After many years of joy today was a sad day for me: My ranking as a power user on the website Digg has killed. I didn’t do too badly as I was in the top 300 — although since the elimination of shouts on the site I found my interest in Digg going down hill. And today the nail in my coffin was the launch of version 4 of the formaly social news website. Many power users have now been given a online version of a fatal dose of Kryptonite, so for my own sake I’ve attempted to reverse engineer why Digg ditched their community once and for all: Read more…
I love the illustrational complexity of Japanese emoticons — and now you can share these silly symbols in the real world with this Ginghami Kaoiro Emoticon Stamper. To me there’s something very appealing about taking digital iconography and coming up with such a primitive analog implementation: Read more…
Generally, Japanese commercials tend to be a bit more outlandish than our own TV spots, so I was a bit surprised to learn that Apple hasn’t really done much to change the format of their recent iPhone 4 ads for an international market, aside from hiring Japanese actors of course. It would seem that Apple has focused almost entirely on their Face Time feature, hoping that live video chat would be enough to sell anyone on their reception-impaired smart phone. To be fair, a simple case can fix that, but why should there be a problem in the first place — right? Any ways, the commercials are still pretty cute. I just wonder if it’s enough to steal NTT Docomo’s loyal fan base.
In the 80s the Amiga was eons ahead of everyone else in the PC market: They had everything from the ability to play full color animations to multitasking. However this amazing platform just never took off. Why? Because the user base took advantage of the first generation of floppy disks and BBSs to pirate pretty much every last bit of software that was written for the platform. Because of this Microsoft never created a version of Word for the Amiga and WordPerfect lost a great deal of money thanks to cheap users. In fact the only winner that came away from the Amiga was the NewTek Video Toaster which was pretty much dongle protected due to the hardware aspect of the product. Read more…
I believe very strongly that Google has an unhealthy monopoly on the internet, so for the past week or so I’ve switched all of my browsers to use Bing as the default search engine. For the most part Microsoft has done an amazing job of going from nothing to something to create a great search engine in a short amount of time, however there are still a few things that they need to beat Google. Having been born with dyslexia one of the things I love about Google is that their spell checker is amazing — in fact often when using Microsoft Word I’ll pop out of the program when I can’t get the spelling of a more obscure word. And this is the very sort of feature that not only does Bing need badly, but something that should also be incorporated into the online version of Microsoft Office. Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Jul 18, 2010 in Animation, Tech
Shocking as it may seem Miffy isn’t Japanese, but in fact is the creation of Dutch artist Dick Bruna who drew the cute little bunny back in 1955. However the graphic cuteness of our bunny friend has always done well in the land of Hello Kitty — and the recent evidence of this is the Miffy Netbook by Onkyo show above. The coolest thing about this netbook is that it features its own Miffy user interface: Read more…
It wasn’t programmable but the Atanasoff–Berry Computer (ABC) was one of the first digital computers ever created. Sadly the research surrounding it ended with World War II (the machine dates to 1942), but the computer designed by John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford Berry got its due in 1973 when they awarded patents for their work which pre-dated the ENIAC. This video from 1999 shows a demo of a reconstruction project which cost over $360,000 to create. Read more…
In this video techie pundit Clay Shirky shares his notion that Lolcats aren’t just a fun waste of time but in fact a sign of progress. His theory is that while in the past humans have had spare time that with the net this potential can be captured to produce things — even if its adding captions to cute kitty photos.
In this clip author Nicholas Carr addresses the topic Does the Internet Discourage Deep Thinking? And I’ve got to say that he’s dead on — I tend to find that in it’s current form the web is a mile wide but an inch deep. For example at your fingertips you can google the name of any historical figure who has ever lived and find at least a wikipedia entry, however if you want to go that extra step and read book on the topic you hit a real dead end. Although I think blaming the net is a bit of an excuse because in reality the signal-to-noise ratio has been been weakened since the advent of television over fifty years ago.
In this video Makerbot founder Bre Pettis demonstrates a 3D printer that he designed. What’s amazing to me about this technology is that while it’s being used as a novelty today I can see it changing the world in two ways: First we’ve lived in an age of mass manufacturing since the Victorian era — this sort of technology could lead to micro manufacturing where short runs of unique objects are the norm. Imagine if you would if no cars were alike in the world? The second thing is that if you combined this technology with robotic assembly lines it could bring back local manufacturing so products wouldn’t need to be shipped around the world and thus saving a ton of energy.
