Shopping is not creating – recent purchases
iPad 3G (corporate buy, Louis and I are fixing to make some cool shit for it)
Quark CR2 MiNi titanium (180 god damn OTF lumens on your keychain)
Atwood Wingnut G2
Next: Sebenza 21 small (the Speedsafe on my Kershaw Avalanche broke!!! great warranty but fuck that), MB Le Grand rollerball, Sinn 656 schwarz on bracelet.
I have website problems
I realized that I registered litwack.org through some weird ancient registrar for ten years in 2001, and I think they exist but I can’t remember the password I gave them and the recovery email is to a defunct Hotmail account I used to have before Google was in advertising. So that’s one problem. The other is that I hate WordPress so much, so fucking much – it’s like when I use a Windows machine, I just assume there are viruses and spyware – well, with WP I have to assume that because I missed a point release some Ukrainian web terror bot has rewritten all the affiliate codes in links in my archives and installed itself as a secret superuser that will some day erase all my posts and replace them with Hate Forest videos.
So anyway, I need to switch to something more secure and also hosted so I can stop paying my tiny internet hosting company money like it’s 2003 because hello, Amazon S3 and EC2 exist and are more stable than you ever gonna be, independent hosting company, no offense. Some serious bloggers are actually switching to Tumblr and I like Tumblr a lot but I’m thinking more Squarespace. Ideally I’d like to get everything in balance so my thin stream of Google AdSense revs pay for my Squarespace account. I think I want to hire someone to set up Squarespace for me, do the whole-blog export/import, work on a theme to my specifications and do some AdSense SEO magic. All optimized for the iPad (ideal viewing) and iPhone. (Hey guess what you can’t install an adblocker in mobilesafari~~omg) If you know anybody who does shit like that, please comment.
+es and -s
First Atwood
I just bought an Atwood Nibble pocket tool for my keychain. Beautiful. Will replace the stock pic when mine arrives and hopefully murder it with a matte DLC coating at some point. Atwood’s UFO knife is my (and my sister’s) favorite folding knife ever. Totally bonkers. I see a Chris Reeve Sebenza in my future – possibly with mammoth ivory inlay – but the UFO is just next level.
ProFlowers for iPhone 1.0 is launched!
You guys, the iPhone app Louis and I did for ProFlowers has been approved and is up on iTunes! We are so happy and excited right now. Give it a try, and if you know a brand who needs an ecommerce app…
Fiiiiinaly
I’ve wanted a copy of this book for a long, long time. Apple product design couldn’t have moved farther away from these concepts – from the front, off, an iPhone is so neutral that it resembles a Braun-engineered river stone. Which is good. But the old stuff, the Memphis stuff, is full of 90s optimism. Now that what we were reaching for has arrived, we are sober.
Prototype orange Newton eMate. There were also purple and red test shots.
Exchanger! This photograph captivated me the first time I saw it. It’s funny someone thought oh, what’s needed is technology to work with paper money. Related: 3-2-1 Contact, The Case of the Funny Money, 3:30.
The sweetest words in the language
“And I’ll throw in the Halliburton briefcase.”
[tossing of hair] “You should stop by sometime.”
“The special is a tableside preparation of Matsusaka prime steak tartare.”
Those are great and everything, but the email I just got tops them all:
Hi, Geoff Litwack (litwack).
Britney Spears (britneyspears) is now following your updates on Twitter.
Tools under consideration
Whenever I take a happiness inventory, the area that turns up right under having sex with girls (apply here) is MAKING AND BUILDING STUFF. Not so much having stuff, or even keeping what I make – the process. So anyway, here are some tools I’m looking at, roughly most expensive to least.
3D printer / scanner combo
The ultimate power: turn atoms into bits and back again. The low-cost 3D scanner of the moment is NextEngine, at $2995, and I think it would be just fine for my purposes.
For the printer, I’m a huge proponent of the RepRap project, but it’s not meant to do fine detail. Z Corp printers get in the game around $20k, color at $40k, but Desktop Factory is doing a mono printer for $5000 (assuming it ships) with $1/cubic inch material cost and a high degree of detail.
RED Scarlet
$3750 for the low end kit, and it’s still pretty ferocious…not to mention it can be configured as a DSLR for taking stills.
Cintiq drawing tablet
I can barely draw, but there are times when I’d like to be able to directly manipulate art assets. For that there’s the 12″ Wacom 12WX Cintiq tablet, $999.
A pico projector
As a writer I’m constantly giving pitches, and I think being able to take a phone and a little projector out of my pocket to show people what I’m talking about would be extremely useful. I’m leaning toward getting a WowWee Cinemin when it ships, but they’re all based on the same Texas Instruments tech so it almost doesn’t matter.
A cutting plotter
A CraftRobo can precisely cut paper to an amazing degree of accuracy – I’ve seen some insane paper models made with these things.
LiveScribe
The pen records all your strokes AND ambient audio – this would have helped me a lot in college. You do need to use special paper, but I think you can print it yourself, and there is a mac version of the desktop client. As it stands I scan a lot of what I write down (in bulk, with a ScanSnap) so this might actually save me a step.
Dell Wasabi
In the wake of Polaroid, Dell has come out with this fun little photo printer. The sheets cost about 50¢/each. It doesn’t work with the iPhone, which is a drag, and I’m sure they’ll discontinue it and the paper at some point in the future. But I do like the concept.
Has anyone used any of these tools? Am I missing anything?
Strange days
I recently joined the beta of Home on my PlayStation 3. It’s the Metaverse from Snow Crash, only boring. It does look really good.
So I boot it up for the first time, design my avatar (below), and am plunked into my beautiful waterfront studio apartment. I leave for the town square, populated by other Home players – you can tell the real women from the men role-playing by the modesty of their outfits – and notice that there is 2D video playing on screens intermixed with the 3D environment – house ads for Sony projects. I go into the shopping mall, browse around – would I like to spend 49¢ on a new pair of virtual jeans? no – and go up to the second floor, where there’s another large video screen playing Sony ads, this time for movies. I stand and watch. Purchase the Fred Claus Unrated Edition in HD from the PlayStation Store.
AND THEN
then a trailer for House Bunny. And there’s my sister, walking to the side of Anna Faris.
Kind of a postmodern moment. I hit the R1 button and make my avatar applaud.
Franzen, you fussy little bitch
Jonathan Franzen has an article in the MIT Technology Review this month about how cell phones are denting his personal sense of urban propriety that includes the following statement:
[...] if you don’t see any difference between reading Jane Austen on a Kindle and reading her on a printed page, or if you think Grand Theft Auto IV is the greatest Gesamtkunstwerk since Wagner, I’m very happy for you, as long as you keep it to yourself.
This made me put down my Kindle, on which I was reading my downloaded copy of the MIT Technology Review. I don’t know about Gesamtkunstwerk, but kunstwerk, yes. Why don’t you keep it to yourself, Franzen? God damn!
I still think Strong Motion is totally awesome.
Gifter 1.0 for iPhone and iPod touch
I don’t know if you guys are used to me being proud, but let me take a moment: Gifter, the iPhone application Louis and I have been working on for the past four months to help with gift-buying has gone up on the iTunes store – you can go to our website and click the download link to get it when you have version 2.0 of the iPhone or iPod touch firmware. Louis has done an amazing amazing job with the code and UI design, and we’re just getting started – this is 1.0 and we’re going to be adding new features and merchants all the time from here on out. Yeah!!
Rise of the robots
- Modular robot reassembles when it’s kicked apart: everywhere on the internet today. Skynet rises. Seriously though, how long until these modules are itsy-bitsy? See also the NeoCube.
New BMW M1: sexxxxxxy. The body looks like two layers, as if the black underneath is cracking through, trying to escape. And check the I Ching rims! In other car news, the 2009 Prius will be bigger inside, longer, 100hp engine, 50-55 miles per gallon. My car, with a 275hp 4.2l V8, gets 15-17mpg.- MSNBC: Smiley-Face Killer. Sounds like a direct-to-video thriller, but real.
- Movies: I saw Teeth yesterday and liked it enough to recommend. Just campy enough. Jess Weixler was brave to take the role and gave a great performance, I thought. Directed by Mitchell Lichtenstein, son of Roy.
If you’ve ever wanted to play a Wu-Tang Clan rougelike, your time has come.- Song of the day: HNIC 2 FINALLY dropped, so here’s Prodigy Raining Guns and Shanks from the mixtape. Looking forward to that new Mobb Deep record in 2011, keep your head up P!
What’s up Monday
Kitsune Noir: House Uc by Miyahara Architect Office: Great use of concrete. I wonder what’s on the roof. - Wired: Deutsche Bank Loves Shai Agassi’s Plan to Bring Us EVs (Electric Vehicles): “Bean counters at Deutsche Bank absolutely love Shai Agassi’s plan to sell electric vehicles like cell phones and think it could be a “paradigm shift” that causes “massive disruption” to the auto industry… a typical contract would cost $550 a month and provide 18,000 miles a year.” Basically, energy is 7¢ a mile versus 24¢ a mile for gas in Europe. This should work, right? People who would buy a loaded Smart would just lease this instead?
Ian Albert – Video Game Maps: Amazing maps of territories I know well. The San Andreas map effort is a real marvel. The clickable version to the left is scaled down to 11% of a version already scaled way down from a gigapixel. (via Selectbutton forums.)- Music music music music: Pilooski edit of Alan Parson’s Project I, Robot for D*I*R*T*Y Edits Vol.1.
Free easy mind-mapping software for Mac OS X 10.5 – MindNode
What a GREAT PIECE OF SOFTWARE. It may be simple, but it’s also intuitive and elegant. It’s slipped right into my workflow between plain text and OmniFocus and I love it. Exports to OPML and more. Start charging, Markus!
Go get it
Did no one notice
that there’s an article about Jan Chipchase in the NYT Magazine this week?! I like his blog, it’s just a little cryptic sometimes – I know, hypocritical coming from me.
Hack your PSP Slim
So I just bought a PSP and waded through a bunch of bad information in order to successfully get it hacked – I decided to write up a little how-to for the nerds in the audience here. Easier than working with an AppleTV but not as satisfying T_T
Hacking an AppleTV: I reached my limit
It’s rare that I set my mind to a small task and fail utterly, but that’s what just happened. It all started when I bought a Time Capsule for my house. Hm, I thought to myself – I can plug in a hard drive and use it as a NAS. So I plugged in a 500gb hard drive – easy, worked fine. My laptop doesn’t have 802.11n – I wonder if I’ll be able to stream sub-720p video from the Time Capsule-attached hard drive? Yes, as it turned out, I could.
Then I thought hey, maybe I should get an AppleTV, do that USB key hack thing, and instead of watching those video streams on my laptop I can watch them on TV. So (and three people who read this blog are going to understand the details of this; I’m sorry, but it all ends in a moral lesson sort of)
- I went to Fry’s and bought an AppleTV
- I updated the ATV’s software to 2.0, or Take Two, as Apple calls it
- I assembled all the software components (Tiger, 10.4.9, ATV update, etc.) and brewed a patchstick
- I ran the patchstick – success
- I SSHed into the ATV from my Mac and installed DIVX and Windows Media codecs, plus ATVFiles (a filesystem browser)
- I copied a test AVI into a “Movie” directory on the ATV; it played
- oh my god, almost there, I thought
- Then I was like wait a minute – how do I access that Time Capsule-attached hard drive? I thought ATVFiles would sniff it somehow, but apparently not
- I called Louis, who suggested I use the Airport Utility to give the disk a username and password, and determine its AFP address – Louis knows everything
- So I SSHed into the ATV and was all like la la la
sudo mount_afp afp://on:demand@Litwack-Time-Capsule.local. ~/frontrow/Movies/afp - The ATV returned “mount_afp: command not found.”
- Command not found? It turned out Apple stripped AFP filesystem extensions from the ATV kernel after 1.0. There were instructions for putting them back, but besides their moderate complexity, I didn’t want to be the first person to try it under ATV 2.0.
- Then I looked into the possibility of using SMB instead of AFP – installing Sharity3 on the ATV and going from there
- but then I took a deep breath and thought: fuck it.
I could get this to work if my life depended on it – downgrading to ATV 1.0 and writing a little XML file for ATV-ShareMounter would probably do it. But GOOD GOD, I personally HIT A WALL here. This was a failure, a total, personal failure. Even worse, reviewing what went wrong, I realize it exposes a failure to plan – I should have sidestepped all of this horror by looking at my desired outcome (video streaming off a NAS to a TV) and bought something actually suited to the task instead of trying to use a fork as a spoon. I’m a nerd, but not the kind of nerd who bashes things around just for the hell of it. I like solving problems, and MAN did I lose sight of my horizon.
I feel like crying.
god damn you
California is a country
I just ordered an incredibly inexpensive two port DVI-D KVM switch from Monoprice.com, which is basically a bridge-to-Taiwan type company (DealExtreme is another example) that’s hellbent on destroying margins on electronic components. Which is awesome. Anyway, the package arrived in a day from California Overnight for $7 ($7!), a shipping company I’ve never heard of that ships CA-to-CA overnight at prices that are like half FedEx and UPS. Amazing.
whoooosh
The big tech story today is the Amazon Kindle reveal in Newsweek
Here. The Kindle, if you’re not familiar, is Amazon’s eink book reader. Bits of information about the device have leaked out since it was first spotted on the FCC’s website last September, but now Steven Levy has the whole story. In brief:
- $399, shipping this week. Very expensive, the price of an iPhone, which seems like an amount only nerds would pay.
- Hardware: 10.3 ounces, six-inch black and white eink
touchscreen, 30 hour battery, “200 books onboard” “more with a memory card” which I’m going to guess will be SD, EVDO for buying books from the device. - Software: Some form of DRM – sounds like one purchase = use on one device, web browser, an email address for the device, annotations on texts, search, Amazon’s store. It can apparently read Word documents and PDFs, but no news on txt or rtf.
- Pricing: Classic (read: public domain) books are $1.99, bestsellers and new releases in hardback $9.99 with backlist books presumably somewhere in between. There are also periodicals: The NYT, The Atlantic, others. Weirdly you can subscribe to blogs but have to pay $0.99-$1.99/mo.
Two years ago I would have been really excited about this. Clearly the biggest deal is the wireless store and Amazon’s pricing, which, aside from the DRM and ripping you off on public domain stuff and RSS feeds seems reasonable, even thrifty. However, with the advent of high-DPI displays in mobile phones, I’m not sure that a single-purpose device like this will be successful at any price. The idea of DailyLit emailing you 1000 word segments of a novel to be read on a phone might terrify the old guard, but fuck the old guard.
Update: me and Tim O’Reilly are on the same track here.
Update 2: Here’s the product page on Amazon. It costs 10¢ to email things to the device – I think that’s to cover a payment to Sprint for data transfer on their network.
Update 3: More from Joel Johnson over at Boing Boing Gadgets. Notably PDF is totally unsupported and it’s possible that Amazon’s .azw DRM format and .txt are the only natively readable file formats.
Update 4: Mark Pilgrim rips the Kindle a new port.
Ugly swarms
- Idea: why don’t the lids of those two-part plastic take-out sushi containers have little wells for soy sauce built into the top? Seems obvious, but I googled around couldn’t find any made that way.
- Kris was here in LA filming the Spike Scream awards, and we were able to hang out a little, which was great. Just wanted the world to know! Also, permanently changed an element of my preparation of puttanesca: hazelnuts instead of capers.
- Weird Al & the Beastie Boys on their first trip to LA:
- So I, uh, heard some things about the retail version of Mac OS X 10.5, Leopard – with Spaces, when you switch from one application in space a to another in space b, the window system does this kind of speed wipe from one space to the next which is kind of dizzying. The 3D dock is really ugly; it looks like glass covered with a thin sheen of cum. (Although you can fix it.) Also ugly: the debossed system icons. Spotlight still sucks; Cover Flow sucks, Stacks suck. Everything else is great: things feels faster, the consistency of the UI is a big relief, Spaces is great, Quickview is great.
I can’t believe I’m writing about the new iPods
- The 8gb iPod touch looks like a good deal for $300, at first glance. But for $100 more in the iPhone you get a cell antenna, a two megapixel camera, and a speaker. The speaker, I think, is kind of a big deal. So: do I buy a touch, or an iPhone and make it work without a contract?
- Steve Jobs lies all the time. To wit: he said Apple would never build a PDA. What’s the touch, then!? Speaking of Steve, I bet he hates the iPod classic now.
AllMost computers will someday be all solid state, but there’s a ways to go yet. - I hope the touch hacking scene is as insane as the one for the iPhone has been so far.
Acronym on the web
As we wait for the SS08 collection (due in March), here’s all the places you can buy my favorite wearable tech online:
The Glade: Beinghunted’s venture, the forerunner to AM Firmament. In stock: SS-J4, GT-J12, SS-J1W, SS-J5, S-KA1, 3A-1 bag, hat, neck gaiter.
Hanon Shop: Tons of stuff including the white SS-J2A, my next purchase (pictured).
Superfuture: Dudes occasionally sell their own personal stash.
Azita Skateboards has the hat, gaitor, SS-J1W and GT-9JTS.
Yoox: Just my bag and a rain jacket (misfiled under women’s.) They got SlamJam’s old stock, seems like.
Rakuten.co.jp has a few older pieces but you’d need to use a shopping service…maybe not worth it.
The Hideout and Grandism might someday restock…more likely the former than the latter.
It’s also worth checking eBay and auctions.yahoo.co.jp once in a while.
Nb. Hugh, if you’re reading this, get at me! I want an Interops compatible Arnis sling…
The nerd in me – my next set of computers
I’m thinking of going from this:
1G MacBook w/ 1tb external hard drives
Treo 650
To this, after Leopard comes out:
24″ iMac
1.5tb external RAID 1
Eee PC 701
Some smartphone because I have to stay on Sprint – I’m thinking a BlackBerry or some HTC thing with a big keyboard.
Why?
- I need more screen real estate; the iMac provides it, and I can add another LCD in the future.
- The RAID makes me feel better about the huge amount of data I have lying around – if one of my hard drives went out right now I’d lose my music collection. (Sort of; I have piecemeal backups.) For people with less stuff, there’s an argument for using Amazon S3 instead of a desktop RAID.
- The Eee PC allows me to get a desktop machine; it’s cheap, light, doesn’t have any moving parts so the battery life should be great, and if Apple releases an ultraportable, I’ll flip it.
- As for the phone, in lieu of an iPhone, I think the BlackBerry is as good as it gets on Sprint. I know the HTC Touch is coming out, but I have doubts about Windows Mobile and touchscreens.
Thoughts?
I write