GalacticMu

According to My Heritage, I am Japanese.

Find out what race you apparently are at My Heritage’s extremely accurate celebrity face recognition page.

Special thanks to Flickr user lalalaa Dolce Vita for pointing out this thrilling technology.

Hi. My name is Sunday. You may know me as “Subspace,” or, the girl who ostensibly has a website. No? That’s okay.

Let’s pretend the last few weeks of nothingness never happened.

That sentence didn’t make a whole hell of a lot of sense. Looks like I still got the magic!

Y’all are probably already on top of it, but Mozilla-gened Songbird is on the scene, a little application that aspires to be Firefox for music collections. And, as I already described to Quagmire, a system for finding DRM-free downloads a.k.a., the probable death knell. All I know is that I go through these periods where I crave a song I’ve heard but as someone that doesn’t really listen to music on a regular basis (more on that in a moment), I can never justify buying an album. Additionally, I have a lasting resistance to iTunes after it crashed two of my laptops. Sure, that was years ago, but I have digital scars like some people have emotional ones.

Generally speaking, I have only a few times where I actually want to listen to noise above and beyond the sound of my own degenerating biomass. I can’t listen to music while writing unless it is either so totally familiar that I can hear it without actually registering it on my forebrain, or there is nothing even closely resembling human speech. This narrows down my library considerably. And eclectically.

My recent music crack has been the Swedish pop star Robyn (whose website, it needs to be noted, looks suspiciously like something GalacticMu’s own Leesa “BattleGate” Leva would have designed), and if I want to listen to “With Every Heartbeat” seventeen times in a row, then by damn it, that’s my right. Not actually, but I’m an American so I have to say that at least once a day or they take my apple pie away. Anyway, the reality is: my writing mixes are often a mix of Gorillaz, Toto, Robyn and Vangelis, and no self-respecting person actually admits to that sort of thing unless they’ve got ladyballs of solid adamantium.

I’m going to go keep playing with Songbird some more in an attempt to procrastinate writing the articles I need to get written from the last two weeks. Whatever, I got until Monday.

Texas-based KumoTek introduces a new line of bots (with awesome names like KT-X Gladiator) which can be controlled with your PS2 wireless controller.

via Engadget

I’m a bit of a kitchen whore, which means that while I love technology as much as the next geeky lady, I get a little wetter over the cooking stuff. Not gadgets like onion choppers (uh, have you tried a knife?) but more like cooktops. Oh, lovely cooktops.

Take for example this sexy beast:

That’s right, it recesses when not in use. It’s the Izona Luna cooktop, which combines the technology of ceramic/glass cooktops with gas. This may seem just gimmicky at first glance, but it in fact combines the two best qualities of both cooktop methods. You see, nothing cooks like gas. Nothing. There are a lot of scientists that can go about explaining why this is, but I’m not one of them. But a gas range (electric too, for that matter) is notoriously hard to clean due to the open but inaccessible chambers directly below the cooking element. A ceramic/glass cooktop is a smooth surface, but the heating element in these is often no better than a cheap electric stove.

Blah blah blah, all of this doesn’t matter - look at that thing! It makes me want to fry up a big batch of vat-grown meat and some heavily gene-modified vegetables.

Via Appliancist

Link to the flash-heavy Izona website for lots of images of gorgeous women lounging on cooking technology.

The want for a society free from violence, free from want, free from meatiness, it is still here.  Because we haven’t yet created our soon-to-be plastic and alloy caretakers.  In the meantime, keep an eye on the folks at MIT.  Which is good advice on any occasion, really.

M.D.S. Personal Robots at The MIT Media Lab.  Be sure to watch to video - this robot’s movement and control are fantastic.  Note to MIT: please stop using plunky jazz bass soundtracks for your robot videos.  This is neither an episode of Seinfeld nor a corporate training video.  One word: Vangelis.  

(Found by BattleGate)

April Fools’ Day has been a major internet holiday for many, many decades now. This particular one was no exception, though it was exceptionally lame. Google’s Gmail offered a false new feature allowing you to set your email’s time of delivery. Uh. April Fools? I thought it was a great feature not because of their intended punchline (closer reading showed that it was powered by an “eflux capacitor” and intended to only insert an email into the past) - postdating blog posts has been a staple for years now, why not email? Blerg, I’m cranky.

Another large entertainment website had the headline of “Paris Hilton and Benji Madden Get Married!” Again? Wait, which celebrity got hitched and then got it annulled? Double-wait, didn’t Nicky Hilton also do that? Oh my god, I wasted precious finger skin on this. Oh yeah, my point: that’s your April Fools’ joke?

The “big” one was that Google and Virgin (with a big hardy-har tip off of naming themselves “Virgle”) are teaming up to send people to Mars. And that, friends, is just fucking mean. “Hey, we’re gonna cure cancer! JUST KIDDING!”

But! Just in time Quagmire spotted this gem, which might still be available here: http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=610771

If it isn’t, I nabbed some images (click on thumbnails to view large):

This thing looks fantastic. Mobile Digital Scribe from IOGear is a digital pen that acts like a regular ink pen but stores up to 50 pages of notes and doodles that can be uploaded to your computer later. If you have the transmitter attached to a computer your input will appear on you screen real time.

I wonder how accurate this thing is. I suspect the results when you upload the day’s notes might be pretty hilarious. But still, the thought of leaving the 5 pound laptop at home on the next away mission without winding up with a pocket full of shit scribbled on scaps of paper makes me seriously want to buy one of these… I’m still trying to find out if this thing will work on a Mac.

via Link

Due to a glitch with Verizon Leila Sales gets a text message when anyone texts to “Leila”, which happens daily. She blogs the unintentional eavesdropping at The Leila Texts.

Quagmire points us toward an article about new satellite-delivered internet in Japan.  At 155Mbit/sec., the service allows rural users to get high-speed internet just by hooking up a small satellite dish.  In the event that you require 1.2Gbit/sec. (!), a 5 meter antenna is required (!!!).  The other benefit is that internet service will not be subject to earthquakes, Gojira, and other natural disasters, allowing for more reliable contact with services and news.

Japan launches high-speed Internet satellite, via Computerworld  

Microsoft announces a June 30th sales moratorium on its Windows XP operating system; Quagmire is shocked to learn that people actually purchase copies of a Microsoft OS rather than “borrow it” from “some friendly Dutch kids.”