sudo make me a cheezburger (LOLified iphone snap)

by Xeni Jardin on April 30th, 2008

... apologies to xkcd.com/149/ (thanks, Wayneco!).

Tags: Boing Boing

Filed under: thekevinpipe.com
Comments Off

iLuv kicks out i168 and i169 HD Radio alarm clocks

by Darren Murph on April 30th, 2008

Filed under: Peripherals, Portable Audio

Something's really wrong with the world if more than a few months pass by without a new iPod alarm clock from iLuv, so we suppose everyone's a-okay for a few more months now. Announced today, the firm has introduced its first pair of HD Radio clocks, and sure enough, one of 'em plays nice with Cupertino's darling. The i169 would be that player, which offers up a mostly black motif, dual stereo speakers, remote, iPod dock, AM / FM / HD Radio reception, an auxiliary input and dual alarm settings for good measure. As for the currently available i168, it provides most everything you read up there sans the iPod compatibility, but then again, it only demands $89.99. What about the i169, you ask? It'll set you back a cool $169.99 when it lands in "early May." Full release waiting after the break.

Continue reading iLuv kicks out i168 and i169 HD Radio alarm clocks

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Tags: Engadget

Filed under: thekevinpipe.com
Comments Off

MacBook Air users still faced with overheating problems?

by Paul Miller on April 30th, 2008

Filed under: Laptops

We're still hearing reports of MacBook Air overheating woe, well after an EFI update in April that was meant to address some of those problems. While hot computers are nothing new, the MacBook Air starts shutting down cores and offloading processes when things get bad, which means users are faced with aggravating stop-start freezing until they can manage to cool the computer off -- or just put it to sleep and let it "rest." Apparently some people have traced this back to the age-old misapplied thermal grease problem, but that's hardly a solace for the average consumer trying to convince Apple to fix this thing for them. We took a MacBook Air that was acting up into the Genius Bar and Apple claimed it couldn't reproduce the problem, though we have heard cases of Apple replacing the computer for users. We'd be curious to know just how many Air users are having trouble, and if the X300 is experiencing anything similar, so let us know in the comments.

View Poll

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Tags: apple, Engadget

Filed under: thekevinpipe.com
Comments Off

Xerox Demos Self-Erasing, Eco-Friendly Paper

by ScuttleMonkey on April 30th, 2008

Lucas123 writes "The same Xerox lab that brought us Ethernet, the GUI and the mouse has demonstrated paper that can be reused after printed text automatically deletes itself from its surface in a day. Instead of trashing or recycling after one use, a single piece of paper can be reused up to 100 times. 'The paper contains specially coded molecules that create a print after being exposed to ultraviolet light emitted from a thin bar in a printer. The ultraviolet bar itself is very small, so it can be used in mobile printers. The technology could also be useful for network printing.'"

GTA IV world record attempt continues, dude not dead yet but some suckas, playas, and hos are

by Xeni Jardin on April 30th, 2008

Following up on the post I made yesterday about a marathon attempt to set a world record for Grand Theft Auto gameplay (it's all happening right next door to Boing Boing tv, at DECA studios) -- bleary-eyed and sleep-depped Bush League GM/Executive Producer Allison Kingsley says, between caffeine slurps...

We're getting close! Jim, our dedicated Bushleaguer, is in his 23rd hour of playing GTA IV for the world record. It was a long, long night but he's nearing the 24th hour. The good news is he's doing surprisingly well, the bad news (in his words) after all this time he's only slept with one hooker.
Other favorite stats:
25.27% of the game completed
34 missions passed
started 23 fires
killed 10 people with bare hands
shot to death 31 times
265.46 is the longest jump distance
1 kill with a molotov cocktail
$50.00 most spent on a date (and although not a big spender he did score 5 times)
38,188 spent on health care
...and the stat he's particularly proud of? 0 times cheated.

Link to ongoing live video and chat; tweets here, G4 just did an interview here. Some quick iphone snaps I took of the ongoing madness are above, below, and here.

Tags: Boing Boing

Filed under: thekevinpipe.com
Comments Off

James Taylor’s drumming machine

by Collin Cunningham on April 30th, 2008

Monk, a commenter on a previous post, pointed out this clip of James Taylor's performing with 'Slap Leather' with his drumming machine, Big Foot. Not the most elegant device, but effective - and perhaps not what you'd expect to accompany Mr. Taylor on stage.

Related:
Drum machine, unplugged

[Read this article] [Comment on this article] Tags: make

Filed under: thekevinpipe.com
Comments Off

Radio documentary on The Jewish Giant

by David Pescovitz on April 30th, 2008

Artwork Images 138991 257064 Diane-Arbus-1
On Monday, I referenced this famous Diane Arbus photograph of Eddie Carmel, "The Jewish Giant." BB reader Christopher Washer pointed me to a terrific Sound Portraits profile of Carmel, who died in 1972. The documentary was produced by Jenny Carchman, who first say the Arbus photo as a little girl and couldn't get it out of her mind. From the description of the program, titled "The Jewish Giant":

The Jewish Giant began with Jenny's search to uncover a story that has remained a secret for 25 years. Eddie was normal sized until he became a teenager, when he began to grow uncontrollably (he suffered from acromegaly, a then-incurable condition resulting from a tumor that had developed on his pituitary gland). According to The Guiness Book of World Records, Eddie grew to be 8'9". As an adult, the only work he could find involved exploiting his freakishness. He starred in B-grade monster movies (The Brain that Wouldn't Die), made two 45 records ("The Happy Giant" and "The Good Monster") and was billed in the Ringling Brothers Circus at Madison Square Garden as "The Tallest Man on Earth." Eddie died in 1972 at the age of 36 in Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx. His coffin was custom made.

The Jewish Giant is a story of suffering, of not fitting in, of the body betraying itself, and of the bizarre life-twists that can subsume a family. It's a story about what it's like to be a regular person looking at the world from inside a not-so-regular body.

Link

Previously on BB:
• Hubert's Freaks: the lost photos of Diane Arbus Link

Tags: Boing Boing

Filed under: thekevinpipe.com
Comments Off

Western Digital’s VelociRaptor drive gets reviewed

by Donald Melanson on April 30th, 2008

Filed under: Storage

We already had some early benchmarks of Western Digital's speedy new VelociRaptor hard drive the day it was announced, but the folks at Extreme Tech have now had a bit more time to spend with the drive, and they've churned out a full review of it for those that still haven't made up their mind. As with others, they found the drive more than lived up to its promise of being the "world's fastest SATA disk," with it even beating out many solid state drives in terms of write performance. The biggest downsides, as you might expect, are its relatively high (but not unreasonable) price to gigabyte ratio, and its maximum 300GB capacity, although that's nothing a second (or third) drive can't solve. Of course, they don't stop there, and you can find plenty of charts and comparisons to quench your curiosity by hitting up the link below.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Tags: Engadget

Filed under: thekevinpipe.com
Comments Off

Memristor — 4th Basic Element of Circuits

by ScuttleMonkey on April 30th, 2008

esocid writes "Researchers at HP Labs have solved a decades-old mystery by proving the existence of a fourth basic element in integrated circuits that could make it possible to develop computers that turn on and off like an electric light. The memristor — short for memory resistor — could make it possible to develop far more energy-efficient computing systems with memories that retain information even after the power is off, so there's no wait for the system to boot up after turning the computer on. It may even be possible to create systems with some of the pattern-matching abilities of the human brain. Leon Chua, a distinguished faculty member at the University of California at Berkeley, initially theorized about and named the element in an academic paper published 37 years ago. Chua argued that the memristor was the fourth fundamental circuit element, along with the resistor, capacitor and inductor, and that it had properties that could not be duplicated by any combination of the other three elements."

Grand Theft Are You Fcking Kidding Me

by Xeni Jardin on April 30th, 2008

Susannah Breslin has a post up today about the overwrought reactions of shock 'n' horror over the sex 'n' violence in just-released Grand Theft Auto IV.

After a video of the Ladies of Liberty City began circulating around, in which men drive around, pick up sex workers and/or drive over them, shoot prostitutes standing on street corners, and get some freaky-ass, legs-in-the-air, booty-shaking lap dances, everyone got all up in arms over it.
The girls at Feministing weren't having it: "It is no question that GTA is merely reflective of the bigger misogyny embedded in capitalist patriarchy, but the question is why is a game that depicts such violence towards women so popular?" (Jesus Christ, if this is what degrees in gender studies hath wrought, polysyllabic bloggers still carping about the patriarchy, please fucking stop handing them out.)
Jack Thompson nearly had a heart attack over it. (To wit: "Grand Theft Auto IV is the gravest assault upon children in this country since polio. We now have vaccines for that virus... The 'vaccine' that must be administered by the United States government to deal with this virtual virus of violence and sexual depravity is criminal prosecutions of those who have conspired to do this.")
And Rockstar got a helluva lot richer. (See: "Record Sales Expected For Grand Theft Auto IV.")

Link

Previously on BB:
* GTA IV world record attempt tonight, next door to BBtv