Handmade African USB Memory Drives
The tiny African country Sao Tome a West African country with a population of about 150,000 located on the Guinea Gulf along the Equatoris getting into the business of creating wooden hand-made USB memory drives as part of SEED 2006, a Design and Social Economy project funded by the Portuguese Cooperation and developed by designer Pedro Alegria.
The designer, Pedro Alegria, introduced the USB flash card design to local craftsmen, all of whom had never seen or heard of such things before. The end result merges traditional “forgotten” craft with hot technology on the rise, sustaining the working families’ needs and offering unique craft-designs to the masses.
These things are really cool and I’d like to get one just for the conversation factor. On my geektastic scale from 1 to 10, I’d give these hand-made beauties a solid 7.
Introducing twttr.com From Odeo
Back in December, 2004 Noah Glass and Evan Williams founded a small company based in South Park, San Francisco, California called Odeo.
For those of you that don’t know, Odeo is a creative way to record and share audio. The best part about the service is it’s free. You can record audio and then share it with your Odeo contacts, by email, or by placing it in a Channel for all the world to hear. Audio from Odeo can be downloaded to desktops, iPods, and mp3 players.
Well on July 13, 2006 they officially launched a new service that helps groups of friends bounce random thoughts around with SMS.
You can find it at http://twttr.com. Twttr is pronounced “twitter” if you were wondering.
Evan Williams has a great technology past. He most recently was with Google, where he ran their personal publishing service, Blogger, which he co-founded in 1999 and later sold to Google in early 2003.
I bet Evan used the money from the sale of Blogger to fund Odeo. I wonder what he sold it for? We’ll probably never know the juicy details thanks to Non Disclosure Agreements.
U2’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday”
President Bush sings U2’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday”:
Real Ridable Robots for Sale
A Korean company called Robot3 builds robots designed for purely for fun including for entertainment at parties and other events.
The most geektastic one in the bunch is a $5,250.00 four-legged beast called R7, which has a plush seat you can sit in while it walks around under your control. W00t.
The company also makes robotic animals, including ridable horses, a raptor, and a bartender which would be very cool to own. Robot Bartender, bring me a pint of Guinness please. They even appear to sell a robot woman! What more do you need in life? Get yours now 
Update (9:44 pm): Apparently the site links for the robots are not working now due to a 503 service error which means the web server is currently unable to handle the HTTP request due to a temporary overloading. I guess to many people want Bartender robots.
Real Fact #153
Tonight I needed to reboot a client server running Windows Small Business Server 2003 because it locked up and I couldn’t get to it remotely.
While I was waiting for the thing to reboot, I grabbed a Snapple from the clients break room fridge. For those of you who know which client I’m speaking about, yes I did put a dollar into the donation cup.
After I finished the Snapple, I was reading the “Real Fact” that they place under the bottle cap. Here is what it said:
The speed limit in NYC was 8 mph in 1895.
That’s really interesting because roughly 111 years later the average freeway speed limit here in the United States is between 55-70 mph depending on which freeway you’re traveling on and which State.
The average speed limit on city streets is between 30-45 mph.
Thanks Snapple for “Real Fact” #153 and for my Kiwi Strawberry drink!
Microsoft to Show Vista At Hacker Conference
Microsoft plans to detail the security features of its upcoming Windows Vista operating system at the Hack In The Box Hacker Conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia September 18-21, 2006. The Hack In The Box conference will host two speakers from Microsoft.
The first, Dave Tamasi, a lead security program manager at Microsoft, will give a presentation on security engineering in Vista. The talk will include a discussion about features suggested by hackers and other security-conscious members of the computing community, in addition to security improvements made on Vista.
The second speaker, Douglas MacIver, a penetration engineer at Microsoft, will review Vista’s BitLocker Drive Encryption and the company’s analysis of threats and attempts to penetrate the security feature.
Speaking of security and hacking, remember today is Microsoft Patch Tuesday, so go grab your updates. Depending on what you have installed on your Windows box, you will be downloading 7 to 9 critical updates for various Windows Operating Systems and also various Microsoft Office products.