Given how much I post about Apple products, I really want to give kudos to Dell for the genuine innovations in their latest laptop. This Ars Technica article describes the cool new features of the Z600 laptop:
Completely wireless docking (screen, keyboard/mouse, audio) via a compatible wireless station. No need for an ugly proprietary dock connector. I want this.
Wireless charging via an induction stand. It won’t charge from your couch, but it’s nice to not have to deal with a cable.
Face-aware locking uses the built-in web cam to lock the screen whenever the user steps out of sight. If it isn’t annoyingly aggressive, this is super cool.
Always-on functionality to continuously fetch new mail. I wouldn’t use this (real-time is overrated), but clever nonetheless.
Gimmicky touch-strip on the side of the screen. Well, they can’t all be winners :)
All in all, a very impressive feature set that demonstrates real creativity. I hope Apple follows suit on some of these, especially the wireless dock.
These dust storm pictures from The Big Picture blog are stunning. This Flickr gallery also has a bunch of great shots. San Francisco looks like this most days, but unfortunately our fog is a dull grey.
I’m certainly not the first to post these picture, but this balloon launch is AWESOME:
The largest mass ascent of hot air balloons took place recently at the biennial Lorraine Mondial Air Ballons rally in Chambley, France. Pilots from around the world lifted off in 329 balloons on 26 July.
The Social History of the MP3 is a Pitchfork article that puts MP3s in the context of previous technological revolutions. It’s full of interesting nuggets:
When radio came along, its broadcasts created communities of music-listening strangers, physically distant from each other but connected through the knowledge that they were listening to the same song at the same time. Where radio brought listeners together as a listening public, the LP started splitting them apart. The LP and 45 rpm formats took the phonograph, which had been in existence for over half a century, to the masses, right as the American middle-class was going suburban and privatizing their lives. We could then use musical objects like we’d been using literature and art for centuries prior: as collectibles, and signifiers of personal taste. The emergence of the cassette–the first sturdy, re-writeable music technology– allowed us to “manufacture” our own music in the privacy of our own homes and recirculate it at our will, through mixtape trading and full-album dubbing.
How the telegraph created commodity futures:
Weirdly enough, this particular effect of mp3s and peer-to-peer networks– that information travels much faster than physical goods– most closely resembles that of the telegraph on the 19th century commodity markets. Before that innovation– the Internet’s great-grandfather– individual markets based in major cities were separated by hundreds of miles, and goods could only travel as fast as railroads could take them. Yet because information about crop conditions could travel via telegraph exponentially faster than the actual crops, the exchange of money for physical commodities was largely replaced by a futures market, based on what would happen.
On the pace of online music
The ideal would have been that a new network of independent music lovers would have elevated different types of music, or even found new ones, the way nascent rock’n'roll, honky tonk, bluegrass, and R&B benefited thanks to the 45. But online, new genres risk being strangled in the crib before anyone knows they exist, and people are “done” with new albums before the cover art has been approved.
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