52books:

A few weeks ago, the Massapequa Library Bookmobile, which was taken off the road last summer after 48 years of service, was towed away to Alec Baldwin’s Amagansett property. Mr. Baldwin, who grew up in Massapequa and whose father taught at the local high school, paid $1,000 for the forsaken vehicle, the library’s director, Patricia Page, told the Transom.

“We were thinking of scrapping it and then he called us himself,” Ms. Page said. “I don’t know how he heard about it, but he used it when he was younger and he seems to have a feel for this community.”

A preview of Craig Ferguson’s robot skeleton sidekick, Geoff Peterson

sarahspy:

Hunter S. Thompson calls to complain about his incorrectly installed JVC DVD player. The voicemail was given to Jeremy Burkhardt at SpeakerCraft by the dealer Thompson called.

(via)

This looks really cool, but is also really stupid. What if you get your pants wet and your celphone turns into a grass stain?

applearts:

10 Futuristic Cell Phone Concepts

Interesting article, but not altogether true.

infoneernet:

Forget E-Books: The Future of the Book Is Far More Interesting

Take a long hard look at a book, any book. Pull a favorite off a shelf, dust off the top—maybe it’s the Bible, the Koran, a novel by Jane Austen or Leo Tolstoy. Perhaps you’re more into Dan Brown or Jacqueline Winspear mysteries, Doris Kearns Goodwin biographies, or you’ve dog-eared page after page in Skinny Bitch. You may even gravitate toward business books like Viral Loop, my latest. Now say your goodbyes, because there will soon be a day that you may view such analog contrivances as museum pieces, bought and sold on eBay as collectibles, or tossed into landfills.

Coming soon… It’s the end of the book as we know it, and you’ll be just fine. But it won’t be replaced by the e-book, which is, at best, a stopgap measure. Sure, a bevy of companies are releasing e-book readers-there’s Amazon’s Kindle, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, and a half dozen other chunks of not-ready-for-primetime hardware. But technology marches on through predictable patterns of development, with the initial form of a new technology mirroring what came before, until innovation and consumer demand drive it far beyond initial incremental improvements. We are on the verge of re-imagining the book and transforming it something far beyond mere words.

Take note: The first battlefield tanks looked like heavily armored tractors equipped with cannons; early automobiles were called “horseless carriages” for a reason; the first motorcycles were based on bicycles; the first satellite phones were as clunky as your household telephone. A decade ago, when newspapers began serving up stories over the Web, the content mirrored what was offered in the print edition. What the tank, car and newspaper have in common is they blossomed into something far beyond their initial prototypes. In the same way that an engineer wouldn’t dream of starting with the raw materials for a carriage to design a rad new sports car today, newspapers won’t use paper or ink anymore. Neither will books. But mere text on a screen, the stuff that e-books are made of, won’t be enough.

» via Fast Company

Google Street View now live for Winnipeg

My 79 year-old mother is still discovering the glories of the Internet. Today’s nugget? Email fonts. (And yes, Chickie is her name.)

Some woman emailed me last week about catering. We had seven emails back and forth on it, until she said she’d pick it up on a certain date, did I want a credit card number, etc. Then an hour later I get a message containing only the text:

***** would like to recall the message, “Sweets”.

What is this, I thought? I emailed her. Nothing. I emailed again later. Nothing. Who the Hell does this? Do you understand how the Internet works? You can’t recall a message, like some crummy GM car. It’s not like shooting a carrier pigeon as it’s flying away. The email’s out there sugar. Have the balls to say, I changed my mind. That I get. Recalling a message? That’s just goofy.

(I had to look this up, and I now guess she was using Outlook. Some genius MS engineer invented this feature but forgot to mention that it only works if the person at the other end has Outlook too. [Which I don’t because I’m not an idiot.])

postmodernista:mudwerks:

Messed-Up Daily Show DVR Description Is Actually Mostly Accurate — Daily Intel

trendd:Animated short shows how Google street car takes care of your privacy.

(via googlejapan)

freshphotons:

(via makingofamovie)

I may be biased because I’m a traditional bookseller, but I think that ebooks are not the wave of the future. People stare at their computer screens and blackberries all day and all night. Does anyone else feel bleary-eyed, or is it just me? Nothing can replace a real book. Have you ever had to reboot a book? Had the book die because the batteries weren’t charged? Ever had to call tech support because your copy of Infinite Jest wasn’t working?

infoneernet:

According to a new report by Forrester Research’s Sarah Rotman Epps, eBooks and eReaders are slowly but surely becoming mainstream. However, while Amazon is the current market leader among early adopters of this technology, Rotman Epps predicts that later adopters will not feel the same loyalty towards Amazon. This, according to the report, will open up a lot of opportunities for other players in the market, including Sony and large mass-market retailers like Walmart.

According to Forrester’s data, just about 1.5% of all US online consumers currently own an eReader - but it’s important to note that this number is up from 0.6% a year ago. Forrester estimates that about 3 million eReader will be sold in the US in 2009. By 2013, this number will grow to 13 million. Now, more consumers than ever before are aware of the existence of eReaders (37%) and the number of survey respondents who intend to buy an eReader in the next six months has grown to 6% compared to 2% last year.

Seen at ReadWriteWeb