Month: December 2006

The Perfect Human

Dean Karnazes ran 50 marathons in 50 days. He does 320 km just for fun. He’ll race in 48 celsius heat. He orders pizza on the run. 12 secrets to his success.

Plazes KML

this is is an awesome integration. shows all your recent plazes, your friends and nearby plazes.

Is More Choice Always Good?

barry schwartz’ less is more redux

Jatropha

the tree is widely used for getting biodiesel in India, and is being promoted as a very easy to grow biofuel crop in 100s of projects throughout India and the third world.

Intel Game for Google Earth

Called Mars Sucks, the game really just involves navigating to specific locations based on a series of clues, whereupon your spaceship starts blowing up the invading Martian craft you’ve found. Intel’s account of making the game is interesting, though. They used the Google Earth client and server, the Keyhole Markup Language (KML), a Web server and PHP5. They’ve made the source code freely available

Typo takes tourist 13K km out

A tourist who wanted to visit his girlfriend in Sydney landed 13000 km away near Sidney, Montana, after mistyping his destination on a flight booking Web site.

biggest routing error, ever?

Boston Gigapixel

very cool. uses the gmaps api to overlay a gigapixel image of boston. its so high-res that you can read license plates.

Hidden Interfaces to “Ownerless” Networks

We contacted all major manufacturers of Wifi chipsets in the US (2000-04) and requested interface documentation. We had little success and found unsupportable rationales for secrecy. We contend that constellations of private part 15 equipment should be considered as an “ownerless” whole network where interfaces should be compelled using a procedure similar to Sec. 68.110.

how the unavailability of hw docs slows down mesh networking r&d (and how the FCC is used as a scapegoat for secrecy)

São Paulo bans outdoor advertising

i am really curious if this will work, and how we will react to it. ad-free locative spaces are hard to imagine (unless they almost collapse under their history, cf rome). here’s what the ban looks like.

Microsoft Wants Its Laptop Back

Microsoft and AMD sent out a pile of very expensive (yet trashy looking) laptops to a number of bloggers over the past week. We were told we could keep them – now after a day of minor outrage by some people they are emailing us back with the following request that we not keep them after all!

this is quite funny. i would not be caught dead with a ginormous laptop with a ferrari logo on it. WTF?