ken's datastream

2009-11-02

Hacking the doorbell – Roo Reynolds

arduino doorbell instructions

Smartphone Showdown: iPhone 3GS vs Motorola Droid

“Would I recommend it over the iPhone? Two thousand plus words later, you might be a bit sad to read: Nope. But I wouldn’t recommend the iPhone over the Droid, either – and that’s the Droid’s real win here. This is the very first phone in over two years that I would consider carrying for day-to-day use instead of my iPhone, but that doesn’t mean I would recommend it whole heartedly to everyone.”

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Monome is a small Catskills-based hardware company that makes controllers for electronic music performance and new media art. Their first product, the 40h, is an eight-by-eight grid of backlit buttons which connects to a computer using a USB cable and the Open Sound Control (OSC) protocol.

Used to be “Philadelphia-based” and specifically “my apartment-based” before I lived here. Hadn’t realized they were a whole thing with a community and a Wikipedia entry.

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The rejection of hard-won knowledge is by no means a new phenomenon. In 1905, French mathematician and scientist Henri Poincaré said that the willingness to embrace pseudo-science flourished because people “know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether illusion is not more consoling.” Decades later, the astronomer Carl Sagan reached a similar conclusion: Science loses ground to pseudo-science because the latter seems to offer more comfort.

—An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All | Magazine

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2009-10-30

Bandcamp

Looks like a decent alternative to Myspace for simple band sites

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