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(2 unread)![Permalink for 'Orangutan Hacks Snack Machine [Image Cache]'](/hacks/themes/default/web/media/pl.gif)
At the Hanover zoo, an orangutan must pull a succession of strings before being rewarded with a nut. Sometimes, the experience gets a bit frustrating:
We've all been there, buddy. We've all been there. [Telegraph via Animals don't think...][Image by Rex Features]
After publishing the The Most Accurate, Highest Resolution Earth View to Date, it got extremely popular: The day after, countless newspapers and blogs worldwide reposted the story. NASA wrote to us, surprised. Why? Because everyone already knew about it:
Yes, the Blue Marble is the iPhone's default screen, which have been seen by millions of iPhone owners and by everyone who has read about the iPhone since 2007. In fact, the image has been public since 2002:
From: *************** <***********@nasa.gov>
Subject: Question on Blue Marble image from NASA
Date: March 2, 2010 8:17:49 PM EST
To: Jesus DiazMr. Diaz
Hello. I am the photo editor for the Public Affairs Office at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
We were happy to see you featured our Blue Marble image on your website last week.
http://gizmodo.com/5478787/the-most-accurate-highest-resolution-earth-view-to-date#comments
We also featured it on our Flickr page but it has really taken off on the web. We had over 500,000 hits in the last two days alone.
Given that this is an image from 2002 I'm just curious what prompted you to post it on your site? Or did you pick it up from someplace other than our site? I see at the bottom it says "NASA via Twitter"
Really, I'm just curious because it's gotten so much play over that few days.
Thank you for your interest in our work.
Take care,
Rebecca
The reason? Because it's a beautiful image, that's all. One that makes you marvel at the beauty of our planet, and how tiny and insignificant we are, but also how unique and rare. [Gizmodo—Thanks to John Hermann for telling me about the obvious]
Don't forget to check NASA Goddard's Flickr page. They keep posting really cool stuff.
newVideoPlayer( {"type":"video","player":"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/SfIbuaIw8fk&hl=en&fs=1&fmt=22","customParams":[],"width":500,"height":412,"ratio":0.824,"flashData":"","embedName":null,"objectId":null,"noEmbed":false,"source":"youtube"} ); The mobile OS running on this old Toshiba TG01 looks like Windows Phone 7 and it mostly acts like Windows Phone 7. But in reality it's a clever user interface skin covering up Windows Mobile 6.5.
Put together by a fellow named LeSScro, this interface tweak can make older WinMo phones pretend that they can handle Windows Phone 7 and will hopefully be made available soon. [Pocket Now via Mobile Crunch]
newVideoPlayer( {"type":"video","player":"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/6BUTK1c3L8c&hl=en&fs=1&fmt=22","customParams":[],"width":500,"height":412,"ratio":0.824,"flashData":"","embedName":null,"objectId":null,"noEmbed":false,"source":"youtube"} ); Take a Linksys running custom firmware, tap into the hardware to power a circuit controlling the locks, and SSH into the router with custom iPhone and Android apps to flip the circuit. Easy, right? [Sunlight via Make via Engadget]
The beardier parts of the web-o-sphere have been abuzz about HTML5, the next version of the language that powers our internet. Will it revolutionize web apps? Will it kill Flash video? Will it fix our gimpy iPads? Yes... and no.
The tech press recently transformed HTML5 from a quiet inevitability to an unlikely savior: When YouTube and Vimeo started testing it, it's was invoked as a Flash-killer, and the emancipator of web video. When Google used it to design a new Google Voice web app, among others, it was framed as the murderer the of the OS-specific application. When the iPad was announced with no Flash support, HTML5 was immediately pegged as a salve, not to mention a way to get around the "closed system" of Apple's App Store.
It doesn't take much imagination to draw these stories into an appealing narrative about how the app-less, plugin-free, totally web-based future is just a browser update away. The thinking goes, somewhere in this impenetrable 125,000-word published standard, you'll find the answer to the internet's every ailment: its clunky, proprietary plugins, its stunted web apps, its fundamental shortcomings as a platform for rich media. At the heart of each of these theories lies a grain of truth, but none of them are totally—or even mostly—true.
Here's what's really going on. HTML is already working its way into the underpinnings of web apps you use every day, making them faster and more stable than those relying on Java or other plugins. They're more like real apps. It's helping us inch closer to the dream of having real applications available at all times, on any platform.
HTML is also setting forth a vision of media—specifically video—that doesn't rely on crashy, resource-intensive proprietary plugins. Look in your plugins folder, you will probably see four video plugins at a minimum. HTML is a standard with an optimistic view of the future: You launch your browser, and whatever site you visit, whatever media you choose to play, your browser just magically supports it, without the frustration, confusion and added instability of a plug-in.
But at heart HTML is just a framework, a glimpse, and an ideal: Its real effect on the internet continues to be defined by the companies and web developers who choose to adopt its many pieces—and it is further shaped by those who don't.
The BasicsBefore we get into what HTML5 means, we have to talk about what it is, and to talk about what it is, we need to talk about what it's built upon.
Hypertext markup language, or HTML, is the language underneath every web page you've ever been to. The language, along with its various complementary technologies (see: CSS, Javascript), has become immensely complex over the years, but the concept is simple. HTML is what turns this:
<u><em><strong><a href="http://gizmodo.com">Hello!</a></strong></em></u>
Into this:
It's basically a set of instructions that a website hands to a browser, which the browser then reads and converts into a formatted page, full of text, images, links and whatever else.
Here, try this: Right-click anywhere on this webpage, and click "View Page Source," or "View Source," or something to that effect. Your eyes will be assaulted with a wall of inscrutable text. You'll see evidence of syntax, but your brain won't be able to parse it. Your eyes will glaze over, and you will close the window. This, my friends, is HTML. But you probably already knew that, because it's 2010, basic web languages are basically in our drinking water. So what's this "5" business?
Somewhere in the central command center basement of the internet, there's a group of guys who maintain the standard, or the rules, of HTML. In the case of HTML5, the buck stops with the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG), and to a lesser extent, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). It is through these independent standards organizations that new features are codified and presented to the public, and later—in theory—supported by various browsers, no matter what company is behind them.
In the early nineties, the W3C and a few influential torchbearers would collect various new web features thought up by different browser makers, publishing these standards with the hope that we didn't end up with different internets for different browsers. By the mid to late nineties, the standards had grown in both size and stature, then serving as the de facto guide for browser makers and developers alike. (If this sounds a bit rosy, the reality was far grimmer—just ask any seasoned web developer about Internet Explorer, version 6 or earlier.)
Despite an occasionally rocky road, HTML standards went beyond being just a record of changes in web technology; eventually they became the blueprint to push them forward. Still, standards are guides, not laws, and no browser maker has to adopt each and every revision.
The last major revision of the HTML standard, version 4.01, was published in 1999. HTML5 hasn't yet been formally codified, but it was born in 2004 and has been undergoing steady work and maintenance since. In the '90s, HTML discussion centered around topics like font coloration, or tables, or buttons, or something more esoteric. Today, a new HTML version means deep-down support for the modern web, namely web apps and video.
The New FeaturesThe HTML5 spec is more than just new tags and tools, but for users and developers, they're what matter most. Specifically, I'm talking about APIs, or application programming interfaces. It's because of these APIs (usually manifested as tags like <VIDEO> or <IMG>) that we'll soon be treated to a richer internet. And it's because of these APIs that when work on HTML5 started, it was called "Web Applications 1.0." Today, if you pick apart HTML5, these are the biggest pieces:
• Video. If you watch video on the internet, you're watching it through a plugin—a piece of software that works within your browser, but which isn't technically a part of it. A decade ago, this plugin may have been clunky RealPlayer software, semi-reliable Windows Media Player controls, or a QuickTime plugin that you were better off skipping altogether. Today, it's probably Flash or Microsoft Silverlight, or a newer, subtler Quicktime or Windows Media plugin. Whether you're playing a YouTube movie embedded on a web page, or just viewing a .mov file as you download it, your browser has to use the plugin.
HTML5 includes support for a simple tag that lets developers embed video in a page just like they'd embed a JPEG or other image, with a pointer to a file on a server. Packed along with the ability to read that video tag are a few rendering engines, which would decode the video without any kind of plugin. Embedding a video with HTML5 is as easy as embedding an image, provided the video codec is compatible with the browser's rendering engine. In terms of code, it can be as simple as this:
<video src="video.mp4" width="320" height="240"></video>
Boom. Video. Here's what some of the current rudimentary players look like:
-SublimeVideo (Safari 4, Chrome)
-YouTube (Safari 4, Chrome)
-Vimeo (Safari 4, Chrome)
-DailyMotion (Firefox, Safari 4, Chrome, Opera)
In theory, eliminating the video plugins means no extra CPU overhead, fewer crashes, and wider compatibility—if HTML 5 video was standard now, we wouldn't be stuck waiting for Adobe to port their plugin to our mobile phones, and Mac users wouldn't bring their systems to a crawl every time they tried to watch a YouTube video in HD. As a general rule, playing a video file through an extra plugin like Flash is going to be slower, buggier, and more resource-intensive than playing it through a browser's native decoder. That's why people are excited about HTML5 video.
• Offline storage: Remember Google Gears? It was a set of plugins for various browsers that let web apps, like Gmail or Zoho Writer (an online text editor), store content locally on your computer, so they could behave more like native apps. Gmail, for example, could then work without an internet connection. It wouldn't retrieve your new emails while offline, obviously, but it'd at least have a working interface and a database of your old emails, just like Outlook or Mail.app would. Well, Google abandoned Gears, because HTML5 basically supports the same thing, again, without a plugin.
-Here's a basic demo (Firefox 3.6, Safari 4, Chrome, Opera)
-And a more complex one, including lots of other tricks (Firefox 3.6, Safari 4, Chrome, Opera)
-Or, try Gmail on your iPhone or Android phone
• Drag-and-Drop Elements, and Document Editing. You know how you can drag and drop emails in Gmail? And how you type into text boxes, to post or send everything from Tweets to emails to forums posts? As it stands, these systems are built on a delicate, complicated stack of ad-hoc code tricks, which have worked fine up until now, but which could stand to be simplified. Even if you're not a developer, just know that this, in theory, translates to increased stability. And that's exactly what HTML5 proposes: Super-simple implementations of editable documents boxes, drag-and-drop page elements, and drawing surfaces.
-A helpful, ugly demo(Firefox 3.6, Chrome, Safari, Opera)
-And an exceedingly pretty one(Firefox 3.6, Chrome, Safari
• Locations services. Now a web app can tell where you are, if you choose to let it. Here's how that works. (Firefox 3.6, Chrome, Safari 4, Opera, iPhone)
There's a clear trend here. HTML5 is about video, and it's about far more stable yet complex web apps. These are the sources of excitement right now, but they're also the sources of confusion.
Hopes and DreamsOn the desktop, the transition to HTML5 will be largely seamless, though you'll notice an uptick in the quality, speed and richness of some apps you use all the time—think webmail, document editors, and text entry applications for starters. On mobile, the results will definitely be more pronounced. Remember Google's new Voice web app for the iPhone and Pre? Take away the browser controls, and it's almost indistinguishable from a native app.
The hope—and it's a realistic one—is that certain categories of web apps will supplant native apps. The advantages are obvious: If your document editor is online, it'll work consistently whether you're on an iPad or a Windows desktop; if your email client is a website, your messages are always available, and your read/unread status is always in sync. Web apps like Google Documents will get faster, more consistent, and more universally compatible. Still, you're not going to see Photoshop or Final Cut in your browser window anytime soon. If this dream sounds familiar, it's because it's very old, and already realized in many ways: Ancient services like Hotmail mark its genesis, and the app-less Chrome OS is its eventual, if limited, endpoint.
The second dream, and the one you've probably been hearing the most about lately, is that HTML5 video could kill Flash. As in, render Adobe's plugin, which most internet-connect computers already have installed, completely obsolete, simultaneously making Apple's iPad and other mobile devices more capable of getting at all the media the web has to offer.
Vimeo, DailyMotion and YouTube (YouTube!) have all recently launched pilot programs for HTML5 video technology. On the surface this is very exciting. Their players are basic, but they work, and there are some rather spectacular demos of more advanced HTML5 video players doing the rounds right now. The latest builds of the WebKit rendering engine, which comprises the guts of both Mac OS and iPhone/iPad (mobile) Safari, Google's Chrome OS, the Pre's browser and the Android browser, among others, support full-screen HTML5 video. The iPad notoriously won't ship with Flash, but Apple's desktop (Mac OS) Safari is one of the first browsers to fully support the HTML5 video discussed here, the natively rendered video used by YouTube and Vimeo in their tests. So the stars are aligning for an HTML5 video takeover, right? No, they're really not.
Managing ExpectationsAs I mentioned, the WHATWG and W3C can publish as many standards as they want, but in order for any to actually matter, browsers have to support them—and by browsers, I mean all major browsers, from nimble, rapidly-developed apps like Opera and Chrome to Internet Explorer, which, by the way, is still globally the most popular dashboard to the internet. Take the <VIDEO> tag as an example: Safari and Chrome do support it, both the HTML code and the native rendering of a couple of associated video formats. Firefox supports the tag, but doesn't support decoding of the key video format currently used by YouTube and Vimeo. Internet Explorer doesn't support it at all without a plugin, and isn't the whole point of HTML5 to get rid of plugins?
Just as different browsers update their rendering engines at different speeds, users of browsers update their software even less predictably, and some don't update at all. Despite Microsoft's aggressive IE8 evangelism, IE6 was only just bumped from being the Number One browser in the world. It was released in 2001, when HTML 4 was just learning to walk and HTML5 was but a glint in the W3C's eye. IE6 will never work with HTML5 video. But it plays video just fine with Flash.
Even on the cutting edge, there are serious roadblocks to widespread adoption of HTML5 video, the most dangerous being video codecs. Because HTML5 supports video embedding natively, browsers will have to be able to decode embedded video files in lieu of the plugin that use to do it for them. The current working HTML5 standard doesn't explicitly define a video format to be used with the tag—and as luck would have it, there are now two formats vying for the job.
• Ogg Theora is a free codec standard—free as in open source—which most browsers that support HTML5 video support right now. It's an attractive option on paper, because browser companies don't have to pay any licensing fees to include the ability to decode it in their software. The trouble is, it's notoriously inefficient, and, perhaps because of this, it's not too popular. Google's standards guru Chris DiBona infamously said:
If [YouTube] were to switch to Theora and maintain even a semblance of the current quality, it would take up most available bandwidth across the internet.
True or not, as a codec standard Ogg Theora isn't gonna cut it, even though from a business point of view, it's ideal.
• h.264 video suffers from pretty much the opposite situation. Based on a codec standard that's natively supported in many mobile phones, it's what Vimeo and YouTube are running in their respective experiments. These video sites' already store their mobile-quality libraries in h.264—what do you think streams to your iPhone YouTube app, since Flash isn't supported? So enabling h.264 streaming is as simple as developing a player interface, which takes no time and even less resources. It's also efficient—that's why it's popular in the first place. One problem though: It's proprietary.
Yes, if you want to build a browser that plays back h.264-based video with HTML5, you need to be prepared to pay millions of dollars to the companies that own the format's patents. Beyond the basic cost issue, some deem it risky to put the internet's entire video ecosystem into the hands of some obscure rightsholders, whose whims could change down the road. (Who, exactly? These guys!)
Google and Apple have so far been okay with the royalties, but Mozilla, creator of Firefox, is taking a more conservative longview. As Mozilla's Chris Blizzard insists, there's a precedent for these worries:
Because it's still early in H.264's lifespan it's extremely advantageous to lightly enforce the patents in the patent pool. MP3 and GIF both prove that if you allow liberal licensing early in a technology's lifespan, network effects create much more value down the road when you can change licenses to capture value created by delivering images and data in those formats. Basically wait for everyone to start using it and then make everyone pay down the road.
So, while h.264 is a shoo-in for the job, it would probably be unbelievably perilous to sign it up.
If this seems like a lot to digest, don't worry! Despite the thousands of urgent words spilled on this subject, it doesn't really matter. Flash is here for a while, because nobody can get their act together.
First let's talk about DRM, a sore subject, but something you can't not talk about. Flash video supports it. HTML5 video doesn't, as it stands. Could you imagine a Hulu on which every video is a right-click away from saving to your computer? A Netflix where you keep what you stream? I mean, sure, you can imagine this, but there's not enough Tums in Los Angeles for Hollywood execs to stomach that discussion. No DRM, no movies or TV shows. Simple as that. And if the fight over a basic HTML5 video standard is fraught, just imagine how tough it'd be to get Mozilla, Apple, Google, Opera and Microsoft to agree on DRM.
Meanwhile, the test runs show, in reality, how little weight is being thrown behind HTML5 video at the moment. This is how YouTube describes their HTML5 initiative, which caused such a fuss last week:
In the last year our community has made it clear that they want YouTube to do more with HTML5. To meet this demand we recently rolled out HTML5 support in TestTube, a destination on YouTube where we routinely experiment with different products. Some of the products in TestTube are successful and rolled out to the wider community. Others, however don't make it beyond TestTube. We're still in the early stages, but our hope is to continue this active and ongoing discussion around emerging Web standards.
Can you feel the enthusiasm? YouTube's HTML5 test is just that, a test. There's no convincing evidence of idealistic shift in the works. YouTube's future hinges on the ability to integrate ads into their videos, to sell access to DRM'd content, and to reach the largest audience possible. Until HTML5 video can pull this off, Google and YouTube are going to keep on doing what they've been doing—using Flash.
Lastly, Adobe has interests in this discussion too, and is working frantically to push Flash to virtually all mobile smartphone platforms that don't already have it. Meanwhile HTML video tag support on smartphones is barely the discussion phases—it's plagued with as many problems, if not more, than desktop HTML 5 video.
And we haven't even talked about the other holes in the HTML5 Murders Flash! narrative. What about the spec's glaring lack of ability to replace Flash's other, non-video functions? Sure, increasing browser support for scaled vector graphics and HTML5's Canvas tag go a short way to creating vivid, visual web applications without plugins, as does the wide array of Javascript tools already available to web developers.
But what about games? And more importantly for developers who like paychecks, what about animated, interactive ads (some which are overlaid on the aforementioned YouTube videos)? The internet's not going to give up on those anytime soon, and the non-Flash web technologies we have now aren't going to cut it for years.
As I said way back at the beginning, part of the job of an HTML spec is to codify what's already being done by developers and browser makers. As such, there's a very good chance that HTML5 is partially supported by your desktop browser. If you have a smartphone with a WebKit-based browser, you already use web apps that leverage the technology. This will simply become more common, in a mundane, linear way: Google, Apple, WebKit, Mozilla, Opera, and yes, even Microsoft will continue to include new features in their software, and developers will begin to leverage it as soon as they can. Web apps will get smarter, faster and more powerful, even if you don't really notice it. You'll worry less about having a constant internet connection, and you'll probably install few native applications on your phone or laptop.
For the foreseeable future, video on the internet is going to remain almost exactly as-is. If anything, Flash will become more entrenched in the short term, as the YouTubes and Hulus of the world expand their catalogs with more DRM'd content, and continue building their desktop content platforms around the plugin. As for mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad, for whom Flash seems eternally out of reach, video delivery will move increasingly toward apps, which content companies can tightly control, and not toward HTML5 video, which—all other problems aside—they really can't.
HTML5 has a place in online video, and I expect companies to continue testing it, playing with it, and expanding their uses for it. I expect browsers to continue increasing support for it—hey, maybe even mobile Safari!—but don't stake your hopes, or a specific gadget purchase, on its immediate promise. An internet where native web languages have killed all plugins, including Flash, is just too far away to talk about coherently.
HTML5 is infiltrating the web, not tearing it down and building it back up. Like the standard itself, the HTML5 web will evolve slowly, with web technologies gradually supplanting tools you use now. You'll notice it, but you'll have to watch closely.
Hat tip to Lifehacker, for noticing—and explaining—the groundswell all the way back in December
Still something you wanna know? Does some other tech term have your fleshy processing unit in a tangle? Send questions, tips, addenda or complaints to tips@gizmodo.com, with "Giz Explains" in the subject line
If you want to give your time lapse videos a nice, smooth pan, try looking next to the pans. Using only an old school kitchen timer and a Go Pro camera, a Make reader whipped up this neat video.
The simplest hacks are the best kind, and this $7 solution is definitely satisfying by that measure. By the way, did you see what I did up there with those "pans"? [Make]
GeoHot, one of the fathers of the iPhone's jailbreak community, has just released the exploit that'll unleash all sorts of promising PS3 hackery, just like he promised. We can't wait for the homebrew and, frankly, piratical features this enables.
From the source:
This is the coveted PS3 exploit, gives full memory access and therefore ring 0 access from OtherOS. Enjoy your hypervisor dumps. This is known to work with version 2.4.2 only, but I imagine it works on all current versions.
You can find it at his page for now—try it out, let us know how it works! [GeoHot via Kotaku—Thanks Richard!]
At least with those Kanye West Venetian blind glasses, you could kinda see. These things are just two screens on your face, blocking your entire field of vision. Get ready to run into walls, just like Lady Gaga probably does.
DIY Lady GaGa Video Glasses from Angela M. Sheehan on Vimeo.
So this hack is pretty much just two small digital picture frames (like those ones you find on a keychain at your local CVS) stuck into the eye-holes of a pair of big sunglasses. You put the word "POP" or whatever on each screen, take off your pants, and presto! You're Lady Gaga. Now you just have to hope that people remember who she is by the time Halloween 2010 rolls around. [Instructables via Engadget]
I've never seen this Ericofon design before, because I was -30 when it was released in 1956, but it's so stylish and cool that I'm glad someone decided to hack it into a Bluetooth receiver.
The project brings a lot of the Ericofon's charm into this century, with the ringtone replicated and even a dialtone, for anyone who remembers what that is. Instructions and documentation of the process are available on the creator's site, but you'll have to find your own Ericofon to do it. [BTEricofon via Engadget]
With an unexpected snowfall blanketing much of the East Coast for New Years, someone—either a traffic worker with a sense of humor or an average Joe with a sense of civic duty—reprogrammed this New England traffic sign.
This time last year we posted a quick bit on how weirdly easy it was to hack road signs. Before that post led to the rash of hacks, usually featuring some permutation of zombies, Nazis, and the Apocalypse, Mark mused:
You should never hack a road sign as part of a prank. But what if you know that there really are Zombies ahead? What then??
Well, it seems like some New Englander found that the roads were, in fact, wicked slippery and thought it prudent to warn his fellow drivers such. A further message to my driving bros: winter driving is hella dangerous as it is, save the texting for when you reach your destination. [Reddit]
Thirty minutes north of the city, Chen waits to meet us for ramen. We're late. Brian's at the wheel of his late-model Audi station wagon, turning the control knob from letter to letter, dutifully twisting-and-clicking the noodle shop's name.
In the passenger seat, I've already got the address and driving directions up on my iPhone.
Welcome to the future of connected cars.
How our cars talk to the internet—and how we talk to our cars—continues to evolve. And it's about to get a lot better. Ford is putting a Wi-Fi router inside next year's Sync-equipped vehicles that will rebroadcast any 3G card's connection. Audi is experimenting with fingertip touch inputs. BMW is already trying to figure out how to put a "monster" antenna on their cars to support the faster next-generation LTE wireless standard "without putting this ugly lump on our cars."
But it's the little ol' iPhone, with its versatile, optional, liability-shifting bundle of apps that may making the biggest difference in how we use the internet in our cars in the coming years.
Getting OnlineDrive off the lot today in a new Sync-equipped Ford, pair your Bluetooth phone, and you've got a data connection to the internet—sort of.
Sync uses technology from a company called Airbiquity. Their service sends data over the voice connection of your phone—not a data plan or SMS—using tech similar to an old-school analog modem. It's rather slick, as hacks go, allowing Sync-connected cars to get data anywhere there is cellphone coverage, even if there isn't data service offered by the carrier.
But I can't seem to track down the raw speed of an Airbiquity connection—and given both the nature of the technology as well as the amount of data a current Sync system displays (sports scores, stock prices, simple phone number lookups)—I can't imagine its throughput compares to a modern 3G service. It's a robust platform for basic connectivity, but it's not Real Internet.
The new Sync fixes that—or will as soon as Ford starts taking advantage of the higher-speed connections. Jason Johnson, an engineer at Ford who helped develop in the in-car Wi-Fi system, was cagey when I asked him when we could expect Sync to piggyback on a internet connection from a third-party 3G stick, saying only that "it broadens the horizons for applications in the future." So strangely, while the new Sync will help you get other devices in the car online, it won't be using that connection for its own data, nor use its Wi-Fi router to talk to, say, your home network. Yet.
Upscale automakers have been taking a different tack, offering optional connectivity packages like Autonet Mobile, or, as BMW has offered since 2007, build in connectivity at the factory.
Like a laptop with a built-in 3G modem, however, these cars suffer from a distinct lack of modularity. Want to upgrade when LTE starts to come online next year? Better buy a new car.
And worse, the integrated systems, even though they're connecting to the same wireless internet as every other device, are severely restricted. The $200-a-year BMW Search service can bring down Google Maps, local fuel prices and grades, even weather forecasts—using a "major GSM provider" in the United States which, although BMW would not confirm, is probably AT&T—but there's nary a web browser to be found.
Danger Ahead"Texting while driving won't seem like a big deal," laughs BMW's Fran Dance, "when people are YouTubing while driving." Dance (no relation) handles telematics for BMW in North America, so he's been thinking a lot about not just how drivers will use the internet in their cars, but how they shouldn't.
"We can't be searching eBay for my favorite Afghan scarf," says Dance. "I really shouldn't be googling too much stuff or reading too much text. BMW recognizes that the driver is still the most important person in the car."
BMW has been doing car computers for years—the new ones are even, by all reports, good. But it took several years for BMW to balance the utility, convenience, and safety factors in their iDrive system.
We'll continue to see development in this area, with bigger touch screens, faster, more accurate voice control (something on which Sync heavily relies), even biometric measurements like Toyota's eye monitoring system.
Apps, Apps, Apps. Also: Apps. Consider the App.But what will our car computers be controlling? More and more, it's looking like iPhones.
For certain, a limited amount of sanctioned applications will be coming from manufacturers to run directly on a car's computer. Ford has let owners add 911 Assist and Vehicle Health Report apps to existing Sync systems by copying them over on USB keys. BMW is exploring the idea of map updates that would allow drivers to turn on audio tours of historic places, matching up museum-style guidebooks triggered by GPS location.
"We would be very foolish to create our own version of Pandora or Rhapsody," says Dance. Better to let Pandora build their own BMW client, for instance, which BMW can then vet, sanction, and install.
Or at least that's what I thought Dance meant, until he explained: "You can listen to Pandora in your BMW today on your iPhone." Well sure. I can listen to Pandora in any car that has an auxiliary input. But BMW is working with companies—including Apple—to allow their iPhone applications to interface with a car's iDrive system. Pandora might be running on an iPhone or BlackBerry, but when plugged into the docking station of the BMW, it could be controlled with all of the car's integrated buttons and doodads.
Ford is taking it a step further, going as far funding the creation of iPhone apps, that mesh with the in-car Sync system. Next year, Ford will open up the Sync API to other developers, making it possible for third-parties to write applications like "FollowMe", an iPhone + Sync app which allows "friends to follow a lead vehicle to a location without the need to physically follow each other, thanks to GPS turn-by-turn directions transmitted from the leader to the followers and read aloud to the drivers."
BMW is taking a hybrid route with its Mini brand. The Mini "Connected Buddy" concept, slurping up music data from a connected iPhone and then building its own "Genius"-style visual map of artists. [Pictured above.] There's the requisite Twitter and Facebook apps. But most of the work is being done by the iPhone, not the car. The screen and controls in the Mini become an extension of the iPhone.
Apps on Phones Protects from LawsuitsIn a large portion of the United States, it's illegal to have a television in your car that the driver can see, a regulation that was put in place long before smartphones and GPS units were even dreamed up. There are considerable liability issues an auto manufacturer has to consider if one were to, say, let you run Firefox in your dashboard.
But by tacitly pushing in-car application development to smartphones—even if those smartphones might so happen to be connected to the car—it puts the liability back in the driver's hands.
There's little danger of smartphone literally crashing the car, either. Sync talks to the same telemetric and diagnostic system that the car's other computers do, for instance, albeit in a one-way polling. It can ask for data, but it can't, say, reprogram the valve timing to allow for greater fuel economy or allow your Focus to run on water even though we all know that's totally possible. More conservative companies like Toyota don't even wire the entertainment system into the same telemetric and sensor packages as the car-control computers.
The Easy Way OutDespite what you might think, I didn't expect the iPhone to play a big part in this story when I first started looking into it. As a music player, sure. Perhaps even eventually as a data option for more modest cars without built-in connectivity.
But using the power of smartphones is clearly where the attention is focused in the connected car industry right now—and I don't think it's such a bad thing. The pace of innovation will be faster for developers if our cars become giant peripherals for our phones, bristling with sensors and data, than if we waited for every manufacturer to make their own monolithic platform. (And while the iPhone is certainly getting the most attention, I have no doubt that BlackBerry and Android phones will get all the attention they deserve if they keep doing well.)
I mean, Sync is built on Windows CE, which may not be the dog in the embedded space it has become on mobile phones, but is still, you know, Windows CE. Jason Johnson was quick to underline how Ford has a healthy relationship with Microsoft (of course) but also how much of the Sync system was engineered on top of Windows CE by Ford.
Yet if Ford does what they're planning to do, that Sync runs on top of CE won't even matter. As long as it plays nice with phones and sends them all the information their apps need, everyone will be happy. And better yet, the cars' capability will be upgraded along with the phones'.
In a couple of years, I won't even have to read the turn-by-turn directions to Brian aloud, because his car will already know exactly what my iPhone knows.
Photo compliments of Mr. Tom Arthur.
Wondering what the future of apps in your car might look like? Jalopnik's own Matt Hardigree imagines what the first 20 apps you download to your car might be.
The NookDevs just got a full web browser up and running on the Nook, alongside Android Twitter/Facebook apps. At what point does the Nook cease to be an eBook reader and start to be something more? [Twitter via Android Guys]
Let's face it, nobody was too upset by the opaqueness of the Nook's spec sheet—screens software, not board-level componentry, are what make ereaders great. But with this teardown comes something glorious: the Nook's Android software has been hacked.
And not hacked like "oh, cool, now we can change the system font" hacked, or "sweet bro, now we can watch the Linux boot sequence" hacked. I'm talking about splayed-open, ready for custom apps, probably-gonna-get-Barnes & Noble-and-AT&T-kind-of-upset hacked. In other words, it's been rooted, like so many Android phones, which means that core OS changes, hacks, and almost certainly apps are all in the cards. Here's the software breakdown, according to Nookdevs:
[The Nook] appears to be running a generic Android image with B&N customization on top to hide the Android underpinnings:
[With]:
• Android 1.5 Cupcake
• Built Tue Dec 1 14:50:20 CST 2009
• turboboot bootloader
• asound
• pvplayer
So what we've essentially got here is a full-fledged Android device, with two screens, a few gigabytes of removable storage and a SIM card with a data connection. The rooting process isn't exactly easy—it involves a screwdriver, a knife, and an Linux computer, if that tells you anything—but the hacking prospects here are massive. AT&T, whose free, unlimited, ebook-only data connection is the Nook's gateway to the internet, can't be too happy about this. That, or they've got some kind of provision for blocking non-ebook data transfer, which the new class of Nook hackers will spend the rest of their devices' lifespans actively trying to circumvent. This should be fun.
And for anyone dying to fill the gaps in the Nook's spec sheet, well, here you go:
• Samsung S3C6410 Processor
• Synaptics TM1369 Touchscreen controller
• Internal 2GB Sandisk microSD card for internal storage
• 3 Partitions
• sdb1: system: ext3 250MB
• sdb2: update possibly?: ext3 150MB
• sdb3: internal memory: ext3 1309MB
• Sierra Wireless MC8777V wireless modem in data only mode
[Nookdevs]
So a new, potentially very popular Mario title comes out today. Sweet, sweet nostalgia. To celebrate, let's revisit all the 2009 NES hacks and mods that have, thus far, utterly destroyed or otherwise corrupted my most cherished memories, shall we?
Our first mod is a relatively recent one. The modder took a nice, fully functioning Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt combo cartridge, gutted it, and turned it into an admittedly clean and portable NES emulator. Sure, the gutting made most of my 1986 memories fade into a terrifying pit of blackness, but at least this wasn't a golden Legend of Zelda cartridge or anything.
Christ! That's ugly. But pimpin' ain't easy, so we'll give it a break. Unfortunately for me, my psyche receives no such break, and I am reduced to but two hearts, and my Master Sword no longer shoots laser beams.
The greatest platformer ever created by human hands, now a lowly 160GB USB drive. When will the insanity end?
Never, apparently. A mere month before the Super Mario Bros. 3 USB "creation" came to light, someone took a classic Game Boy, removed everything in it that made it a timeless piece of video game lore, and replaced it with a hard drive. Half a heart left, and there's this incessant beeping in my ears. Jack needs food, badly.
When I grip an NES control pad in my hands, its hard edges digging unforgivably into the soft flesh, I go to my happy place. When modder Taylor Merrill does the same, he hears the theme song from Sanford and Son. He also hears friends and relatives because he managed to get a Samsung Eternity phone into the controller that defined a generation of early console gamers. Good for you all. My childhood just ran into a goomba, jumped straight up into the air, and fell off the screen.
Nothing game changing, just bug fixes and small tweaks. Don't expect one of Palm's infamous syncing hacks, because iTunes support is nowhere to be found. Fire up your updaters, 1.3.1 is live now. [BGR, GadgetsOnTheGo, thanks Jimmie!]
A video has been posted to YouTube by a group called "DarkForum" in which plans for a card skimmer are demonstrated and a contact email for sales of said illegal device is listed. Screw these guys.
Let me reiterate: Card skimmers are not cute hacks or experiments. They're illegal devices used to steal money from innocent people, and anyone who makes, uses, buys or encourages the use of them belongs in jail. Tellingly, the first related video on YouTube is called "Pin Pad Thief Sentencing." I realize that by writing about these dorks I'm giving them publicity, but I'm hoping that publicity only results in something very, very bad happening to them. [YouTube]
Food writer and culinary expert Michael Ruhlman didn't want us to get through a week of celebrating kitchen gadgetry without singing praise of the digital scale. Damn the cups and tablespoons, cooking by weight is the only path to awesomeness.
The kitchen is a place where tools, gadgets, and gizmos—that is, the very non-human objects that entrance guys—are in continual use. I, like every cook I know, love my tools. The breakfast chef instructor when I was at cooking school reportedly slept with her omelet pans. She understood. Cooks throughout America go kind of silly in the head when they go into a cookware store (I pretty much want everything I see even when I don't need anything).
While important to remember—as American's chief food geek Alton Brown has noted here and elsewhere—you don't want unitaskers in your kitchen (unless it's an air-popper used to toast pine nuts!), things like hand blenders and cable thermometers with wireless remotes are incredibly useful.
But for all our gadget hunger, America has yet to embrace what is one of the most important tools of all in the kitchen. A digital scale.
Why is a scale important? Because recipes work better when you weigh ingredients. A cup of flour can weigh between 4 and 6 ounces. That means if you've got a bread or cake recipe that calls for 4 cups of flour, you might measure out 16 ounces or 24 ounces—a 50% difference in the main ingredient! No wonder people are so afraid of making their own cake. Measuring is easier and cleaner and results in fewer dirty measuring cups when you use a scale. You can measure everything right into your mixing bowl. Have you ever tried to measure out a cup of shortening? It's a mess.
Another example: If you know pasta is three parts flour and two parts egg, fresh pasta dough takes about two minutes to put together. Put your bowl on a scale, crack in your eggs and add 1.5 times as much flour. Two large eggs are about 4 ounces, so you'd add 6 ounces flour. Need four portions? Put four eggs in your bowl and add 12 ounces of flour. Recipes scale up and down multiple times and always work.
Pancake batter, in fact all quickbread batters, are essentially equal parts flour and liquid and half as much egg. You can measure out all your ingredients into a big measuring cup with a spout for easy pouring. If I'm just making pancakes for my 10-year-old kid, I use one egg. If making for me as well, I add another egg. If my wife wants some, then I make a three-egg batch.
Moreover, this kind of proportional cooking by weight works in grams, ounces, whatever unit you want. Whether you mix 20 ounces of flour and 12 ounces of water, or 500 grams of flour and 300 grams of water, it's going to be good bread dough.
So as more and more of us head into the kitchen, I've been on a mission to urge people to embrace the scale. I've become a scale evangelist.
I use a My Weigh scale and love it. It works great and doesn't cost a fortune. Thomas Keller and his gang at French Laundry, Per Se and Bouchon use A&D scales, which are very sensitive but a little pricey.
My Weigh recently came out with a new one that does something really cool. It measures by percentage. Which is how a lot of bakers measure. The standard baker's percent of bread, for instance is 100% flour, 60% water, 3% fresh yeast, 2% salt. With this scale, you simply pour in the flour, hit percent, then the "tare" or zeroing button, and begin adding the water till it reads 60. Zero again and add your next ingredient.
This is a tool that really does make cooking easier and faster. So the next time you need a gadget fix, skip the panini press and buy a scale.
Michael Ruhlman couldn't have written Charcuterie without a scale, and his most recent book, Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking is devoted solely to cooking by using proportions by weight. It is the opinion of at least some Gizmodo editors that Michael's recently published Elements of Cooking is a must-have for people who take their own cooking (and eating) seriously. He also blogs at ruhlman.com.
Let's get that Taste Test taste out of your mouths with a little after dinner mint, shall we? Then, when we've exhausted our supply of Altoids, we can be good little geeks and make zany things from the tins!
I'm thinking of 15 things, in fact, all of which are listed over at oobject in a handy little list.
There's the "minty mp3 player," for example, perfect for the subway. Or perhaps the iPod nano dock is more your style? No? You'd prefer an Altoids tin mouse? You're in luck! Someone made one of those too. There are even two—yes two!—Altoids tin cameras to create as you sit back and digest all the wonderful content we've seen stream across the homepage this week.
Lastly, there's also an Altoids UMD case, which is the perfect addition to any GameStop storeroom. Those worthless, unsold UMD movies won't stack themselves, you know! [oobject]
Alton Brown famously disdains spending money on "unitaskers" and other kitchen gadgets, when you can just as easily (and far more cheaply) get by with what's around the house. Here's what happened when I asked about his favorite hacks.
Tell me about your favorite home kitchen hacks.
I don't set out to devise hacks every year. I'm lazy—that's where they come from in the first place. I'm also cheap—that's where the other half comes from. I use almost everything in my kitchen at home.
For instance, I use a coffee grinder to make rice flour for tempura, because why buy bags of it when I only need it five times a year? I toast pine nuts in an air-blow popcorn machine. I am really bad about burning pinenuts on the stove. I also dry out herbs in the air popper.
I own a panini press, but do I make panini? No, but I do make a butterflied Cornish hen in 12 minutes, two of them in fact. They come out nice and crispy, with enough fat left over to throw in a handful of spinach.
Those don't seem like big deals—they're not really clever, at least not to me.
They actually are really clever. What about non-kitchen gadgets? Which do you put to use in the kitchen?
I use heating pads to raise dough on, or to incubate yogurt with—that's an ordinary item that you don't see in the kitchen. I have used a hair dryer to the bottom of my charcoal grill to turbo charge the Weber.
Whoa. Is there a danger in doing that?
Is there a danger? What do you think? Of course there is. Hell yes, there is. You could burn down the house and the whole neighborhood if you're not paying attention. I only do that on concrete in the driveway because it's freaking hot.
Do you wear your big fireman gloves?
The big silver gloves? They're for changing nuclear fuel rods in a power plant or something. Of course I wear them. I even melted a pair of those before—messing with something I shouldn't have been messing with, but that's apropos of nothing.
Would you care to elaborate on that?
No, I shouldn't.
Awwww...
I do like to have liquid nitrogen around, for when we suddenly come into large amounts of fruit. I have a source at a medical supply company. I can instantly make ice cream—just crank up the stand mixer, puree some fruit, pour in a liter of liquid nitrogen and in 30 seconds you have some ice cream. Depending on the sugar level, sometimes it takes up to a minute.
When I get a really ripe watermelon, I sometimes puncture the skin with a drill bit and drain the juice. I will stick that into a mixer for 30 seconds with liquid nitrogen for instant sorbet. But nitrogen displaces oxygen in air, and the human body is not programmed to send messages to the brain when it's getting too much nitrogen. So I do this in a relatively ventilated place.
Sometimes I smash up some dry ice with a hammer, throw it in a cooler with some blueberries, and shake the cooler around until the berries sound like marbles. Open the spigot outside to let the sublimated CO2 run out. It quick-freezes the berries for storage. The faster they freeze, the smaller the ice crystals that form, the less mushy they are when they thaw. I love blueberries in the winter, but I'm not going to buy them shipped in from Chile. I buy a lot in the summer and freeze them, but I don't freeze them in regular temperatures because it takes too long.
These all seem extremely useful, but none of them are too elaborate.
As far as grand hacks, I'm not going to do them if they cost a lot or take me a lot of time. I'm not going to come up with an idea if it takes me an hour at hardware store and hours to build at home. Sure, I'll make an air cannon to shoot potatoes out of PVC but that's ballistics, that's fun. Cooking's not so fun that I want to spend that much time doing it.
Alton Brown is celebrating his 10th year of Good Eats, commemorating that with a live taping in Atlanta this week and the launch of his cookbook all-around kitchen sourcebook Good Eats: The Early Years, covering recipes and tips from the first 80 or so episodes. You probably realized by now—perhaps disappointedly—that the alligator isn't part of a kitchen hack. It's actually a shot from his Feasting on Asphalt River Run series.
Taste Test is our weeklong tribute to the leaps that occur when technology meets cuisine, spanning everything from the historic breakthroughs that made food tastier and safer to the Earl-Grey-friendly replicators we impatiently await in the future.
Gadgets stands are usually begrudging buys: If your gadget needs a stand, it probably should've come with one; if it could just sorta use one, it's hard to justify the cost. The solution? Make your own damn stand, for nothing.
Gadgets stands, from iPods and ebook readers to HDTVs and laptops, are some of the most accessible DIY projects out there—no circuit diagrams, static bracelets or soldering irons here, just cheap, useful, approachable projects. Here are a few of the best.
The cardboard box: Download the instructions, print them out, cut up a box, and slide it together. Hey presto! Laptop home theater. Bonus feature: it's recyclable.
Laptops
Why you want one: It's easier on your wrists, keeps your notebook cool (especially low-to-the-ground models, like MacBooks), and can give you some space to stow accessories. Taller units make watching TV less painful.
The ring binder: Accomplish all of the above goals with your kid's leftover school supplies, or a $5 trip to Officemax. Poke holes for ventilation, thread various wires to make it more like a full-service laptop dock, and slide peripherals underneath for maximum convenience. Bonus feature: plenty of available ring sizes, binder-stuffing adjusts your viewing angle.
The coat hanger: Like the cardboard box, except with industrial-chic styling, and some semblance of adjustability. It looks a little precarious, but hanger devotees assure us: it's sturdy(ish). Bonus feature: the higher elevation matches well with external monitors.
iPod/iPhone
Why you want one: Aside from often doubling as a charging dock, iPod stands make the hunched-over, arms-out process of video-viewing a little more bearable. With a good Twitter app, news aggregator or music streaming service, or just the native media interface, it can also let you use an iPod Touch or iPhone as a quasi secondary display.
The binder clip: Devised for older iPods, the binder clip is timeless, unless Apple someday moves away from the dock connector. Bonus feature: if you feel this is too simple, you can make a much more complicated one out of, like, 20 clips.
The paperclip: Just as simple as the binder clip, but in landscape. Plus, you might not have binder clips laying around; you do have paperclips. Bonus feature: crudely adjustable.
The business card: You just need a spare business card, a pen, a ruler and the ability to fold paper for this one. Bonus feature: It's utterly disposable.
The Kindle
Why you want one: For reading?
The bedhead: Designed by the dude behind XKCD, this twisted coat hanger is for reading while lying down, sideways. Bonus feature: there's a page-turn lever built in.
The Bookend: Book accessories past a future, living together in peace. This hardly qualifies as DIY, actually, since you're just bending a metal bookend a little bit. Bonus feature: it's probably tougher than your Kindle.
HDTVs
Why you want one: Because a having TV stand or mount is a given, and they universally cost too much.
The Easel: It should go without saying: get a strong easel for this one, not some flimsy elementary school toss-out. But it's clever, for smaller sets, and adjustable. Craigslist is your friend on this one.
The Diner Table: A little more involved than the easel hack, but much more gratifying. Discarded restaurant tables+crappy old desks and/or coffee tables=a fun afternoon of beginner-level woodworking and a place for your HDTV to live, in (some kind of) style. Bonus feature: may smell like bacon, or cigarette smoke.
A streamlined son to Dealzmodo Hacks, Hackmodo is a weekly guide to getting your hands dirty, tech-style, and hopefully saving a few bucks. If you've got any hacks or tricks you'd like to see featured here, let us know.
The Orbis is only half as big as the Segway that spawned it, but don't let that fool you. The thing's easily twice as cool, especially if you happen to be Woz playing Segway polo.
I mean come on. Facts are facts. Smaller footprint. Easier maneuverability in the tight spots. Folds down for easy storage in the closet when that hot date comes over for a digestif. Brisk 13 mph top speed. Completely portable. Battery powered. This is assuming, of course, you give two shits about the Segway to begin with.
Negatives? Blatantly obvious balance issues abound, sure, but the designers can work those our with Woz's money help, right? Otherwise what's stopping you from falling like a tree when you come to a standstill?
Too bad it's just a concept at the moment; a mere whiff of a hipster's passing dream. This will change though. Segway culture demands it be so. [James Dyson Award via Design Blog]
It was only a matter of time before the unbridled fandom of Nintendo and Apple transubstantiated into the ultimate hack.
In this clip, we see an OpenGL ES demo in which the Wiimote has been paired (over Bluetooth, of course) with the iPhone. The iPhone is then able to track the Wiimote's orientation in real time.
At the moment, this demo is nothing more than that—a taste of the Wiimote working on the iPhone. It'll be interesting to see if/how the project evolves from here. But imagine the potential of a game that used both the iPhone and Wiimote's accelerometers. Or heck, imagine playing a scaled down Wii Sports on your iPhone.
Let's make this happen, modders and coders who are working for free, risking Nintendo's wrath and have about 1000x more coding talent than me. I insist. [Flickr via MAKE]
Don't get me wrong: the announcement that LG's connected HDTVs are getting Vudu streaming—especially instant-on 1080p HDX movies—is a good thing. It's just that we got a few minutes with the service, and, well, something's a little... off.
It's got nothing to do with Vudu's service, which is largely unchanged from the days of the Vudu set-top box. (I mean, we're still in those days, technically, but hey, narrative! ) The interface is the same easily navigable set of panels and menus, which seem to work fine with LG's standard remotes—no standalone clickwheel controller here. The movie selection is still decent, with concurrent releases for SD, 720p and 1080p HDX films on a near-DVD timescale, which has been one of Vudu's selling points since it first hit A/V stacks last year. And it's certainly not the 1080p HDX video quality, which was excellent on the 47-inch LH50 and started streaming in just a few seconds, even on the demo room's ~4.5mbps connection. Nope, it's not that.
The strange feeling I got from the movie samples, whether in SD, 720p or 1080p modes, was down to LG: The NetCast sets that'll carry the Vudu option have LG's 120Hz Trumotion interpolation technology, meaning that they essentially insert frames between what's already on the source material, with the stated purpose of "smoothing" the video output. As we—and others—have complained about before, though, the effect can be strange, making motions seem unnatural, and giving a multi-hundred-million-dollar films an odd, camcorder-like aesthetic.
That issue is really offputting here, and not optional. It made The Knowing look like a daytime soap opera, and made the bus chase scene in The Prisoner of Azkaban look like an extended Benny Hill sketch. Sure, I'm being a little hyperbolic, and for a lot of people—the people who actually like the idea of these high refresh rate sets, I guess—this won't matter. But for anyone who's sensitive to this kind of thing, it could be a dealbreaker. Vudu says they're in talks with LG to include an option to disable this feature with future Vudu-enabled sets, but for now, well, sorry,
But despite this admittedly obnoxious issue, the previous conclusion still stands: set-top boxes are on their way out, and multi-service web-connected TV's are The Thing Right Now. Netflix is showing its bright red face basically everywhere right now, and apparently, Vudu's in talks to try to get that same kind of presence. Which, 120Hz or not, is a step in the right direction. [Vudu on Giz]
Sony introduced the Walkman in 1979, and I got mine a year later. The Walkman boosted the profile of audio cassettes, which had been challenging LPs and 8-Tracks as a music medium. They soon dominated the music scene.
A $185 TSC-300 I bought from J&R, my Walkman was also a stereo recorder. (Note the spiffy name—even when it was clueful, Sony was clueless.) No way you could put it in your pocket—it was about the size of a trade paperback book. But the music sounded great, and it doubled as a very solid, if bulky, recorder for interviews.
Besides the Walkman, a real driver of cassettes, so to speak, was the car experience. Cassettes were a big improvement over the first personal car audio technology, 8-Tracks, which had to switch from one "track" to another every few minutes, and to accommodate this, labels would often rearrange the order of songs on an album, or even cut off a long song in the middle. (I once went cross-country in a Trans Am with an 8-track, and to this day every time I hear The Doors play "The End," my mind inserts an 8-second pause before Jim Morrison kills his dad and fucks his mom.)
As now, people had all kinds of exotic car-stereo rigs, but as an impoverished writer I outfitted my 1972 VW bug with a minimal unit (a no-name brand for $99) that I bolted under the dashboard and wired up to the speakers. Not pretty, but I could control what music I heard in the car, which was actually a novelty then.
The other big advantage of cassettes, of course, were that they were recordable. You'd buy blank 90-minute cassettes (chrome high bias, if you were an audio nut) and tape one album on each side. (Since most records were shorter than 45 minutes, you'd grab a song or two from another album to avoid a long dead spot before the tape reversed.) And you'd borrow albums from friends and tape your own. You could also tape from other cassettes, but the quality degraded each time you made a copy made from a copy. It was like an organic form of DRM. Everybody had a box with hand-labeled cassettes and before you went on a car trip you'd dig in the box to find the tunes that would soundtrack your journey.
Cassettes weren't the most reliable technology—it was pretty common for the music to stop and then, when you tried to eject, the player wouldn't give up the tape. You'd use brute force, and sticking out of the plastic would be a tangle of brown spaghetti. But even though audio cassettes supposedly degrade after 20 years or so, I still have a couple in my car that I made in the '70s—one of the early Stones, taped from the mono originals, and a Neil Young tape with "Tonight's the Night" on one side and "On the Beach" on the other. Neither has lost its magnetism, physically or psychically.
The cassette era was a big setup for the age of iPod, a pocket-size digital device that was not only a playback unit, but the equivalent of a room-size cardboard box full of tapes. And, of course, Napster, which made the whole world into a big cassette-tape-swapping community, where everything was free.
Steven Levy is a senior writer for Wired, most recently writing about Google's ad business and the secret of the CIA sculpture. He's written six books, including Hackers, Artificial Life and The Perfect Thing, about the iPod. In 1979, he had just left his first real job, at a regional magazine called New Jersey Monthly, to become a freelance writer, and had yet to touch a computer.
Photos of every blank tape ever at tapedeck.org
Gizmodo '79 is a week-long celebration of gadgets and geekdom 30 years ago, as the analog age gave way to the digital, and most of our favorite toys were just being born.
