] Google SMS (Short Message Service) enables you to easily
] get precise answers to specialized queries from your
] mobile phone or device. Send your query as a text message
] and get phone book listings, dictionary definitions,
] product prices and more. Just text. No links. No web
] pages. Simply the answers you're looking to find.

This works great. I'm gunna end up paying for cheaper SMS service with this.

Google SMS

] In recent months, these slender solid-state memory chips -
] known by many names, but officially U.S.B. flash drives -
] have increasingly been seen blinking from the ports of
] computers in classrooms and libraries, conference rooms
] and offices, coffee shops and airport lounges.
]
] And when the devices, which can cost less than a music
] CD, are not being used to store or retrieve data, they
] often dangle from key chains and backpacks - or even from
] the necks of users - as if pendants signifying a cult of
] convenient computing.

In the late nineties JLM wrote an essay on the death of the floppy disk. It was in response to a class assignment in which he was asked to design one.

What is the point, he asked, of having a floppy disk when you have the internet?

Well, the floppy disk is still here, and apparently its becoming somewhat of a fad.

I'm having a hard time with this. I want one. I'm not sure why. Basically, its a techno toy. I don't know what I would do with it, but its cheap, so who cares? Put it on my key ring... maybe it comes in handy some day.

Trouble is that everytime I think I might have a use for one, scp comes to the rescue. I can move whatever I want to the Memestreams webserver and grab it later. So what's the point? Why can't everyone use one of those web file storage services?

Part of this is the ease of use factor. People have trouble getting their computers to fileshare properly, but the USB drive is simple. Bandwidth issues sometimes matter. So do oppressive corporate firewalls.

But a fashion statement? What does it say? I'm enough of a computer geek to want to wear a computer peripheral around my neck, but I'm not enough of a computer geek to have figured out how to use the internet for this instead?

The New York Times - From Storage, a New Fashion

Report on Livejournal infrastructure.

Slashdot | Large Scale Web Apps Built on Open Source

Photos of the hardware all of Google ran on in 1999

Google's Hardware Setup in 1999

RomanPoet has an interesting request:

As many of you know, modern color copiers/Photoshop detect currency and refuse to scan/open such images. There has been some work in reverse-engineering what algorithms are used to determine what is currency. I am very much interested in expanding this work towards the end of creating false positives. [Think like a T-shirt that when worn would make you difficult to photograph, or artists discreetly embedding such watermarks inside photos that they dont want photoshopp'ed, etc.]

Consider this a call for any comments/knowledge relating to this issue.

Also see: http://www.wildspark.com/eurionize/
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/archives/000497.html

Photoshop Currency Detection

] One-thousand infrared-enabled stickpins were distributed
] to attendees. The pins "remembered" the unique identifier
] of every other pin that comes into range. When the wearer
] walked past a central display, his or her data was
] downloaded into a PC that generated a visualization of
] the entire network.

Interesting, sort of...

Boing Boing: TraceEncounters and nTAGs

] Overdue debtors beware: You may not be able to rely on
] Caller ID to screen out those annoying bill collectors
] much longer. A California entrepreneur has a plan to
] bring the hacker technique of Caller ID spoofing to the
] business world, beginning with collection agencies and
] private investigators.
]
] Slated for launch this week, Star38.com would offer
] subscribers a simple Web interface to a Caller ID
] spoofing system that lets them appear to be calling from
] any number they choose. "It creates an extra avenue for
] them to have someone pick up the phone," says founder
] Jason Jepson.

US website offers Caller ID falsification service | The Register

] GmailFS provides a mountable Linux filesystem which uses
] your Gmail account as its storage medium. GmailFS is a
] Python application and uses the FUSE userland filesystem
] infrastructure to help provide the filesystem, and
] libgmail to communicate with Gmail.

This is a fucking brilliant idea! If I was giving out an award for hack of the year this would be in the running. Yes, python is a brain crushingly inefficient way to implement a filesystem, but Gmail is still likely to be the bottleneck. Google probably won't like this because they don't really expect people to use all of the space they have, but they probably can't stop you from doing this either. Got to port this to OSX!

GmailFS - Gmail Filesystem (dot mac for linux for free)

] New Yorker Joshua Kinberg is a bike messenger of a
] different stripe. Instead of ferrying legal papers
] between lawyers, he uses a homemade, wireless,
] bicycle-mounted dot-matrix printer to spray protest
] messages in the street.

More digital graffiti. This is a much more practical implementation then the spray paint robot. Unfortunately, this guy got arrested at the RNC.

Wired News: Bike Writer Pedals for Protests

Provides features such as:
* Regressive Imagery Analysis - provides a psychological profile of your journal.
* Word Count - provides a list of the words used in your journal, and their frequency.
* Post Frequency - graphs the frequency of your posts over time.
* Comment Count - graphs the number of comments left by users in your journal, and also how many comments you've left them.

LiveJournal Archiver and Analyzer