Over the past month or so I've neglected the shaving to the exent you see now. Jay doesn't mind it, actually said he liked the scruff... I guess its growing on him. I've gotten reaquainted with my chin, and I probably won't entertain a real beard again till fall... **notice the one eye refusing to open, half of my face wasn't awake yet... apparently the half of the brain too that tells me to put my collar down. #snap

I've been meaning to record an output of some of the live video mixing I do at Club Marcella, but I haven't been able to square away a non-crash-impending process. For now, check out this animated gif of some screen prints I compiled... click on the thumbnail on the left to launch it in Lightbox. P.S - the Pole Chicken, the sweet innocent boy featured underneath has met an unfortunate series of events with his face. This totally botches my plans to use him for future performances as I've been told he has a huge gash on his face. Goddammit, these pretty boys are so delicate... bears look better with scars and blemishes.

I was watching the latest episode of Weeds on showtime last night, and boy did my geek tail start wagging when I spotted Andy using an Android phone! Pretty neat, even though Nancy Botwin uses an iPhone 3G. On a side note, Weeds is getting better than ever... Monday nights on Showtime at 10pm.

I just came across these awesome HD timelapse videos taken by an Ontario resident, of Niagara Falls and the Peace Bridge. I've driven past the Falls when it was all lit up, same as the Peace Bridge... and never gave either enough time to take in just how beautiful they are bathed in lights. Check out these time lapse videos after the jump, shot with a Nikon D90, and quit yer WNY whining for a second.

When Kidrobot dropped the Adult Swim mini figures, they tried to create exact copies of adult swim characters. Coupled with a so so production quality they looked more like gumball machine toys. When Kidrobot made the Simpsons Mini Figures, they were caricatured to 3." I remember Hero Design ran out of them quick, as opposed to several of the Adult Swim toys floating in the "Land of Forgotten Toys." Thankfully when Kidrobot produced the Futurama toys, they went with a winning strategy. Created by Matt Groening with David X Cohen and Kidrobot, the series has 12 3" characters, blind boxed, plus two chases, and sell for 8.95 each. Goes on sale at Kidrobot and official places like Hero Design on August 13th. I'm so excited I could spit. via Vinyl Pulse

I was wondering what Jack White was doing these days... apparently a part of the new group The Dead Weather, formed from Alison Mosshart (of The Kills), guitarist Dean Fertita (of Queens of the Stone Age) and bassist Jack Lawrence (of The Raconteurs and The Greenhornes), and Jack of course. "Treat Me Like Your Mother" is their latest single and the video was directed by the legendary Jonathan Glazer. I wonder who gave the go for this, or does a Glazer video mean that its ok to have guns in a music video? The Dead Weather - Treat Me Like Your Mother

Burgers and Fries, Heartburn, OH MY!

Fast Food - 4 mini posters designed/printed by Mark Brickey @ Hero Design Studio

Mark Brickey is a poster artist,  co-owner of Hero Design Studio, and lover of fast food. If you have any plans to bargain with Mark, try greasing the wheel with an order of McD's fries. These four mini poster prints depict the four corners of American cuisine: pop, burger, soft serve, and fries. À la carte prints are 8" x 10" Four/Five color silkscreen, printed on 100# Cover Cougar Bright White. Signed and limited edition. Priced individually $10 dollars, or go for a valued sized four-up 16" x 20" print featuring each design for $25 dollars each. **All proceeds go directly to Mark Brickey so that he may continue to afford to eat Junk Food. Just one print purchase can feed him for one afternoon. Please, think of the Brickey. Support America today! Go online or stop by in person: Hero Design Studio 93 Allen St Buffalo, NY 14202

Any other VJ's like to use their screens as ambient light sources? Before I
started plugging in the Macbook Pro to run custom video at Club Marcella, I
woult loathe the 6 screens we had... pumping out Adult Swim or some other
DVD of visual blah.. I couldn't control the light emitted from the displays.
Now I use it to my advantage... who cares if someone has a seizure... #snap

My Polaroid Bluetooth Zink Printer has been sitting collecting dust since last October. Like the iPhone, the G1 (and every other Android device) offers stereo bluetooth, but no support for any of the file transfer protocols (FTP, OBEX, OPP, etc.). Since then, I've been waiting for an app to add that particular support. Wait no more.

Bluetooth Fileshare - Bluex is a very simple app that allows you to send and receive files using the OBEX bluetooth profile. You need to have your phone rooted to be able to receive files, but not if you just want to send. Yea sure, this should be a stock feature on Android, but it's absolutely worth the €1.40 to get to use my POGO printer again.

Using  Bluex is pretty easy; it adds itself to the share menu, making it accessible from any application. Simply pair with your device and Bluex will send the file along, in this case, your photos to a POGO Printer. I have noticed that the 3.2 megapixel images are too large for the POGO to accept over bluetooth, but that can be fixed by first opening the photo in PicSay (max resolution is 1024x768) before sending them along.

Target now sells the Polaroid POGO printer for $70 bucks, which is half the price of what I paid last year. I'd really recommend buying one. There's nothing cooler than getting to print out those candid cellphone pics, in sticker form no less. But first, pick up Bluex.

photo from ToastyKen on flickr Android is nearly a year and a half old. However, its flagship device, the T-Mobile HTC G1/Dream/ChinPhone/GPhone has only been active since October, 2008. In that time, the rolly-polly green robot started with:

• A fledgling OS (designed by geeks with a love for UI but lacking in aesthetics)
• Running on a lone device that looks like the plain jane developers' mockup passed around in its infancy (As much as I love the G1, the chin gets me no respect from the iPhone 3G using boyfriend)
• A crippling in the US by T-Mobile's lack of nationwide 3G (shortly after this year the G1 went for sale in other countries with better cell service than the US... but not as affordable.)
• No onscreen keyboard, automatic rotations, or multitouch, no bluetooth, widgets were a hack (When the G1 was hacked to find that the screen had the capabilities for multitouch, the crowd went wild. HTC calmly said (paraphrased) "it wasn't in the plan to have multitouch for the G1, and besides... the screen can't do real two finger tracking anyway.")
• A weird confusion of what to qualify itself (Was the G1 a Gphone? Is it safe to call them all GPhones? Do we call them [the devices] Androids? It's an open platform but Google is all up in it? Who calls the shots? T-Mobile or The Google?)
• A battery life that isn't so bad if you live in the other thousand cities without  3G, but hellish if you lived in NYC, Baltimore, DC, etc.
• A Marketplace that showed a lot of promise but only had a handful of cool apps. Nothing you could buy, all free.

Time passes. I unboxed my first Android phone on October 21st, 2008. I was SOOOO excited. Finally, I was free from having to use Windows Mobile that, while fun to hack, not the most efficient thing to use. I packed my old T-Mobile Shadow away (with the three extra batteries) and accepted The Google as my Personal Data Savior... And it wasn't an iPhone . I've always stayed away from the iPhone, any time I've used it I never felt productive, millions of apps and hardly any of  'em are any use if you can't run programs in the background, cut and paste, or beam shit. That wasn't an iPhone rant. I'm so happy ya'll finally got to use cut and paste... I'll admit that while its still a little dumb to use it has more functionality than Android's cut and paste. And its pretty, I'll give you that, but I'm pretty too. I want my phone to have the brains. Android needed to grow up fastlike. The iPhone had a year on the streets (now two years and three fucking generations to get shit halfway in the right direction) and the G1 didn't get any slack. If Android showcased its power in a sleeker form it might have impressed more people (like the gays with money)... The G1 is a little clunky. The physical keyboard was great for me but turned others off, mainly those with iPhones used to an onscreen keyboard, and those who believed that real keyboards were now archaic. GPS and the first smartphone with a magnetometer (compass) were serious pluses, but the lack of a 3.5mm audio jack made it hard to stand up as the great media player it could be. And the chin... now a signature look when HTC makes a phone for Android... the chin was the bad idea that stuck, no matter that it lets the trackball hang out, its weird. That being said, Android moved on. It was actually pretty nice. We got to see the first real open (sorry Symbian, your days are numbered) operating system in the wild, sell a shit ton of phones for T-Mobile and spread worldwide like a virus. The idea of what Android is came clear when the "cupcake" update was announced. I couldn't wait for the official update, so I rooted my phone to allow the modded Sapphire 1.5 build. I tried about 4 different flavors of Android in the month it took the update to drop. Even Donut (the upcoming 2.0 release by the end of the year) is running out on the web in some chopped up form or another. Hackers took the best of the cracks and compiled their own editions, like the builds by JesusFreke. Google summed up its customizability by mentioning that in the official world there would be be exactly three flavors of Android: those with a lot, a little, or no Google Experience (Email, search, browser, Calendar, Contact syncing, and other Google Apps, all linked to your Google acct) Widgets used to just be a clock, a search-bar, and a picture frame. Boy, you can never have too many clocks. The homescreen had three pages, which soon grew to a possibility of dozens when home screen replacements first hit the market. Homescreen and even keyboard replacements showed that you didn't have to install a hacked ROM to change the look or functionality of  your device.  Custom widgets showed up on a Homescreen replacement app first, and The Google Android Development Team watched on, even supportively mentioning that there could be a security risk with custom widgets and they were working on new permissions to make them safer when widgets came out for real in 1.5. When 1.5 went live widgets took off and added the extra layer of functionality Android needed to compete as a smartphone. I have never been more productive with a phone. I love my G1, despite the dents and scratches,  minor sluggish moments, and the stupid chin. The best feature with Android are its intents. An Intent is a process by which applications running on Android can share data across other apps, augmenting the OS's power. For example, when I take a picture, I can send it to PicSay to edit the colors and crop, then twitpic it directly with Twidroid. When I click on a youtube or twitpic link, an app grabs the link and pulls a thumbnail preview so I don't have to launch a browser. Android multitasks pretty damn well, too. The number one gripe with smartphones that multi task are that it drains the battery.  Of course it drains the battery... because it's being useful. I'd rather carry an extra battery around than have a phone I could only run one app at a time. With over a million G1 units running in the US, its time for the next wave of the expansion. T-mobile has announced the My Touch 3g (the HTC Magic) is available for pre-order for an August launch. Motorola's Morrison plans to attract the sidekick users with a affordable android device aimed for a younger crowd. Samsung's Galaxy is for sale in germany on O2, and will hit the US sometime by the end of the year. LG even plans to make a Prada phone that runs on Android for some serious highend looks and brains. Remember when I placed my bets on Sony Erricsson? Looks like they plan a XPERIA based device codenamed "Rachael." This could be the shiny phone that gets my boyfriend off the iPhone bandwagon and into the multitasking arms of Android. check out the specs, pics, and UI preview below. Did I mention this phone is mad pretty? Specs - Built on a Qualcomm QSD8250 Snapdragon chip that can give speeds up to 1 Ghz, 8 megapixel autofocus camera, 3.5mm audio jack, standard miniUSB jack, 4" touchscreen with WVGA resolution at 800 x 480 pixels. Custom SE designed Android interface (2.0 AKA Donut). 3d Graphics capabilities.