l-dopa

I love Griffin Technology. They make really neat stuff; case in point, couple years ago they came out with an almost entirely useless glowing knob! And I bought it! And I still love it to this day.

Griffin’s new “SmartDeck” seems marginally more useful. It’s a cassette feeder, yes, but it also controls the stereo in a magical way so you can use your existing tape deck controls to control the iPod. Then again, since the cassette feeder cable is four feet long, your iPod is probably going to be somewhere within arms reach anyhow; in any case, if I was in the market for a new cassette adapter for my iPod, this is totally the one I’d get.

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~jeff

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~jeff

I just realized today that up until the invention of flash memory based mp3 players, every single music playing device in history (player piano, wax cylinder, phonograph, reel to reel, tape deck, CD player, hard disk) all had one thing in common: a rotating mechanical element.

Along those lines, I suppose it won’t be too much longer until non-volitile flash memory replaces all the current forms of media with rotating mechanical elements — and while I’m sitting here next to this noisy PC with a loud fan and an even louder hard drive, I can’t say it’s a bad thing.

~jeff

A couple of years ago, my friend Chip (photographer, machinist, and Dean of the Yale School of Art), said to me, “The milling machine changed everything. It was the first machine you could use to make another one.” Think about how that changes things, because it changes a lot.

There’s a fairly lively community of machinists out in the world who trade plans. So the milling machine of 2005 is clearly derived from its ancestors in the 19th century, but it’s evolved — and I really mean evolved, like, by natural selection — substantially.

I’ve always wished I had a milling machine. But they require skills I’d need to learn on top of thousands of dollars of equipment, that, unlike a computer, is dangerous and big.

These guys want to fix that problem. This thing means that I could have this doodad sitting beside my computer, and when I think of an object I want to make, I design it, and this thing poops it out. If I don’t like the way it’s pooping them, I download an upgrade to the machine, print out the upgrade, install it, and then it works better. Just like software.