Techcrunch: Ridemakerz Builds a Virtual World For Boys Filled With Its Toy Cars

Posted by on under sheep company, virtual experiences, electric sheep, toy cars, ridemakerz, andreini, virtual world, pixar, corporate clients, ceo, beta |

Engadget: A tale of two Pico-ITX mods

Posted by on under sinclair zx81, cyberspace decks, timex sinclair, project aces, case modders, membrane keyboard, th guy, search and seizure, designer drugs, usb keyboard, secd, pico itx, technological breakthroughs, old game, cut throat, true measure, case mod, gibs, mey, |

As William Gibson once wrote, "the street finds its own uses for things." Of course, the future he envisioned was populated by cut-throat characters with names like Dex Cowb0t, mercenary-types who made their money the only way they knew how: with custom cyberspace decks, hopped up on designer drugs like "splurge" and "spazz." What he never understood was that the only true measure of a technology is its ability to aid a bored populace in its pursuit of nostalgia and novelty. And by these standards, the Pico-ITX board might be one of the most important technological breakthroughs of its time (roughly 2007-2010 CE). Where would the hackers and case modders of our humble era be if it weren't for this guy? They wouldn't be shoving PCs into old Game Boy cases, that's for sure. Case in point: the Linksys Bt320g seedbox project places VIA's EPIA PX10000G mobo and a 320GB HDD in an old Linksys shell (and a 400GB HDD in a second router). The man responsible doesn't say whether or not this one was intended to thwart they copyright police in the event of a search and seizure, but on the other hand we're assuming that he isn't going to be seeding OpenOffice on the thing either. If retro computing's your bag, we've found a Timex Sinclair ZX81 case mod that should bring you considerable joy. Unfortunately the membrane keyboard's been disabled, but if you don't mind using a USB keyboard with a machine that originally sported 1KB RAM (at a whopping 3.25MHz), you might want to hit the read link and see how it's done.

Read - Linksys BT320G case mod
Read - Sinclair ZX81 turned into PC

Filed under: Desktops

A tale of two Pico-ITX mods originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Dec 2008 12:43:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Engadget: A tale of two Pico-ITX mods

Posted by on under sinclair zx81, cyberspace decks, timex sinclair, project aces, case modders, membrane keyboard, th guy, search and seizure, designer drugs, usb keyboard, secd, pico itx, technological breakthroughs, old game, cut throat, true measure, case mod, gibs, mey, |

As William Gibson once wrote, "the street finds its own uses for things." Of course, the future he envisioned was populated by cut-throat characters with names like Dex Cowb0t, mercenary-types who made their money the only way they knew how: with custom cyberspace decks, hopped up on designer drugs like "splurge" and "spazz." What he never understood was that the only true measure of a technology is its ability to aid a bored populace in its pursuit of nostalgia and novelty. And by these standards, the Pico-ITX board might be one of the most important technological breakthroughs of its time (roughly 2007-2010 CE). Where would the hackers and case modders of our humble era be if it weren't for this guy? They wouldn't be shoving PCs into old Game Boy cases, that's for sure. Case in point: the Linksys Bt320g seedbox project places VIA's EPIA PX10000G mobo and a 320GB HDD in an old Linksys shell (and a 400GB HDD in a second router). The man responsible doesn't say whether or not this one was intended to thwart they copyright police in the event of a search and seizure, but on the other hand we're assuming that he isn't going to be seeding OpenOffice on the thing either. If retro computing's your bag, we've found a Timex Sinclair ZX81 case mod that should bring you considerable joy. Unfortunately the membrane keyboard's been disabled, but if you don't mind using a USB keyboard with a machine that originally sported 1KB RAM (at a whopping 3.25MHz), you might want to hit the read link and see how it's done.

Read - Linksys BT320G case mod
Read - Sinclair ZX81 turned into PC

Filed under: Desktops

A tale of two Pico-ITX mods originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Dec 2008 12:43:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Engadget: Unbagging: Peek CEO Amol Sarva

Posted by on under amol sarva, dead trees, favorite pastimes, preme, engadget, gadgetry, reading material, written word, gallery 1, vivant, peek, new feature, ceo, lt, email, peoe, ing, photo |

Gallery: Unbagging gallery 1

Continue reading Unbagging: Peek CEO Amol Sarva

Unbagging: Peek CEO Amol Sarva originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 30 Sep 2009 14:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Kottke: The Zappos movement

Posted by Jason Kottke on under amaz, h company, ppos, hsieh, specific company, steve jobs, rk, new yorker, snapshot, shoulders, cult, housewares, ty, pers, ceo, clothes, shoes, experiences |

From last week's New Yorker, a snapshot of the cult of Zappos just before the Amazon acquisition. I found it somewhat odd that the CEO, Tony Hsieh, doesn't particularly care about the products his company sells:

"I've never been into shoes -- and I'm still not," he said. Zappos has begun to expand from shoes, as Amazon did from its base of books, into other categories of merchandise: handbags, clothes. "Kitchenware, housewares, whatever," Hsieh said. But he's not really interested in those things, either. "I much prefer experiences to stuff," he said.

Hsieh also doesn't downplay the cultish aspects of the company either (unintentionally or not):

Though he has become increasingly visible as the face of Zappos and spends almost all his time proselytizing its culture, Hsieh resists the idea that he is powerful, or that the perpetuation of the brand rests on his shoulders. "For any company or movement or religion or whatever, if there's one person that personifies it then that puts that company or vision at risk, if the person, say, dies," he said. "What's gonna happen to Apple if something happens with Steve Jobs? That's why it needs to be about a movement, not about a person or even a specific company."