Gadgetopia

I'm a little surprised, frankly, that I'm four years into this blog and I've never mentioned this book. I saw it on the shelf the other day at a used book store, and I can't believe I haven't told you about it. I read "Ship of Gold in the Deep ...

Sci-fi geeks rejoice: there are two fan films available on the Net based on subjects near and dear to our hearts. "The Fanimatrix" is a 20-minute story based on the world of "The Matrix." It was produced by two New Zealanders (awesome): "'The Fanimatrix' is a fan-made, zero-budget short film ...

Why We Should Fear The Matrix: The government proposed Total Information Awareness (TIA) and privacy advocates flipped their lids. TIA was an attempt to catalog scads of information about...well, everyone, in order to "prevent terrorism." Now that TIA is dead, MATRIX has popped up. "Congress should be applauded for shutting ...

The Muppet Matrix: This was the final project for a group of college students in a 3D modeling class. Kermit as Neo, Gonzo as Agent Smith, etc. The animation quality is about what you'd expect from a college project, but the whole idea is just a blast. Did you know ...

Characteristics of the Best Systems: Here's a fantastic collection of usability guidelines that cuts across authors to reveal they're all really saying the same things, just in different ways. If all software developers would follow these rules, it'd be a whole new world. "This is a collection of heuristics, attributes, ...

Matrix Sequel Has Hacker Cred: An old article, but one I d missed up until now: apparently The Matrix Reloaded contains the rarest of cinematic rarities an accurate hack attempt. An Nmap port scan is a common prelude to an intrusion attempt a way of casing the joint, to ...

Google Press Center: 2003 Year-End Zeitgeist: The Google Zeitgiest is out for 2003 and, as always, it's pretty interesting. They include graphs on the search term spikes for various events: the California earthquake, Matrix Reloaded, SARS, etc. And, of course, the top search terms of the year: Britney Spears, Harry ...

While tidying up some files on my hard drive slow day today I bumped into a copy of the ASCII Matrix movie clip that we wrote about a while back (was it really that long ago?) After watching it a couple of times I got to wondering where ...

eNetwizard Network: Take a look at this site design, then consider the name of the product. Do you think they could set sued for this? Just wondering.

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 ...

CSS2 Test Suite Failures Results: This is a great page on CSS support in the latest browsers. It has several dozen tests, explains how the browsers did, and lets you link to the live test so you can look at it in the browser you're using. It really shows you ...

Payphone Warriors: This sounds like a fun hacker-esque game played on the streets of New York: The streets of 2030's New York remain the only venues not under the thumb of the monolithic corporations. The streets are, as was in times even less bleak than these, the domain of gangs. ...

The 20 Best Hacker Movies: An interesting list. I don t disagree with his top 2, though I would have reversed their order, and I did when I talked about this a few years back. While none of these next 20 movies depicts the true motions of computer hacking, most of ...

Carnegie Mellon Wi-Fi Data: Carnegie-Mellon University has a page which shows a map on on-campus Wi-Fi activity in real time. There's a dot for the location of every connected wireless card. This reminds me of those campuses a decade ago that had Internet-enabled soda machines that would report their temperatures ...

Bullet time: A really interesting Wikipedia article. Who knew that bullet time started in Speed Racer? Bullet time (often hyphenated as bullet-time) is a concept introduced in recent films and computer games whereby the passage of time is displayed as extremely slow or frozen moments in order to allow a ...

I got to thinking about this today, and so I'll throw it out there for comments. My vote is Wargames from 1983. That film introduced a lot of people to a world we never knew existed. Tron is a very close second. Surprisingly, The Matrix isn't even on my Top ...

Natural orifice surgery has tongues wagging: Medical science is doing some scary cool things with remote manipulation. This is an article about how doctors are removing gallbadders by running tools down through patients mouths, or in the case of women up through their, uh, lady parts. The thought ...

I got to thinking the other day that the content management field is flooded, especially the open-source systems. Go to sites like CMSInfo.org, OpenSourceCMS.com, CMSWatch.com, etc. and you'll see hundreds of them. Then, every week, I get notifications that new ones have been released: NetWizard Matrix, and Tiki, and WSW, ...

Gizmodo : Porsche drives: I've written about the Porsche-computer connection before, but I didn't know Porsche Design is behind the VPR Matrix computers that Best Buy sells. Nor that they're coming out with a line of external hard drives. For the record, Porsche Design has the same genesis as the ...

AAcer presents exclusive Ferrari 3000 notebook: I want to put this right next to the VPR Matrix designed by Porsche that I'll never own. "Acer, Official Supplier to the Scuderia Ferrari racing team, announces the exclusive Ferrari 3000 notebook that perfectly combines the essence of two persistently avant-garde companies with ...

Num Sum: Here's a great little app for creating small, simple speadsheets online and sharing them. The Pizza Calculator shows you the price per square inch of pizza based on the size you buy -- it's fully a third less per inch when you buy a 20-inch over an 8-inch, ...

Could this be the new way to overcome bandwidth problems for "movies on demand"? ASCII Matrix is simply amazing.

OS Shootout 2003: Mac OS X vs. Windows XP vs. Linux: Great article comparing these three OSs in a matrix with rows for UI, wireless support, CD burning, etc. Good place to see what the different OSs are better at. I only read halfway down the list, but it looked ...