smooves

What were you most afraid of in High School? Getting turned down by that Cheerleader at the prom? Arriving at school naked, just before the big test you never studied for? Or, was it Mom and Dad finding all of your nudie-mags whilst looking for gift ideas? Look inside to see which terror Gamestop chose to highlight in their latest ad campaign.

According to the ad, your parents are going to find out exactly what kind of sick, perverted stuff you are into - unless you use their new Holiday wish-list website (titled HintOrElse.com, just to rub it in). It's good to see one company really get into the holiday spirit, if 'the spirit' happens to be free-wheeling paranoia and abject horror.

author: stimply
date: 2008-11-20 13:31:45

heh, he said "rub it in"

author: nook
date: 2008-11-20 16:15:58

yeah, I usually rub "it" "out" but that's just me

Ocarina, the second iPhone application from Silicon Valley based Smule, has surged to the top spot on the iPhone App store just a little over a week after launching (you can download it here for $.99).

Why? Just like Smule’s first application, a social virtual lighter (yeah, I know), People are fascinated by interacting with others. With the lighter it was competing geographically for the brightest light. With Ocarina, it’s listening to the music of others.

Ocarina, named after an ancient flute-like wind instrument, lets people play haunting, flute-like songs by blowing into the iPhone microphone and hitting the virtual buttons.

Yay. But the cool thing is you can hit a button and listen to what other Ocarina users are playing around the world. It’s social music, and strangely compelling. The company says Oscarina users have have listened to more than three million melodies. You can listen to some of them here.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

From the CC Blog:

The ever innovative Brooklyn-based singer songwriter Jonathan Coulton has teamed up with Creative Commons to release his greatest hits compilation “JoCo Looks Back” on a 1gb custom Creative Commons jump drive to help support our 2008 campaign. If that weren’t enough, JoCo and CC have also included all of the unmixed audio tracks for every song on the drive. That’s over 700mb of JoCo thing-a-week goodness. Since all of JoCo’s music is released under our Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, this is an incredible opportunity for the public to remix and reuse his fantastic music. Song files are in 320kbps MP3 and unmixed audio tracks are in 256 VBR MP3.

We’ll be offering the drives exclusively at our $50 dollar donation level (and above) until December 31st. Also included are a CreativeCommons.net account, an OpenID identity, and a 2008 campaign sticker.

Jonathan also wrote a wonderful commoner letter speaking on how he, as a musician, uses Creative Commons to support himself and his career. Read it here.

The letter is just about the most moving CC writing I've seen.

The new CETMAcargo bike from Eugene.
(Photos courtesy Lane Kagay)

The latest news in the hot cargo bike market comes from Eugene. The photo above is of the new CETMAcargo bike designed by Lane Kagay of CETMA Racks.

All loaded up.
(Photo: Lane Kagay)

CETMA, well-known for their front cargo racks, moved to Eugene from San Francisco back in 2007. Kagay says his cargo bike — which is manufactured just outside Eugene — is still in prototype phase but will be will be available soon. He’ll be in Portland at Clever Cycles on Thursday afternoon to give a special sneak preview and offer test rides of the bike.

Here’s what Kagay revealed about the bike in an email to BikePortland:

View of the bin on the shop floor.

This bike is very innovative with a frame-integrated platform and bi-partable sections which makes front cargo area and rear cockpit interchangable for different rider’s preferences. Makes shipping easier, too.

Future features will include an internal hub (NuVinci?) and disc brakes.

Kagay also says on his blog that the bike weighs only 55 pounds. This bike looks like a very capable hauler and I can’t wait to see these on the market.

Story continues below

Eugene is also the home of the Center for Appropriate Transport (CAT). Their Long Haul cargo bike is also made in Eugene.

This bike is yet another sign that the cargo/utility bike category is a hot trend in the bike industry. In the past few months we’ve heard about new bakfiets from China and Portland, a rear-load approach by Salt Lake City-based Madsen, the heavy-duty Yuba Mundo, and more.

For more on the development of the CETMAcargo bike, check out Kagay’s blog at CETMAracks.com (click on “News!” in the sidebar).

[Note: Several of you have emailed about my upcoming review of the Madsen (which I've been riding daily for over a week). I'm working on it and hope to publish the story soon.]

Before 2007, using the internet on your phone would make you want to kill yourself, if you were dumb enough to believe the crap splattered across that tiny screen even was the "internet." But the combination of increased bandwidth and better mobile software means that more phones really are promising to deliver the real internet, in living color. We tested eight different browsers, and while some put smiles on our faces, others proved that rendering HTML correctly is a far cry from actually giving you an awesome web experience. And what about 3G vs. Wi-Fi? Everything the carriers have told you is a lie. This is the true state of mobile web.

Before we give you the rundown of each of the most prevalent mobile browsers, here's how they all stacked up in a timed test of how fast (and how well) they could render websites, chosen for their diversity and particular challenges:

This second chart runs through the same procedure with all of the phones that had Wi-Fi options:

It's a pretty daunting pile of numbers, so let's break it down into standard prose, rating each browser as we go:
Android
A fast, smart mobile browser based on WebKit. It tackles most sites with (almost) unrivaled grace and speed. Panning and zooming could be smoother and more responsive, but with a ton of options for getting around a page—various touch methods and the trackball—few sites will be challenging to zip around. The only thing we really miss is multitouch for zoom. Buttons just aren't a very elegant or precise solution, and while the whole-page magnifying glass technique is nice, we'd love something a bit more refined. Overall though, we're happy campers on Android's browser. Grade: B+

BlackBerry Bold
Leaps and bounds ahead of the browser BlackBerry users have put up with for years, it renders most pages correctly, even if scripts give it a conniption fit (hence its long load times for Wikipedia and the WSJ). It uses the standard "click to zoom" metaphor, which works well enough, though getting around a page with the trackball can be kind of a work out for you thumb. The Column View, which squeezes a whole page into a single column, is fairly convenient and makes it easier to get around wider pages, even if it doesn't work equally as well on every site (nice on Wikipedia, ugly on Giz). Hopefully they fix the script performance in the Storm, which is using an updated version of the Bold's browser. We humbly suggest they ditch their home-baked browser for one based on WebKit, which would help out there. Grade: B-/C+

iPhone
What can we say? It's still got the best mobile browser around. It crushes basically everything but Android's browser—which is also based on WebKit—in speed and outclasses its still classy brother-from-another-mother (and everyone else) with the ease and elegance of its multitouch zooming. Some pages still give it fits, and it's missing Flash support, but it really does deliver an unrivaled mobile web experience. We love it, but make no mistake we're eagerly waiting for something better. (Mobile Firefox? Is it you?) Grade: A-

Nokia E71 Symbian S60
Hey look, another web browser with WebKit guts! It doesn't perform quite as well as Android's or iPhone's iteration where speed or render accuracy are concerned (can any Symbian nuts explain why?), but it does a serviceable job. The big thing it has going for it is Flash Lite 3 support, though performance there is kinda assy and memory intensive. Navigation is tougher with the E71's d-pad than with a trackball, but the whole page magnifying approach makes it easy enough to get around (too bad you have to dig through a menu or two to get to it). Not bad, but short of excellent. Grade: B-

Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile
Jesus Christ. This is a joke, right Microsoft? Hahaha. No really, this is the worst smartphone browser on the planet. It couldn't render its way out of an ASCII-art paper bag. It totally screwed up every single test page, except for Wikipedia, which it only mostly screwed up. Good luck navigating a page if you're granted the miraculous occurrence of it being rendered in a state that's usable. Grade: F-

Opera Mobile on Windows Mobile
Microsoft's own intentions notwithstanding, you can use the internet on a Windows Mobile phone. You just need Opera Mobile. It's kind of hobbled by Windows Mobile's assy performance, but it usually gets the job done. Not as quickly or always as accurately as its WebKit rivals, but it's definitely usable. Interestingly, it benefits more from the extra bandwidth offered by Wi-Fi than the WebKit browsers do. Menu-based zoom is annoying and imprecise. Touch-based panning worked okay, though a little laggy. We mostly navigated with the Samsung Epix's optical cursor, which worked pretty well, somewhere in between a d-pad and a trackball. Grade: C

Sprint Instinct
Holy CRAP. This is not the painfully lousy browser the Instinct shipped with not by a long shot. The original was slow and fairly feeble, even if it was the head of its (dumbphone) class. The new 1.1 browser really is a life-changing upgrade. It suffers in the chart because it's much slower than most other browsers, and zooming is still clumsy, but once the page loads, it's much smoother to pan and actually move around. I got a bit annoyed that it lied about pageload time, hanging at the last 2 percent of the status bar for half the load, but it usually gets things right. This is the best non-smartphone browser you can get. Grade: C+

LG Dare
Like the Instinct, the Dare proves you can actually get a usable browsing experience on a feature phone. It's a little nimbler at loading pages than its Korean blood rival, but the reason it ultimately posts lower marks than the Instinct is that it buckles way more easily under a moderate to heavy pageload, turning it into an unresponsive picture of the website you were trying to look at. Still, it renders most pages fairly accurately, and we like the sliding zoom scroll bar, at least in theory, since it seems like an intuitive way to deal with the zoom issue. Unfortunately, it works more like a glorified pair of buttons. (Note: I don't think the speed was actually a piddly 300 Kbps—I think it just had a problem dealing with DSL Reports' mobile speedtest, even though it's text-based for the dumbest of phones.) Grade: C

Methodology
We tested every browser only using the full—not mobile—versions of selected sites, over 3G and, whenever possible, Wi-Fi. All scripts were turned on, and the cache was cleared before each round of testing. We took the average of a series of five sequential speedtests to give us an idea of the bandwidth we're dealing with, and timed how long it took to completely load a site according to each browser's progress bar. We assessed whether or not it rendered the page correctly, on a scale ranging from "excellent" to "good" (a couple things out of place) to "utter fail" (I've seen prettier train wrecks).

A few additional issues to note: Internet Explorer would not work on Wi-Fi. Opera yes, our Skyfire install, yes, Internet Exploder, no. (Samsung suggested it might be because of Opera.) We didn't pursue the matter because of how IE did in the 3G tests: A page that looks like a pile of blended dog poo is going to look like that no matter how much faster it loads. Sprint's updated Instinct and Verizon's Dare, which we included as best-of-class examples of feature phones, don't have Wi-Fi capabilities. We left out Opera Mini and Skyfire, since they both leave most of the hard work to servers which essentially spit out a kind of image file—besides, we don't think this kind of internet-by-proxy browser will be around for much longer.

The Big Gulp
Remember our mantra it's code that counts? It's true for mobile internet too. An awesome browser can make up for a mediocre network, but a terrible browser delivers a crappy experience no matter how great the network is. It's all about the browser. As it stands, WebKit is clearly the best thing going, but even then, software implementation matters, or Nokia would deliver as good a performance as Android and iPhone. Proving the point, it's striking how little Wi-Fi actually boosted speed beyond 3G—hell, WebKit browsers on 3G slid past some of the others that were running on Wi-Fi.

Another thing to note is that the zoom metaphor is a tricky thing to nail. Buttons are too brutish, the magnifying glass is imprecise. Multitouch seems to be the best way to handle zooming in and out in a way that's intuitive and precise. Hopefully we'll see other developers start to use multitouch interfaces in touchscreen phones (*cough*ANDROID!*cough*).

As much as this blow-by-blow battlemodo shows you all the problems we encountered, the big picture is that really, mobile web is pretty dandy right now, and getting dandier. It could be more reliable, faster, maybe a little more versatile, but for the most part, yes, you can access the internet on your phone. Compared to just two years ago, that's really saying something. We can't wait to see what it'll look like in two years. Maybe Internet Exploder will actually work. Nah, that's a little too sci-fi.

Me: “Hello, how may I help you?”

(The client looks at name on desk; my name’s Hattie.)

Client: “Your name is so stupid.”

Me: “Sorry, sir. I can’t help that. It’s not so bad. ”

Client: “Your parents must really hate you.”

Me: “No, I’m sure they don’t. How can I help?”

Client: “I want to check my registration. Name’s Horace Gumptin.”

Me: *stifles giggle*

Client: “Are you laughing at me? Your name rhymes with fattie!”

Claiming to be tired of seeing poor-quality "rip-offs" of their ridiculously acclaimed TV series and films, the Monty Python troupe has created an official YouTube channel to post free, high-quality clips from their vaults, with only Amazon merchandise links for advertising. Their official, tongue-in-cheek video proclamation is below. [via]

If you're a power searcher, or other people think you are, and you're getting tired of constant requests for answers to questions that a quick Google search would provide, try Let me google that for you. Enter a search term, click the Google Search button, and a link appears that you can copy, paste and send to your friend. When they click the link, an animation displays the complicated process of searching Google for information, and then directs the user to the actual search results page from Google. Snarky? Yes. However, the time the user is forced to study the search term you used, they might pick up a trick or two in keyword syntax, search operators, literal strings and the like. After all, give a man an answer, and he'll come back tomorrow asking for more. Teach a man to search Google, and you'll have to offer tech support when he ends up downloading malware while cruising shadier purveyors of adult entertainment and file sharing software.

author: gorytunes
date: 2008-11-19 20:58:09

stimply will be sending me these weekly

I had the chance this afternoon to speak with John Ziegler, a documentary filmmaker and former radio talk show host who built the website HowObamaGotElected.com and is promoting a forthcoming documentary of the same name.

Ziegler was responsible for commissioning a Zogby International survey of Barack Obama supporters, which took the form of a multiple choice political knowledge test, stating a "fact" to the respondent and asking them which of the four major candidates (Obama, McCain, Biden, Palin) the statement applied to. Because I believe that many of the statements on the survey are questionable or false but are misleadingly presented as factual to the respondent, I characterized the survey as a "push poll" in an article posted early this morning.

Ziegler had contacted me by e-mail, asking if I'd like to interview him; the interview itself was conducted by telephone. Ziegler asked, among other conditions, that I post a full transcript of the interview, which I have. The transcript below is intended to be representative as possible from my shorthand transcript, with the exception of two or three rapid-fire ad-hominem exchanges being edited out. The transcript, however, is not safe for work.

Nate Silver [NS]: Were only Obama supporters interviewed for the [Zogby] survey, or was everyone interviewed?
John Ziegler [JZ]: The reason why I interviewed Obama supporters only is because I’m doing a documentary on the media coverage of the campaign and how the media coverage of the campaign impacted what Obama supporters knew or thought they knew about the campaign. I had planned from day one because I knew that no one would take seriously any random sampling of interviewees that I was going to commission a scientific poll of these questions. I also knew that it would be a lot cheaper for me to do a nationwide survey of Obama voters than the nation as a whole because basically I’d only have to do half the number of people to get a representative sample. When I went on FOX last night, I made a deal that if anyone on the left -- you're more than willing to take me up on this -- wants to ask the exact same deal of the McCain supporters and you get examples that are equal to or worse than the Obama supporters, then I’ll pay for your expense. The point here was not to show that Obama supporters were idiots -- there are plenty of idiots on both sides of the aisle -- but what information they got from the media that they were able to consume.

NS: Do you stand by all the statements in the survey as being unambiguously true?
JZ: I stand one hundred percent by the notion that there is absolutely zero ambiguity as to what the right answer is to any of the questions. With the one exception of the Palin-Russia-Alaska question which we asked the way we did for a very specific purpose which was to try and gauge the Tina Fey Effect which I think we did in a very effective manner which was what was actually said by Tina Fey, everyone attributed to Sarah Plain. But for purposes of scoring Obama supporters’ answers we counted Palin as a correct response.

NS: What was the right answer to that [Palin] question?
JZ: The technically accurate question [sic] is that none of the four people said that, but we counted it as correct if they said Sarah Palin.

NS: Why would you commission a survey question with no correct response?
JZ: The purpose of the question, you pinhead, was we wanted to determine the Tina Fey Effect.

NS: Were the interviews conducted by telephone or online?
JZ: How can you ask a question like that and pretend that you have any clue what you're writing about! That's unbelievable that someone could write what you did! That is unbelievable that you wouldn't know that it's a telephone or an online poll and that you went on my summaries of the questions before the questions were even released!

NS: We’ve heard reports from our readers that very similar questions had been asked in an online format. There was no online component at all?
JZ: That is correct, which you would have known if you had looked at the information. Before you called this a push poll -- you don't seem to know the definition of a push poll. How do you have this website?

NS: Is the complete interview available anywhere -- complete results for the interview?
JZ: Yeah if you had done your research it is all online, every question, all the cross-tabs. Man, you're never going to post this [transcript], are you?

NS: Were the respondents informed of the 'correct' response during the telephone interviews?
JZ: No.

NS: Did Zogby have a chance to preview the questions before agreeing to accept your business?
JZ: John Zogby himself or the company?

NS: Either/Or.
JZ: I am quite certain that if I asked a question they deemed inappropriate they would have not allowed the question to be asked.

NS: What questions were removed from the survey.
JZ: We didn't remove any, we edited some.

NS: What questions were edited?
JZ: Nothing was substantially edited but there was some wording on some that we went over with them. For instance, I think I had inadvertently said “See Russia from my home” instead of “See Russia from my house”. There was a distinction about Obama talking about energy prices versus electricity prices so we corrected that. That’s all that I can recollect.

NS: What did Zogby charge you -- what did you pay for this survey?
JZ: I'm not going to tell you that, I'm not a fucking idiot.

NS: Did he charge you at his usual rates or did he ask you for extra?
JZ: You'll have to ask them. I'm not going to respond how much money I paid for this. It was substantial but I’m not going to say anything more than that.

NS: In the Youtube video, how were the Obama supporters identified for the Youtube video?
JZ: I had nothing to do with it. I had a person who was working with me who happens to be a black female since you seem to think I’m a racist who was the one that chose all of the respondents based on conversations we’d had prior, people who were well-spoken, thought they were informed, willing to come on camera and [who] voted for Barack Obama.

NS: What was the location of the polling place where the interviews were conducted?
JZ: They were both in Los Angeles.

NS: Okay, that's what I kind of guessed. How many Obama supporters did you speak with in total?
JZ: All twelve we spoke with are in the video.

NS: Was there any significance to the fact that in the YouTube video, seven of the twelve Obama supporters were black?
JZ: [Laughs]. The reason why we had more black supporters – that might surprise some of the people that we spoke to -- if we go by your apparent ability to determine race -- the first location happened to be in a black section of town and we were able to get our interviews faster there because of they way that was set up, because of the logistics. We had a second location but it got dark and we didn't have any lights. So, that's it, it was no grand racial conspiracy.

NS: How did you represent yourself to John Zogby?
JZ: As private company, Death-of-Free-Speech-dot-inc which is the name of a book that I wrote.

NS: Did Zogby give you sign-off on the press release that he released on his website?
JZ: I'm not sure what you mean by sign-off. The press release I had input into, yes.

NS: Did you have financing for the project or was it paid for out of pocket?
JZ: It is not self-financed.

NS: Who paid for it?
JZ: You think I'm going to tell you that? When you've already shown yourself to be the enemy?

NS: Was it paid for by the RNC?
JZ: [Laughs]. In your world, the question that I would ask you is what question [in the survey] is there any ambiguity as to what the answer is?

NS: Well, that Obama 'launched his career' at the home of two former members of the Weather Underground --
JZ: That happens to be one of the questions that Obama supporters did the best on! They did better on that question than on any other Obama-related answers! And here you’re telling me that it’s not true?

NS: What do you mean by "launched his career"?
JZ: The first campaign as told by the person whose position he took in the State Senate, as told by her admission, his first campaign event was in the home of Bill Ayers and his wife. [Laughs] Unless you live in the Obama kool-aid world! That is astonishing to me that you would not accept that! And by the way, when you're given four responses to that question, what else was the response going to be? Sarah Palin?

NS: Well, her husband was a member of a secessionist party.
JZ: You are such a hack! That's a very good analogy.

NS: Do you think that certain types of voters are less well informed?
JZ: I think anyone that looks rationally at these poll results would have to conclude that Obama voters are incredibly poorly informed about major issues that occurred during the campaign -- my guess is because McCain voters got their information from different types of media than Obama voters did.

NS: What types of media would you consider credible?
JZ: I think you need a variety of sources, but I do not accept the notion that if it's not in the New York Times it's not true and if it is in the New York Times it is. Just because Sean Hannity says something doesn't mean it’s not true.

NS: What is Barack Obama’s religion?
JZ: You'll have to ask him. But I do know that he never claimed to be a Christian until he met Reverend Wright. And I do believe -- and I’ve never held this against him -- that it would have been highly unlikely for him not to have been registered as a Muslim as a child in Indonsesia but who cares. He did change his website based on that reality –- he was far more ambiguous about that issue on Fight The Smears. I’m an agnostic so I couldn't care less what his religion is. I just care that he lied about it.

NS: When do you think Obama was a Muslim?
JZ: I think he was likely -- registered as a Muslim between the ages of 6 and 10 while he was going to school in Indonesia. It would have been highly unusual for him not to be.

NS: But would you personally consider Obama a Muslim?
JZ: No, because he was a child. We're talking about two totally different things. There's what religion you're born into and there's what religion you become because of your own decisions

NS: Would you consider Obama a Christian?
JZ: You'd have to ask him. There was never any evidence that he was a Christian until he decided to join the church of a racist hate-monger for political purposes.

NS: Would you not believe Barack Obama if he told you he was a Christian?
JZ: Does he believe that Jesus Christ was the son of God who died and was raised from the dead later?

NS: Do you think he’s a believer in Jesus Christ?
JZ: I have no way of knowing that. I don't think there's any evidence that he is, either.

NS: Do you have doubts about Barack Obama's birth certificate?
JZ: I couldn’t care less about that. I accept he was born in Hawaii.

NS: Would you consider yourself well-informed
JZ: I’d consider myself extremely well-informed.

NS: Who are the two senators from South Dakota
JZ: Thune and, uh, Johnson.

NS: Very good. South Carolina?
JZ: Go fuck yourself. I'm done with this interview if you're going to ask me stupid questions like that. Obviously I know who Lindsay Graham is.

NS: Well, since you’re running a website calling people misinformed, I’d like to see if -- there are certain things you’ve said that I would consider misinformed.
JZ: Misinformed? You're a piece of work! You are never going to have the guts to post a representative transcript on your website! I thought you actually ran a legitimate website!

NS: Thank you, have a good day.
JZ: Go fuck yourself.

author: distilled
date: 2008-11-19 08:56:45

Material

author: nook
date: 2008-11-19 13:00:59

wicked material

Now that Sirius and XM have merged, everybody is happy—not. The subscribers are ticked off; the stockholders are beyond ticked off. And Clear Channel? Extra ticked off.

author: cephalex
date: 2008-11-18 17:56:04

Hulk MAD at losing "Left of Center" station.

Google released this morning its seventh edition of SketchUp for Windows and Mac systems, the free 3D modeling tool that topped our list of Top 10 Google products you forgot all about. New to this edition are tools for collaborating and sharing models and objects through the 3D Warehouse, automatic tools for beginners, and lots of other tweaks. What do you use SketchUp for? Tell us in the comments. [via]

Times may be hard economically, but you don't need to give your electronics-DIY enthusiast friend a naff present, thanks to MAKE's sub-$20 Electronics Gift Guide. In fact, some of the items listed are so neat I'm tempted to gift a couple to myself right now... There's a DIY battery-powered USB charger kit good for iPhones, a tiny persistence-of-vision LED display, solar-powered theremin and more. My personal fave is the Drawdio music-making pencil. There're a few LED decoration projects there too: I think my Christmas tree may end up glittering with some DIY LED goodness this year. [Makezine]

Some covert gamers spend all their time programming Tetris clones for their graphing calculators. Others simply rip out the guts of a GameBoy and cram it into their old TI-84s. It's the difference between programmers-in-the-making and hackers-in-the-offing!

GameBoy Color inside a TI-83 series calculator [Mark Bowers via OhGizmo!]

Hey, Nintendo—what's going on here? After a good year or so looking the other way on Wii homebrew (for the most part), now we've got two fairly serious brew-killing updates in the last month? Word from the folks at Wiibrew.org is that the latest update, System Menu 3.4, is apparently a doozy when it comes to ruining the homebrew party.

New features include USB keyboard support in the Mii channel, enhanced parental controls, and that's where the fun stops: the update also apparently deletes the Homebrew Channel and any other unofficial channels and promises to "check for and automatically remove" modified save files from your system—which is the method used to execute the famous Twilight Hack that makes all the homebrew possible. Not sure whether that means it will disable such save files going forward—hopefully not.

So at the moment, if you have homebrew on your Wii or are planning to (using our handy guide, of course), don't update. The Wiibrew folks will hopefully come up with a patched solution that allows you to upgrade without the ill affects. Man, I hope we didn't jinx Wii 'brew by calling it "relatively stable!" [Wiibrew via Maxconsole]

After one of the mysterious delays pretty much synonymous with Apple's closed and inscrutable application approval process (the roll of an i-ching disgorged from Steve Jobs' uptight, puckered rectum), voice search has come to the iPhone Google App. It's available now.

I like it. You need to turn it on in the Google App, at which point, you can simply push a microphone button and speak your search into the phone. Google then generates a visual wav pattern, outputs a delightful burbling audio noise to indicate that it is processing your requests, then outputs search results as normal.

How does it work? Pretty well. When you first start it up, a charming cartoon boy walks you through how to use the program, and "skateboard bulldog" works as advertised. I decided to take things up a notch, and Google voice search performed well here too, managing to keep up with a torrid stream of profanity and give me results to match. Likewise, it correctly gave me results for my name without a stumble.

Unfortunately, Beschizza did not fare so well, first returning a result for "rob dyskenesia," which sounds like a cerebral disorder and then for "robert fisk usa." Likewise, "Salomee Sklodowska Bronislawa" resulted in listings for various Warsawian pizzerias. Basically, you need to use some common sense: things that are not pronounced even close to phonetically will generate bad results.

Overall, it's a big improvement over stock Google searching on the iPhone: for most searches, just speaking into your phone is about a hundred times easier than trying to type it out with the iPhone's excellent but typo prone onscreen keyboard. Go grab it.

San Francisco artist Robert Burden spent a year — a year — painting his man-sized Voltron pièce de résistance, "Defensor Mundi", and caught the whole process in time-lapse. Sure, the floral theme doesn't inspire much confidence in Voltron's RoBeast-slaying abilities, but the music and painting are a treat. [BoingBoing via Make]

Here's a nice technique for hacking indexes into your quadruled Moleskine notebook -- x-acto out little divots at the index points:

The squared notebook gives a nice line to follow for the cuts. Any tool should aim to exactly fit these lines, just to enhance the feel of the finished tab.
The very square edge is a little open to becoming frayed and bashed, so the tool should be a curved die giving a nicely rounded corner to the tabs. Either the square shallow tab as shown here, or a deeper semi circular version would be nice. I clipped only 5 pages at the start of a section.

Moleskine indexing hack tool (via Make)

author: distilled
date: 2008-11-18 09:33:07

OCD Material

From Keyboard Magazine Presents: Vintage Synthesizers:

If it weren't for the rock-and-roll world' perverse tendency to shovel lead synthesists into the guitar-hero mold, the remote controller idea might never have gotten off the ground. Even before Moog's guitar-necked portable Liberation synthesizer, remote controllers were appearing with everything but frets and strings. Case in point: The David Company's Clavitar, surely the duck-billed platypus of keyboard phylogeny.

David Clavitar in Vintage Synthesizers [Books.Google.com via Surroundhead]

Somehow, I don't think the world is ready for a charger that powers up an iPhone when you flex a hand grip. I mean, a firm handshake commands respect, but we are still talking about exercise here. So, I think that a solar powered charging case is probably about as eco-friendly as most of us are willing to get. On the other hand, you could view it like a stress reliever—a means of squeezing away your frustrations. Based on the time displayed on the iPhone in the image, my guess is that the designer also had stress relief in mind with this concept as well. [petitinvention via Ecofriend via Gearfuse]

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

If Minority Report has become the benchmark by which gestural interaction is judged, that was always intentional. The film’s production team wanted to work with the people actually developing science fiction-like technology. And it’s sci-fi like technology.

So, let’s not talk about how cool-looking the clip is above – not that it doesn’t look cool. After all, most of what you actually see on the screen is stuff you can do with your desktop computer and some projectors. So the question is, what benefit do you get from really nailing a gestural input? It’s the input that matters.

Even if you engage exclusively your right brain on this, there’s quite a lot that’s impressive – the properties proponents of this kind of interface have been advocating for many years:

The interface is 3D. Not to overstate the obvious here, but the ability to intuitively navigate in 3D is no small matter. This sort of interface might not work for detailed 3D modeling, but for quicker, more comfortable 3D navigation, the mouse / mouse wheel has always been woefully inadequate. The mouse is fundamentally designed as a 2D pointing device, which is why it requires awkward conventions like WASD keyboard navigation in 3D games. Joysticks work for spatial navigation (ask your friendly fighter pilot who relies on them in life-or-death situation). But actually moving stuff around in 3D requires something different.
Gestures are intuitive. We hear a lot about gestures, but these are actual, human gestures – the kinds of motions you’d make to a person, the kinds you’d use when running a dog around an agility course. (And, believe me, if you can keep up with a border collie, you’ve got a good interface!)
It’s collaborative. Here’s an experiment: share your mouse with a friend. How’d that work out for you?
It could help navigate information. This to me is actually the least convincing part of the demo – but I think that’s an opportunity. We’ve had a chicken and egg problem: our interface is 2D, so our information is 2D. Sure, there’s the odd exception, like Google Earth – but how much time do you use Google Earth compared to Google Maps? Thought so. Some of the demos here remind me of Apple’s 1990s tag navigation interface for the Web. Others return to the odd, needlessly-3D photo organizing app model that seems to permeate these demos. (And until you can shout “enhance” at your computer like on Star Trek to see some tiny area of an image, I wonder how useful that will be.) I think we have to re-learn how to organize information in three dimensions, having done it in two dimensions for so long.
It blurs the lines between computing and performance. The reason we focus so much on live performance on this site is that, at its heart, it’s all about real-time communication. If you can make something work live onstage, or live in a club in front of drunken people, you’ve probably mastered it on some important level.

Myron Krueger’s shadow is cast over more recent gestural interface developments – in a good way. Photo by Dave Pape.

g-speak is really, truly, brilliant work – not just as a video demo, but from what I can see, in the detailed work they’ve done with the gestural interface and the way screens are networked together. To say that it’s “the first major step” in interfacing since 1984 would require ignoring the extensive work done on this sort of interface. Look back to Myron Krueger’s work in the 1970s which predated even today’s UI as we know it, and work looking more like this in the years since. Then again, maybe that’s the point.This isn’t about novelty; on the contrary, it’s trying to work out how to design interfaces connected to metaphors and human physical wiring that pre-date the invention of computers.

Theremins: best played shirtless. (Um, I’m sure it … interferes with the signal. Or something.) Leon Theremin nailed this sort of interface in 1919 for sound. Almost 90 years later, it’s reaching the same level of sophistication in computer interfaces. Photo (CC) Joshua Vernon-Rogers.

Odds are, you can’t afford Oblong’s platform. But that leaves tons of other possibilities this sort of thing could inspire. Musicians already know that moving your hand around in space with no tactile feedback makes precision challenging – the Theremin requires years of practice to master, eludes many would-be players, and limits certain kinds of controls. (Oh yeah … the Theremin also came before 1984. Quite a few years before 1984 … think 1919.)

In other words, we’re now seeing the first realization of the level of sophistication that we knew was coming. But it’s only one implementation. Look out for more gestural interface development in the future. And now that people are nailing the input/output method, the bigger challenge is next: content.

Visualists, unite!

author: analytic
date: 2008-11-17 17:34:58

This is some pretty amazing stuff ...

author: analytic
date: 2008-11-17 17:36:16

I wonder how much of this you could duplicate with just a wiimote?

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