this was a pretty bad idea. So bad that, unlike today, the tree would only be put up a few days before Christmas [PDF] and was promptly taken down afterwards. The candles would remain lit only for a few minutes per night, and even then families would sit around the tree and watch it vigilantly, buckets of sand and water nearby. It’s kind of like the old-timey equivalent of deep-frying a turkey: People knew it could burn their house down, but proceeded to do it anyway.
By 1908, insurance companies wouldn’t even pay for damages [PDF] caused by Christmas tree fires. Their exhaustive research demonstrated that burning wax candles that were loosely secured to a dried-out tree inside your house wasn’t safe. At all. Electric Christmas lights were becoming a viable option for some Americans. They weren’t perfect—incandescent bulbs can get plenty hot, and sparks from malfunctioning strings can still light up a dry tree—but it was a much safer option than lighting multiple fires so close to their favorite fuel.
Keep in mind that by “some Americans,” I mean the extremely rich. In 1900, a single string of electric lights cost $12 [PDF]—around $300 in today’s money. It would take the magic of mass manufacturing to create the Clark Griswold-esque neighborhood light displays would become an American tradition.
The Dawn of Tacky Lights
In 1900, eight years after General Electric purchased the patent rights to Edison’s bulbs, the first known advertisement for Christmas tree lights appeared in Scientific American Magazine. Like I said, these suckers weren’t cheap. They were so expensive that the ad suggests renting lights for a holiday display.
Twenty-five years later, demand was up. There were 15 companies in the biz of selling Christmas lights, and in 1925 they formed a consortium called the NOMA Electric Corporation, the largest Christmas light manufacturer in the world.
Even though NOMA was formed three years prior to the Great Depression, their appeal was great enough to pull through, becoming a juggernaut that was synonymous with Christmas lights from the Depression clear through to the Civil Rights Movement. NOMA didn’t just further Edison’s vision, though. They worked hard to bedazzle, becoming the world’s biggest manufacturer of the bubble light—arguably the first great mass-produced tacky Christmas decoration.
Though NOMA is no more, these psychedelic bubble lights are thankfully still in existence. These colorful round plastic cases hold an unseen bulb, while a candle-shaped vial of clear liquid protrudes upward. As the bulb heats up, the liquid—usually methylene chloride, a chemical with a low boiling point—also heats up, so that the vial would bubble, flickering like the candle it was supposed to replace.
Alas, in 1968 the NOMA Electric Company stopped manufacturing lights, and the bubble lights became more of a novelty, soon to be joined by a host of ridiculously shaped Christmas lights, including chili peppers, flamingos, beer cans and a miniaturized version of that leg from A Christmas Story.
With NOMA, the tacky Pandora’s box had opened, and even people who didn’t spring for bubble lights or their Tex-Mex successors have done wonders with the decidedly more standardized sets we all know today. One they were weatherproofed for outdoor use, it was only a matter of time before they were stapled to every square inch of house, hearth, tree, even truck.
The Lights You Know and Love
Incandescent lights are the ones that started it all. Even though they’re well over a hundred years old now, the technology largely remains the same. The shapes and sizes of the bulbs, on the other hand, have been in constant flux. Now we’re left with three major types of incandescent Christmas light bulbs, as described by the excellent guide at JimOnLIght.com:
The Mini/Fairy Light: This is the big kahuna. If you haven’t seen one of these by now, then you’ve probably never seen Christmas lights. Traditionally, the set is wired in series, hence the age old problem where if one bulb goes out, the rest won’t light. But it’s not hard to find sets that are wired in parallel nowadays.
These guys also have a lo-fi twinkle method built in. That little red-tipped bulb that comes with each set is made in a way that as the filament heats up, it rises and breaks the circuit. That, of course, shuts of the rest of the lights. When it cools down, it falls again to complete the circuit, and the lights (wait for it…) come back on. Physics 101.
C7: Again, an incandescent light that comes in a different-sized glass housing. These are about the size of your thumb, and work in almost exactly the same way as a mini light.
C9: You get the picture by now. Same shape as the C7, but slightly bigger.
LED lights have been growing in popularity for the past few years. Regardless of what you think of their light output, there’s no denying that they’re much more energy efficient than incandescent bulbs, and give off less heat. And who knows, maybe someday they’ll match the color temperature of good-ol’ tungsten lighting. Until then, here’s what you’ll be looking at, again according to the guide at JimOnLight.com:
5mm: These are the LED equivalent of incandescent mini-lights. They’re small LED bulbs in a plastic enclosure. Usually the “white” level is waaaay off from the “white” of incandescent lights.
G12 and G25: Just like with incandescent lights, you’re going to find a whole lot of the same with LEDs, just in different shapes and sizes. These are globe shaped plastic enclosures, G12 is pictured.
C7: You’ve seen these before, except this time there’s an LED inside.
You’ll find a bunch of crazy light designs out there, but 99.9% of them are just plastic enclosures that are illuminated by these types of bulbs.
A Long Way From Candles
The basic foundation of the Christmas light, the incandescent bulb, hardly changed for nearly a century, and is only now undergoing is first major revolution, as we we start replacing our old tungsten lights with energy-efficient LEDs. Yet, in that same time, we’ve gone from sticking burning candles in a tree to creating massive, computer-controlled—and completely excessive—light displays like this: One thing’s for sure: No matter what the technology at hand, no matter what the reason to celebrate, the human desire to light up trees and houses in the cold darkness of the winter months will forever be a source for amazing—and often hilarious—innovation.
There’s been an immense amount of crosstalk, speculation, and just plain noise over the past 48 hours about a device allegedly called the Nexus One, or as it’s more commonly known: the Google Phone. We’ve heard all sorts of reports about the HTC-made device, and figured it might be helpful to put together a little roundup about what we know — and don’t — on one of the potentially more exciting devices we’ve seen recently. Read on for an exploration of what this device could mean, as well as a little editorial perspective on some of those “confirmed” stories of the day!
Apple’s always been a particular kind of company, obsessed with experiences, controlling them, end to end. But those they’ve always been centered around the traditional desktop. Until Apple bought Lala. Is Apple taking the internet seriously now?
By “taking the internet seriously,” we mean, in one sense, getting more serious about “the cloud,” which is a digital yuppy euphemism for “stuff stored on honking servers out there somewhere that you access over the internet.” A few things—a few acquisitions, really—make us think Apple is eyeballing the internet in a new way as means of service. And we don’t mean in the sorta kinda way they run MobileMe, which has been, at first, a flop and now, decent if it were free like all the Google stuff is and not $100 a year.
• The biggest piece is Lala. It remains to be seen how radically Apple uses it to transform iTunes, but the potential for a complete upheaval of the current iTunes model is enormous. Right now, you buy stuff on iTunes, download it to your hard drive, and sync it to your iThing through a rubbery white cable. A LalaTunes would be re-oriented around the web: You buy and manage songs over the web, and could stream your library anywhere, like to other computers, to your phone, directly. You can buy the streaming rights to a song forever, for 10 cents, rather than download it. And if this new, de-centralized iTunes is indeed embedded all over the web, it would become the de facto way to listen to music on internet, the same way Google is just how you search.
• Apple tried to buy AdMob, before Google did. AdMob is a mobile advertising company, formerly, one of the biggest. They sell ads, on the internet, for mobile phones. Apple might’ve wanted it as a defensive move to keep it away from Google, but just as likely, Apple wanted a slice of the mobile advertising revenue that’s simply going to explode over the next couple of years, much of which is being sold for the iPhone.
• A somewhat shakier rumor is that Apple’s is thinking about buying iCall, not just for the fitting name, but because they’re a VoIP company. If Apple’s really diving into the internet stuff, an internet calling service makes some sense. Also, though unrelated, it’s interesting that after Apple blocked the app Podcaster for being iTunesy, it later released the functionality it provided, and Apple’s complaint about Google Voice and other GV apps, were that they “duplicated” functionality.
Apple’s dabbled in internet services for a long time—you know, .Mac and MobileMe, with its storage and syncing and photo services—but in the future, you’ll probably mark the iPhone as when the internet really started to matter—despite the fact that Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer wasn’t horribly off-base when he said “the internet is not designed for iPhone.” The phone is evolving to rise to the challenge, from both inside out and outside in. Remember how limited the iPhone felt before apps? Before it became a real internet thing?
The defining conflict of personal computing for the last two decades has been Apple vs. Microsoft, Mac vs. PC. Today, it’s a three-way battle: Apple vs. Microsoft vs. Google. Steve Ballmer’s been mocked for years over his obsession with Google, manifested through Microsoft’s blind pursuit of search marketshare, but his single-mindedness looks far less loony today. It’s funny, actually, that Microsoft has been entirely absent from Apple’s recent collisions, which have all been with Google: Maps, voice, mobile advertising, music, executives, phones, etc. Microsoft doesn’t even enter the picture here, at least from Apple’s perspective. And these fights are all about the internet or mobile services.
Which is illuminating. Microsoft has had their lunch chewed, swallowed and spit back into their faces on mobile, on digital music and on, um, the internet. They let all of those things, which they were in a serious position to dominate, pass them by. Windows Mobile is hosed. Zune HD is amazing, but far too late. Google owns over 70 percent of the search market, and people are still abandoning Internet Explorer in droves after Microsoft let it rot for years. Microsoft, with its OS on 90 percent of the world’s computers, obviously has much more to lose than Apple if the OS becomes truly irrelevant.
Apple probably doesn’t want to be Microsoft. Complacency breeds extinction. And it’s clear that things are continually shifting away from the traditional desktop (or laptop), to the internet. I’m not saying Apple’s abandoning OS X and MacBooks and we’re going to all wake up in the puffy cloud tomorrow, but anybody who thinks things aren’t going in this new terminal-client direction, where OSes and hardware don’t matter is blind or stupid or in denial. I mean, it’s already here in some ways. (Uh, just look at Google.) A model that stays tethered to the traditional desktop is like tying a weight around your ankle and trying to fly by flapping your arms.
An Apple that’s seriously focused on the internet could be a curious thing. Apple’s all about ecosystems that flow and work together. Would it be a walled garden in the clouds? Or would it be open, you know like people seem to think the internet should be? (I think of how Nintendo transitioned Mario from 2D to 3D with Super Mario 64. It was totally Mario, but something completely new.)
Whatever the case, it’s hard to imagine Apple not taking the internet and internet-based services more seriously than ever—butting heads again and again with Google, the new Microsoft (of the internet) shows at least that much. We’ll have to wait and see what that really means, though.
As Mariah Carey‘s song goes: “all I want for Christmas is a loyal house-cleaning robot.” Okay, not quite, but we did become hopeful when we saw this photo taken inside Dyson’s first London pop-up shop. Sadly, it turns out that the sole purpose of this prototype-testing robot arm is to constantly twist a DC24 vacuum cleaner — presumably to show off just how great a dance partner your rug cleaner can be. If you’ve just had your wildest dreams shattered (trust us, we’re right there with ya), feel free to pass on a petition to the Dyson engineers staffing that temporary shop — you’ll get to play with nine of their vacs and the Air Multiplier bladeless fan while you’re there. You have until January 25th. Chop-chop!
Remember that retro-looking PsiXpda UMPC we spotted earlier this month? Turns out it looks just as old school in person. That said, we’re still curiously attracted to the device, which sort of resembles an enlarged Touch Pro2 with a pinch of 1997 mixed in for good measure. The device was whipped out in the wild over at the LeWeb conference in Paris, and we were told that it was rocking Bluetooth, 3G WWAN, 1GB of RAM and a 16GB SSD, and we also learned that Windows XP was chosen due to its ease of integration within a corporate environment (though Ubuntu, Jolicloud and a host of other Linux-based operating systems can and will work). The QWERTY keyboard underneath is backlit in nature, the CPU is a 1.1GHz Atom and the removable battery is good for 2.5 hours of usage (with WiFi on) or 4 hours if using it offline. Hop on past the break for a peek of it in action, but keep the £500 price tag in mind before getting too excited.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
By the time 1880 rolled around, Edison had his incandescent light bulbs pretty well figured out, and was on the lookout for a way to advertise them. To display his invention as a means of heightening Yuletide excitement, he strung up incandescent bulbs all around his Menlo Park laboratory compound, so that passing commuters on the nearby railway could see the Christmas miracle. But Edison being Edison, he decided to make the challenge a little tricker by powering the lights from a remote generator eight miles away.
By 1908, insurance companies wouldn’t even 
In 1900, eight years after General Electric purchased the patent rights to Edison’s bulbs, the 
The Mini/Fairy Light: This is the big kahuna. If you haven’t seen one of these by now, then you’ve probably never seen Christmas lights. Traditionally, the set is wired in series, hence the age old problem where if one bulb goes out, the rest won’t light. But it’s not hard to find sets that are wired in parallel nowadays.
C7: Again, an incandescent light that comes in a different-sized glass housing. These are about the size of your thumb, and work in almost exactly the same way as a mini light.
C9: You get the picture by now. Same shape as the C7, but slightly bigger.
5mm: These are the LED equivalent of incandescent mini-lights. They’re small LED bulbs in a plastic enclosure. Usually the “white” level is waaaay off from the “white” of incandescent lights.
G12 and G25: Just like with incandescent lights, you’re going to find a whole lot of the same with LEDs, just in different shapes and sizes. These are globe shaped plastic enclosures, G12 is pictured.
C7: You’ve seen these before, except this time there’s an LED inside.
