Condiment Gun October 27, 2009
Posted by Joey in Gadgets.Tags: Condiment Gun, Gun Control, PETA
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Yum! Eat hamburgers and hotdogs, piss off PETA. Use a toy gun, piss off gun-controlling politicians and bed-wetting progressives the world over. What could be better?
Condiment Gun: The sure-fire sauce dispenser.
Chips without ketchup? Hotdogs without mustard?
It doesn't bear thinking about. Now man's favourite comfort foods have been given their own specialist kitchen tackle… the Condiment Gun!
Greasy spoons, BBQs and Saturday night TV dinners beware – nosh-time is about to get a whole lot more fun! Simply fill one of the two squeezy cartridges with your favourite sauce, load it into the barrel of the gun and snap the chamber shut.
Vanishing Point Fountain Pen Vanishes October 6, 2009
Posted by Joey in Gadgets.Tags: Fountain Pen, Namiki, Pilot Vanishing Point
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Yes, it’s true! eBay user goodthingsrunning is selling a Pilot Vanishing Point fountain pen that has apparently vanished, because there’s no sign of the pen in any of the four photos on the auction page. Nice shot of the box and the cartridge converter, though.
Pilot Namiki Vanishing Point Fountain Pen – eBay (item 330365943199 end time Oct-13-09 06:10:42 PDT).
Pilot Namiki Vanishing Point Fountain Pen Gunmetal Grey Includes: original box, Use and Care Guide, Registration Card (unregistered), ink cartridge and converter. Two Binderized points: Fine Point and Stub Italic Purchased from Richard Binder; barely used.
Miniature Living Room Inside A PC October 4, 2009
Posted by Joey in Art, Gadgets, Technology.add a comment
I have to admit, this is freakin’ cool!
I’m a MacHead, and the only thing I miss about PCs is building a customized gaming machine.
There’s a painstaking amount of detail inside the scene, including intricate housewares such as a vase, flowers, the newspaper, and a gumball machine (?!). Anyone with this much time on their hands must also spend hours thinking of the perfect way to get away with murder.
Happy Birthday, Compact Disc October 1, 2009
Posted by Joey in Gadgets, Music, Technology.Tags: Compact Disc, Sony, The Cars
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Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way to obsolescence.
I bought my first CD player in 1985; my first CD was, I think, The Cars by The Cars. I just plunked down major bucks for the complete remastered Beatles albums, but that’s likely to be my last major CD purchase. It’s downloads from here on out.
Oct. 1, 1982: Portable Music Enters the Spin Zone | This Day In Tech | Wired.com.
1982: Sony starts selling the first CD players to the public. Change is in the air.
Once upon a time cassettes were the preferred method of storing music. These mighty rectangles of plastic and magnetic tape allowed for easy recording, flaunted ample capacities, and were effortlessly portable. (If you weren’t worried about portability, there was still the reliable LP vinyl phonograph disc.)
And yet cassettes sucked.
No More GSM Noise September 30, 2009
Posted by Joey in Gadgets.Tags: 8820, Blackberry, Bold
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I replaced my BB 8820 with a Bold. The Bold is not much of an improvement, but at least there’s no more GSM noise.
Life is good.
The Lost Symbol: Kindle Version Rulez Amazon September 19, 2009
Posted by Joey in Books, Gadgets, Internet, Technology.Tags: Amazon, Dan Brown, Kindle, The Lost Symbol
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Kindle version of The Lost Symbol is still #1 on Amazon’s best seller list.
The Kindle edition of Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol seems to be outselling the Hardcover edition of Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol as was first discovered by Kindle Nation Daily. At the time I’m writing this, the Kindle version is still ahead on Amazon’s sales charts.
Alabama: No Dildos For You September 12, 2009
Posted by Joey in Gadgets, Government, Politics, Regulations, Wacky Religious Beliefs.Tags: Alabama, No Fun Allowed
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Alabama, still stuck in the Victorian era, bans sex toys. Not to worry, you can always make your own.
Thank the gods for the intertubes.
Alabama Supreme Court upholds sex toy ban.
The Alabama Supreme Court on Friday upheld the state’s ban on the sale of sex toys, but Love Stuff, the Hoover store that filed the challenge, has no plans to stop selling the devices.
While people have the right to use the devices in private, the Legislature has the right to ban public distribution of those products, the court majority ruled in a 7-2 decision.
Love Stuff had asked the court to strike down the 1998 law, arguing that the ban violated a person’s right to sexual privacy. The court upheld the law, saying public morality was a legal reason to regulate sales.
Sorry, Apple Fans: No Apple Tablet September 9, 2009
Posted by Joey in Gadgets.Tags: Apple, Apple Tablet, iPod Nano, iPod Touch
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Sorry, the rumored Apple Tablet failed to materialize at the iPod event today. And no camera on the iPod Touch either, but the Nano got one.
Apple’s Big Event: A Scorecard – PC World.
Prediction: That pesky ol’ Apple tablet will finally be unveiled.
Sound the game show buzzers: We have our first loser. To be fair, plenty of people said the thus-far-mythical tablet wouldn’t make it to this week’s Apple event, but others held onto hope that it would. The good news, though: The tablet’s continued omission from any official announcement means the Apple rumor mill still has plenty of fodder for the next few months.
Amazon To Make Good On Orwell Blunder September 5, 2009
Posted by Joey in Gadgets, Internet, Oops!, Technology.Tags: 1984, Amazon, George Orwell, Kindle
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Finally, Amazon comes clean on its blunder of erasing 1984 and other Orwell books from Kindles.
Amazon Offers to Replace Copies of Orwell Books – NYTimes.com.
Amazon invited some unflattering literary analogies earlier this summer when it remotely erased unlicensed versions of two George Orwell novels from its customers’ Kindle reading devices.
Jeffrey P. Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, apologized to customers for the deletions in July. And late Thursday, the company tried to put the incident behind it, offering to deliver new copies of “1984” and “Animal Farm” at no charge to affected customers.
Amazon said in an e-mail message to those customers that if they chose to have their digital copies restored, they would be able to see any digital annotations they had made. Those who do not want the books are eligible for an Amazon gift certificate or a check for $30, the company said.
The message included Mr. Bezos’s mea culpa from July. “This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of ‘1984’ and other novels on Kindle,” Mr. Bezos said. He went on to describe Amazon’s actions as “stupid, thoughtless and painfully out of line with our principles.
Cracking GSM for Fun and Profit August 25, 2009
Posted by Joey in Gadgets, Government, Technology.Tags: A5/1, Cryptography, GSM, NSA, Surveillance
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You probably didn’t know that the encryption standard on your GSM phone known as A5/1 is a pathetically weak algorithm. It was made that way deliberately so that the spy agencies of the world could spy on you. Now, A5/1 decryption is coming to the average joe hacker.
Spying: Not just for governments anymore.
Cracking GSM phone crypto via distributed computing.
If you are using a GSM phone (AT&T or T-Mobile in the U.S.), you likely have a few more months before it will be easy for practically anyone to spy on your communications.
Security researcher Karsten Nohl is launching an open-source, distributed computing project designed to crack the encryption used on GSM phones and compile it into a code book that can be used to decode conversations and any data that gets sent to and from the phone.
He hopes that by doing this it will spur cellular providers into improving the security of their services and fix a weakness that has been around for 15 years and affects about 3 billion mobile users.
“We’re not creating a vulnerability but publicizing a flaw that’s already being exploited very widely,” he said in a phone interview Monday.
