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03 Jun 2010 10:45

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Tech: Ever wanted to charge your phone with a bike? Today’s your lucky day

  • Do you know how many urban hipsters would use something like this to charge their phones? Oh wait, it’s a Nokia product. Nevermind. That’s fine, though, because it’s not designed for urban hipsters, but developing countries lacking electrical outlets. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

01 Jun 2010 10:41

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Tech: These colorful blocks represent the fastest supercomputers

  • This may be one of the coolest infographics we’ve ever seen. This interactive work splits the relative speed of a bunch of supercomputers up a number of ways – by speed, by OS, by country – and looks awesome. Linux pretty much owns this market, by the way, and IBM and Intel have their fingers in the mix the most, although AMD, HP and Cray hold their own. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

31 May 2010 21:42

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U.S.: The dude in this photo has his own personal lobbyist

Rodney Anderson is a cool dude. A mortgage broker, he realized that some of his clients weren’t able to buy homes because of old medical bills. His lobbyist is fixing that. source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

24 May 2010 22:37

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Tech: Publish2’s News Exchange: Any publishers need fact boxes, eh? (Eh?)

  • A little secret about us: We’ve grabbed more than a few article ideas for ShortFormBlog from Publish2‘s pretty excellent Link Newswire (and its corresponding WordPress plugin) and have enjoyed seeing what other journalists come up with. And many of the people involved are smart guys whose names we see everywhere on the Web, like Greg Linch and Ryan Sholin.
  • their new thang: “News Exchange“While we feel like certain things about Publish2’s system could be slickened up and simplified, they’ve got a pretty great thing already going. And it’s something they’re expanding, big time, with their new “News Exchange,” which expands the basic idea of Publish2 to something where your blood, sweat and tears can end up in print. It’s kinda like the AP, except without the false sense of superiority or the budget for a foreign bureau.
  • we’ll try it. give us a chance.Which leads us to say: We’ll try this out when it opens up to us plebeians. If any newspapers would like to use any of SFB’s content somewhere, let us know. We’d totally be wiling to throw you a bone or two if you throw us a link. We realize we’re a tad opinionated for some of you jerks, but we also think that there might be some pretty cool things you could do with a bunch of numbers. One request: Don’t cut our copy. It’s already short, jerks! source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

23 May 2010 11:48

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Tech: GPS in need of an upgrade, and it’s gonna cost a couple bucks

  • $8 billion to upgrade the widely used geo-navigation system source
  • before The system had a margin of error of about 20 feet – OK for driving, bad for walking a city street.
  • after After the upgrade, the system will be able to get within an arm’s length of the location. Whoa, cool!
  • » Not just for nav: It’s used for all sorts of purposes, including tracking financial transactions from ATMs and stock trades. In 2007, when the system was knocked offline in San Diego, cell phones and hospital paging systems stopped working. In other words, the technology, which currently uses 24 satellites to do its dirty work, is pretty useful.
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

22 May 2010 16:19

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Music: These budding Deerhunter fans are more talented than we are

  • As some of you may know, one of of favorite bands is Bradford Cox’s Deerhunter, one of the more ambitious, experimental acts out there. And these kids above, well, just nailed their most well-known song. We’re not talking like knowing three chords. No. We’re talking the bass part on the intro that hooks you in. We’re talking the distortion. We’re talking the dueling guitar solos at the end of the song. It’s the kind of performance that makes music fans like us realize exactly how mediocre we actually are. Yeah, we’re pretty mediocre.
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

15 Apr 2010 10:04

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Tech: Twitter finally gives us some concrete numbers about its growth

  • 604,455 accounts per Twitter employee
  • 105M number of users on Twitter; 300,000 get added daily
  • 50M number of tweets
    that get sent out
    every single day
  • 75% of all tweet traffic comes from third-party applications source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink
 

14 Apr 2010 11:47

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Tech: The Library of Congress thinks tweets are really important

  • Library to acquire ENTIRE Twitter archive — ALL public tweets, ever, since March 2006! Details to follow.
  • A tweet from @libraryofcongress • Which sounds absolutely awesome. Could you imagine? Twitter getting archived into the annals of history? The sandwich you ate? All the malware links? The Bieber-bombings we’ve seen over the last month or two? The FourSquare mayoral races? Sign us up! source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

12 Apr 2010 21:46

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Culture: Random quotes from three Pulitzer winners today

  • one “I don’t always feel comfortable about what I’m doing. It’s the whole ‘industry-versus-citizen’ thing where the industry always wins.”
  • two “Last year it happened three times in one day, the worst day so far in the worst year so far in a phenomenon that gives no sign of abating.”
  • three “Frankly if you kept
    it to a small scale and were satisfied to keep it to a grand a week, I don’t know how you would ever get caught.”
Posted by Ernie Smith • 1 Comment • Permalink

09 Apr 2010 15:32

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Tech: Want to print your own newspaper? In the U.K., you totally can.

By taking advantage of large newspaper presses’ offtime, The Newspaper Club has been able to turn out small print runs for anyone, cheap. (Hat tip @10000words) source
Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink
 
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