What's New is Old

Mark and Wes in Pleasant Hill, CA at the Monsoon Masala restaurant.

Sites of Interest:

Office chair that measures farts and sends twitters.

Brain-Twitter interface. There have been similar machines that read brainwaves as an input device to a video game.

There are websites where you type commands and a virtual actor obeys them. E.g. Virtual Girlfriend.

Long before twitter you could leave community messages on cards.

The Community Memory system of public terminals.

Optical signaling is an ancient method of long-distance communication.

History of the Vocoder instrument, first demonstrated by AT&T at the 1939 World's Fair.

The Legend Group turned into Lenovo and acquired IBM's Personal Computer Division.

Version 9.04 of Ubuntu Linux was released.

Nintendo Gameboy turns 20. You can play the old games on emulators.

For several days, the Apple.com home page was taken over by a counter supposedely showing the number of app downloads as this approached one billion.

Apple iTouch 3.0 firmware will unlock the Bluetooth capability that was already in the hardware.

Broadcom is first with a Bluetooth 3.0 chipset.

Bluetooth and Wi-Fi share the 2.4 GHz radio band.

How Bluetooth got its name.

Donald Knuth's "The Art of Computer Programming".

Acer confirms it will make an Android phone, but this guy is skeptical whether Android will become popular.

Mark thinks this is a very weird name for a website about things you like: www.likaholix.com.

Oracle is buying Sun for a mere $7.4 billion.

Wes is trying to sneak Blackberry applications into Slurpcast.

Wes' iPhone Applications of the week:

Yowza! - Launch it and it finds deals in your geographic area. Show the cashier the deal on your iPhone screen, they scan the barcode, and you save money.

CraigsMobileList - Wes' favorite app for accessing the craigslist website.

Mark's iPhone Applications of the week:

PocketMeter - It emits sound and measures the time it takes for the echo to return. Point it towards a wall or floor, touch the screen, and it will show you the distance.

3 Numbers - Currency & units converter, tip calculator, and calculator all in one. But the special thing about this app is the steampunk look. To understand the true meaning of "steampunk", visit the Kew Bridge Steam Museum in London.

Mark and Wes in Lafayette, CA at the Swad Indian restaurant. Sites of Interest:

Amazon officially announced the Kindle 2.

E-ink devices will soon be in color.

Modern Flash Memory is like the ancient core memory in that they both retain their bits when power is removed.

Wes mentioned an idea from the TED Conference, Homo Evolutus.

Bill Gates released mosquitoes to an audience at Ted.

Mark thought this Hello Kitty lineman's handset was for sale, but it's just a hand-made gift.

History of the early day web browsers.

The public first had access to the Internet via a Shell Account, which is character-mode access like a DOS or UNIX command line. Using TIA and other programs, people could do graphic web browsing on their cheap Shell Account.

In 1999, the World's Smallest Web Server was the size of a box of matches.

Basic Stamp and Arduino are popular systems for making prototype electronic and robotic projects.

Today's Front Pages can also be viewed via a U.S. map.

Years ago Mark and his cat wrote a daily email newsletter called WebSkulker. The site is still up so people can look through the archive, but don't try to subscribe. Wes mentioned the Dancing Baby phenomenum and Mark remembered that this WebSkulker issue discussed it at the time. Scroll down for the article "Dancing skulkers". The links still work after all these years, but the links within those pages generally don't.

New YouTube cult classic: David After Dentist. Another classic: audio of Christian Bale going crazy on a movie set. And finally a mashup of the two.

The Truth in Caller Id Act of 2009 is working it's way through congress.

How capacitance screens like the iPhone's work. You can buy a stylus that will work for this type of screen, but you can also make one yourself -- the Related Videos show other home-made ideas. Gloves that will work with iPhone and other capacitance screens.

Chutzpah award for Wells Fargo.

Early history of Compaq Computer.

Computers that weigh 1.5 tons.

Will there really be an ASUS Eee Phone?

Wes' iPhone Application of the week:

Spell Check -- Look up words to verify spelling and to get definitions. The dictionary resides in memory so no Internet access is needed.

Mark's iPhone Applications of the week:

Fart Army -- Mark thought Wes would like this because Wes used to play with little green soldiers.

Remote Fart -- Search the wifi network to find other users, then cause fart noises to come out of their iPhone.

Tilt Meter Pro -- Mark's favorite app for using the iPhone as a level tool.

Mark and Wes in Berkeley, CA at the Caffe Strada.

Sites of Interest:

Where are they now? 25 computer products that refuse to die.

Wes mentioned the vaporware Peapod electric car, and Mark pointed out that the Electric Time mini cars are available today.

The Nopopo Batteries from Japan will recharge with urine, blood, and even apple juice! But remember, liquids only, no po po!

RIM removed an application from the Blackberry app store, Wattpad eReader.

History of the Hewlett-Packard company, starting with the sale of oscillators to Disney.

40th Anniversary of the Request For Comment method of developing Internet standards.

Bill Gates and Paul Allen started their computer carreer with Traf-O-Data while they were in high school.

Bill Gates rocks! (Starting at 4:23 into this video)

The real portable Commodore 64, and Ben Heck's vision of what a Commodore 64 laptop would have looked like.

How to turn the lit-up Apple logo on a MacBook into a second LCD monitor.

Frequent IMs with your boss make you more productive.

BumpTop reminded Mark of the old Microsoft Bob add-on for Windows. But now that he watched that video to remind himself what Bob was really like, maybe they're not similar at all.

Wes' stupid $400 BlackBerry can't even run the most essential iPhone apps like iPimpler, i-Chirp, iTrigger Fart Version, I Crush Your Head, or Burpy.

Wes' BlackBerry is so useless that he might as well get this or this instead of the real phone.

Wes' iPhone Applications of the week:

i-c-LiveCams -Live streaming video from cameras around the world

Howcast - View videos from howcast.com wherever you are.

Mark's iPhone Applications of the week:

Skype -Phone calls and chats through the Skype system.

SullysFlight - Mark has this, but it no longer seems to be available. It was a subset of X-Plane, which is still an active app.

Mark and Wes in Moraga, CA at the Ranch House Cafe.

Sites of Interest:

Steve Jobs maintains grip on Apple.

Some Safeway stores now have free Wi-Fi as part of a rebranding marketing effort.

Remember ICQ?

Tesla is working on an electric sedan.

Mark sounds skeptical that Tesla will ever ship anything, but they claim they have already delivered 250 of their Roadster model. Video of a real owner showing off his Roadster.

The idea of battery-powered cars is older than you think.

Solar-powered birdhouse with perch that lights up at night to attract bugs for the birds to eat.

Submit an image to TinEyeto find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions.

iPhone firmware 3.0 has been jailbroken, but you probably shouldn't try it yet.

There are lots of rumors that new iPhone models will be out this summer.

Is this article accurate about Obama's gift of an iPod to the Queen of England? No? How about this one?

President Obama gave Gordon Brown a box set of DVD's.

One of Google's April Fools jokes was that Google Apps can now be written in Fortran 77.

Information and video tours of a typical Google data center.

Flywheels are now used for Uninterruptible Power Supplies in competition to batteries. (Mark called these "gyroscopes" because he was thinking of something that spins.)

The Apple 1 and a history of the Apple Computer Corporation.

Nomee, TweetDeck, and PeopleBrowsr are software/websites that help you organize your feeds from various social networks.

Wes likes the hi5 social networking system which claims to be the third largest in the world, but Mark never even heard of it. They are having a funding crisis.

Mark couldn't remember the free dating service with the fishy name. It's PlentyOfFish.

Write applications for .NET using the MONO IDE on Mac, PC or Linux.

Mark likes the free SyncToy program from Microsoft, and mentioned it because it uses .net.

Is voicemail obsolete?

Mark's favorite voicemail transcription service is VoiceCloud.

Western Digital goes solid state, acquires Silicon Systems.

iFart was the #1 seller in the iPhone app store.

Mark's iPhone Applications of the week:

Bump-Somehow it knows when you bump two iPhones together, and will transfer contact information.

TapTapCards-Turns pictures on your iPhone into real picture postcards that are snail-mailed to your friends.

Color Splash - give photos a dramatic look by converting them to black and white, while keeping your chosen details in color.

iControl Cat- remote control for your cat, just like TV remotes. Mark particularly liked this because, believe it or not, he bought one of these and it didn't work either.

Farthoven -this sort of fart app has been done before, but Mark liked the name.

Mark and Wes in Lafayette, CA at Pizza Antica.

Sites of Interest:

Medieval Tech Support for this new-fangled thing called "books" on "paper".

IBM's history and a history in ad pictures of IBM typewriters, including the Magnetic Tape/Selectric Typewriter (MT/ST).

The Friden Flexowriter used paper tape to do very early word processing.

The new mp3HD format and information about the various MPEG standards.

Fingerprinting blank paper using commodity scanners.

Statistics on iPhones and iPhone apps as of March, 2009.

It's hard to believe, but Wes' stupid $400 Blackberry can't run any of these essential applications: Buzzbuka, Bikini Fart, iGoniometer, Drop It, or Dangerous Finger.

StumbleUpon is a social application for sharing great web sites.

TJ-2 was a very early computerized word processor.

php and Microsoft's ASP are extensions to HTML that coordinate with processes running on web servers.

Web developers can get free, unlimited IP address geolocation with MySQL.

Alexander Bain invented the fax machine earlier than you'd think.

The concept of dithering is used in both audio and graphics processing. This technical article goes into great detail, including some history of the word.

Wes' iPhone Applications of the week:

Alpine Racer - like Nintendo 64's skiing game.

PocketMoney - Lets you track your cash flow, understand your net worth, and improve the overall health of your finances.

Mark's iPhone Applications of the week:

Emerald Chronometer - Models of high-end mechanical watches with many of the most complex "complications" found in real watches, plus refinements found nowhere else.

Bell & Ross - Another beautiful simulation of a real mechanical watch.

Mint - Sign up for an account on mint.com, add your online banking and credit card accounts, and access them anywhere.

Mark and Wes in Orinda, CA at the Serika Japanese Restaurant.

Sites of Interest:

Compact Disc turns 30.

Remember the first CD Burners?

The longevity of optical media.

Audacity - an open source cross-platform audio editor.

Wavosaur - a free audio editor for Windows that supports VST plugins.

The Mentalists use iPhones as instruments; and another cellphone orchastra based at Stanford University.

The latest iTouch models can now be jailbroken.

History of WYSWYG.

The LOGO programming Language.

The Forth programming language.

The Pentium Chronicles.

We have mentioned the Will It Blend site before, but now there's Will it Fart?

Pastor Gas.

Kid uses a fart machine during a City Council meeting.

Google will shortly have free phone services, so sign up for the waiting list. (If you have a Grand Central number, you can keep it and Google has probably already converted it to the new system.)

Tellme has free voice phone services for the public.

Wes' iPhone Applications of the week:

TextFree Unlimited - Buy this app and then send and receive unlimited free text messages from an iPod touch or iPhone to any US mobile phone. They have a free lite version of the app to check it out.

Things - Todo manager that synchronizes with Things for Mac.

Mark's iPhone Applications of the week:

Toodledo - Todo manager that synchronizes with the toodledo.com website, and via that, it can sync to Outlook.

Farty Face - Select or take photos of your arch-nemesis (or best buddy) and blast away!

Mark and Wes in Concord, CA at the Fry's Electronics Store.

Sites of Interest:

Legal stink over fart apps.

Mark and Wes bought these Poqet PC devices back in the day, and still have them.

Sony P Series tiny notebooks are still bigger than the Poqet.

The technology behind the movie Coraline.

Mark suspects the $1,000+ "power conditioners" at the Fry's store are just glorified $5 power strips and in the real world don't make any difference to audio and video quality.

Mark guesses that this is the "store on Locust" with the $80,000 amplifier; but their website doesn't show anything like that.

The Amazing Randi has a $1,000,000 challenge about audio cables, but Mark was wrong in the details.

Startup.com, the movie.

Big Blue's employees really, seriously, used to sing these IBM company songs.

President Obama introduces RECOVERY.gov.

If you have a U.S. GSM cell phone (AT&T or T-Mobile), the trapcall service will show you the caller-id of people who try to call you with their id blocked; plus other services. This really works and Mark uses it.

Mozilla's Bespin framework aims to build an interactive Web-based code editor.

The WebKit open source project let's you design your own custom web browser.

Mark mentioned a street in London that protects pedestrians who walk while texting. This turned out to be a hoax.

The old Commodore Amiga with Video Toaster, could do this, but it takes 21st century engineering to actually make toast from a video machine!

How to build an aquarium from an old Mac.

Wes' iPhone Application of the week:

He didn't have any this week. Mark was shocked.

Mark's iPhone Applications of the week:

Tootin Pooch -- the world's first dog-fart app.

Pukey Pete -- quite possibly the first puke app. Mark may branch out from fart apps and become an expert on puke apps as well.

Ocarina -- turns the iPhone into a serious ancient flute-like music instrument.

Fartarina --a mash up between Ocarina and a fart app.

SignalScope -- turns your iPhone into a powerful real-time spectrum analyzer and oscilloscope.

Mark & Wes in Concord, CA at the Korean Bulgogi House.

Sites of Interest:

Scandal in the FartApp space: FartnBurp claims to be the first to have farts and burps in the same app, but we reviewed one last week which had that and more.

The author of a great Rubik's Cube solver talks about marketing his product against fart apps.

Some women should not be allowed to call them "Panties".

How MapQuest Works.

History of Microsoft on the Web, including IIS.

Abacus Online Museum.

Synth Pioneer Jean-Jacques Perrey in a music video. Wes thought he was the creator of the Oramic, but that was Graham Wrench who built this for Daphne Oram.

Mark found this 1-terrabyte hard drive for under $99.99. (That offer is sold out, but you can probably find others like it.) He said this was $1 per gigabyte, but it's actually $0.10 per gigabyte which is 10 times more amazing.

Solid state "hard drives".

Boobs And Booty Banned From The App Store -- but there are ways to cheat.

How to re-program temporary road signs to say what you want.

New version of Google Earth lets you explore beneath the oceans, and has many other new features.

Mark points out that virtual reality will never seem like real life until smells can be recorded and played back. Maybe something like this?

The technology behind Benjamin Button.

Bug Labs -- This company makes a collection of easy-to-use electronic modules that snap together to build any gadget you can imagine.

MuxTape -- A place for bands to post their music, and for listeners to create mixes.

The Kindle 2 was a rumor when we did this recording, but has now been officially announced.

Videos of the Apple Newton 2100.

A New Zealand man bought a used iPod that turned out to be full of military secrets.

VMware Fusion is popular for running Windows on a Mac, but Virtual Box runs on many other platforms, is open-source, and freeeeeeeeeeee.

Microsoft has a new virtual machine product, Hyper-V, meant for running server systems.

Wes' iPhone Applications of the week:

ModPlayer -- plays mod files. Duuuuuhhhhhh.

Speedtest.net Speed Test -- Test the download and upload speeds of your iPhone's Internet connection, whether wifi or cellular.

Tweetie -- Full-featured app for interfacing with twitter.

Mark's iPhone Applications of the week:

Slurptastic -- cleans your screen from the inside.

Jaadu VNC -- Expensive, but best app for remote control of a PC, Mac, or Linux machine. The instructions show how to install a freeeeeeeeeeeeeee VNC server on the machine to be controlled.

TwitterFon -- Mark's favorite Twitter app. He was wrong when he said it didn't have a way to mark favorite tweets; he later figured out how to do it.

Mark & Wes in Oakland, CA at Sura Korean restaurant.

Sites of Interest:

Information about Carpal Tunnel syndrome. Article that claims mice are more the cause than keyboards. Catalog of weird types of keyboards for people who do have this.

Mark bought this vibrating Wake UP alarm which alerts you if your head nods forward while driving or in a movie. He bought it from an English language website in Korea which took an American credit card and shipped the item quickly. There is no link directly to the item, so go here and in the Title box search on exactly this string, including the brackets: [ICONIC] Wake Up

History of Unisys, a union of Burroughs and Sperry Rand. The old Univac computers are in that timeline, long before the merger.

The Mojave Experiment: Microsoft punks users to show people like Vista.

How to control your humpy thing.

Mark liked the movie My Bloody Valentine 3D.

Watch all the episodes of the cult classic TV show The Prisoner for freeeeeeee, and read about the remake.

Download movies very cheaply in various formats.

Website that helps you sneak into multiple movies in a multiplex.

Wes' iPhone Applications of the week:

Find an Apartment -- Lets you search Craigslist, Google Base, and more for apartments.

Gym Buddy -- Keeps a record of your workouts.

Mark's iPhone Applications of the week:

iBurp On Your Fart Ahhhh -- Select burp, fart, and relief noises, all in one app!

Byline -- RSS reader that does two-way syncing with Google Reader.

Mark & Wes, in Walnut Creek, CA at Nama Sushi & Teriyaki.

Mark and Wes talk about Steve (you know which Steve) and his health and what he admitted. What went on at MacWorld? Where is the promised iPhone firmware with push notification? Apple NetBook? Newton? Why does Mark think that Steve needs a visit to McDonalds? Bits about Windows 7.

Sites of Interest:

We clown Steve Job because this quote shows he would be against our "What's New is Old" show format.

The truth about iMeat.

The "Whipple procedure" is sometimes used for patients with pancreatic cancer. If Steve had this, it might explain his weight problems.

Sign up for the Windows 7 public beta test.

The Windows Blinds product lets you "skin" a large number of visual elements of Windows and applications, including letting you make XP look much like Vista.

Microsoft is extending the date for Windows XP.

Joost doing better in the marketplace with it's new web-browser-based player.

Fart Studio, your all in one flatulence solution.

The QWERTY keyboard was designed to make you type slower. Everyone believes that the Dvorak keyboard invented by Dr. August Dvorak is faster, but that may be a myth!

JibJab to keep the laughs rolling.

The last factory to make player piano rolls has stopped production.

Actress Hedy Lamarr invented spread-spectrum radio using piano roll technology.

Pour yellowsn0w on your jailbroken iPhone 3G to SIM-unlock it so that it will work with almost any GSM SIM card in the world.

Freeeeeeeeeeee Internet dating sites.

Wes' iPhone Applications of the week:

iAmAMan - Free calendar application meant to be used by men to secretly track multiple women's monthly cycle.

Eternity Time Log - Time tracking and reporting application.

Mark's iPhone Applications of the week:

Touch Physics and Crayon Physics Deluxe -Similar game/puzzle apps that let you draw objects with crayons on a blackboard, and they start moving to the laws of physics to let you solve the puzzle for each level. The serious bug in Crayon Physics was fixed in the latest version, so try it.

Tag Reader and Seadragon Mobile - Mark mentioned these because they are written by Microsoft for the iPhone, and he thought that was weird.