I just started untangling wires yesterday in preparation for retangling them under the same desk in a new house come Sunday. How perfect that LifeHacker should choose this week to present the Top 10 Ways to Get Cables Under Control.

Via GeekPress.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 06:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last night (Friday, October 26^th), at Phil's kind invitation, I had the distinct pleasure of attending the Boulder Future Salon's monthly meeting and participating in a lively and far-flung consideration of the month's selected topic: "Moore's Law"

Continue reading "Boulder Future Salon Considers "Moore's Law"" »

Posted by Michael S. Sargent at 03:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This Reuters article:
Centennial time capsule car found ruined | Oddly Enough | Reuters

Got me thinking about a couple of things. First, how might the time capsule have been done better (please confine speculation to approximately mid-century technology), and second, what would constitute

"an advanced product of American industrial ingenuity with the kind of lasting appeal that will still be in style 50 years from now."

with respect to early twenty-first century technology?

Please discuss in the comments.

P.S. I think I'll do some checking into how the economics of the capsule contents might have been improved. I'll let you know if anything particularly interesting comes of that.

UPDATE (Moments later): a bit of searching yields a price range of about $900 to $11,000 for similar era Belvederes in conditions ranging from semi-restored to ... iffy. A restored 1956 done by hot-rod legend Boyd Coddington's shop goes for $29,500

UPDATE FROM STEPHEN:

I'm reminded of Doc Brown's 70 year preservation of his time traveling Delorean:

Notice how this was portrayed in Back to the Future III. Dr. Brown put the vehicle up on pylons. It's covered. And it's in a sealed room.

A mine would be far superior to a natural cave because caves tend to be damp (they're usually formed by water). The preserver could choose a place in the mine where drainage is assured. Barring a cave-in or the renewed mining activities, this sort of time capsule would be perfect.

But even as portrayed in BTTF III, certain parts - like the rubber wheels - didn't fare so well. Even a carefully preserved car would need a lot of work before it would be ready for the highway.

Posted by Michael S. Sargent at 09:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In a way, this post is a sequel to my recent "Closing the Digital Divide" post... Think of this series as Better Living Through Cheap Electronics.

I'm rough on cell phones. Any cell phone I carry will be folded, spindled and mutilated before being dropped from a height onto concrete (2005's phone), or fumbled into a swimming pool (1999's phone), or put through the washing machine (this year's mishap).

So when I discovered my very clean but very dead cell this week in the wash, I figured I had three options:

1. Shell out a couple of hundred bucks for a new phone at my Cingular dealer;

2. Get the same phone either free or cheap from the same dealer by signing an extended service agreement; or

3. Buy a Cingular-compatible phone cheaply on eBay and drop in the SIM card from the dead phone.

Confident that I will kill whatever phone I choose within a year, option 1 seems foolish. And I don't like option 2 because I don't want to get locked in forever with one carrier. If I had signed a new service agreement every time I destroyed a phone my commitment to Cingular would now stretch out a decade. What if Verizon offers a better deal next month? Man, this bird gonna fly!

Since I hadn't lost the washed phone I knew I could just transfer the SIM chip into another Cingular-compatible phone. So I was just about to purchase one off eBay - and wait the week or so for it to be shipped to me - when I learned about option 4:

4. Buy a $20 GoPhone.

Yeah, that's right. One of those pay-as-you-go phones that you'd buy for Ralphie:

The helpful clerk at Wal-Mart explained that you don't have to pay-as-you-go if you don't want to (paying as you go costs much more per minute than being on a standard plan). There's a pay-as-you-go SIM included in the GoPhone package. Ignore that and drop your regular Cingular SIM into the Cingular GoPhone and you'll be up and running immediately with your old number on your regular service plan. Your phone book list should make the trip too.

$20 later I'm talking again. And this isn't some ugly clunker of a phone either:

The GoPhone wouldn't be sufficient for everyone. There's no camera, fancy games, or Internet surfing. It's a voice phone that can also send and receive text messages. That's about it.

But I carry a PDA for those other functions. For me, this is perfect. This is the disposable phone I've been waiting for. I could destroy a half-dozen of these $20 models in '07 and be money ahead.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 08:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)