Geek T-Shirt Collection #9: Joost Doodle

One of the more discreete Joost T-Shirts, featuring the good old Doodle that used to show back in the day of the stand alone Joost client.

About Joost
(From Wikipedia)

Joost is a system for distributing recorded TV shows and other forms of video over the Web using peer-to-peer TV technology, created by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis (founders of Skype and Kazaa).

Joost began development in 2006. Working under the code name “The Venice Project”, Zennström and Friis assembled teams of some 150 software developers in about six cities around the world, including New York, London, Leiden and Toulouse. According to Zennström at a 25 July 2007 press conference about Skype held in Tallinn, Estonia, Joost had signed up more than a million beta testers, and its launch was scheduled for the end of 2007.

The teams are currently in negotiations with FOX networks. It has signed up with Warner Music, Indianapolis Motor Speedway Productions (Indianapolis 500, IndyCar Series) and production company Endemol for the beta.[2] In February 2007, Viacom entered into a deal with the company to distribute content from its media properties, including MTV Networks, BET and film studio Paramount Pictures.

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My Shit Turd picture got a feature on NewYorkShitty.com

Here’s my 2 cents for NewYorkShitty.com before 08 comes to an end…

Turd on the G Train

Me and my family saw this (and laughed hard as I took out the camera without hesitation) on our way into the first G car on Court Sq. (headed towards Greenpoint of course) First thing that came to my mind. “This is so NewYorkShitty.com material”

If you find the image funny, wait until you read the post by Miss Heather, which made this very “Dear Reader” have a real LOL.

Please Digg Up Miss Heather’s Post

About NewYorkShitty.com
Taken from it’s About Page:

As you can probably deduce from the title of this blog, I live in Green Brownpoint, Brooklyn. During my one block trek to the Franklin Corner Store one April day (in 2006) to get a sandwich, I was astonished at the sheer quantity of dog shit I encountered.

Green Street is not the easiest sidewalk to negotiate: the sidewalks are uneven and pock-marked with holes. Dodging piles of dog shit every five feet does not make this task any easier, much less when carrying delicious Cuban sandwiches. It was during this adventure through Poopland that I had the following epiphany:

1. This is ridiculous.

2. I wonder if the people who see fit to use my block as a pissoir would like it if I took a shit in the middle of their living room? Probably not.

3. This is like walking through a fucking mine field, so maybe…

4. if Queen Noor (and Lady Diana before her) can lobby against the use of land mines, perhaps I can raise awareness about the plague of unattended dog shit in my neighborhood. Call me the Dog Shit Queen of Greenpoint New York Shitty. I’ve been called worse.

Will ‘Smell’ ever be a part of entertainment?

I often get sad when I remember that there’s hardly a way to realize the duration of the present, but it’s comforting to know that we have books, photography, audio recording and video recording as very tangible ways to bring the present back.

There’s however one thing lacking in these technologies to relive the past or to tell stories, and I think it could be one of the most powerful ways of telling a story, smell. We all have at some moment smelled something in particular and have that smell help us vividly remember a moment 10 years ago like if it was today.

I keep thinking on how to do it, and I want to share an idea I had last night after thinking about it for a few minutes.

At first I thought, is there a way to quantify or mix chemicals to produce smells out of basic components, the same way we can do it with color (RGB or other schemes)? hmm, maybe, maybe not, I think there’s too many chemicals involved, so scratch that. However, I believe that a smell, once it hits your brain, it’s nothing more but a series of electrical impulses sent to a specific area of the brain which is in charge of making you smell something.

We need a sensor, our noses, and then that information, somehow must be transformed to electrical impulses, and I think this is the foundation to create a device to record smells.

First we’d need to have some sort of electronic nose, whoever could build this will have to take a serious look on how our nose detects smell in the air. I suppose we’ll have iteration after iteration of this device until it can record up scents not even humans can detect (this reminds me of mp3 and how it just ignores a lot we can’t hear).

Then, once you can record this information, the problem is… how do you get it in the brains of an audience, I don’t think we’d attach anything to our noses and have something mix substances to reproduce a smell, that’d be ridiculous, instead, we need to send an electrical signal to our brain so that the smell can be interpreted and smelt, without using our nose. So I suppose in theory, there will be at some point in history a device that can broadcast brainwaves to a lot of people on a movie theater audience, or on your home tv.

The applications would be awesome… Imagine playing Gears of War 8 with smell, the battlefield experience would be so much more engaging if you could smell the smoke, the lead, the blood, …

After that we’ll probably also figure out a way to record and broadcast weather conditions, and make us feel heat, or cold, or wind, all while sitting in front of our console, or on a movie theater.

If for some crazy reason you start developing this technology, or you know of someone doing it, please let me know, it’d just be awesome to know that this is happening during my lifetime.

Matt Pond PA offers his newest EP ‘The Freeep’ Free through Frostwire

From Frostclick.com

Download Torrent

mattpondpa.com

Matt Pond PA (commonly typeset as matt pond PA, or mppa for short) is an indie band formed in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1998 by singer/songwriter Matt Pond. Throughout the years the band released 7 albums, 9 EPs and played with artists like Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, Youth Group, Nickel Creek and Mae.
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Geek T-Shirt Collection #7 – MyBloop.com

There’s only 2 copies of this shirt, I made them on spreadshirt.com, the other one belongs to Fitim the original founder of MyBloop.com. I believe I’m the 3rd or 4th person to join the project, I did so around 2006, and it wasn’t until spring 2008 that we had the current look and feel of the site, along with the current logo which was created by El Blogo, an amazing graphic designer from Venezuela, who also gave birth to the FrostWire logo.

MyBloop.com According to Wikipedia

MyBloop is a file hosting and social networking website, based in New York, USA.

Angel Leon, one of the founders of the service once said:

“Google downloaded the Internet, MyBloop.com uploaded everybody’s hardrive to it“

Details of the service

* Free of cost
* No need to enter CAPTCHAs to access files
* No waiting time required to access files
* Unlimited number of simultaneous downloads
* No limit on the size of file the user can upload
* No limit on the number of files the user can upload and manage in account
* Ability to upload all types of files
* Ability to stream .mp3 files, without the need to download them (with a flash interface)
* Ability to stream .flv files, without the need to download them (with a flash interface)
* Ability to stream .wma files, without the need to download them (with Windows Media Player plugin)
* Ability to stream .wmv files, without the need to download them (with Windows Media Player plugin)
* Ability to organize the music files in playlists
* Uploaded images are displayed in embedded form (no need to download them to see them)
* Ability to organize files in folders
* Ability to delete files
* Ability to rename uploaded files
* Files are never deleted (unless the user deletes them, of course)
* Ability to upload multiple files at the same time
* Ability to mark files as “private”, so only people that know (or guess) the exact URL of the files/folders can access them
* No discrimination against people based on their location (unlike Megaupload, for example)
* Free and open source, cross-platform software, that allows the user to upload files from the desktop (BloopLoader)

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jQuery tag wrapping

Many times you’ll be working on something in HTML that could be long and repetitive, and then for some reason you need to edit the entire thing to wrap each of the tags on some other tags, a common example would be to link many elements.

Take this example, there’s a bunch of photos, they’re all contained in divs that have a css class called “photos”, inside we just throw
a bunch of <img> tags, and all of a sudden our boss tells us he wans to have every image on that page linked to “http://domain.com/photos”. jQuery to the rescue, no need to wrap each <img> with <a href=””> by hand, you can do it all in one line

So if the code looks like this:

       <div class="photos">
            <img src="http://domain.com/0670027481_m.jpg"/>
            <img src="http://domain.com/211161aa99_m.jpg"/>
            <img src="http://domain.com/173bb0cd6_m.jpg"/>
        </div>
        <div class="photos">
            <img src="http://domain.com/841fd90b5b_m.jpg"/>
            <img src="http://domain.com/52dda2cee5_m.jpg"/>
            <img src="http://domain.com/b569399599_m.jpg"/>
        </div>
        <div class="photos">
            <img src="http://domain.com/8806e863a4_m.jpg"/>
            <img src="http://domain.com/5e43aa95fe_m.jpg"/>
            <img src="http://domain.com/68a74a088c_m.jpg"/>
        </div>

        <div class="tshirt-photos">
            <img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3149/3113619519_72ce82c545_m.jpg"/>
            <img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3236/3105792155_99f2388869_m.jpg"/>
            <img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2114/2372582266_765842fae9_m.jpg"/>
        </div>

With jQuery you can match all the <img> elements, and wrap them all with “<a href=”http://domain.com/photos”></a>” in a single line of code:

$(document).ready(function() { $(".photos img").wrap('<a href="http://domain.com/photos">') })

So to explain how it works, when the document is ready (when it’s finished loading) the function inside is called back, it will use the jQuery selector $(“.photos img”) to match all the <img> tags contained withing elements of css class “photos”, then it applies the wrap() function, which will wrap the matched elements with the given html tags.

About jQuery

jQuery is a lightweight JavaScript library that emphasizes interaction between JavaScript and HTML. It was released January 2006 at BarCamp NYC by John Resig.

Dual licensed under the MIT License and the GNU General Public License, jQuery is free and open source software.

jQuery contains the following features:

  • DOM element selections
  • DOM traversal and modification, (including support for CSS 1-3 and basic XPath)
  • Events
  • CSS manipulation
  • Effects and animations
  • Ajax
  • Extensibility
  • Utilities – such as browser version and the each function.
  • JavaScript Plugins

jQuery Documentation

Recession on a country with lines for $5 coffee, really?

Either the recession is a media stunt, or people don’t know the value of the money they got left.

Last week I traveled by car from Washington,DC to New York, and on every service station I stopped along the highway, it was pretty much impossible to get a starbucks coffee because the lines were ridiculously long.

I thought it was a Manhattan phenomenon that so much people would want to pay for expensive coffee, given that you can actually have really good coffee for $1 or less if you think about it.

Has the dollar lost so much value, or we no longer think about how much things are worth?

To put it in perspective, I often think about the cost of energy and all of the things you can do with a gallon of gas.

The most expensive gallon of gas I’ve seen so far in the United States has been about $5 and we were outraged. But seriously, we’re paying way more for coffee.

To get a gallon you’d need about 16 cups, let’s say each small cup of starbucks costs $3, that’s $48 a gallon. The average car holds up to 15 gallons, you’d have to pay about $720 to fill up the tank.

Coffee is a freaking renewable resource, it can grow on it’s own for all we know, why do we accept to pay so much for it?

Oil heats your home, Oil is used to make electricity so you can read this, Oil can transport you and your family with a lot of shit in the car for miles, it’s been extracted out of the earth, it’s been processed by super expensive technology, there’s shitload of R&D to find it, if it wasn’t for it, pretty much billions of people wouldn’t even exist, we couldn’t travel or transport goods, and best of all, it’s non renewable… why the hell is it so cheap? or is the right question, why is coffee so damn expensive?

Fashion, laws of reason don’t apply

If George Boole would enter Lord & Taylors, he’d come back 15 minutes later with an Ak47 after loosing his mind and shoot everyone in the store for being so stupid.

If I showed you this, how much would you say it’s worth, a black jacket and white shirt for a woman, that pretty much looks like an every day use garment

$50, or maybe even $150 for the whole thing (and I still think that’s expensive) right?

Think again…

$200 for the shirt, and $500 for the jacket, $700 fucking dollars! And that’s without shoes, skirt and jewelry, seriously women, what are you thinking? are you thinking?

And then I looked around me, and there was this herd of women lurking around the store, looking at all the clothes like if they were hunting for their prey, they had this twisted look in their eyes as they checked every piece of clothing.

And why? Why do they even there pricing a jacket for $500 (or more, I saw even more expensive ugly crap in there) Because I think that Fashion companies rely on the fact that there’s dumb ass people that have no clue on what to do with the money, and who have lost perspective of all the things they could be doing with the same amount of money, or who really don’t have a clue of basic aritmetics, or the “greather than” operator, and that a higher numbers on a price tag means more money?

Sometimes I really feel like saying Recession my ass, and I often wonder if all the people being layed off are just suffering the consequences of the irrational fear on investors, which has been manufactured by the media puppeteers, who sometimes decide to sell us Britney’s clubbing stunts and another day scare us with “the crisis”.

And Fucking Christmas, every year I see how much faker it gets. With so many layoffs the TV should be telling you to keep your money for food, and to just go and enjoy your family and plan on what to do next year. But that’s a whole different subject for another post.

Geek T-Shirt Collection #6 – Strands.com

geektshirt-strands

Thanks to Kalong from Strands.com for sending this one.

About Strands

Strands, Inc. is a developer of social recommendation technologies founded in late 2003 by Dr. Francisco J. Martin.

Strands develops technologies to better understand people’s tastes and help them discover new things they will like. Strands has created a social recommendation engine that provides real-time recommendations of products and services through computers, mobile phones and other Internet-connected devices.

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