Technology

React Publish your own item

by Sheila Lennon
'Bottom-up' journalism from the pros

April 19, 2002

Knockin' on heaven's door: From the Seattle Times, Father of guitar hero Jimi Hendrix dies at 82. Of congestive heart failure. "It was Mr. (James Al) Hendrix who introduced his son to music, buying him an old ukulele, which the future rock star taught himself to play. In his lyrics, Jimi often alluded to his childhood with his father, describing the view from one of their homes, which looked out on Mount Rainier: 'Well, I stand up next to a mountain/ and chop it down with the edge of my hand.' " Also: Kon-Tiki author Thor Heyerdahl, Anthropologist and Adventurer, Dies at 87. Of cancer.

Muzzles at eBay? Silicon.com reports, "eBay has laid down a new set of laws to radically reform the use of its discussion boards. Surfers will now be prevented from using community discussion boards to post warnings about companies who have ripped people off or, conversely, recommendations of companies. Similarly users will not be able to conduct their own private conversations via the bulletin boards or discuss postings which have already been deleted. eBay claims the crackdown is part of a policy to simplify the use of its message boards."

Weekend project: Get your herb seeds going. There's a primer at bhg.com: Herbs from A - Z, The Basics, Potted Herbs, Crafting with Herbs, Herbal Recipes.

Look it up the easy way: "Highlight Word is a (free) bookmarklet that lets you look up the definition of a word that's in a Web page. To use, drag the appropriate link for your browser to your favorites/bookmarks in your browser. Select a word using your mouse on a Web page you want to find its definition, then click the Highlight Word link in your bookmarks/favorites. A new window will pop open and the word you selected will be sent to Dictionary.com."

Airline loses elderly woman in December, and she's still missing: This Washington Post story is way too strange.

April 18, 2002

March on Washington: No, this is not a flashback. Saturday, the April 20th Mobilization wants to "Stop the War at home and abroad" with a gathering in D.C. There's a poster in pdf format. But, as The Washington Post reports, this is not a simple, one-issue demonstration: "The escalating violence in the Middle East has given a new emotional urgency to social activism, uniting a diverse mix of demonstrators headed to downtown Washington this week. Those opposed to global capitalism and the U.S. policies that support it, others who have decried the war in Afghanistan, and activists who objected to widespread arrests of Muslims in the United States have joined pro-Palestinian groups to march for a common cause. " Sidebar: United We Scratch Our Heads.

Eye candy: Unidentified clowns watch a competition, Wednesday at a clown convention in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. AP Photo

Small wonder: AP reported yesterday that a little-known San Francisco firm called OQO has created a computer the size of a paperback novel. "When the $1,000 Ultra-Personal Computer hits stores this fall or winter, it will operate as a stand-alone wireless handheld computer, akin to a Palm, the company said. Or it can be used as a ``modular PC'' that connects to a full-size keyboard, mouse and monitor to replace a desktop PC." Will it work with the virtual keyboard?

Reawakening the creative mind: "Australian scientists say they have created a 'thinking cap' that will stimulate creative powers." It uses magnetism. BBC reports that its inventors say tests on 17 volunteers show their device can improve drawing skills within 15 minutes.

AP photos The new VW super-economy car. In the bottom photo, outgoing chairman Ferdinand Piech drove it to this week's stockholders meeting.

VW concept car gets 200+ mpg: It uses diesel fuel, seats two in tandem (like a bicycle) and goes 72 mph.

Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and YOU? "ART AS MONEY OR MONEY AS ART? From April 15 to June 1, 2002, the Providence Ekistics Guild is seeking contestants who wish to be on Noney - the People's Currency. Noney (it rhymes with funny) is a new form of cultural (not legal) tender, which the Providence Ekistics Guild will screenprint as bills and issue in fall 2002. Each Noney bill is a signed piece of art. Each bill is also tradable (sic) for things..." Contestants (greater Rhode Islanders only, apparently) need to send, by snail mail or email, a photo and the names of their favorite bird and favorite vegetable. After choosing 10 winners, the guild plans to screen print 10,000 Noney bills this summer and then release them in the fall. More info. Thanks to Ian Donnis for the link.

April 17, 2002

Updated 1:54 p.m. £7500 Relic: A 1981 photograph by Yoko Ono -- entitled Season of Glass -- of John Lennon's bloodstained glasses and a glass of water with the Manhattan skyline in the background sold at auction for £7500 ($10,828) today at Bonhams in London. The unusual arrangement of objects was Ono's way of creating a traditional Oriental family altar on a window ledge in their Dakota apartment after her husband's 1980 murder. The water was intended as symbolic food for his soul. Only six copies of the photo exist. The sale, to benefit "Artists Residencies In Toyko," had been expected to bring £8000 to £10,000 ($11,549 to 14,437).

Size might matter: The man who has Einstein's brain. He's sent pieces of it to researchers.

For thrifty shoppers: pdadeals.net catalogs discounts and freebies, and seems to have "serial couponing" down pat. Example: "50% off Toys & $35 off $50 from Amazon.com Get up to $50 in the Spring Savings Toy Store, then apply these coupon codes ($35 off $50) in the following order to get toys for cheap with free shipping! SAVETENSSS43, 905514, 905513, 905517, MAPMCEXCLUS2"

Very cool: The Museum of Online Museums (MoOM). Its current featured exhibition is The Museum of Firecracker Pack Labels. MoOM offers some "links to brick-and-mortar museums with an interesting online presence" (including RISD's), but many more links to niche collections online that could suck up all your free time:

April 16, 2002

Peer review: "The most interesting development in newspaper blogs is at the Providence (R.I.) Journal's pacesetting site, where staffers have started not one but two new blogs," writes Wayne Robins under the headline Blogrolling On a River in this week's Editor & Publisher (the mag our bosses read).

Test-driving "IT": Using Dean Kamen's much-hyped Segway scooter (aka Ginger) is more like walking than riding a scooter, says Dan Bricklin, who got a chance to try to break it: "Impressions after riding a Segway HT: Part 1."

Retooling Mother Nature: Tomato Catch-Up: Discovery Of Ripening Gene Could Make Store-Bought Tomatoes As Tasty As Homegrown. Great news on the face of it. But will it create killer tomatoes?

Never too old to rock: While I was away, Jane Scott, 82-year-old rock critic, retired after 50 years at the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Here's a delightful All Things Considered audio interview with her.

April 15, 2002

Not unpacked: I've brought 200 digital photos and lots of anecdotes back from Amsterdam, but it will take a few days to edit them into a neat package. Ever eaten Magnetotron Porridge? I have...

The fight for the future (continued): Gateway, the computer company that made stars of black-and-white cows, launched a new TV commercial last week. Gateway CEO Ted Waitt is driving a truck, Gateway's cow mascot rides on the passenger side, and both are singing along to Sundown, Elwood's hiphop cover of Gordon Lightfoot's 1974 hit. The commercial offers a free MP3 download of the tune and urges viewers to burn it onto a CD or load it into an MP3 player. Instructions for ripping and burning are on the same page.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is urging viewers to Thank Gateway for Standing Up to Music Industry Bullies ("In a new TV advertising campaign, Gateway bravely asserts their customers' rights to format-, time- and space-shift their music collections.")

The response by Hilary Rosen, president and CEO of RIAA (the music industry group that sued Napster into irrelevance) is a bit confusing, but seems to suggest that these "fair-use" rights are piracy. Stay tuned.

Why it matters: "William Gibson believes modern life is inseparable from mediated interpretations of that life. The Internet is well on its way to becoming the vehicle by which all media is distributed or at least somehow refracted," wrote Andrew Leonard in Salon last year. Gibson, whose 1984 novel Neuromancer coined the term "cyberspace," was the subject of a documentary called No Maps For These Territories, which Cory Doctorow reviewed last year after its debut at the Slamdance film festival. (The film is based on a cross-country weekend trip Gibson takes in a limo, interspersed with conversations with writer friends and scenes of Bono reading from Neuromancer.) Doctorow quotes Gibson's reaction to an ATM in Santa Monica spitting out his balance at a Vancouver bank: ""We've been growing a prosthetic extended nervous system for the last 100 years or so - and it's really, really starting to take."

Neuromancer is freely available on the Net, both in text and as an audio book read by Gibson, with music by U2 and assorted sound effects and ambient noise. You can also buy it in most online and "meat-world" bookstores. No Maps For These Territories is now available on VHS and DVD.

Planets on parade: Cosmiverse reports, "During the last week of April and the first two weeks in May... anyone looking west at sunset will be able to see the planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn and Jupiter. A few hours later at 4 A.M., armed with a large-size amateur telescope, they can continue their grand tour by observing Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, a few wandering asteroids and maybe even Comet Ikeya-Zhang in the east."

April 9, 2002

AMSTERDAM -- A.S.C.I.I. is a subterranean internet cafe, and more. Its name is an acronym for Amsterdam Subversive Code for Information Interchange, which derives from another acronym we associate with non-formatted textfiles ("pure ASCII").

Jannahe Evers ASCII volunteer

Everything is donated -- time, rent, computers, expertise -- "in the tradition of information being free," said Jannahe Evers, one of the group's volunteer system administrators yesterday, before he poured me a cup of very good coffee in ASCII's basement home. "We only use open-source software here -- Linux on most of the machines, FreeBSD on one, the Mozilla browser on another. (AOL plans to switch from Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser to a browser based on the cooperatively developed Mozilla.)

"We teach people Linux," Evers said, "but if they just want to use the browser, they won't notice a difference."

Computers line the walls and a few benches in the small cafe, while neon spray paint in day-glo pink and green graces old keyboards that hang from the rafters as decor. Posters urge change and/or freedom, as underground hangouts always have.

Evers was proud that ASCII was the first group to offer free net access, and has been copied in Germany and elsewhere. He's especially awed by the efforts, in Sheffield, England, of the Redundant Technology Initiative, which collects and recycles old computers in a warehouse, and Access Space ("Access Space offers the chance to learn how to build the web. But instead of using fancy new technology that you'll never be able to afford yourself, Access Space uses zero cost computers reclaimed from the trash, and Linux, the revolutionary free operating system.")

ASCII's site is hosted by squat.net, online home of the longstanding Amsterdam tradition of squatting.

ASCII lurks in the basement of a book store at 24 Jodenbreestraat, just a block from the Waterlooplein flea market, where a life-size statue of Nefertiti of Egypt was going for $160 yesterday.

April 8, 2002

Sunday night in Amsterdam, Joe's birthday dinner in an Argentinian steakhouse near Rembrandt Square had begun strangely -- our cocktails, appetizers, salads and entrees had all arrived together. Now the entire waitstaff had gathered at our table, jabbering angrily in Dutch at the scene outside the window: A police car idled as three men showed their IDs, and one was put in the car and taken away.

"What's happening?" I asked. "He is arrested for smoking grass on the street! We heard it on the scanner," our waitress said. On every block are "coffee houses" that sell small quantities of marijuana and hashish for personal use, but one must not smoke them in public.

Dutch laws are liberal -- prostitution is legal, bars open till 4, beer sold on Sunday, psychedelic mushrooms every day. But each has its designated area, and there's a penalty for straying outside the lines. Tobacco use is common, and smoking permitted everywhere in restaurants.

"Police here are so mean," she steamed on. "You cross when the pedestrian light is red, bang! Ten euros.($8.80) And two weeks from now, a new law, if I drop my chewing gum, I get fined. They just want money, and why? Holland is rich, the Dutch economy is very good. They are mean to the people. I do not like the attitude of the law here."

"Are you from here?"

"I was born here, but I am from Yugoslavia," she said.

"Where we come from, police are busy with big crimes, the little ones sometimes slide," I volunteered.

"They'll have big crimes here, if they keep this up," she said. "People are getting very angry."

A wave of tiredness hit us all, and Casey, my daughter, who'd been unable to shake an American cold, headed out. Joe and I paid the check and eased back across the bridge toward home, our lovely, airy houseboat. It is the perfect apartment, floating gently in the sunny Amstel canal.

When the tour boats go by, cameras point at us. I wave, and the whole boatload waves back. Being part of the tour gets old quickly. The evanescant curtains become essential.

We have pored over maps, gotten pleasantly lost, found the flower market, the grocery store, the Saturday morning organic farmers' market. Unlike London, where internet and email kiosks are nearly as common as phone booths, all netaccess is in internet cafes. There is a 24-hour Easy Everything with dozens of seats, and automated, timed sessions for browsing and web mail, but no printing, downloading or actual computers, for that matter -- just screens and keyboards.

Today I will carry a floppy to the reggae coffee house, bar & internet cafe (real computers) near the Liedesplein to file this before we take that canal boat tour, making it our water taxi to the museums and to neighborhoods we haven't seen yet.

First impression: Amsterdam's public areas are clean, busy and safe (although signs warn of pickpockets). The cars and streets are narrow, the canals are the real highways (in case you wondered, hundreds of cars are fished from them each year), but bicycles rule. Its attitude toward personal choices is civilized. This country lives on waterways and flowers, and everyone pedals.

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Subterranean Homepage News
by Sheila Lennon
features & interactive producer of projo.com