Each moment of the everyday, every action of living, poses the question: how it might be lived differently, more truthfully and respectfully. Through the conscious experiment and artful intervention Momentarium inspires creative techniques to address the challenges of our times.
Lates video clips.
Chicago has finally released its RFP for a citywide Wi-Fi network. In May 2006, Mayor Richard M Daley had announced a plan to provide affordable broadband Internet service to all Chicagoans and to make computers more widely available to low-income residents. The Mayor also offered $250,000 in grants to help community groups come up with innovative ways to help close the digital divide, and he appointed an advisory panel to make further recommendations on the issue.
The City of Chicago’s Department of Business and Information Services (BIS) introduced a Draft RFP for comments on May 30, 2006. The City received many meaningful comments and suggestions, which are incorporated in the Final RFP, which it issued today.
Full RFP [pdf]
If you have a passport, now is the time to renew it — even if it’s not set to expire anytime soon. If you don’t have a passport and think you might need one, now is the time to get it. In many countries, including the United States, passports will soon be equipped with RFID chips. And you don’t want one of these chips in your passport.
RFID stands for “radio-frequency identification.” Passports with RFID chips store an electronic copy of the passport information: your name, a digitized picture, etc. And in the future, the chip might store fingerprints or digital visas from various countries.
Opening a new front in its battle with cable companies for the country’s Internet, telephone and television customers, AT&T Inc. on Tuesday started selling Web-based TV service.
For $19.99 a month, the telecommunications firm is offering about 20 channels over the Internet, with the promise of more soon. The service is available to anyone with a high-speed, or broadband, Internet connection – wired or wireless.
The rollout is “an example of how we’re trying to evolve into an entertainment company,” said Sarah Silva, Milwaukee-area spokeswoman for AT&T.
Computer systems are notoriously finicky. They’ll hum along just fine and then unaccountably slow down, freeze up or stop working altogether. Finding the cause of some unexplained problem is difficult and time-consuming, especially with complicated systems in real-life settings.
Bryan Cantrill and a team of engineers at Sun Microsystems Inc. have devised a way to diagnose misbehaving software quickly and while it’s still doing its work. While traditional trouble-shooting programs can take several days of testing to locate a problem, the new technology, called DTrace, is able to track down problems quickly and relatively easily, even if the cause is buried deep in a complex computer system.
The DTrace trouble-shooting software from Sun was chosen as the Gold winner in The Wall Street Journal’s 2006 Technology Innovation Awards contest, the second time in three years that a Sun entry has won the top award. The panel of judges, representing industry as well as research and academic institutions, selected Gold, Silver and Bronze award winners and cited one technology for an Honorable Mention.
For the awards, now in their sixth year, judges considered novel technologies from around the world in several categories: medicine and medical devices, wireless, security, consumer electronics, semiconductors and others.
PDF summary of all the winners.
Mark Warner, an unannounced candidate for the presidency, is going to be interviewed in Second Life on Thursday at 3:30pm (eastern time, I think).
Warner is someone to watch. He’s also played the NASCAR card.
While most VoIP phones require you to be connected to your PC via a USB cable our Cordless VoIP phone uses a wireless signal that allows you to roam your house or office while using Skype. You may use the phone for both PC-to-PC and PC-to-Phone calling.
Dutch artist/engineer Theo Jansen makes unbelievable kinetic sculptures; it’s as if da Vinci had access to PVC. This video (a BMW ad, as it happens) shows off some of his walking machines in motion on the beach. Wired covers the genesis and evolution of Jansen’s work, and you can see his two-ton Animaris Rhinoceros Transport on the move in this video. Many more photos are on his site. [Via] [For more on kinetic scuplture, see previous entry.]
Madison City Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl:
This is to give notice that the Office of the Madison City Clerk will conduct a public test of the electronic voting equipment (including the AutoMark Voter Assist Terminals) in accordance with Section 5.84(1) Wisconsin State Statutes:
August 28 – September 1, 2006 8 a.m.-Noon and 2-4 p.m. (or until complete)
Room 104 of the City-County Building
210 Martin Luther King, Jr., Blvd., Madison [Map]Maribeth Witzel-Behl, Interim City Clerk
Check it out!
A Fabulous tool for the excellent firefox web browser:
With Hyperwords™ installed in your web browser, select any text and a menu appears: searches, references, emailing, copying, blogging, translation, & more