I’m a fan of Popgadget, a site that aims to pick out tech for people in general and women in particular. Three things recently caught my eye on this site, two that have to do with weather (which I’ll go ahead and admit I am preoccupied with, genuinely) and one that’s concerned with eco-friendly fashion.

I’ll link w/ short summaries here for clarity:

Diamond Weather Station: A crystal-studed bedside weather monitor, that lets you know what’s going on with a blinging graphic before you even leave the comfort of your pillow.

Smart Umbrella: An umbrella that’s connected to remote weather monitoring and has a handle that flashes when you need to take it with you.

CO2 Runway Dress: A snazzy dress created by the Danish (who’s innovation I rarely get tired of) that monitors CO2 levels and lights up when levels are “high”. Unfortunately, there is seemingly no quantitative result from this, perhaps only maybe a laughable sparkling reminder to do something different, or ya gonna die. Al Gore would approve.

Several other gadgets and posts, one to monitor babies, one to help care for elderly adults, one commemorating the Hello Kitty, have me both loving and hating Popgadget at the same time. Inevitably the gadgets are attuned to the life of a caretaker, someone who’s got an inclination for pastels and pinks in particular, and someone who’s ready to drop $80-$140 USD to have the edge on the other tech heady ladies in the herd.

But I like some of these gadgets! And I can’t figure out how anyone would run a technology blog for women without acknowledging that stereotypes about women’s interests are based both on the reality of women’s roles and the traditions of women’s roles, each of which influence what get’s classified as “lady-like” and each of which can be troublesome to accept as is.

There’s no easy way to tackle this. I’ll keep watching Popgadget until the pink gags me or the care-taking wears me out.

My computer crashed and I was looking for a quick way to take music from my iPhone to iTunes. There are quite a few places out there trying to sell you something that can do this. Senuti offers a free trial and was quick and easy to understand. This is the sort of software  generation that is worth donating to!

Check out Senuti here.

I shot this series of photos with a Gigapan camera last summer. Though I never managed to sit through the painfully slow stitching process I did put it together in Quicktime form. It gives a viewer the feeling of nodding “yes” as cars and trains go by. Yes southern town of York, Yes.

Welcome to day 8 of the 100 Days in the news project. For 92 more days I will be pulling news stories from my Google reader and making artwork about it!

Following yesterday’s post I had some pretty good responses from friends about the snappy concept of the Not So Obsolete project that I’m now renaming the Floppy Flash!

Skimming today’s news I just couldn’t let go of the idea that everything about today might be a message to modify yesterday’s attempt at a cool crafty way to house my boring flash drive!! How to keep to my new project a day requirement?  Beginning grad school several years ago I wrote an essay after my first theory class extolling the virtue and necessity of PLAY as a means to not only learn but to be refreshed as well. I proposed that through play we find space in our lives to not only be creative, but to re-create things which seem fixed and resolved in the world around us. So today’s project is a yesterday’s project with a more informed twist- an effort not to just make something but show how it is made!

Today’s project is inspired by:

The Varieties of Play Match the Requirements of Human Existence

Today you have the opportunity to make your very own Floppy Flash!!

You will need:

A flash drive that’s easily opened. I used a 4GB Lexar flash.

Black foam core.

Shiny silver, white, and orange paper.

Glue

Set of keys- err.. you really only need one key.

An x-acto knife- useful for cutting materials, opening flash drive, and hollowing out space in foam core.

LET’S GET STARTED!!!

*Just to help you out I suggest looking at the real 3.5 floppy as you do this or pulling up an image of it as a visual aid yo help you as you work.

Step 1:Crack open that Flash Drive! It feels really good to have the sensation of breaking something when you’re really not. That naked little Flash Drive body is pretty amazing…

Step 2: Cut a 3.5 x 3.5 square out of black foam core. I rounded my corners with an x-acto knife and sanded the edges for smoothness. Measure the body of your naked flash drive and let that tell you how far you want to cut into your square for the part of the Floppy Flash that will be hidden under the faux metal part of the disc.

Step 3: This is where you get to use those keys! I started hollowing out a space in the foam core (carefully!) with an x-acto knife and then finish by pressing down some of the hardest to reach foam with a key. This worked great for me and made sure that the path was clear so my flash drive could slip right in. Start with hollowing out the space for the flash in the small cut-away part of the foam core that will house your flash body.

Step 4: Take small plug-in of your flash drive and push it in to larger part before you begin to cut a place for it. This will help you make sure to put the hole in the right spot. Remember to press down the foam with the key before shoving in your flash- you don’t want to get a bunch of foam up in your flash drive!

Step 5: Now for the fun part. Cut and glue on a fake label for your Floppy Flash. Cut and Add the “metal part” at the top and the certifiably real metal circle of the  back of your floppy disc. Yea! It’s looking really swank at this point!! Write something witty on the label part like “Floppy Flash” or ” Not Obsolete”

Step 6: leave it on your desk and wait for the fun to begin.  Someone wanders by and asks

” Whoa- are you still using these?”

At which point you crack that puppy open and show them the relevant data storage inside!!! Blam!!!

Total Time Spent: 2hrs.

Total Cost of Material: $0

Amount of Fun had: 9!

Day 7 of the 100 Days in the news project. For 93 more days I will be pulling news stories from my Google reader and making artwork about it!

FAQ: Are you making work for 100 consecutive days?

A: Yes! 100 days! Back to back!

Today’s news sources are:

From Gizmo Watch:

Alpheus

Today’s idea came to me rather quickly as I skimmed the news. Gizmo Watch posted yet another modification on the flash drive which has been housed in a variety of unlikely ways in the past several months. Following an inspiring lecture by Stephanie Syjuco who incorporated fake 3.5 floppy discs into an art project of hers, I was reminded of how quickly data storage devices become obsolete and I started wondering when the flash drive would bite the dust. There seems to be some irony in housing the flash drive in unusual outfits. It’s almost as though we can’t wait for the next mutation.

…and so without further delay today’s project: Not So Obsolete

Total time spent: 30 min. Gees!!!

Total Material cost: $10

Total fun had: 9!!!

Day 3 of the 100 Days in the news project. For 97 more days I will be pulling news stories from my Google reader and making artwork about it!

Today’s News Sources are:

From Google News:

ISPs: We Swear, We Won’t Watch Your Every Move

By Michele Masterson, ChannelWeb
12:41 PM EDT Fri. Sep. 26, 2008

and

from BoingBoing:

Britain will make foreigners carry RFID identity cards and will put us in a huge, Orwellian database: the rest of Britain will be next

Posted by Cory Doctorow, September 26, 2008 6:26 AM | permalink

With Britain’s recent introduction of mandatory biometric RFID cards and the increasing concerns with monitoring on the Internet, today’s topic of debate is surveillance!!

I got up from reading the two above articles and to my surprise found the problem has spread to my own back yard, and garden, and to my own laptop! I guess I’m not surprised by a few of these, but really- my toothbrush doesn’t know anything! It was by the sink the WHOLE time!!!

Total cost of materials: $1

Time spent making: 2 hrs

Amount of fun had: 8!

Today’s inspirations were:

The Power of Negative Thinking

and

Keepin’ it real fake, part L: The “Ipod style Mobile Phone iPhone”

by Conrad Quilty-Harper, posted Mar 18th 2007 at 7:12AM

My day started with a meeting during which a friend and I talked about our obsessions with iPhones- they cost a bit too much for us, one brand dominates the market, and well, we want them anyway. I started thinking that I needed to come to terms with the fact that perhaps in the next few months I would not be getting a high paying job, would not be getting an iPhone, and would still be lugging around my laptop so I could catch that one e-mail I was waiting for.

What to do? Well for one the situation is not so terrible. I have a phone that has a truck load of sentimental value, not to mention that it flips open in a fancy way. Also, it’s good to remember that it can be a relief to be unreachable. I replay to myself an experience this summer when a friend’s boss e-mailed him an angry note in the middle of a camping trip effectively reining in the good times being had.

I’ve realized it’s not so much the “having” of the iPhone that’s driving me nuts, but the fact that it seems like an extremely handy tool that many in my social circle see as the ultimate authority in problem solving when it comes to directions, weather, looking up words, and on and on.  Just once or twice I want to find the word in the dictionary faster than on wikipedia- I want to make it outside and get hit by rain drops before my friends can look up the local weather conditions.

How to even the score??  With the use of Today’s 100 DAYS IN THE NEWS project. The very first in a series of 100 projects based on my responses to news items in my Google reader!

I’ve decided to level the playing field with my very own hand crafted iPHONE VOODOO!!!

The next time a friend pulls out the iPhone, I plan to whip out my little evil equalizer and stall that high-tech gadget with some electronic soul-poking.

“Why isn’t my iPhone working?”

“Hmmm…wow. I don’t know…sure is strange!!! Oh Look! We can just use this paper map to find our way!!”

Total construction costs: $20.00

Total time in construction:3hrs.

Amount of fun had (scale of 1-10): 7

As a blogger, a tweeter, and indulger of various forms of mediated connectivity I enjoyed reading this New York Times article on digital intimacy.

Perhaps most enjoyable to me: the interviewee’s accounts of a sense of intimacy through experiencing the minutia of contact’s everyday life. Also of fascination is the decorating of the mundane; that people are motivated to speak of their daily lives in a way that demands attention or is entertaining to an audience. Ideas of with whom and how we connect are shifting and social circles are bubbling and expanding in ways that we are not used to and we’re clumsy with it for now. The article wisely points to the unlikely circumstances that have followed increased disclosure of personal information: trouble with parents, coaches, employers, ex-boyfriends  and others airing or seeing the dirty laundry of people they are close to or whose lives they can affect. Perhaps the most insightful point to the article, whether we choose to participate or not, our identities and lives are now highly likely to be affected by digital socializing.

Reading through a few technology blogs and then a few psychology articles about the nature of criminals, I was in the midst of trying to combine the two ideas somehow ( which is seems my brain does naturally) when I came across this word of the day on Urban Dictionary: JAILBREAK

All of these ideas mingled with a Thoreau quote that had resonated with me last night as I sat reading Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan.

“Men have become the tools of their tools”.

While advertising would have us notice only the new options this or that new gadget can offer us, surely there will be things which are lacking. Is it only the technically adept user who will feel the parameters of their new toy or will the laymen have a sneaking suspicion that something is left out as well? It is interesting to flip advertisement of the new freedoms a device might offer you to ask yourself the opposing question of:

“What does this gadget keep me from doing?”

We are at a place in time where only the nerds can save us. Well maybe the artists too. My work this year with Robot 250 has restored my hope that funding may be directed towards a few places other that development of the latest marketable features which also just so happen to rope you into spending more of your precious moola.

Like the high school educated dude ( so I’m told) who invented the best method for making fake fire, it will no doubt take years for some gadgetry to fall into the hands of certain trades, cultures, and economic brackets where we will see the uses of technology stretched in unlikely and amazing ways by people who are in contact with a different set of needs and materials.

Projects like the Gigapan take an adventurous step in the right direction by distributing and collecting the fruits of their invention to a wide array of users. Other companies could learn from this example.