...more recent posts
Sexy Motorola PEBL V6 cellphone. Edge capable (Edge is Cingular's high speed network offering - not quite as fast as EV-DO but still nice.) Includes Bluetooth, and an MPEG4 VGA video camera, plus POP3 and IMAP-compatible email app, and MP3 ringtone support. Strangely I'm not lusting after this one, but I think it will be very popular. Clearly a very nice phone. Sort of surprising to see Motorola making some nice design decisions lately (remember way back when their Startac was king?)
Sprint released an EV-DO laptop PC Card even though they have made no announcement concerning their anticipated EV-DO network roll out. The card release is reasonably leading people to think it will be soon.
EV-DO is the 3G cellular data technology that Verizon has had out for many months in a lot of major US markets (including NYC.) Very high connection speeds, but with a tiny bit of latency (like all cellular networks - really only a factor if you are playing on line games,) and a growing (but unconfirmed on my part) reputation for not working so well through lots of walls.
AccessTunes: stream your iTunes library across the internet. $15, although it will let you stream 50 songs before requiring you to pay up. Supposedly the web based interface is a little slow, and remote browsing is not as slick as it is in the iTunes interface, but still this is pretty interesting.
I was severely tempted by the Sony/Ericsson K700a which just went on sale. Probably the best cameraphone you can buy at the moment. Unfortunately they priced it insanely high. $450 *with* a two year contract. That's more than a freaking Treo 650!
Anyway, my problem was just solved by the announcement of the K750i, a replacement for the K700 that should be available "this quarter". No word on pricing yet, and it's disappointing that it is only a GRPS device (won't work on 3G networks,) but otherwise this is the phone I have been waiting for. 2.0 megapixels, and more importantly a real auto-focus mechanism. Very slick.
Pics on page 2 of the link above, plus a couple more shots at the bottom of this page.
Jason Kottke is quitting his job in order to blog full time. He hopes to support himself through reader donations.
First, let me tell you what won't change. The content on kottke.org will always be freely available to everyone who visits, regardless of whether you have contributed or not. No special "member" content or services. Think of kottke.org as non-crippled, fully-supported shareware...you only pay if you feel it's worth supporting.If he succeeds it won't necessarily mean that others can do the same thing - since he is so much more popular than the "average" blogger - but if he can't make it work then most likely no one else can either. Or, in other words, he's the man for the job, and I guess we will all soon find out if no advertisement reader supported blogs are in any way possible. Good luck Jason!
It's not officially official yet, but Bruce Schneier says that SHA-1 has been broken. This would be a rather large deal in the cryptographic world.
As usual, especially with technical topics, Wikipedia provides a great overview. (They already have this latest Schneier news in the write up!)
Nokia licenses Flash from Macromedia for cell phone use.
And Nokia has also licensed Microsoft's AcitveSync and WMA.
Google has offered to help host Wikipedia.
I saw some video projected from a Mitsubishi XL5U projector last night. Wow. I have no idea if this is a really good projector, or if they are all this good, but it looks great. And huge. And so bright. I was under the impression that you had to have a dark room, but that is most definitely not the case. The picture is blindingly bright. Why don't more people have these? There must be some downside I am missing.
I've mentioned the photo sharing site flickr many times as an example of how much is possible right now in terms of building very sophisticated application-like web interfaces.
Here is an interview with flickr CEO Stewart Butterfield that is a pretty good explanation of what the site is, and why it has grown so popular.