Thursday, February 21, 2008

Lifestreaming, the next generation

Actually, this sounds like a spinoff of Microsoft's MyLifeBits project:
The idea behind the neck-worn Momenta PC is that it actively records everything in a rolling buffer and, creepily, reads your pulse; once it encounters an increased heart rate, it TiVo's the previous five minutes, so you can later review whatever it was that caused your pulse to go up.
For some reason, the model appears to be naked except for the Momenta PC. And it records when your heart races? I think I know what the killer app is.
At least one finalist in MS Next-Gen PC Design Comp is creeping us out

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Keep yoga out of prisons!

That's the gist:
A Norwegian prison has suspended yoga classes for prisoners because the intense emotions evoked by the exercises caused the inmates to become restive and violent.
Cory Doctorow comments:
I kinda get this: when I started doing yoga, I would sometimes get into a pose and experience a great upwelling of sadness or anger and have a vivid flash of some past unpleasant experience. The yogic explanation is that the memory is "stored in your muscle," something I treat as allegorical (along with all the business about chakras, prana, etc).

I've heard of this too, from close friends as well as elsewhere. But in over two years of ashtanga, I've never experienced it. I wonder how common it is, but I guess it doesn't have to be too common if it makes even a few inmates restive and violent. Namaste.
 
Prison yoga made inmates restive and disturbed - Boing Boing

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Monday, February 18, 2008

Starbucks makes a step, but just one small step, in the right direction

Starbucks has been offering T-Mobile wifi service for years, for a price. So I was glad to see that they are now going to offer AT&T wifi for free. Free wifi, after all, is a standard feature in Austin coffee shops. Even the Dairy Queen has free wifi, for crying out loud. But the devil is in the details:
Starting this spring, Starbucks is also giving its card holders two free hours of free Wi-Fi service per day at participating locations.

"This is what our customers have been waiting for -- free Starbucks-quality wi-fi," Chris Bruzzo, chief technology officer for Starbucks, said in a statement. All Starbucks employees, about 100,000 of them, will also get free AT&T Wi-Fi accounts to use in the stores.

For java junkies that do not have either an AT&T subscription or a Starbucks card, Starbucks will sell two-hour blocks of wireless Internet at $3.99 or a monthly membership of $19.99 per month.
So we really aren't talking about free wifi, we're talking about no-additional-cost-for-subscribers. I guess I'll stick with the genuine free wifi of my local coffee shop.

Starbucks, AT&T offer free Wi-Fi service - Austin Business Journal:

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