infobong.com the absurd courts the vulgar

• LED Bed
  I mentioned this at the Austin Bloggers Stammtisch last night, so I thought I would put it up here. This guy has created clusters of RGB LEDs to create lighting tones.
  (tags: DIY geek hack LED design)
• Tuned In: Fake-News Synergy? You Can’t Make This Stuff Up
  Viacom maybe interested in purchasing The Onion to complement “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and “The Colbert Report.”
  (tags: business TV newspaper synergy humor)

No Comments

• Little Brother Is Watching
  I think I missed this the first time around, but plans are in the works to have Hong Kong scouting-like groups to scour message boards for copyright infringement.
  (tags: scouting China surveillance copyright intellectualproperty)
• Cat and Girl: Bohemians
  “A bohemian is just someone waiting to hear back from grad school.”
  (tags: comics subculture humor)
• “in ten years Radiohead will occupy the same place in history as Marillion”
  Long, insightful blog post about the eroding distinction between indie record production and major labels. I recently saw a collectors edition of one of Radiohead’s later albums in the clearance bin at Waterloo, provoking a bit of schadenfreude.
  (tags: indie music co-optation longtail business)
• Microradio’s Second Wave
  The FCC is stepping up enforcement of unlicensed microradio operators and levvying stiffer fines. This post suggests that people are still clamoring for access to the airwaves in urban areas.
  (tags: microradio citizensmedia radio power FCC publicpolicy)

No Comments

• Pitchfork Interview: David Byrne
  Byrne discusses My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, a recently reissued collaboration with Brian Eno.
  (tags: interview music islam records)
• Piracy Or Promotion? Five Pilots Leaked
  Via Waxy, three CBS pilots and two ABC pilots from the fall season are available on Bittorrent. I suspect they came from unscrupulous critics or ad-buyers, rather than insiders engaged in a little viral marketing.
  (tags: bittorrent TVontheWeb TV file-sharing)
• Another CAPTCHA — But I failed (partly)
  Tim O’Reilly discusses a CAPTCHA system that uses photos from Hotornot.com to determine if a user is human. He and another (presumably) straight man experienced difficulty in identifying hot guys, raising some interesting gender issues.
  (tags: gender Web2.0 CAPTCHA spam mashup)

No Comments

• Urban Fonts - Eroded Fonts
  It seems like you get what you pay for with free fonts, but I can think of how a few of these fonts might be useful for projects. It has a nice feature that allows you do type in text which is rendered in the fonts.
  (tags: font design useful)
• Levels of the Game: The Hierarchy of Web 2.0 Applications
  Tim O’Reilly offers a hierarchy of Web 2.0, suggesting how to determine the 2.0-ness of a given project.
  (tags: Web2.0)

No Comments

• Get the Kids Drunk
  Atrios has this insightful post on the drinking age of 21 in the US. I agree that the problem isn’t teen drinking as much as teen driving. Let’s make the drinking age 18 and the driving age 21.
  (tags: youth publicpolicy transportation)
• After the house has gone
  When I lived in Philly, I was fascinated by seeing leftover paint and wallpaper sticking to the sides of buildings where a neighboring building once stood. Apparently the word for this in Barcelona is “Medianera.”
  (tags: landuse photography whoa)
• zefrank on ugly MySpace profiles
  This vlog post situates ugly MySpace profiles within the history of print design and adds a little Web 2.0 sassy sauce.
  (tags: myspace design typography production authorship history video)

No Comments

• Chinese Company Intends to Build MG’s in Oklahoma - New York Times
  I’m not sure it bodes well that a Chinese business is outsourcing manufacturing to my home state. The relaunched MGs will be built in Ardmore, which is about halfway between Dallas and OKC.
  (tags: business oklahoma China globalization labor)
• Stabbed in the Back! (Harpers.org)
  I’m not sure I buy this 100%, but this piece describes the “Stabbed in the Back” rhetorical strategy used by conservatives. They argue that internal disagreement is at fault for disastrous wars like Vietnam and Iraq.
  (tags: history politics war anti-war meme)
• Global Protests at Indiscriminate Israeli Bombings…
  Juan Cole’s rundown of news about Israel’s attacks on Lebanon.
  (tags: stupid war)

No Comments

• Guardian Interview: Bruce Sterling
  I’m not sure why Sterling insists on describing himself as a mere “science fiction writer,” since his most influential stuff seems to be his nonfiction work. He talks here about his latest book and environmental issues.
  (tags: environmentalism rfid utopianism globalization publicpolicy)
• Wired News: MySpace Kills Internet Tube Song
  (tags: power myspace copyright politics stupid)

No Comments

• Condé Nast Buys Wired News for $25 Mil.
  It struck me as goofy when Wired News was spun off from the magazine. I hope the two outlets develop a shared editorial direction.
  (tags: media magazine business)
• Quirky serifs aside, Georgia fonts win on Web
  Via Kottke, this story suggests that Georgia is back in a big way. I’d suggest its popularity is due to the fact that it and Times New Roman are the two serif fonts you can expect users to have. And Times is kind of ugly.
  (tags: typography webdesign font blog)
• Business Reply
  “This small, sixteen-page pamphlet is produced to put inside the postage-paid, business-reply envelopes that come with junk mail offers. Every envelope collected is stuffed with the pamphlet and mailed back to its original company.”
  (tags: comics business weird slack)
• Pitchfork: Ian Curtis Movie Begins Shooting
  Pitchfork has more details about *Control*, a movie about Joy Division.
  (tags: film punk biopic music history)
• Paper Thin Walls
  This looks like Digg for hipsters. Yeah, yeah, whatever.
  (tags: bubbler Web2.0 music meme)
• How to Break Out of the Academic Ghetto…
  Henry Jenkins on academic publishing and reaching mainstream audiences.
  (tags: academic books audience)
• Guardian: This time, it’ll be a Wikipedia written by experts
  Wikipedia apostate Larry Sanger launches a collaborative online guide that experts can edit.
  (tags: wikipedia Web2.0 academic)

No Comments

I’ve complained before about my mobile phone, but I just discovered another quirk that really takes the cake. My phone just vibrated, and I immediately pulled it out of my pocket. It told me I had one new voicemail message, so I hit the “call voicemail” menu option. The nice synthetic-voice lady started talking and informed me that I had six new voice messages, and the first dates back to June 24th. I’m going through a very stressful time, so I just hung up and went back to what I was doing. But, if you’ve left me a message in, oh, the last two or three weeks, you now know why I haven’t returned your call.

No Comments

• Mr. Stevens’ wild ride, through a “series of tubes”
  Nice chronology of the online response to Alaska Senator Ted Steven’s speech comparing the Internet to a “series of tubes.” If they had only used that Ajax framework used in the JFK timeline, my life would be complete.
  (tags: history meme publicpolicy networkneutrality blog)

No Comments