Gadgetopia

Apple to pay $100M to Creative in settlement: It's interesting that Apple is settling a case on IP. Apple said it will pay $100 million for a license to use Creative's patented technology in its iPod music player, settling all legal disputes between the two companies. Jobs made this statement ...

Creative says it has patent covering iPod technology: Creative has been awarded what appears to be a stunningly stupid patent which it will likely use to sue Apple for infringement. Creative said the patent covers the way music tracks are selected on a device using a hierarchy of three or ...

Reticulum Rex: Here's a great little Flash movie from the folks at Creative Commons that gives you an update of where they're at after a few years of work. It's exciting to see what they're accomplished. It also led me to Common Content: An Open Catalog of Creative Commons licensed ...

Creative Showcase: Some neat Web ads here. Click the screencap to see the ad. "Creativity is alive and well, and living on the Net. But too many breaking campaigns have slipped through the cracks without the industry taking notice. Explore with industry consultant Joseph Jaffe an ongoing showcase of the ...

Welcome to HiddenPassageway.com - There is no fantasy: This company makes secret, Batcave-like modifications to your home: Pull a favorite book from your library shelf and watch a cabinet section recess to reveal a hidden passageway. Twist a candlestick and your fireplace rotates, granting access to a hidden room. Custom-designed ...

A batch of Creative Zen Neeon (their spelling) music players left the factory with some bonus software: Looks like somebody turned off the virus scanner at the Creative production plant--it would appear that about 3,700 Japanese 5GB Zen Neeons shipped since July might have possibly been packing a W32.Wullik.B@mm payload. ...

Smackerel: When multimedia was black and white: An homage to the wonder that was hypercard. HyperCard delivered significant computing power to creative people who had few preconceptions about what it should be used for. Artists, writers and other non-programmers dived in. Stacks were shared via BBSes, floppy disks and books. ...

Rubik's Cube Art: Defined as another electronic coffee table book, this site shows some creative works of art.

The case of Wikipedia: I'm actually linking to a section of a larger article. The complete article is a little slow, but there's a nice section here on the Wikipedia the awesome online encyclopedia that's often a first-stop reference for me. Another secret of the success of Wikipedia is ...

Example Style Guide: The guys over at silverorange have published one of their HTML style guides under a Creative Commons license allowing you to borrow it for your own uses.

CSS Design: Custom Underlines: If regular underlines aren't enough for you, try some of these. Custom underlines allow for new creative opportunities that might be appropriate for some websites. They can also be used to provide additional visual cues to the differences between the types of links contained in a ...

OYEZ: Toss out that directory of J-Lo tracks, baby, because the oral arguments of the U.S. Supreme Court have arrived. Get them here on MP3. Too bad the content is licensed under Creative Commons, because it'd be awfully funny to listen to arguments about pirating music on a pirated MP3. ...

That's right; a tube sock to hold an iPod, and it's up for grabs on eBay. From the looks of the pictures linked to the auction, it's not even a new sock. The thought process that went into developing this product must've really been something. A true creative genius at ...

Seven Hundred Issues, a CMS, and Creative Commons: TidBits has been looking for a CMS for a while now. We reported on their search way back in April. "Honestly, it's been a roller coaster ride. We'd start looking at a program, get excited about everything it promised, and then discover ...

Hell.com is being sold at Web domain name auction: It would be worth buying just so you could have the subdomain "whatthe." The Internet domain name Hell.com is scheduled to be sold at a live auction Friday, with organizers expecting bids of more than $1 million, The Wall Street Journal ...

MONEY Magazine's Best Jobs: Software Engineer ranked number one in Money Magazine's "Best Jobs in America" report. Software engineers are needed in virtually every part of the economy, making this one of the fastest-growing job titles in the U.S. Even so, it's not for everybody. Designing, developing and testing computer ...

Wikipedia:Featured pictures visible: Almost two years ago, we talked about how Wikipedia is a handy place to find copylefted images of stuff: As if Wikipedia wasn't useful enough already, it also happens to be a great archive of public domain and Creative Commons-licensed images. Now MetaFilter points to Wikipedia's Featured ...

Ars Technica reports that Blizzard has given Legendary Pictures the go-ahead for a Warcraft movie: "From our first Warcraft game to our latest novels, our intention has always been to develop a rich fantasy universe that could support stories and products in many forms," stated Chris Metzen, Blizzard Entertainment's vice ...

When Worms Get Literate: Here's an article on OSNews that explains how a new worm is finding phpBB installations to infect. [...] the Santy worm sported a relatively new "feature": it was using the Google search engine in order to automatically find its next victims; as far as I know, ...

The Great Hollywood Journey, Part II: This is direct from Bungie: They've secured an Executive Producer to help guarantee the creative integrity and technical excellence of the Halo film. And that Executive Producer's name is Peter Jackson. I'll give you a second to process. If you're having a strong, ...

The Art of Unix Programming: Eric Raymond, hacker extraordinaire and open source champion, has finished his masterwork, "The Art of Unix Programming." And, just like he did with "The Catherdral and the Bazaar" (which is available in XML or PostScript, natch), he's giving it away on his Web site. It's ...

Movie critic Roger Ebert recently answered a question from one of his readers regarding the use of Macs by the good guys in movies and Windows use by bad guys. "Since many Windows machines look alike, Apple is one of the few manufacturers that can gain by product placement, which ...

Microsoft's Portable Media Center is set to release today. Digital Media Thoughts reports that two units, the Samsung Yepp (pictured here) and the Creative Labs Zen are already listed at Amazon. These are neat little doo-dads, but it seems like a device for a pretty small niche. You'd need to ...

Karla, our creative director, bought a new leather coat. Yesterday, she pulled a slip of paper out of the pocket it s scanned and re-produced above (click here for a larger version). It looked like it was ripped from a notebook, and the letter was hand-written in ballpoint pen. In ...

Silk Icons: Here's a really great set of free icons (a very small subset displayed above). We've talked about stock icons before (that article is top 10 on Google for "stock icons"), but these look just about as good and don't cost a thing. "Silk" is a smooth, free icon ...

2003-2004 MIT IDEAS Competition: Be a geek, win a contest, improve the world. IDEAS is a competition started in 2001 at MIT to promote student innovation and inventiveness for community needs. The IDEAS Competition provides an opportunity for members of the MIT community to develop their creative ideas for projects ...

Jobs May Fill Seat at Disney: Eisner and Jobs two egos that go great together. Eisner is under fire, and bringing a tech and creative legend like Jobs aboard may be enough to deflect some of the damage. As far as the entertainment industry and Wall Street would be ...

Magazine > The Making of an X Box Warrior" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/22/magazine/22GAMES.html?ex=1251000000&en=0c119a867ac95256&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt">The Making of an X Box Warrior: The U.S. military is apparently becoming very good at making video games. Despite what you see in action movies and other video games, cars do not provide good cover from bullets. The snipers ...

Downloading squeezes the art out of the album: Fascinating theory here. The album, music's dominant creative framework for the past 40 years, is dying under the wheels of an accelerating revolution. The digital age, driven by single-song downloads, threatens to eradicate the multiple-track album, whether on compact disc, cassette or ...

Q and A With Brian Eno: Here's a nice little interview with the guy that came up with "The Windows Sound." He explains how it came about, and how it helped him get past some creative blockages from which he'd been suffering. The thing from the agency said, "We want ...

VisitorVille: Web Site Intelligence for Creative Thinkers.: You gotta see the screenshots of this it's Webalizer meets SimCity. Traffic stats are displayed in little Sim-like animations with visitors getting off buses with "Yahoo!" and "Netscape" painted on the top. No...seriously. Look at these screenshots. Buildings grow and shrink in ...

Admit it: whenever some group like 37 Signals or Six Apart comes out with a new software product, you secretly think, "I could of done that." How many of us developers thing we could build something just as good if we only put in the time? I do. Yes, I ...

Zap Your PRAM: The guys over at silverorange were kind enough to invite me to their conference coming up in October: "The Zap Your PRAM Conference is a gathering of creative professionals, academics, and intriguing people from around the world interested in design, the web, and emerging technologies. It's a ...

I knew this was going to happen sooner or later. Record companies have started spamming bogus files onto P2P networks like Kazaa. The files, which appear to be a music file, are in fact a short excerpt with something else filling the remaining time information about the artist, an ...

If a 23 inch diagonal flat panel monitor just isn't big enough for you, how about strapping four of them together for a panoramic, Grand Canyon-like view? With its ultra-widescreen format, phenomenal image quality, stunning aluminum construction and spectacular high-resolutions, the new Grand Canyon Displays are the ultimate solution for any ...

In my line of work I see more bar codes than most people, and probably know more than is healthy for anyone about all the types of codes & what makes them go. But this guy, Scott Blake, has put a new twist on the whole works, using bar codes ...

Porn industry mulls next-generation DVD: We've talked a bit before about the upcoming format war between next-generation DVD formats: Blu-ray and HD DVD. Blu-ray has the edge since it's backed by Sony and Phillips, but you'd be surprised who is probably going to end up deciding who wins: Pornography customers ...

Here's a trend I'm seeing in driver downloads from hardware manufacturers: they're bundling dozens of drivers into one file that detects your hardware and installs the right driver. (Mind you, while I'm just noticing this trend, it's probably been around for years...I'm not all that perceptive...) I got a new ...

When Jaguar releases next year's XK, its dashboard will be graced with a Flash interface. Alpine has put together an in-dash unit that uses plain old Flash for the button display. (Link.) Different display modes will allow control over audio, navigation, climate control, cell phone and other vehicle settings This ...

So I'm Googleing around looking for info on building a bike rack for my garage to keep my kids from making a parked bicycle maze, and I stumble upon this: 3D Chop Shop. Virtual Cycles' 3D Chop Shop is interactive software that allows you to build and customize your dream ...

I got an email on Wired Rants and Raves a while back (the last one in the list). Just found it, five months later. Reading it again, I believe it even more strongly. The article "The Games Wal-Mart Doesn't Play," (Dec. 2, 2002) quotes: "It's almost impossible to get a ...

tinydb.org: This is the first Google App Engine app I ve seen. tinydb lets you write to it by send a small GET request with querystring arguments containing some bit of textual data. You get a URL back, from which you can retrieve what you wrote in XML or JSON. Here ...

THE.SCENE: I'm rapidly becoming addicted to "The Scene," a soap opera about the exploits of Brian Sandro, a member of a DVD-pirating group. There have been 14 episodes so far, and I've watched three of them. Each is about 20 minutes long, and consists of a screencast of Brian's desktop, ...

Piracy is Progressive Taxation, and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution: The O'Reilly Network is making great strides in e-book publishing with their Safari service. I've been a customer of Safari in the past, and I found it very good. In this article from last year, Tim O'Reilly ...

Popular Tags on Flickr Photo Sharing: I swear that some of the best photography these days is coming out of amateurs. This page on Flickr displays the keywords that people have assigned to images they've uploaded. The bigger the font size, the more times that keyword has been used. These ...

As if Wikipedia wasn't useful enough already, it also happens to be a great archive of public domain and Creative Commons-licensed images. I wrote up a post on my personal blog about the future of "downtown." I needed a few pictures to illustrate it with, so, in a stroke of ...

About Fog Creek Software: I wanted to send Joel Spolsky an email today, and I was prowling around the Fog Creek site looking his email address when I stumbled onto this "About Fog Creek" page. It's well-worth reading (which makes it a glaring exception to the average "worthless by definition" ...

I often give thought to the really unfortunate sales process involved with Web development. There's so many variables involved with building a Web site, and so much of it is buried in the creative process, that it's hard to really paint a picture in a prospect's mind as to what ...

Last year, I wrote a short essay wondering how the look of a site affected its usability. I said: To what extent will the 'look' of the site help or hinder it from achieving reaching its goal, whatever that may be? [...] Can simply re-skinning a site fundamentally change the ...

I've been putting off posting about The Building of Basecamp because I was trying to get my hands on a picture. Neither Joe nor I thought to bring a camera, and the workshop was the first thing we did in Chicago, before Joe bought a disposable to shoot this ...