Have a Prius? Wish it could get 100MPG in the city? Maybe the Prius+ is for you. It’s a PHEV, a plug-in electric hybrid, which lets you recharge the batteries from an outlet as well as from the car’s motor.
The details look a bit daunting, but the folks behind the project are demonstrating that they can convert a Prius in a weekend at this months Maker Faire in the Bay Area.
I should have never found out about MyHeritage’s Face Recognition program. You can upload photos and see what celebrities their face recognition software matches you with. My most frequent matches were Melissa Gilbert, Renee Zellweger, Juliette Lewis, Marcia Cross, Kirsten Dunst and Emma Watson, with the occasional (and weird) Harrison Ford, Englebert Humperdinck and Conan O’Brian thrown in. When I ran this photo, Karen’s top match was Clark Gable and mine was Keith Ledger. So that was weird. Who do you look like?
I just “posted”:http://labs.evdb.com/archives/2006/02/spotted_in_the_1.html about the new “Podbop”:http://podbop.org service, which uses EVDB data to help people discover new music. A snippet:
bq. Podbop’s mission is to prevent the “shoulda been there” syndrome. You know the story: a friend goes to a concert by a little-known band then tells you, “You gotta hear this!” You discover that they’re awesome, just in time to realize that they won’t visit your town for another year. If ever. “Shoulda been there.”
bq. Rewind a month and try it the Podbop way instead. You go to the Podbop site and find your city’s podcast. (San Diego, for instance) Podbop gives you a steady stream of MP3s for bands that are performing soon in your town. If you like one, follow the link to the Eventful page for details on the concert. Now you’ll be the one to tell your friend, “Gotta hear this band!”
Check it out for your town and see what you think.
(Author’s note: Chris Messina implored us to blog about Mash Pit. I didn’t want to just parrot other excellent posts, so here’s my demented version of the event.)
Four thirty. A.M., as in oh-dark-thirty. Ben and Karen will be asleep for another three hours. Uh huh. Why am I up this early? Because I have to leave for the airport in an hour. Uh huh. Why is that again? It takes me a moment to focus, to remember. Oh yes. It’s because I go into berserker paroxysms of geeky hyperactivity whenever the triggerword API is spoken, and I don’t stop until some kind soul utters the safeword.
In this case the fiend is Chris Messina, and the cause of the utterance is Mash Pit. It’s the latest bud from the BarCamp bush, a one-day test to see if meatspace interaction can produce cyberspace results. If successful, a number of Mash Pits would follow, each building on the the code and content of the last. It’s in San Francisco, of course. I’m in San Diego, of course. “It’s not that far,” I think, glossing over the realities of security checkpoints, delays and AirBART. “The flight is barely as long as my old commute to Encinitas.” Uh huh.
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Here is a webpage with the steps to find a human when calling in for customer service to some larger companies. You know, figured it could be useful in this day and age.