Technology

    The iPhone 3G has been out for a month now. Are you one of the trendy few who are still waiting in line at the Apple Store for a chance to give AT&T a hundred bucks a month? Well if you can hold out a little while longer you'll be able to stand in line at your local Best Buy store for the chance to give AT&T a hundred bucks a month. I assume opening another front in the war on non-iPhone-phones means that the number of units on the ground will increase, but who knows...

    Last week I saw the infamous YouTube video of the Chinese farmer flying his homemade airplane. He should have made a homemade tripod so I didn't have to stare at his crotch for five minutes while the Chinese countryside when by. The video was still cool, but it could have used less crotch. Apparently the big thing in China right now is to make your own personal aircraft out of dirt and scraps. This morning I saw another such video, this time a dude in China flies around for three minutes in a homemade helicopter. Yup, a helicopter made of scrap and communist ambition. Thankfully this video was shot by a bystander so you don't have to stare at the pilot's crotch the whole time. Both of these videos give the impression that these are indeed homemade vehicles, I mean they sound as if they are powered by dirt bike engines or vacuum cleaners. These videos do prove undeniably that Tom Friedman is wrong, the world isn't flat. Thanks to global warming and free trade the Chinese now have a firm lead in homemade aircraft technology.

    Lately I've been seeing a lot of videos of people who've hooked up old printers, scanners and hard drives to play music. This has been done to varying degrees of success for a few years now. The first time I saw someone using old hard disk drives as speakers, it was in a video some dude made to prove that it was possible. The song he used was Yatta, this was a more than a couple of years ago... I haven't bothered to read into the science of it all, but it certainly sounds like the hard drive's platter it doing most of the work, the spinning and reverberation is what is making the noise. Like the cone part of a speaker, I could be wrong but I don't care. My point is that I'm more impressed in the folks that are using scanners and floppy drives to play bits of music. I've put together a list of my favorite examples of people using computer hardware or peripherals to play music. The videos are inside.

    A recent article in Wired revealed a new design from BMW that I found pretty amazing.

    On the right is a video talking about it and demonstrating etc.

    I personally think the car is pretty sweet and I hate cars. I can't talk for safety and all that jazz but really who drives cars for safety? If everyone wanted safety in their cars we'd all be driving Volvo's. You can hit those things with a meteorite and you'd still walk away without a scratch. They are basically German Tanks.

OK, not really, but there has been speculation over his appearance on Tuesday during the iPhone G3 unveiling. Jobs had a rare form of pancreatic cancer about five years ago ("rare" in the sense that it wasn't as deadly as normal pancreatic cancer), but nonetheless Apple fanatics (aka "art fags") are clamoring to make claims about how much longer he has left. A sure fire "slam dunk" for all you Dead Pool fans (the game, not the comic book character).

    I ran across this last week. Some enterprising Asian tech blogger has created an LED powered emoticon mask. It seems like they've combined their loves of 1337speak and Iron-Man. This thing is being billed as a "Mask of Emotion" which is not to be confused to Ron Burgundy's "Glass Case of Emotion." There aren't many details on this thing and I'm guessing you can't really wear it trick of treating... It's probably plugged into a wall socked or car battery via jumper cables. But more importantly, I'm pretty sure you can't see anything while wearing it... So it guess it's less like Iron-Man and more like Daredevil when you get down to it.

    Hippie news bureau The Environment News Service has a story about how the official vehicles for this year's Democratic National Convention will be running on beer. Well, they are calling it "waste beer" which is burnt as ethanol would be. The Coors company is providing said waste beer to the democrats. Supposedly this waste beer is somehow different than the "shit beer" Coors normally produces... but I'm skeptical to say the least. However, in the spirit of Memorial Day weekend, I do plan on buying a case of Coors Light and pouring it into my gas tank to test this out. If, by some miracle of science, it works that means I can fill up my tank with boozes for something like $80 instead of $40 worth of gas.

    It's been no secret that CNET has been hurtin' lately, Ziff Davis (a part of CNET) has been in debt for... well... ever. Ziff Davis is actually bankrupt, seriously. So it came as a bit of a surprise to most folks when CBS announced it's plan to buy CNET this week. At first this seems like one of those moments when old folks realize what used to be cool, well after it's prime and said thing is no longer cool. CBS says it wants to cash in on some of those online ad bucks that CNET has. Wow, what a novel idea, internet advertising... I certainly don't see any ads on CBS' homepage already... Remember when Time Warner and AOL merged? That certainly ended happily for everyone... oh wait... they're going to split up. And what is going to happen when AOL is on it's own? I'm already prepping the AOL = Worm Food story.