Garmin, the well-known navigation company also makes bike computers. Today they unveiled a GPS-enabled bike computer that adds bluetooth to pair with your phone (and piggyback on your network connection).
The resulting product video featuring Garmin's pro team riders is a little Hollywood and a little silly showing riders competing virtually against each other but paints a pretty impressive picture for real-time stats, weather, maps, and data sharing among cyclist friends. More at
Wired's Gadget blog and
a complete review at the DC rainmaker cycling site.
posted by mathowie
on Jan 8, 2013 -
39 comments
"In 1911, the
Saenger Brothers, Abe and Julian, operators of a drug business at Louisiana and Milam streets, decided to enter the amusement field. They were impressed with [Shreveport movie theatre operator E.V. Richards] and induced him to join them in their new field of endeavor ... In 1912 the Saenger Amusement Company was organized with Saenger Brothers, E.V. Richards and L. M. Ash as the stockholders. Richards continued as manager and an expansion policy was adopted which linked
Texarkana, Monroe and Alexandria with
Shreveport and thus formed the first
Saenger chain of theatres in this area ... The company moved to New Orleans where
the Strand Theatre, a building of
magnificent modernity, was formally opened on July 4, 1917 ... In 1924 the company again inhaled deeply before exhaling a new record of expansion that established branches in 12 southern states. In 1926 and '27 further expansion took the company into Cuba, Jamaica, Panama and Costa Rica. During the expansion peak 320 theatres were involved in the holding company." Sadly,
few remain. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns
on Nov 8, 2012 -
8 comments
Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) are a new service from U.S. weather service and FEMA. Starting in June, they will send a text message with a strange tone to your mobile device if you are in range of a Tornado Warning, Tsunami Warning or other major event (in the U.S. only). Major events include "Presidential Alerts." You do not need to sign up.
Washington Post Capital Weather Gang has a few more details.
posted by LobsterMitten
on May 24, 2012 -
62 comments
In the silence of connection, people are comforted by being in touch with a lot of people — carefully kept at bay. We can’t get enough of one another if we can use technology to keep one another at distances we can control: not too close, not too far, just right.
The flight from conversation.
posted by cashman
on Apr 22, 2012 -
38 comments
A new initiative recently proposed by the Royal Canadian Mint proposes to create the MintChip, a digital currency that’s similar (to BitCoin), but is backed by the Canadian government.
Aiming to become “the digital equivalent of the coins we use every day,” in the Canadian Mint’s own words, the MintChip will target micro- and nano-transactions conducted both online and offline, whether at the physical point of sale, on mobile devices, or among peers. Via
posted by infini
on Apr 20, 2012 -
37 comments
"The Secret Gestural Prehistory of Mobile Devices is cultural anthropology. It seeks to recover those moments of intuitive prehensile dexterity, when the famous and the ordinary alike felt the unconscious desire to occupy their hands for an as yet unknown purpose. Like Roy Neary's obsession with the image of Devil's Tower in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), this gesture was vague, uncanny and compelling. It is the intimation in images of a gestural second nature to come."
[more inside]
posted by taz
on Mar 20, 2012 -
16 comments
Adobe has partnered with Google to develop
PPAPI, codename "Pepper", a modern API for browser plugins. New versions of Adobe Flash will be released
only as part of Google Chrome for the Linux platform. The last version of the Flash plugin for mobile browsers will be 11.1, according to the newest
Flash roadmap, released today.
posted by helicomatic
on Feb 23, 2012 -
49 comments
The Newspaper Map: browse thousands of local, regional and national newspapers from around the world, based on geographical location. Filter and translate languages, see newspaper archives back to the early 19th century, and find fourth estate Twitter and YouTube feeds. A
mobile version is also available.
via
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul
on Jun 7, 2011 -
7 comments
Security-in-a-Box.
A complete guide to digital security for advocates and human rights defenders (and for you too!). It includes all the info and tools you'll need for anything related to personal digital security.
Mobiles in-a-box: Tools and tactics for mobile advocacy.
Message in-a-box: Everything you need to make and distribute your own media.
NGO-in-a-box: Set up you NGO using free and open-source software.
[more inside]
posted by lemuring
on Feb 28, 2011 -
14 comments
Inside Google's Age of Augmented Humanity. Wade Roush of Xconomy interviews Google researchers working on
speech recognition,
machine translation, and
computer vision.
[CEO Eric] Schmidt talked about "the age of augmented humanity," a time when computers remember things for us, when they save us from getting lost, lonely, or bored, and when "you really do have all the world's information at your fingertips in any language"—finally fulfilling Bill Gates' famous 1990 forecast. This future, Schmidt says, will soon be accessible to everyone who can afford a smartphone—one billion people now, and as many as four billion by 2020.... It's not that phones themselves are all that powerful, at least compared to laptop or desktop machines. But more and more of them are backed up by broadband networks that, in turn, connect to massively distributed computing clouds (some of which, of course, are operated by Google). "It’s like having a supercomputer in your pocket," Schmidt said in Berlin. "When we do voice translation, when we do picture identification, all [the smartphone] does is send a request to the supercomputers that then do all the work."
posted by russilwvong
on Jan 20, 2011 -
62 comments
What the Heck is Shadow DOM? Browser developers realized that coding the appearance and behavior of HTML elements completely by hand is a) hard and b) silly. So they sort of cheated. They created a boundary between what you, the Web developer can reach and what’s considered implementation details, thus inaccessible to you. The browser however, can traipse across this boundary at will.
posted by netbros
on Jan 18, 2011 -
38 comments
Where do you think Apple’s iPhone is the most popular? Where do Nokia’s Symbian phones dominate? How is it going for Android in different parts of the world? What about Blackberry?
We’re going to answer all of those questions and more in this article, which will closely examine mobile OS usage across the world.
posted by infini
on Jan 14, 2011 -
45 comments
You are in a warm, dark, comfortable place. This has been your place since you became aware that you are alive. It's almost time to enter a different world now.
In 1986, Activision published a roleplaying computer game called
Alter Ego. Unlike the action and fantasy titles that ruled the day, this game simulated the course of a single ordinary life. Beginning at birth, players navigated a series of vignettes: learning to crawl, reacting to strangers, getting a first haircut. The outcome of each scenario subtly influenced one's path, and with every choice players slowly progressed through infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age.
Graphically minimalist -- one's lifestream is represented by simple icons, and the scenarios are all text -- the game was nevertheless engaging, describing the world in a playful, good-natured tone tinged by darkness and melancholy. And it had quite a pedigree; developer and psychology PhD
Peter Favaro interviewed hundreds of people on their most memorable life experiences to generate the game's 1,200 pages of material. Unfortunately for Dr. Favaro, the game didn't sell very well. But it lives on through the web --
PlayAlterEgo.com offers a full copy of the game free to play in your browser, and the same port is available as a $5 app for
iPhone and
Android.
More: Port discussion group -
Wishlist -
Vintage review - Original game manual (
text or
scans)
posted by Rhaomi
on Dec 31, 2010 -
46 comments
In February of 2008, Microsoft
acquired the maker of the Sidekick, Danger Inc.,
for $500 million dollars and rolled the company into its Premium Mobile Experiences division, led by
Roz Ho. The Sidekick retained a dedicated following after the merger despite some
hiccups along the way. Twenty-six months after the acquisition, Microsoft
unveiled the KIN One and KIN Two devices which would launch in May. The devices were backed by a huge and
mildly controversial marketing push aimed at the young, hip social-networking addict niche. Reviews were
generally negative and often cited needless complexity, software that was lacking basic functions and no support for third party applications. The devices ran a fork of
Windows Phone 7, Microsoft's rewrite of their aging mobile operating system that had been
rapidly losing ground to RIM, Apple and Google. Just seven weeks after launch,
the KIN is dead. Engadget has some
insight into the failure and the subsequent shake-up at Microsoft.
posted by cgomez
on Jul 1, 2010 -
98 comments
Flash Mobs Take Violent Turn in Philadelphia [H]undreds of teenagers have been converging downtown for a ritual that is part bullying, part running of the bulls: sprinting down the block, the teenagers sometimes pause to brawl with one another, assault pedestrians or vandalize property. . . .
The flash mobs have raised questions about race and class.
Most of the teenagers who have taken part in them are black and from poor neighborhoods. Most of the areas hit have been predominantly white business districts.
In the flash mob on Saturday, groups of teenagers were chanting “black boys” and “burn the city,” bystanders said.
Bill Wasik is not proud.
posted by grobstein
on Mar 25, 2010 -
70 comments
