Posted by Michael Pinto on Jun 22, 2009 in Tech, Videogames
If you’re a retro computing fanboy like me on Saturday you were devastated to learn that Apple denied permission to the developer who created a Commodore 64 emulator for the iPhone. Now normally this news wouldn’t surprise me, but what broke my fanboy heart is that the developer jumped through all the right hoops: Not only did they get a license from the owners of Commodore but they even got positive signals early on from Apple. Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Jun 19, 2009 in Japanese TV, Tech
I don’t know the exact date of this advert but looking at a primitive cell phone my guess is that it’s from the late 80s. The spot is for KDDI who entered the cel phone business in in 1987 and are still going strong today. The music in the advert is by Yuming (Yumi Matsutoya) who hit her career high point from the late 80s until the early 90s which is why her music seems to dominate the spot.
From Spain comes this amazing hand made felt iPhone. This bit of craftwork seems to be a one-of-a-kind object, but as with most gems that you find on Etsy if you see something that’s sold out you can always ask if the artist might create a similar piece on commission. What makes this iPhone work so well to me is that the artist went the extra mile to sew together every little icon on the screen, I just love those geeky details: Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on May 11, 2009 in Star Trek, Tech
There was only one way to buy a Star Trek ticket (aside from getting on a physical line at a movie theater) and that’s to purchase it through Fandango. But having a relationship with Fandango isn’t my idea of “fun” — my goals when using this type of site is to get in and to get out, it’s a utility and anything that gets in my way is just a hassle. However some marketing dudes at Fandango somehow think that they’re Yelp! and want to push their lame attempt at a “community” by including reviews of films. Now I don’t mind that, but what I do mind is that their way of building a “community” is to spam those who purchased a ticket but never asked for any marketing emails to come their way: Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Apr 30, 2009 in Science, Tech
Anyone who has watched the Six Million Dollar Man One knows that one of the holy grails of bionics is to create a bionic eye. But one problem (aside from portability) has been how to create an eye that isn’t a flat surface. This video shows some new work being done where scientists have placed a pixel detector on a surface that can be flexible which brings us a bit closer to making bionic eyes a reality: Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Apr 29, 2009 in Animation, Tech
If you’re any sort of anime fanboy (or fangurl) you’re going to want to sign up for Nico Nico Douga which is almost like a Japanese version of YouTube (in fact the first version of Nico Nico Douga used YouTube as a source). However most fans get turned off as you need to register to see any videos and the entire interface is in Japanese (although there are Spanish and German interfaces available if you know those languages). The other nice thing about the site is that it encourages users to post high quality video.
To make it easy to get started I put together the first three steps to get you to he right spot. This is where you click on the homepage: Read more…
I always assumed my love of tech was natural, but looking back at this early 80s advert you can see the pressure on every young member of Gen X to grow up and be the next Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. The funny thing is that these early computers struck me as being clunky at the time because my expectations were set by watching science fiction TV shows where computers were much larger but did cooler things. The commercial above and below feature a later version (from 1980 on) of the Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer which was lovingly renamed as “The Trash 80” because it was in competition with cooler machines like the C-64 and Atari 400 which were cheaper and better. Read more…
Posted by Guest Author on Apr 21, 2009 in Animation, Tech
Virtual idols have been around longer than you think — shown above is a magazine cover featuring Kyoko Date from 1996. In this article Nick Kent gives us his insights:
The interesting “real” Robo-Girl in the pop culture room is Hatsune Miku, who really is software:
She’s a second generation Windows voice synthesis software released in 2007 that anyone can buy at mainstream Japanese software retailer for around $150. With a slightly difficult user interface software one can program her to sing anything in a voice that’s now not far out of place on the pop charts. The Vocaloid technology was created by Yamaha and then licensed to developers, namely Crypton who developed the character and voice. Read more…
In this article pop culture pundit Nick Kent gives us his insights into the growing trend of J-Pop singers who want to sound cyber:
I’ve been noticing a mini-trend in Japanese pop music lately consisting of pretty female singers singing with android sounding vocals rather than natural sounding ones. I can’t help but to think Cher’s 1998 hit single “Believe” makes her the Borg Queen of this phenomenon: Read more…
On November 22, 1963 along with President Kennedy newspapers received their first fatal wound and they’ve been slowly fading ever since. Most people learned of the assassination of JFK via their TV set or radio — and ever since then newspapers have broken less-and-less news each year. Smugly watching this death march has been broadcast and later cable television news. At a certain point the money, power and glamour shifted from print to the small screen and along with that came a certain sense of hubris that we see today. Read more…
Disclaimer:Reverse engineering the mechanisms of Digg is always a guessing game — and a hard one because Digg is always changing the rules of that game to stay one step ahead of spammers. So everything in this article is just my speculation — it’s not a “how-to get to the front page” methodology.
Not too long ago (around February) Digg cracked down on power users by limiting the number of diggs in a 24 hour period. Now this isn’t a science but after 150 or so diggs a user would be greeted by the warning “Whoa there cowboy! Itchy trigger finger? Digging fast is so lame. How about reading some stories instead?” Now notice that last line about “reading some stories instead” — it’s always been my theory that while Digg never prints a rulebook that they always give your humorous hints as to how to succeed on Digg in their interface design. Read more…
Being on Twitter every day I’m always reminded of the web 2.0 mantra that software should always be in beta — so being creative I started to wonder “why not take this to the next level and turn a bug into a feature?” Having some game design experience I know that having fun negative payoff can be much more entertaining than actually winning a game sometimes. So I applied this logic to the now familiar “Something is Technically Wrong” illustration and have come up with a series of customized versions which I propose that Twitter adapt right away. Sadly knowing that Twitter is now mainstream I’ve designed these screens to appeal to original core audience of geeks who may feel abandoned as every brain dead TV presenter boasts of their account on the air:
On this day in 1993 Intel introduced the first set of Pentium chips which ran at 60 MHz. While that hardly sounds impressive today, back in the day this was a critical breakthrough for the first PCs that would support multimedia. Looking back at it Windows 3.1 seems primitive, but this was the first generation of PCs that started to feel more Mac like — the improved ease-of-use opened the doors of computing to a generation of users who were put off my the MS-DOS text interface that dominated screens until that point in time. Read more…
Introduced in 1964 the IBM System/360 was THE most popular computer of that era when such devices were the exclusive domain of big business and government. Each computer supported floating-point calculations and ran with up to 8 megs of memory! Sadly there are very few of these gems still in existence today — in fact the Smithsonian owns a 360 but sadly it isn’t even on display.
But the real story behind this computer is the project manager — who was Fred Brooks. As fate would have it in addition to the hardware Brooks also had to manage the development of the operating system for the 360 which was System/360. Luckily for all of us the project was a disaster going over budget and over time. However Brooks turned lemons into lemonade by writing the book The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering which was first published in 1975: Read more…
I came across this commercial for the Xerox Publishing System from 1986 and it got me to thinking: It’s commonly accepted wisdom that Xerox did too little too late with the innovations that were generated at their PARC research facility (user interface, ethernet and laser printing) which is why Apple was able to have their breakthrough. Looking back on it that’s true, but I think the missing lesson is price point as much as speed to market. Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Feb 19, 2009 in Tech, Videogames
The latest Apple commercial featuring 20 hot games on the iPod Touch brought a smile to my eye as it represents Apple getting back their pre-Macintosh roots of the Apple ][. The hidden secret to the success of any operating system is games. Now these don’t have to be games aimed at hardcore gamers, in fact what will sell a platform are casual games that you can drop in and out of easily. Read more…
Sometimes it takes just the right twist to make something interesting, in this case the Spykee Spy is a WiFi robot which is controlled remotely by you but the cool thing is that the robot can take pictures and video. So while at work your robot can wander about your home and report back to you. Each robot features a bitmaped face which lends some humor to the design. But best of all certain models of the robots can act as a cradle for your iPod or iPhone (which is a nice touch):
I hate insects with a passion but my favorite new toy line of the entire show was Hexbug — this is a collection of actual working robots each of which is equipped with a different type of sensor (light, sound, motion, etc.) which effects how it interacts with you. I’ve seen these sorts of creatures before made by robotic fanboys, but this product will bring these sorts of critters more into the mainstream as they very low priced (I was told they were going for about $10 on average – you can buy the entire line of 10 for $100 too). In fact the CEO of the company told me that kids were using these toys as fundraisers for science fairs in order to build their own robotic creations. Here are the Hexbugs in action at the fair:
The first Amazon Kindle looked like something from the 90s, you’d half expected that it would be running HyperCard with some Voyager CD-ROMs providing the content. So with the debut of the Amazon Kindle 2 I was sort of surprised to see them still sticking with the same old ugly plastic buttons, a black and white screen and that awful off white casing surrounding the display. Frankly in a recession I’m not going to drop $360 on something that looks like it should cost under $100. Read more…
If you’re a geek and you’re reading this, to you social media is old news — which is why it’s now mainstream (and about to get worse). But first a history lesson: The real story behind the sucess of MySpace and Facebook is that they were sites NOT aimed at geeks — unlike so many Web 1.0 hubs the real appeal of this first generation of these Web 2.0 sites is that they allowed a younger demographic to organize their real world activities. As an example MySpace empowered Gen Y to see their favorite band or to meet their classmates before moving into the form on Facebook. Yet there was still a generational barrier in place that has only slowly been crumbling lead by elder techies and creatives. Read more…
The fake iPhones from China are getting much better as time goes on! It should be noted that this is the second (or maybe third?) generation of iClones to hit the markets in China and each time they seem to get better. What’s impressive about this version is that not only does it sport an Apple logo (much improved without that pesky bite mark) but the touch interface looks like the real deal: Read more…
From time-to-time techies go through certain fads where a certain idea just seems right, so we often yearn for a solution to which there is no problem. A good example of this occuired in the 90s when many smart folks realized that while a PC with Windows 95, Netscape and a dialup modem were great — what if you could push this concept one step further and have a consumer friendly all-in-one unit? The answer was WebTV and the device was a resounding failure.Read more…
Posted by Michael Pinto on Jan 21, 2009 in Star Trek, Tech
I would be a liar if I said that I spent the past day thinking of about anything but the inauguration of President Barack Obama. One one level I was just overjoyed to hear Obama publicly re-embrace the ideas of science and ecology, which in a way strikes me as sad as being something that “we have to return to” in the first place. And of course the two central issues at hand today are the economy (or rather the lack there of) and ongoing asymmetrical warfare — yet underneath all of that chaos was a very positive echo of the civil rights struggle of the 1960s. And in a sense part of the triumph of that struggle was an indirect result of a few bold visionaries who embraced the then very odd notion of the world growing smaller was a damn good thing.Read more…
Nearly a day goes by on Twitter without yet another social media “expert” choosing to stalk me. At first it started innocently — back in the day (about a year ago) various techie friends started to declare themselves social media gurus because they decided to hang out on Twitter and Facebook all day. And now an army of their offspring monitor Summize in search of human flesh. Read more…
Not too long ago (around February) Digg cracked down on power users by limiting the number of diggs in a 24 hour period. Now this isn’t a science 
