Applied Digital Solutions are marketing the VeriChip as the world’s only implantable ID technology, claiming they could one day replace credit cards. They are also receiving condemnation from some fundamentalist Christians who believe that this is the fabled ‘mark of the beast’ of biblical lore
Darren Barefoot points out a consumer-sized wind turbine from Windsave. A very nice device that allows you to generate wind power at very low wind speeds
Dell is moving its call centre operations for the Latitude and Optiplex computers back to the US from Bangalore, India after an onslaught of complaints from dissatisfied customers who couldn’t cope with the differing accents and scripted responses. Is this the beginning of a trend where companies recognise that the quality offered by relocation to cheaper centres around the world doesn’t result in customer appreciation and better quality?
In an interesting twist on political correctness, LA County has banned the use of the terms Master/Slave
Paramilitaries, embedded journalists and illegal protests. Think this is Iraq? It’s Miami, with uber-Nazi Timoney leading a armed military assault on the democratic right to peaceful protest
Jon Lech Johansen, the Norwegian who drew the ire of the Hollywood movie industry by breaking the encryption code for DVDs at age 15, has now cracked the codes for iTunes
In an unusual combination, the British Library has formed an alliance with Amazon.co.uk to sell to the public catalogue listings of over 2.5 million literary works from its collection
I’ve known of the notorious Nigerian scam for years. The first time I actually saw physical evidence of the scam was when a letter arrived at work.
We were a small branch office, so everyone got to see the poorly photocopied document. One of the engineers said that they used to send them out of classy looking faked stationery. Not this scammer, but if was nice to see that they’d kept up the time honoured tradition of fake stamps.
The gist of the letter was much the same as the continual pleas from Nigerian widows you get in your inbox now. But at least they’d made the effort to match the content to our company business. Surprisingly enough the company did have business in the region mentioned, but contacting a minor sub branch halfway around the world for transfer of funds was never going to work when we had a head office who was constantly miffed over our stationery expenditure.
The Green Man has pointed out a group that goes out of their way to bait the scammers.
New York’s highest court has heard arguments in the case of a man who has refused to cut his dog’s tail for national competitions. John Hammer contends that the ‘docked-tail‘ standard violates state law against intentionally injuring an animal and constitutes illegal discrimination
A young entrepreneur has gotten into the business of recycling junked TV commercials for clients with low budgets. TV ads cost anywhere between $50,000 and $1 million and small businesses usually cannot afford an original production. The company, Thought Equity, wipes off all references to the earlier company and makes the junked commercial ready for reselling with a price tag less than $10,000
New laws allowing Singapore to launch pre-emptive strikes against computer hackers have raised fears that internet controls are being tightened and privacy compromised in the name of fighting terrorism
iPod’s Dirty Secret (Quicktime video) tells the story of a 18-month-old iPod with a dead battery. Apple will fix it…
This guy bought an iPod about 18 months ago and the battery is now dead. Apple charges about $255 to replace the battery. So he goes around and adding this info to iPod posters. The battery saga is not cool but:
a) iPod runs on essentially a laptop type battery. It will lose its ability to recharge over time, as do PDA’s, mobile phones and laptops.
b) There are other options for when your babys battery dies, you are not at Apples mercy. Yes opening your iPod means you kiss your warranty kaput, but unless you’ve bought Apple Care, iPod probably aint going to die within warranty time (1 year).
The article I’ve linked up the top of this entry has some links worth checking out including this one www.ipodbattery.com.
This is something Apple should look at, either dropping the price of replacement batteries (somehow), or making DYI kits available. Or maybe this is something Sony could look at as the internal batteries are Sony. They’ve just missed out on creating something iPoddy so they might as well capitalise on the accessories.
Some other iPod accessories worth checking out is the back up battery by Belkin. With this baby you can power your other baby with 4 AA alkaline batteries, for about $70. Nice one.
Another stroke of genius is this baby, the Belkin iPod Media Reader. You can transfer images from your digital camera to your iPod on the go so you can free up more room on your camera. Now this is a fucking must have if you’re like me and carry both iPod and digital camera everywhere you go, and it’s $200. Yes another fucking nice one.
Woo hoo! You can now buy Nathan Jurevicius prints from the Outré Gallery. I am very tempted by ‘Cat Guru’ and ‘Blue Kitty’.
An exhibition of his fine work has also been announced entitled ‘Girls and other Scary Things Toys, Prints and Sculptures by Nathan Jurevicius’, which opens 16 January 2004 at the Outré Gallery in Melbourne. Fingers crossed it’ll be heading over to Sydney as well.
‘Tis always a pleasure to visit The Joy of Tech and chortle at its rather amusing comics.
Here are some Mac related samplings:
Mac eye for the Windows guy
Panther Party
Windows Hell Freezing Over
Melani McAlister, an associate professor of American studies at George Washington University, takes us on an interesting journey through the evangelical mind and its obsession with fulfilling its end times prophecy at any cost — as well as making a tidy profit on the side
Daniel Frommelt and his posse have recoded a prototype of Slashdot that uses valid, semantic HTML and stylesheets. Frommelt projects four-figure bandwidth savings in the candidate redesign, were it adopted, not to mention better appearance in a wide range of browsers and improved accessibility. Next he needs volunteers to retool the Slashdot engine. And yes, he did it all with CmdrTaco’s blessing
A Toronto man is the first to be charged with theft of communications for downloading child pornography using someone else’s residential wireless network. The War Driver was caught naked from the waist down driving the wrong way down a one-way street, with a laptop in hand
A new device called a dog on a chip may combine the benefits of technology and nature by not only detecting dangerous or illicit substances but by providing the electronic equivalent of a dog barking
Soon to be on Slashdot…
A man inundated with penis enlargement spam has been arrested for threating the lives of the alleged spammers. The 44 year old programmer verbally threatened employees of the penis-enlargement company Albion Medical with a variety of horrors including anthrax, castration, shooting, and torture with a power drill.
For decades scientists and farming bodies have been trying to find alternatives to shearing for removing the wool from the sheep’s back. All sorts of weird inventions have come and gone but one, it seems could now be here to stay. Bioclip involves the use of an injection to break the wool. The product is now used commercially on tens of thousands of young sheep and within weeks Bioclip will announce that an international company will distribute the product throughout Australia
RSS – Posts
