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QuotationsBook offers its quotations and search results via RSS. If someone were to write a plug-in for Movable Type for this, you could display related quotations alongside blog posts using tags (e.g. tag an entry with “friends” and you get a quotation about friends). Cool.
Fun bunch of Flickr photos from mleak depicting bugs and slugs shilling for the man: Pepsi Ladybug, Nike Water Strider, FedEx Grasshopper, Coke Slug, and Adidas Spider. (via bb)
I had this idea the other day that instead of having to open my laptop or turn on the TV to check the weather report, my toaster could burn that information onto my breakfast toast as a passive information delivery mechanism. I knew that people had wired toasters to print images on them, but I didn’t remember that someone had done the weather thing already. That got me thinking about what other information a toaster could print on bread. A graph of the previous day’s DJIA activity? Photo of your kids? The Red Sox score from last night?
There are constraints, of course. Bread is not exactly a high resolution medium. A course wheat bread would be difficult to print on while a dense rye might give you a couple dozen ppi to work with. But then you run into a contrast problem…toasted rye bread isn’t much darker than untoasted rye bread. Now, if you were to use Pop Tarts, they’re a little more high-res, a finer grained paper. You might even be able to print a few lines of text if the heating elements were precise enough…your stocks, meeting schedule for the day, top news stories, shopping list, the 5-day forecast, or a serial short story that you read over a few breakfasts (you could call them Breakfast Serials™!!). Or maybe toasters will be free in the future, with the toaster companies making their money from advertising printed on your morning toast, not unlike the free newspapers they hand out in the NYC subways.
Though what would be even better is wifi-enabled Alpha Bits. Just connect the box to your local network, pour yourself some cereal, and view the five most recent headlines from your RSS reader floating in your milk. Then right click your bowl to open up links on the screen in your refrigerator. That and a rocket-powered hoverbike, please.
Clip of Dj Spooky’s “Rebirth of a Nation”, a remix of D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation” adapted from a Ku Klux Klan propaganda piece.
Cool video by the British group Hexstatic for a song called Distorted Minds. It’s almost audiovisual hypertext.
Paul D. Miller (aka Dj Spooky) has a new book out about remix culture called Rhythm Science. More on the book at MIT Press and it’s available at Amazon.
Announcing the world’s smallest mp3 player: the iPod Flea. Love the Flea collar.
Directions for setting up a Bayesian spam filter to play chess.
A Japanese bank is putting a slot machine in their ATMs; get three 7s and the fee is waived. All they need is the sound effects from Super Mario 2 and I’m so there!
Video Games Live is presenting a series of concerts featuring music from video games. Last week, the Los Angeles Philharmonic played in front of around 10,000 people.
Apple announces the Harper’s Special Edition iPod. “Number of media legends who came together to create this exciting new Apple product: 2. Chance that literary-minded American consumers will find this new iPod impossible to resist: 1 in 1.”
Age Maps. “Two photographs of the same person, from different periods of time (child and adult) are spliced together.” Very cool effect.
A list of mini golf holes based on movies. “Raiders of the Lost Ark: You must putt the ball precisely into the idol’s head, or a 15-foot-high, 1-ton golf ball comes rolling after you.”
Cassette tape DJ mixes music with his custom-built cassette decks.
A visual history of sampling; who’s been sampled and who’s doing the sampling.
A DJ scratches out the Imperial March from Star Wars on his decks.
65,000 photocopies of 300 different films made into a 14-minute short. Quite clever.
“The problem with mash-ups is that once you get past both ‘oh, that’s unexpected’ and ‘that must have been difficult’, what you’re left with is a dj with really fucking terrible taste in music”. IMO, few mash-ups have gone beyond the novelty stage.
Advancing scientific research means that chimeric animals are on the way. “In the case of human cells’ invading the germ line, the chimeric animals might then carry human eggs and sperm, and in mating could therefore generate a fertilized human egg. Hardly anyone would desire to be conceived by a pair of mice.”
Audio from the Who Owns Culture? talk by Lessig, Tweedy, and Johnson now online. Streaming audio or mp3.
Ask and ye shall receive: Google Maps with the NYC subway stops on it. A little flaky in Safari, but works well in Firefox.
Nine Inch Nails is offering a GarageBand file with the complete mix of a forthcoming song. Can’t use the remixes commerically, but still pretty cool.
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