Recently in toys Category

When I first heard about Amazon’s new e-reader, Kindle, last week, I was pretty excited. Yeah, it’s pricey, at $400, but the idea of being able to read not just books but newspapers and blogs wirelessly and comfortably really appeals to me, as does the idea of being able to carry around a lot of reading material in a small package. (As a subway rider who hauls around a lot of crap with me every day, this can be a matter of some concern. If I’ve got only a few chapters left in a book, do I take it with me on my trip plus something else to read when I finish that -- which means carrying around an extra book all day -- or do I put the almost-done book aside to finish later and just start on a new book? Truly, this is a dilemma of literary proportions.)

Still waiting for your jetpack? We were promised jetpacks by the year 2001, weren’t we? Well, turns out they do actually exist... and the second -- yes, second -- Rocketbelt convention is happening this weekend in Niagara Falls, New York.

It doesn’t really seem like this is technology that could get you to work or anything, but still: at least someone is working on the cool tech sci-fi has been promising us for half a century.

(Technorati tags: rocketbelt, jetpack)

Mark Morford, Gen X columinst for SFGate.com and my geeky spiritual brother, has recently had a very similar experience to mine with regards to making the HDTV plunge. And he wrote about it, of course:

So why I felt the need to sell my perfectly good lump of a TV to a former housemate and then swallow the red pill and sink a small mountain of cash into an enormous, glistening 46" Samsung LCD that weighs almost as much as my ex-girlfriend and blocks out the sun and will likely be obsolete by the time President Obama gives his first State of the Union address (prediction: optimistic, but overall, still pretty screwed) in order that I may be able to see -- what now? NASCAR? "Grey's Anatomy?" Reruns of "Scrubs" on WGN? -- from deep space and still not miss any major plot points, is a bit beyond me.

Much more:

I was at my brother Ken’s place last night, and we were flipping around the tube, and we came across The Empire Strikes Back on one of the HBO channels. Shockingly, Ken had not heard of the saga of the Bespin Ice Cream Guy, so after Bespin Ice Cream Guy made his brief appearance, we Googled him, so I could show Ken the hilarious action figure fans have developed.

BICG Central seems to revolve around these two sites:

http://www.geocities.com/ocb75/
http://www.thecustomalliance.com/curto/willrow.asp

Look at those URLs. My shock at discovering Ken’s lack of exposure to BICG’s saga was nothing compared to learning that no one has registered any of these domains:

bespinicecream.com
bespinicecreamguy.com
bespinicecreamcompany.com
bespinberryblast.com
willrowhood.com

So I challenge geeks to steal these domains, and create a worthy tribute to one of Cloud City’s bravest and more ingenious citizens.

(Technorati tags: Bespin ice cream guy, unregistered domain names)

Speaking of girl geeks and their toys: I just bought myself a birthday present, an unbelievably gorgeous Olympus Stylus 710 digital camera, a long-time-coming replacement for my absurdly old Olympus Camedia D-360L with its ridiculous 1.3 megapixels. And I’m already in love with it.

I bought it so I could do some blogging from Worldcon next week, complete with images that people wouldn’t have to stand still for 10 minutes for, which the old Camedia daguerrotype-maker has been requiring of late. And I’m so incredibly backlogged trying to get ready to head to the con that I figured the first chance I might have to play with the thing and read the manual and such would be on the plane out to Anaheim. But I couldn’t wait.

First image taken with my new digital camera:

Remember floppy disks? Remember how we thought they were so damn cool? It seems hilarious now, in retrospect -- my iBook doesn’t even have a floppy drive, and why should it? Anything small enough to fit on a floppy is small enough to email to someone. I, for instance, regularly receive files by email from clients that would maybe just about fit on one of those 3.5-inch floppies, but not at all on those 5.25-inch babies we all had hanging around in the late 1980s.

The blog Fosfor Gadgets has a sweetly hilarious look back at gadgets now and then, one of which is the late and not at all lamented 5.25 floppy:

In the end of the 80’s the most popular removable storage media was the 5 1/4 inch diskette, capable of storing 360 KB (later 1200 KB). If you compare that to a big compact flash card of today, you could store close to 25 000 diskettes on ONE 8GB CompactFlash card…

25,000 floppies? In the weird and roundabout way in which my brain makes connections between all sorts of seemingly distantly related stuff, this makes me think of the quote, from IBM’s Thomas J. Watson, who said, circa 1950ish, that “I think there would be a market for about five computers.” Which is funny now, but of course we have the benefit of hindsight, and of seeing what computers would do in the half century since he said that. If you had told me in 1986, only 20 years ago, that I might someday need to store as much as info as could be held on 25,000 floppies, I’d have laughed. And yet today, my already pathetically out-of-date digital camera uses a disc that can store more than my 1986 brain could have ever conceived of ever needing. And it’s all just dumb pictures of my cats.

I don’t have any old floppies still hanging around (though my mom may still have them in her attic, even though I keep telling her she can throw away all my old Commodore 64 shit that for some reason got left behind at my parents’ house), but if you do, you could always make a Starship Enterprise out of one of them. Or if you’re merely nostalgic for the old days, you could buy a floppy notebook from Acorn Studios -- very reasonable priced, and you’ll be the envy of all the equally nostalgic geeks in your social circle. (Acorm has lots of other cool geeky crap on offer, too. I love the creativity of geeks.)

I was surfing around looking for something for a film review I’m working on for FlickFilosopher.com, and I came across Mike Godwin’s blog -- he’s the former lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation for whom, as you may already know, Godwin’s Law is named. But anyway, this isn’t about Godwin’s Law the law (which has to do with how likely it is for someone to invoke Nazism and Hitler in an online discussion -- see Wikipedia for a complete rundown and analysis of the law) but Godwin’s Law the blog.

Here I am, madly in love with my new iBook with its 1.5GB of RAM and 1.4 GHz processor and its large (for a laptop) millions-of-colors screen and especially with OS X, with its floaty 3-D windows and buttons and drag bars with their metallic sheen and it’s all just so luscious and intuitive... and here’s Godwin’s blog:

Speaking of LEGOs, the lower-tech, non-Mindstorm building blocks are practically an artistic medium unto themselves in the geekiverse. There’s the lowbrow appeal of The Lego Suicides, which is sick, sick, sick performance art... and damn hilarious. You’ve got the cinephiles expressing themselves in celluloid and plastic brick at BrickFilms.com. LEGOS are perfect for sculpture, as Nathan Sawaya demonstrates at his The Art of the Brick:

Wired is on the curious case of the LEGO people. No, not these LEGO people...

[from PodBrix]

...but the not-plastic folks at the LEGO company. It’s like this:

I can’t stand routine. The reason I’m basically unsuited for employment is because I can’t abide doing the same thing every day (like reporting to a cube farm at an ungodly hour of the morning and sitting there for eight or more hours). But there are certain low-level subroutines that help my life run smoothly that, when they get disrupted, are way more discombobulating than I expected they would be.