Jessica and I rode the old English 3 speeds to work today, in honor of Earth Day and our car being out of gas. Hoping it forms a habit. Twas a tad chilly at 37F when we left the house but we had our love of the earth to keep us warm.
Speaking of habit forming, I know a lot of people with high efficiency cars get hooked on hyper-miling—changing their driving behavior to max out every last drop of fuel and/or electricity with the help of the instant feedback mpg readings on their dashboards.
Not my bag.
I could however, get into this:
A dashboard for your house’s fuel efficiency. You can watch the digits change as you unplug stuff. This one’s $99 from Black & Decker. The only question is, what do we call it?
Hyperhousing?
KiloWatching?
nook (the barnes & noble reader)
barnes and noble is launching their new ebook reader, nook, on november 30. it hits the same price point as amazon’s kindle but has some key differences, most notably the color touch screen, built in wifi and mp3 player. wired’s review is very positive, so it will be interesting to see what happens when it hits the market.
of course, personally, i think it will be a very long time until i’m ready to part with paper books, but i totally want to see one of these in action.
amendment: i totally forgot to mention one of the nook’s big advantages over the kindle – a loan feature! that’s right, you can loan nook ebooks to friends (as opposed to the walled kindle).
(image from gizmodo)
Local Boy Pleases TechSavvyMama
Local interactive mastermind Christopher Taylor who is always hard at work for clients has created an iPhone ap for kids. His efforts have garnered the notice of ABC News which has in turn catapulted him up the coolness ladder and now here he is featured on the holy grail of creativity blogs, RedBlackBrown. Nice work Christopher!
Let that be a lesson to you kids.
"mesmerized by the pulsating apps."
As Apple iPhone and iPod aps are purchased the sale creates a pulse on a wall of monitors that display the icons for many of the more than 50,000 apps. Cool to see how all those purchases by individuals can interact and inform on a tapestry about the whole. It’s kinda like the National Debt Clock billboard I once saw in New York without the depressing overtones. Or maybe it’s the opposite of that. See it for yourself if you’re in San Francisco at WWDC. Thanks to TechCrunch for posting a video.
I don’t have a netbook and I really haven’t paid much attention to them at all, but this new operating system is really eyecatching. Moblin is an open source linux-based operating system and judging by this video, it seems like it has a lot of potential.
(via ben)