What the fashionable gargoyle is wearing this season
LooxcieIt's a bluetooth headset with a 640x240 f2.8 video camera with a five hour buffer. It sounds like you have to manually turn it on to record, but it continuously fills a thirty second buffer, so when you hit record, it starts recording 30 seconds ago, like Tivo.
No iPhone support yet.
Tags: phones, robots, the future
MAGNET WARS
They say that academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so low. Well, welcome to the next level.
Zen Magnets, a maker of neodymium magnet toys, has been under assault by the much larger and better distributed Buckyballs, maker of a nearly identical toy. After Zen Magnets listed a couple of eBay auctions with a set of Buckyballs and a set of their own, asking customers to decide which was of higher quality, Buckyballs replied with a legal threat. Zen Magnets countered with an open video response, in which they presented the voicemail from Buckyballs and demonstrated their claims of quality through repeatable, factual tests, providing quantitative data to back up their assertions. Soon after, Buckyballs CEO Jake Bronstein got the video taken down from YouTube via a DMCA takedown, despite the fact that the only elements not made by Zen Magnets are the voicemail he left and some images of himself, which are low-resolution and publicly available online. Zen Magnets has decided to file a counter-takedown notice — not effective yet apparently, since the video is still marked as taken down. Mirror:
There is some serious OCD in that video. Also, that dude talks just like the principal on Daria: "Hello students of Lawwwwwwwwwndale High."
I have a set of Buckyballs. They aren't as much fun as you'd think. It's hard to build anything other than a pyramid or a tube.
Tags: doomed, firstperson, mpegs, toys
The XX
You know, when I first discovered Massive Attack in the early 90s, I used to proclaim that those guys were going to be the next Pixies -- the band that seems very niche at the time, and not apparently that successful, but then every single person who bought the album was going to start a band, and in fifteen years everyone was going to sound like them.
Then trip-hop suddenly just vanished, and its angry cousin drum-and-bass suddenly just vanished, and I thought, well, I sure called that wrong.
And now here we are, sixteen years later, and I just saw a show with 2,800 other people by a band whose singer sounds exactly like Tricky and whose entire album is basically a cover of the song Protection.
(Not that there's anything wrong with that.)
They put on a good show. But as expected, Warpaint was the reason to go.
Tags: firstperson, music, photography, reviews, sf
Location: 37° 48' 28.80 N, 122° 16' 14.40 W
