$1,300 Power Bars

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Mark and Wes in Concord, CA at the Fry's Electronics Store.

Sites of Interest:

• Legal stink over fart apps.
  
  
• Mark and Wes bought these Poqet PC devices back in the day, and still have them.
  
  
• Sony P Series tiny notebooks are still bigger than the Poqet.
  
  
• The technology behind the movie Coraline.
  
  
• Mark suspects the $1,000+ "power conditioners" at the Fry's store are just glorified $5 power strips and in the real world don't make any difference to audio and video quality.
  
  
• Mark guesses that this is the "store on Locust" with the $80,000 amplifier; but their website doesn't show anything like that.
  
  
• The Amazing Randi has a $1,000,000 challenge about audio cables, but Mark was wrong in the details.
  
  
• Startup.com, the movie.
  
  
• Big Blue's employees really, seriously, used to sing these IBM company songs.
  
  
• President Obama introduces RECOVERY.gov.
  
  
• If you have a U.S. GSM cell phone (AT&T or T-Mobile), the trapcall service will show you the caller-id of people who try to call you with their id blocked; plus other services. This really works and Mark uses it.
  
  
• Mozilla's Bespin framework aims to build an interactive Web-based code editor.
  
  
• The WebKit open source project let's you design your own custom web browser.
  
  
• Mark mentioned a street in London that protects pedestrians who walk while texting. This turned out to be a hoax.
  
  
• The old Commodore Amiga with Video Toaster, could do this, but it takes 21st century engineering to actually make toast from a video machine!
  
  
• How to build an aquarium from an old Mac.
  
  

Wes' iPhone Application of the week:

• He didn't have any this week. Mark was shocked.
  

Mark's iPhone Applications of the week:

• Tootin Pooch -- the world's first dog-fart app.
  

• Pukey Pete -- quite possibly the first puke app. Mark may branch out from fart apps and become an expert on puke apps as well.
  
  
• Ocarina -- turns the iPhone into a serious ancient flute-like music instrument.
  
  
• Fartarina --a mash up between Ocarina and a fart app.
  
  
• SignalScope -- turns your iPhone into a powerful real-time spectrum analyzer and oscilloscope.
  

A Garden Hose in Paris

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Mark and Wes in Lafayette, CA at the Swad Indian restaurant.

Sites of Interest:

• Amazon officially announced the Kindle 2.
  
  
• E-ink devices will soon be in color.
  
  
• Modern Flash Memory is like the ancient core memory in that they both retain their bits when power is removed.
  
  
• Wes mentioned an idea from the TED Conference, Homo Evolutus.
  
  
• Bill Gates released mosquitoes to an audience at Ted.
  
  
• Mark thought this Hello Kitty lineman's handset was for sale, but it's just a hand-made gift.
  
  
• History of the early day web browsers.
  
  
• The public first had access to the Internet via a Shell Account, which is character-mode access like a DOS or UNIX command line. Using TIA and other programs, people could do graphic web browsing on their cheap Shell Account.
  
  
• In 1999, the World's Smallest Web Server was the size of a box of matches.
  
  
• Basic Stamp and Arduino are popular systems for making prototype electronic and robotic projects.
  
  
• Today's Front Pages can also be viewed via a U.S. map.
  
  
• Years ago Mark and his cat wrote a daily email newsletter called WebSkulker. The site is still up so people can look through the archive, but don't try to subscribe. Wes mentioned the Dancing Baby phenomenum and Mark remembered that this WebSkulker issue discussed it at the time. Scroll down for the article "Dancing skulkers". The links still work after all these years, but the links within those pages generally don't.
  
  
• New YouTube cult classic: David After Dentist. Another classic: audio of Christian Bale going crazy on a movie set. And finally a mashup of the two.
  
  
• The Truth in Caller Id Act of 2009 is working it's way through congress.
  
  
• How capacitance screens like the iPhone's work. You can buy a stylus that will work for this type of screen, but you can also make one yourself -- the Related Videos show other home-made ideas. Gloves that will work with iPhone and other capacitance screens.
  
  
• Chutzpah award for Wells Fargo.
  
  
• Early history of Compaq Computer.
  
  
• Computers that weigh 1.5 tons.
  
  
• Will there really be an ASUS Eee Phone?
  
  

Wes' iPhone Application of the week:

• Spell Check -- Look up words to verify spelling and to get definitions. The dictionary resides in memory so no Internet access is needed.
  

Mark's iPhone Applications of the week:

• Fart Army -- Mark thought Wes would like this because Wes used to play with little green soldiers.
  
  
• Remote Fart -- Search the wifi network to find other users, then cause fart noises to come out of their iPhone.
  
  
• Tilt Meter Pro -- Mark's favorite app for using the iPhone as a level tool.
  

Boobs Not Allowed

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Mark & Wes in Concord, CA at the Korean Bulgogi House.

Sites of Interest:

• Scandal in the FartApp space: FartnBurp claims to be the first to have farts and burps in the same app, but we reviewed one last week which had that and more.
  
  
• The author of a great Rubik's Cube solver talks about marketing his product against fart apps.
  
  
• Some women should not be allowed to call them "Panties".
  
  
• How MapQuest Works.
  
  
• History of Microsoft on the Web, including IIS.
  
  
• Abacus Online Museum.
  
  
• Synth Pioneer Jean-Jacques Perrey in a music video. Wes thought he was the creator of the Oramic, but that was Graham Wrench who built this for Daphne Oram.
  
  
• Mark found this 1-terrabyte hard drive for under $99.99. (That offer is sold out, but you can probably find others like it.) He said this was $1 per gigabyte, but it's actually $0.10 per gigabyte which is 10 times more amazing.
  
  
• Solid state "hard drives".
  
  
• Boobs And Booty Banned From The App Store -- but there are ways to cheat.
  
  
• How to re-program temporary road signs to say what you want.
  
  
• New version of Google Earth lets you explore beneath the oceans, and has many other new features.
  
  
• Mark points out that virtual reality will never seem like real life until smells can be recorded and played back. Maybe something like this?
  
  
• The technology behind Benjamin Button.
  
  
• Bug Labs -- This company makes a collection of easy-to-use electronic modules that snap together to build any gadget you can imagine.
  
  
• MuxTape -- A place for bands to post their music, and for listeners to create mixes.
  
  
• The Kindle 2 was a rumor when we did this recording, but has now been officially announced.
  
  
• Videos of the Apple Newton 2100.
  
  
• A New Zealand man bought a used iPod that turned out to be full of military secrets.
  
  
• VMware Fusion is popular for running Windows on a Mac, but Virtual Box runs on many other platforms, is open-source, and freeeeeeeeeeee.
  
  
• Microsoft has a new virtual machine product, Hyper-V, meant for running server systems.
  

Wes' iPhone Applications of the week:

• ModPlayer -- plays mod files. Duuuuuhhhhhh.
  
  
• Speedtest.net Speed Test -- Test the download and upload speeds of your iPhone's Internet connection, whether wifi or cellular.
  
  
• Tweetie -- Full-featured app for interfacing with twitter.
  
  

Mark's iPhone Applications of the week:

• Slurptastic -- cleans your screen from the inside.
  
  
• Jaadu VNC -- Expensive, but best app for remote control of a PC, Mac, or Linux machine. The instructions show how to install a freeeeeeeeeeeeeee VNC server on the machine to be controlled.
  
  
• TwitterFon -- Mark's favorite Twitter app. He was wrong when he said it didn't have a way to mark favorite tweets; he later figured out how to do it.
  

The Humpy Thing

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Mark & Wes in Oakland, CA at Sura Korean restaurant.

Sites of Interest:

• Information about Carpal Tunnel syndrome. Article that claims mice are more the cause than keyboards. Catalog of weird types of keyboards for people who do have this.
  
  
• Mark bought this vibrating Wake UP alarm which alerts you if your head nods forward while driving or in a movie. He bought it from an English language website in Korea which took an American credit card and shipped the item quickly. There is no link directly to the item, so go here and in the Title box search on exactly this string, including the brackets: [ICONIC] Wake Up
  
  
• History of Unisys, a union of Burroughs and Sperry Rand. The old Univac computers are in that timeline, long before the merger.
  
  
• The Mojave Experiment: Microsoft punks users to show people like Vista.
  
  
• How to control your humpy thing.
  
  
• Mark liked the movie My Bloody Valentine 3D.
  
  
• Watch all the episodes of the cult classic TV show The Prisoner for freeeeeeee, and read about the remake.
  
  
• Download movies very cheaply in various formats.
  
  
• Website that helps you sneak into multiple movies in a multiplex.
  
  

Wes' iPhone Applications of the week:

• Find an Apartment -- Lets you search Craigslist, Google Base, and more for apartments.
  
  
• Gym Buddy -- Keeps a record of your workouts.
  
  

Mark's iPhone Applications of the week:

• iBurp On Your Fart Ahhhh -- Select burp, fart, and relief noises, all in one app!
  
  
• Byline -- RSS reader that does two-way syncing with Google Reader.