Published on December 28, 2007
One of my birthday gifts this year was a T-Shirt from Exploding Dog (Thanks Alison!) so I wanted to take a moment to share what Exploding Dog is.
http://www.explodingdog.com/
The artist, Sam, takes e-mails that he receives from the site’s viewers and turns them into drawings. They are extremely simple line drawings with solid shading, but the amount of expression and emotion he is able to convey is always incredible. Sometimes they look like the doodles of a 6 year old, but the details in the characters like weight and posture, combined with the compositions, prove to me that there’s a lot more going on in this artist’s head. The expression he gets out of the eyes alone, which look like random circles but always seem to show the right expression, astounds me. He has also been doing this for years. But maybe I’m just easily entertained. Here are a couple of my favorites.
“A Quiet Moment Alone”
“Timing is Everything”
They also make good wallpapers with a little modification:
Published on December 21, 2007
I saw this over at the Yanko Design Blog. A very clever solution to a problem that I think we all probably experience, but don’t really consider fixable.
Raise Me Up is an electric powerstrip designed to make it easy for one handed operation. Normally you would have to brace a powerstrip with one hand while pull the plug with the other. Raise Me Up uses a simple lever switch to connect and disconnect plugs.
Designer: Yoo-Kyung Shin
Via: Easy Plugs - Yanko Design
Published on December 9, 2007
Sam Steele is at it again. He has just updated his MobileScrobbler iPhone/Touch app (that I talked about earlier) to version 1.1.0 in his http://dev.c99.org/iphone/ installer source, while the Community installer source still shows version 1.0.4. Version 1.1.0 now includes streaming music from last.fm! You can search based on artist name or tag, as well as play your last.fm recommendations.
The app still logs any music you play in the iPod app. If you open MobileScrobbler while playing music stored on your device, the app will load all of the last.fm info for the current track, also giving you the option to “Love” or “Ban” the track, helping Last.fm learn your listening habits even more. Hitting “Skip” will move to the next song in your iPod playlist, without having to bring up the iPod controls or go to the iPod app. As far as logging options, you can now select whether you want tracks to be submitted over Edge (handy for anyone without a data plan).
My only issue with the app so far is that streaming music has a very low volume, but I’m sure that will get fixed in no time. Sam has added a Donate button on the Mobilescrobbler website, so be sure to throw a little love his way.
Published on December 7, 2007
That was fun while it lasted… the author stepped in to explain why the installer source for My Location wasn’t working anymore. From the Hackint0sh thread:
“Bad news, I’m afraid.
We have been requested by Google to remove access from the iPhone app to their web cell id service. The app is therefore suspended for now.”
It’s a shame that they’ve killed off such a useful application. Hopefully this means that an official update is around the corner for the iPhone.
Published on December 6, 2007
Google released a new beta of their Google Maps for Mobiles application that uses cell phone towers to triangulate the user’s position without needing GPS. The beta is limited to a few cell phone systems right now. I tried it on my Windows Mobile 5 phone and it works great. Naturally, iPhone owners instantly speculated about when Apple and Google would offer this functionality as an update to the iPhone’s Google Maps application.
It seems that www.sanoodi.com has beat Google and Apple to the punch, releasing a “My Location” app for the iPhone that seems to enable Cell Tower based positioning in Google Maps.
You have to be running native applications to get the functionality. Add www.sanoodi.com/iphone to your installer.app sources, and find the app under the Misc category.
I’ve only used both the official Google solution and this new solution from one location. They both seem to be just about equally accurate. I’m impressed that the “hacked” solution can be just as accurate as the official solution so soon.
Thanks to Wayne Sutton for the heads up.
Update: You can read more information at the Hackint0sh forums. This app isn’t using triangulation yet, which explains why it’s a good distance off most of the time. It passes the CellID of the tower you’re connect to and compared that to a database of towers. Then the position of that tower is fed into Google Maps.
