Apparently, tinfoil hats = evil plot:

The helmets amplify frequency bands that coincide with those allocated to the US government between 1.2 Ghz and 1.4 Ghz. According to the FCC, These bands are supposedly reserved for ”radio location” (ie, GPS), and other communications with satellites (see, for example, [3]). The 2.6 Ghz band coincides with mobile phone technology. Though not affiliated by government, these bands are at the hands of multinational corporations.
It requires no stretch of the imagination to conclude that the current helmet craze is likely to have been propagated by the Government, possibly with the involvement of the FCC. We hope this report will encourage the paranoid community to develop improved helmet designs to avoid falling prey to these shortcomings.

Filed under: tronix · 2 Comments

A show that’s sure to have lots of blinky lights (and very big, loud, exploding things). SRL will be in San Jose (as part of ISEA) on Friday night, Aug 11th. I think I’m gonna get tickets and check it out.

Also, the following day, my friend Doria will be here from NY for a visit (and some foo camp thingy) but before that, we’re gonna go for some *real* camping, possibly along the Lost Coast (aug 12th-15th). I think dogs are allowed! and it’s on the beach!

what say you people?? wanna go??

Filed under: upcoming · 2 Comments

Tonight the San Francisco Center for the Book is presenting X Libris: SFCB 10th-Anniversary Exhibition. If you are into binding, letterpress, platemaking, or any other aspect of making books, you should check it out!

Filed under: books · 0 Comments

You want to turn away, but cha can’t help looking. Good thing YouTube wasn’t around when I was 12.

(actually, it’s not like a car wreck at all, cause these two guys make me unspeakably happy for some odd reason. i’ve watched this video at least 10+ times! yeah, i know…I have unspeakably horrifyingly bad taste in music :-)

Filed under: beats, video · 1 Comment

I just finished reading a book called Einstein’s Dreams. I think I first read it about 10 years ago and it immediately became one of my favorites so I wanted to read it again. The book is a series of simple but surreal vignettes about time, each illustrating a different world (in the vein of italo calvino’s invisible cities). In some worlds, there’s no concept of the future and people act without fear of consequences…in others, no memories and no past…in yet another, everyone’s lifespan lasts only for a single day.

The vignettes are dreams that a fictional Einstein has while developing a new theory about time in 1905 and in each world, people live and interact depending on the way time moves (or doesn’t move), bringing up all sorts of fascinating scenarios. It’s beautifully written and takes only a few hours to read, but it stays with you and will make you feel grounded and light headed at the same time.

Filed under: books, inspiration · 1 Comment

Starting on Friday night at Zeitgeist and running through the whole weekend, Cyclecide presents Pedal Monster! a gathering of mutant bicycle clubs descending on San Francisco for bicycle-rodeo-
pedal-powered-sideshow-circus-madness! The weekend’s events will be at the Mission Village Market at 18th and Alabama

And on Saturday, there’s the Tour De Fat at Speedway Meadow in Golden Gate Park. “Two parts bike rodeo and one part circus you can expect fire-jumping bike acts, cycling games, a cruiser bike parade, live music, tasty eats and great beer….all proceeds benefit two nonprofits: the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition& the Bay Area Ridge Trails Council.” I don’t know why they decided to have both events on the same weekend because I can’t decide which one to go to!

Lastly, a biking event that just passed, the butter lappers showed up en masse wednesday night for a wedding on wheels!

Filed under: cycling, tiki lifestyle, upcoming · 1 Comment

We’ve been having fun socializing Zara.. Just a few weeks ago she was scared of a lot of people and all other doggies. Now that she has her shots we go to Bernal hill every day, and we’ve gone on adventures to Land’s End with Jesse and Bob, and to Fort Funston with Lisa and Amy. She loves other people and is getting used to other dogs. Our neighbors cut a hole in their fence so their dogs could play with the dogs next door, and we get to take Zara over for doggie play dates. Very fun!

But Zara is still a scaredy puppy, and we a lot more work to do.
Things Zara is scared of:

• BBQ grills
• Ceiling fans
• Helium balloons
• The sound of the wind
• Her reflection

Filed under: zara · 3 Comments

According to this captcha. I don’t know what it says about me that I can never seem to identify the hottest 3 out of 9 guys in this test but I can identify the women. And I’ve never doubted my orientation. hmmm.

(via O’Reilly Radar)

Filed under: why are we here? · 5 Comments

A more earnest proposal (than mine) to improve literacy comes from Arena who just sent an email about her friend John Wood. John left his job at Microsoft in 1998 to start Room to Read, a non-profit that helps impoverished nations to build schools, libraries, computer labs, and language labs.

His book Leaving Microsoft to Change the World, published by Harper Collins, will hit stores on Aug 29 and you can get the first chapter by sending an email to book at roomtoread.org with “Chapter 1″ in the subject line.

Filed under: books · 1 Comment

Check out this crazy series of animations… made in ResEdit!

Pixhell was my crappy little retro animation series from days gone past.

Each episode was painstakingly draw pixel by pixel in ResEdit (with a hacked, larger-than-32×32 CICN editor!). I’d take a screen-grab of that, dump each individual frame into GIFBuilder, adjust the pace and timing, convert the .gif to a Quicktime movie, pass that off to Kurt to add sound effects, and post it on the site. Sometimes? A two-week process, all up.

Check out the creator’s blog and the animations on archive.org.

Unrelated bonus: Human Space Invaders

Filed under: video · 2 Comments

This could very well beat seeing your name in crackers.

No serifs mixin with san-serifs here so this should get by the Family-Friendly-Traditional-Values committee no? :-)

You can get your own name or check out the whole alphabet over here.

Filed under: design, tiki lifestyle · 2 Comments

I made it into Sati and Melody’s online journal for Week 3, Escalante, Utah. WooHoo! There is a crazy amazing freefall rappel at the end of the video. Check it out!

Direct Link to Week 3 Flash Video Journal.

Filed under: podcasts, video · 6 Comments

I don’t know how that smutty, smutty post ended up on this blog, but I will have you know that TikiRobot is a Family operation, and we support Family Values.

Look people, the letter A having relations with another part of itself is UNNATURAL! If we let this slide, we are in danger of going down a very dangerous slippery slope. What’s next? Serifs getting friendly with sans-serifs? Monkeys wanting to marry lobsters? At TikiRobot, we say NO! Traditional marriage = one Robot + one Octopus!

Filed under: bobslobster · 2 Comments

I’m testing this thing called twttr (an odeo side project :-) I can send updates about whatever I’m doing via text message from my phone to the box above. As you can see, I ain’t doin much right now…but that could change…I guess that’s the idea.

Filed under: neat · 3 Comments

potentially not work safe. only if you stare at it long enough.

(via anil, the jay-z of blogging)

Filed under: design · 1 Comment

Here’s a mashup I can get behind :-) My friend Mike made these stickers and you can order a set on cafe press. Speaking of biking, we’ve got a veritable peloton going on now for the butter lap (with a team of 8 showin up last night)! If you’d like to join, we meet every Wed at 6 pm by the Ferry Bldg for a lap around the city and then finish off with beer and burgers at Zeitgeist. (and if you’re not into the biking thing, you can also just meet us for beer :-)

Filed under: cycling · 1 Comment

As a bit of Blatent Self Promotion, I’ve uploaded some pictures to a Slide Slide Show :-)

It’s good to be back! I had a fantastic time with Sati and Melody in the Escalante National Monument. Even the bad stuff was good :-) Thunderstorms came in and washed out huge chunks of Hole in the Rock Road (which we now call Hole in the Road Rock), we had to dig Sati’s CRV out of mud, water and even quicksand. Yes, real quicksand!…..what fun!

Link to Los Pares Extremos.

Filed under: cartography, inspiration · 2 Comments

This looks interesting. Bio Mapping is a project by Christian Nold, an artist in London, that “allows the wearer to record their Galvanic Skin Response (GSR)… a simple indicator of emotional arousal in conjunction with their geographical location.”

This can be used to plot a map that highlights points of high and low arousal. By sharing this data we can construct maps that visualise where we as a community feel stressed and excited.

David Smith, a writer for the Guardian, has an account of how it works over here. Maps like this become even more interesting I think when you begin to overlay information from other maps like this one.

(via SmartMobs)

Filed under: cartography, design, science · 1 Comment

Video of a giant Pac-Man screaming in terror as Blinky chases him around a library and computer lab going “wakawakawaka” :)

Filed under: video · 2 Comments

Happy sparkly-day you guys! :-)

Filed under: no code · 1 Comment

Ouch. That was what went through my head when I took my first dip in the bay in aquatic park this weekend. it was so cold, it actually hurt! (in case you’re wondering what possessed me to jump in at all, I’m supposed to do my first triathlon on angel island in 2 weeks! :-O!! so I actually should have taken the plunge a lot earlier, but I guess better now than on race day). anyways, after wading in and paddling for about 2 minutes, I thought to myself, this can’t be right. It’s way too cold – I must not have zipped up my wetsuit properly. So I promptly paddled back to shore, got out, and to my utter dismay, discovered that everything was as it should be. wetsuit was zipped up all the way, velcroed flaps were in place, my cap was on right. The water was indeed THAT COLD.

I sat for a while wondering whether or not to go back in…and finally, I think it was the sight of crazy 70 year old guys from the Dolphin Club going in bare skinned that convinced me I wouldn’t die of hypothermia. so I went in and spent the first 5 minutes trying to come up with every possible excuse I could give Arena (who convinced me to do this triathlon with her) for not doing it. What initially seemed like a short distance (1/2 mile) now seemed impossible to cover! However, after bitterly cursing myself for about 10 minutes, I finally started to warm up and develop a good rhythm…and after half an hour of swimming I covered the distance I needed for the triathlon! yay! amazingly enough, I got out of the water feeling much warmer than I did when I first jumped in. And it felt really good. Now that I know I won’t die, I think I’ll be doing a lot more swimming in the bay! The benefits being

• LOTS of SPACE!! this is the best part for me because I’ve always hated swimming in crowded pool lanes, and not having someone nipping at my ankles was really nice.
• No more neck and shoulder pain. yep, the soreness that develops from sitting at my computer WAY too long goes away after a cold swim.
• No gym fees! okay, wetsuits are definitely not cheap…but after the initial expense, swimming in the bay is free! And you can go anytime. At sunset, you get to swim with a lovely view of the golden gate bridge against a pretty pink sky.
• It’s comforting to know that if you get thrown off a boat, you won’t die…at least, not right away. (okay, maybe that’s not a benefit)

The downside…

• Did I mention it’s cold? soooo cold, it actually hurts for the first ten minutes or so.
• Swimming with seals. This was offered to me as a benefit, but I actually hope I never see a seal since I can’t help but think of shark food whenever I see them. Maybe I’ll get over it. This makes me wonder why wetsuits are always black…why not magenta or radioactive yellow?…something that would make me seem totally unappetizing to a shark.
• Smelly! yep that’s what you’ll be after a dip in the bay. I didn’t realize this until I got into my car after drying off and was trapped with just the smell of…me. hmmm, maybe this whole swimming in the bay thing isn’t such a great idea after all. whose silly idea was this?

Filed under: no code · 3 Comments

This is a bug fix release for the clients, web site, and server, and we corrected 48 separate issues in the mac client alone. But true to form, the Mac team snuck in some awesome features for you:

• Read and Unread – darken or remove the item in the ticker after you click on it. Check the “History” tab in the preferences for some more options on this feature.
• Take My Picture – Is there a video camera built in or connected to your Mac? If so, the Upload Window now has a “Take My Picture” button. Check out the evidence above! :-)
• Direct-From-Camera Uploads – If your digital camera or card reader (SD, CF, etc) is connected, click on the “My Camera” button to bring up the Image Capture services dialog. Select one or more pictures, click “Download” (wait for the pause, sorry no progress bar yet), and boom, you can upload those pictures to a Slide Show.
• Scale Down Large Image Files – This makes the above feature usable. Images are scaled down to 1600×1200. As a bonus, I respect the EXIF “orientation” flag. This keeps your vertical pictures vertical (if your camera supports it)

Whew! Now if you don’t mind, I’ve got some camping to do :-) I’m psyched that when I come back from Utah I can just drag images from my SD card reader onto slide and have them up on the web…

Link to Slide homepage which has Download!!! links all over the place.

Filed under: cocoa, code code, inspiration, osx · 3 Comments

One of my favorite places: Escalante National Monument. A week of hiking slot canyons, laying in the sun, and perhaps a dip in the river awaits me. I will be hanging out with the Couple, Extreme while they rappel down fantastic red rock walls. Back on Sunday.

Link to wired website with their online video jounal of canyon exploits.

Filed under: inspiration, no code · 2 Comments

The senator took a break from fighting for ANWR oil drilling and pork barrel bridges to explain why he voted against net neutrality:

I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

[...]the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck.

It’s a series of tubes.

Transcript and audio link here.

Filed under: all talk · 1 Comment