I’ve installed the Audio and Video plugins. You can add audio to your post with a simple tag, shown below. NOTE: In order to show the tag, I’ve added a space between the brackets and the enclosed text. You MUST OMIT the space between the bracket and the enclosed text if you want this to automagically work!

[ audio:http://web.path.to/yourSong/file.mp3 ]

The player will read the ID3 tags automagically. Or, you can specify the information like this:

[ audio:http://web.path.to/yourSong/file.mp3%7Ctitles=Title Of The Song%7Cartists=The Best Band Ever ]

You can specify multiple songs/titles/artists, too:

[ audio:http://web.path.to/yourSong/file.mp3, http://web.path.to/yourSong/anotherFile.mp3, http://web.path.to/yourSong/aThirdFile.mp3%7Ctitles=Title Of The Song, Second Song, Third Song Rules%7Cartists=The Best Band Ever, A Mediocre Band, Some Guy ]

For video, you do something similar:

[ flvplayer http://acme.com/video.flv 400 300 ]

Those last 2 numbers are width and height, and they are optional. I recommend specifying them as shown, however, since our blog’s center column is 400 pixels wide.

If you have trouble uploading your audio or video files (PHP currently imposes a 2 MB limit on uploads), contact me for FTP/SCP access.

I created this image last night from multiple exposures taken from my back deck. It was foggy, and I like how the depth of the various trees on the hill came out. This was just my first experiment.

(full-sized version).

Heh. Process ID 420. Event: hang.

What’s not to love?

It might have come down from Amazon’s headquarters reading something like this:

kindle 7.17.09 allowing orwell downloads doupleplusungood refs unbooks revert fullwise

OK, when it comes to writing in doublespeak, I’m obviously no Winston Smith. What I’m trying to say is this: on July 17th, Amazon reached into Kindle devices across the globe and deleted all traces of the book Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell.

Claiming they’d mistakenly allowed the book to be sold by a publisher who didn’t own the rights, Amazon remotely erased both Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm from hundreds of devices, and credited the accounts of the affected Kindle owners.

Amazon promised, though, that they’ll never do it again.

Allowing for the identical Apollo guidance computer (AGC) in the Command Module (CM), containing a program called COLOSSUS, it is correct to say that we landed on the moon with 152 Kbytes of computer memory.

That quote, and the link included in it, are from a paper by Don Eyles, introduced by the BBC as “a 23-year-old self-described ‘beatnik’ who had just graduated from Boston University and was set the task of programming the software for the Moon landing.”

These days it’s rare to find an icon that fits in 152 Kbytes of computer memory!!! Those guys wrote all the software that got a spacecraft to the moon and back.

I walk by the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory every day… but today I have special respect for the kind of work those people did, and do.

Xconomy magazine calls it the technology that might have saved Polaroid: a small, portable, low-power, inkless printing system. It’s basically a special paper that’s got embedded crystals inside of it that turn from white to either cyan, magenta, yellow, or black when exposed to heat. The printer itself is a little thermal print head that can deliver microbursts of different temperatures at very precise locations.

Just like with the old SX-70, the real money is in selling the paper. The first commercially available devices using Zink are on sale now.

I upgraded my phone to the new Palm Pre this weekend. Being a Sprint customer and having a phone that was starting to seem antique made the choice pretty easy (I’ve had only two cell phones in the last seven years that I’ve been with Sprint). Honestly, I was done with T9 typing and no web browser. I actually waited in line for an hour to get one of the 50 phones delivered to Santa Monica, CA. This was a new social/cultural experience for me (waiting in line for the newest block of silicon and plastic) and I was able to handle the ordeal by telling myself it was an anthropological learning opportunity. Interestingly, the people in line seemed pretty normal and friendly. There were no strange Pre fanatics or obvious hard-core geeks. In fact, I don’t recall anyone even saying anything about the Pre, but it was obvious that people were excited about it.

My take on it? I think it’s fantastic. It’s intuitive, has all the touch screen capabilities introduced by the iPhone, comes with all the apps I will every actually use and it’s smooth and quick. It’s also a bit smaller (length x width) than the iPhone, which has always seemed a little unwieldy to me. One of features that really proves itself is the ability to have multiple applications running simultaneously (load a web page, a large file from an email, get a software upgrade or download an application all at the same time). The applications are sorted into visual “cards” that you can easily navigate by flicking your finger left or right. Close an application instantly with a flick of the finger.

The Pandora application works perfectly. Signing up my work email (Microsoft Office Outlook with Exchange from saveonit.com) literally took 10 seconds, required no email to our IT department and all of my calendar events automatically started appeared as notifications. The notification system is nice: it pops up a stack of transparent notices on the bottom of the screen. The MMS application makes it easy to navigate between conversations you’ve had or are having. And the camera takes crisp three megapixel shots with almost no noticeable delay between button press and when the phone is ready to take another picture.

So, if you’re like me and never really wanted an iPhone, but felt like you were missing out on some cool features then I would highly recommend the Pre to you. I’m loving it.

F-your-I, blog readers: I’ve disabled hotlinking of any images hosted on noiselabs.com/blog … if you’ve been hotlinking those images on a page hosted somewhere else, you’ll now see a “broken image” icon.

If you need any of those images for your own website, I suggest you download them from one of our legitimate pages, and upload them to your own hosting provider.

Thank you for your attention :)

I’m not sure I can explain what it is, but Magical Nihilism makes for some fascinating reading.

Graphic novel creator Warren Ellis never fails to amuse, enlighten, or dismay, depending on your tastes.

Tellart Labs in Providence, RI makes physical interfaces for computing devices… they take mashups to the physical plane!

The Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science has an amazing library of works on line, including this article on urban design innovator Kevin Lynch.

I meant to post about this when it was first published back in April: Steve Crocker’s Op-Ed in the New York Times marking the 40th anniversary of the RFC, the process by which Internet protocols are standardized. It makes for some great reading. Also interesting is Crocker’s RFC 1, the initial Request For Comments that described the HOST software requirements for machines connected to the brand-new ARPA Network… which laid the foundations for this vast series of tubes we know today as teh Internetz.