I have finally found a soup to nuts Steampunk machine / design concept that I can really get behind. From the looks of things each and every little detail is taken care of. I hate it when the aesthetic doesn’t extend correctly and seamlessly to the peripherals. With this design shown over at Yanko Design, they thought of everything. From the speakers to the mouspad having a tiny little desk lamp over it. Even the cabling is wrapped to look the part.

The machine appears to be a mac mini, and is inscribed with The Apple Company, Gearless Calulating Device. The best part is if you follow through to the original designer and you have the extra coinage you too can have one of these beauties built for you by Old Time Computers.

Well Done !

Via » Yanko Design.

Wired recently reported that a Hacker Disabled More Than 100 Cars Remotely. The “Hacker”, not to be confused with Angelina Jolie in the movie of the same name, obtained a password and managed to abuse a no start function in the cars. This time the system in question is canned Webtech Plus, a way for car branches to repo vehicles that haven’t been paid for by making them unusable.

Take this as a warning people. Any machine once connected to a network is inherently vulnerable. You can code tight as you can, run every type of security measure you want in front of and behind the connection. But as so many sci fi writers have written, Information Wants to be free. I would never want a no start feature in my car. You can sell as many OnStar vehicular recovery features that you want but if it means someone can either maliciously or mistakenly cause my car to do things i don’t command it to then i’m against it. This was just the first publicized  example of the system being abused.

Have to say the Pay Technologies little black box under the hood is quite reminiscent of a loan shark coming around to rough you up a bit and “remind you” to pay I wonder how you check to see if this system is installed, or if the car buyers are made aware of it when they purchase?

So it has been 5 years since i first came up with this concept.the idea behind the celebration was simple, more than any other career choice IT can be learned on the go, provided that there are people willing to teach. I owe my career and my livelihood to the countless techs forum posters and how to authors out there. A degree in anthropology can do many things but teaching you how to run an apache web server isn’t one of them. So this is a chance for those of us with some small amount of knowledge to give back to the community.

I Picked April 15th, tax day to pay your karmic dues as well. The original tagline was Pay your Taxes Pay your due. Teach a Man to Tech. It has changed over time to a yearly theme. This year is Teaching and Sharing Tech, hopefully focusing on bringing and creating more pieces of usable information for anyone no matter their level of expertise.

You can either pick an individual to take under your wing for the duration. Or you can commit to writing a guide or how to on some common topic. Last year I write a guide to improving your blog through good design. Either way blog about it, share your experience, because only through constant sharing can we ensure the next generation of techs have sufficient resources to teach themselves, or at the very least they know who typo ask for help.

Help us combat the image of the grumpy tech, and the cranky helpdesk worker. Lets fill the space with good and helpful content instead. Feel free to use a graphic and drop me a line if you would like to commit to the Adopt a Newb Celebration for 2010, Graphics after the Break.

Tag Any Posts or guides with AaN10 to get included in the summary. You can also link back to this article to provide a directory of currently active Helpful projects

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One of my problems with Apple is that they provide very few options to keep old machines current. It’s called planned Obsolescence, your machine will not only be out of date soon, but the OS might not even run on your machine in a couple of years. And since Apple updates their OS nice and often the third party vendors choose to support the latest incarnation. For Apple lovers this is a double edged sword.

First off their OS becomes much slimmer since it doesn’t have to support older machines. However Apple’s are also usually built well. I have a 10 year old machine that still runs, and it was an everyday machine for 3 years. I have a 6 year old machine that is in mostly working order, only 1 usb port isn’t working, and this machine was very roughly used.

The problem ends up being that the machines are built well enough to last but shuffled off to the also ran pile due to upgrades.

What to do with the old machines then? One example is the timepiece to the side, but i think a $1,500 time piece is a bit outlandish don’t you? What would you rather have? A passable Machine that lasts a bit, but has a long tail for OS 3rd party app compatibility?  OR An extremely well made machine which will soon be forced to backup status by frequent os / New 3rd party software compatibility issues?

SlipperyBrick.com.

One of the biggest buzzwords lately is Green Tech. But the problem with generating power is that quite frankly its a bit hard to do. Solar energy is by far the most talked about alternative energy source but Solar energy is operating at around 20 % efficiency. That means for every 10 units of energy collected by the panel you get 2 usable portions out.

Wind energy is a lot more efficient, the only problem being that its much harder to find a sustainable wind source than a sunny day. Portable wind generators, provided they don’t need a ton of sustained wind would be a huge boon to emerging societies, relief work in remote locations or just being awesome all by your lonesome and blogging on a mountaintop.

While just a concept piece the Eolic looks like it might have a horse in that race. Carbon Fibre and a small footprint could make this an interesting design to watch, and it looks just plain awesome, lets admit it.

EcoFriend

A simple enough hack but ingenious. Take one part Wifi Detecting shirt from Thinkgeek, subtract fabric with scissors. Add in your car and shake and bake till it looks awesome. I’m not sure announcing your intent to go wardriving is the best practice considering the overall attitude towards borrowing another person’s poorly secured internet connection.

But don’t tell that to MACGEEK. All thats left is to have a ipod doc on the license plate, and the need to replace the car every year to something with less buttons. All snark aside; I’m a sucker for crazy license plates so this hit a couple buttons here.

SlipperyBrick.com

My thought has always been that guns are not inherently bad. Bad people use guns to spread their malfeseance and careless people leave them out where accidents can happen. If you own a gun, your right isn’t just to own it but but rather should be contingent on your care and propper treatment of the weapon.

A new idea in the realm of gun safety has emerged. Armatix is now selling a .22 caliber handgun with an external safety. Basically if you’re not wearing this obviously styling watch the light on the gun doesn’t turn green. And as we all know green means go; its not go time unless you have your watch on. There is a proximity detector in the gun which enables all of this.

I can’t imagine a more useful application than for police. If it  works as advertised it would basically eliminate the possibility of an officer’s weapon being stolen and used against him. However you also have to wonder about adding an extra layer of possible failure in between a cop and doing his job or protecting himself. Its interesting to see the tech non the less

Also no one is suggesting cops would be toting a .22 around either. Just some food for thought.

SlipperyBrick.com

Although just a design concept these shelves are just awesome enough to get me thinking about how i should properly decorate the CaffiNation Lair. The idea looks simple enough to implement. I can’t help but think these shelves, depending on their price would be a huge hit in many a geek lair.

The Obvious end to this would of course being some truly smart geek finding a way to use conducive paint, or hidden wires, and make the shelving actually do something… The walls the limit here

OhGizmo!

“Life is not one big joke, its a series of little jokes all lined up in a row… there they are look at them” ~Richard Pryor, Moving

There must be something in the water supply this week, or the moon is in an odd alignment or possibly, just possibly everyone I know is having at bad week at the same time. So I’m here to spread a little story and a chuckle.

I have been rebuilding our oldest plotter in work; a plotter is a big printer for those who didn’t know. This Bike sized printer has had more than its share of problems, but today took the cake. I finish a massive rebuild of the drive system, fixing belt issues, tracking strips and tension-er assemblies. This rebuild took the better part of two weeks. Its sounds more like a car then a printer right now. I put the last screw in, turn it on and watch the standard settings / printer test scroll across the LCD.

Just as the first text flashes onto the screen a smoke signal puffs up from the back of the plotter. followed by another. Either we had been inhabited by very tiny indigenous people or something was very wrong. I pull the cord out of the wall with a nice big blue spark and spin the machine around only to find a big puff of smoke coming out of a hatch. open the hatch see a sparky / smokey mess fizzle out. Not… Good… So the parts are on order to fix this.

You know you’re having one of those days when your printer catches fire… little did I know there was actually an error message for it lp0 on fire! Now I know what to file the report under. Thanks Chris for the heads up re the error

I’m sure if you are even passingly interested in technology news you are probably aware that we are once again on the cusp of a big Apple event. This happens every year to some degree. Since the world went gaga for the iPod some time back this means tons of media coverage. Even the morning news shows now tart up a 4 day old story as Tech Bytes and feed it to the masses.

The iPod, the iPhone, iMac, iaM tired of it. Even the i fixture in front of the word speaks less of original thinking and more of branding, and its fast becoming hackneyed

I like a machine that does what it is supposed to do, hopefully with as much transparency as possible and then goes about its business. I have never been one to give in to devotion or cultish following of any tech products. At their core they are purchases to be made, or not. Ecosystems to support, as someone in tech support, and liars. All products lie to you either through omission, or through outright deception. Read the rest of this entry »