By Adam Frucci, Gizmodo – August 11, 2010 at 02:00PM
For this week’s Photoshop Contest, I asked you to come up with some really crazy patents. I’m not sure how crazy they are, but I do know that none of them would be accepted by the patent office. More »
By Meredith Woerner, Gizmodo – August 11, 2010 at 11:07AM
![Click here to read "How To Batman" teaches you everything you need to know](https://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/8/2010/08/160x120_howtobatman.jpg "Click here to read "How To Batman" teaches you everything you need to know")
Batman has been very busy, improving the world of Gotham City with his latest how-to videos. Learn how to dress for an interview, how to feed goats, or how to make a Western movie, from everyone’s favorite raspy-voiced vigilante. More »
By Rich Whittle, Business Opportunities Weblog – August 11, 2010 at 10:07AM
In this edition of Inventor’s Journal, Rich Whittle teams up with MIT Libraries to learn what a patent is and why patents can be important to your research.
If you’re interested in viewing the rest of the video tutorials, use the links below. These videos were produced by MIT Libraries and we use them under a Creative Commons license.
Part 2 – What does a patent look like?
Part 3 – How to search for patents.
Part 4 – Which patent search tool should I use? Why not just use Google?
Next week we’ll be talking with Russ Colby, the inventor of the Talking Toilet Paper Dispenser.
By Whitson Gordon, Lifehacker – August 10, 2010 at 06:00PM
Firefox: Some sites (like IMDB) prevent you from performing certain actions, like right clicking, on their pages. Firefox extension RightToClick disables these scripts, giving you the ability to right click, select text, or perform other actions forbidden by a given web site.
After installing the add-on, you’ll notice a new green cursor icon in your toolbar or status bar (depending on your Firefox setup). If you stumble upon a site that won’t let you perform certain actions on their pages, just click RightToClick’s icon to disable that JavaScript. The icon will animate and you’ll be able to bring up the context menu, select text, drag and drop, and do any of the other things the site originally disabled. There aren’t a ton of web sites out there that disable these actions, but it’s a handy add-on to have around if you frequent a site that does.
RightToClick is a free download, works anywhere Firefox does.
By Tim Carmody, kottke.org – August 10, 2010 at 05:50PM
This Best of Kottke post was easy, because I wanted to write something about Steve Jobs over the years anyways. The kickoff is Jason’s link to a 1995 interview with Jobs for Smithsonian Magazine. It’s mostly reflective, talking about his childhood, his history with Apple and early history with NEXT and Pixar. Toy Story hadn’t come out yet, and it’s fascinating to read what could be his bluster about what the movie and company were going to do, which of course turned out to be totally true. He’s also absolutely thrilled with what NEXT was doing with graphical user interface and networked computers. Windows 95 came out four months later.
It’s a sharp contrast with his interview the next year for Wired, which is mostly about the future of computing. He’s devastated and angry about Windows, but incredibly enthusiastic about the open web.
The desktop computer industry is dead. Innovation has virtually ceased. Microsoft dominates with very little innovation. That’s over. Apple lost. The desktop market has entered the dark ages, and it’s going to be in the dark ages for the next 10 years, or certainly for the rest of this decade.
It’s like when IBM drove a lot of innovation out of the computer industry before the microprocessor came along. Eventually, Microsoft will crumble because of complacency, and maybe some new things will grow. But until that happens, until there’s some fundamental technology shift, it’s just over.
The most exciting things happening today are objects and the Web. The Web is exciting for two reasons. One, it’s ubiquitous. There will be Web dial tone everywhere. And anything that’s ubiquitous gets interesting. Two, I don’t think Microsoft will figure out a way to own it. There’s going to be a lot more innovation, and that will create a place where there isn’t this dark cloud of dominance.
He also has this crystal clear vision about how the web was going to move beyond simple publishing and would be used to do commerce and create marketplaces for physical and virtual goods — a vision, which, again, turned out to be exactly right.
Two common threads in both interviews: he hates teachers’ unions, and doesn’t think technology can do anything for education. You generally see a much more libertarian, pessimistic Jobs in both of these interviews than you do today. He talks about death a lot, even though he’s still young and healthy.
Finally, I’ll link to what’s still one of my favorite looks at the future of consumer technology, Jobs and Bill Gates’s 2007 joint interview at D5 with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. (Prologue – Full Video – Transcript) It’s long to watch, but so worth it. They joke and reminisce with each other, tell stories about the early days of the computer industry, and share ideas about where things are going. (Bill Gates’s first line: “First, I just want to say: I am not Fake Steve Jobs.”)
The iPhone (announced but not released) is hot as hell, but Apple is still a much smaller company than Microsoft. Vista’s just been released and is stumbling out of the gate. Gates, unlike Jobs, is incredibly invested in trying to do something in tech to help education, and Jobs (whose Apple now has a huge education market) is mostly silent.
It’s also painfully obvious in retrospect that Jobs is talking about the expansion of the iOS into the iPod Touch, iPad (and maybe beyond) while Gates is talking about the experiments in input recognition that played into Windows 7 and the new XBox Kinect. Neither of them have any real idea what to do with TVs, but Gates actually seems to be more visionary, in part because he can afford to be less coy. It’s great. I’ve probably rewatched it four times, and you’ve never seen it, and care about this stuff at all, you should catch it.
Tags: Apple Bill Gates Steve Jobs
By nate@arstechnica.com (Nate Anderson), Ars Technica – August 10, 2010 at 03:55PM
Baylor University doesn’t want its students using peer-to-peer networks. A BlueCoat PacketShaper locks down bandwidth to students, and all inbound ports are blocked by the campus firewall to keep “computers from acting as servers or super nodes in peer to peer networks.”
Illinois State uses a packet shaping device called the Packeteer; it singles out P2P traffic and clamps down hard on its available bandwidth to ensure it can’t disrupt other, likely more productive uses of the campus network. In addition, the school’s intrusion prevention system tries to block P2P traffic in both directions at the campus border, though only if it comes from residence and wireless hotspots—faculty and staff are trusted to use P2P applications responsibly.
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By John Biggs, TechCrunch – August 10, 2010 at 10:18AM
A young lady named Jennifer – the Internet is now hunting down her last name – sent a selection of thirty-three photos to her entire office of twenty people detailing why she’s quitting. Mostly it was because of a man named Spencer who called her a HPOA (go ahead and look it up or just look at the pictures) but you’ll note one important slide in her presentation.
That’s right: Spencer was a TechCrunch reader!
Spencer spent 5.3 hours on TechCrunch. That’s a good hour a day, every day. Take this as a “recommended dosage” and increase as necessary. Also, don’t be a Spencer. Also, hire this young lady. She seems to know her stuff, especially if she was thoughtful enough to spy on her own spiteful boss.
UPDATE – The last word on the HOPA/HPOA debate comes from here and it can be spelled either way. Either way, incidentally, it’s also a horrible thing to say.
By chris.foresman@arstechnica.com (Chris Foresman), Ars Technica » Infinite Loop – August 10, 2010 at 12:30AM
One interesting characteristic of Star Trek: The Next Generation—one that separated it from the original series and most of the early films—was its widespread use of smooth, flat, touch-based control panels throughout the Enterprise-D. This touch interface was also used for numerous portable devices known as PADDs, or Personal Access Display Devices. These mobile computing terminals bear a striking resemblance to Apple’s iPad—a mobile computing device largely defined by its smooth, flat touchscreen interface.
To understand the thinking that led to the design of the Star Trek PADD, we spoke to some of the people involved in production of ST:TNG (as well as other Star Trek TV series and films), including Michael Okuda, Denise Okuda, and Doug Drexler. All three were involved in various aspects of production art for Star Trek properties, including graphic design, set design, prop design, visual effects, art direction, and more. We also discussed their impressions of the iPad and how eerily similar it is to their vision of 24th century technology, how science fiction often influences technology, and what they believe is the future of human-machine interaction.
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By udijw, DIYPhotography.net -DIY Photography and Studio Lighting – August 09, 2010 at 05:38PM
Tilt Shift Lenses are cool. They are those lenses that allow you to take those miniature looking photographs.
I dare you to get a real one; Both Nikon and Canon models are so pricey that you have to give a kidney to afford them. (OK, maybe just a pinky). But we have some good news. Bhautik Joshi (the inventor of the weirdly named plunger cam) and John Swierzbin (who is a DIY lens master) came up with an extensive tutorial about building your own tilt shift lenses.
By (author unknown), Core77 – August 09, 2010 at 01:52PM
I found these doodads kind of interesting: They’re an engineering solution to the industrial problem of how to securely mount something heavy and vibration-prone, like a generator, to something else in such a way that the former doesn’t shake the bejeezus out of the latter and rip free of its moorings.
Called Rope Isolators or Cable Isolators, they come in circular and linear variants and are designed to be corrosion-free, no-maintenance, no-lubricant-required devices.
Admittedly these are more of an engineered object than a designed object, but I’m digging their industrial-octopus aesthetic and am posting them here in the hopes one of you will incorporate them into some type of furniture design.