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Monday, March 24, 2003 |
Tammy and I've seen two interesting pieces of cinematography in the past two days.
On Sunday we (with my parents) saw "Amandla! A Revolution In Four Part Harmony" an excellent documentary about the South African struggle with apartheid through the sounds of the music that was created during that time. Very, very powerful. Although the footage of the violence is prominent, it is the music that hits you in the gut.
"The Amandla! film is ten years in the making, in part, because it is so far-reaching. It covers a half-century of songs that fueled the fall of South Africa’s oppressive regime and includes recollections and powerful commentary from the artists behind the music: Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba, among many others. Contemporary singer-songwriter Vusi Mahlasela is a prominent presence, narrating and performing throughout the film. The soundtrack features songs from Hugh, Miriam, Vusi, Abdullah Ibrahim and more as well as choral pieces, freedom songs and never before heard recordings."
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Beijing Bicycle Xiaoshuai Wang Tonight we watched Shiqi sui de dan che (Bejing Bicycle) - a strangly gripping story revolving around the theft of a bicycle and two young chinese men, who get wrapped up in the ownership of the bike for different reasons. There''s a twist of love, more violence than I expected and a whole lotta things near the end that never quite get straightened out. It does give an interesting nod to modern Bejing and the reality of the human condition.
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10:51:01 PM 
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HP's new Bluetooth Pocket PC.
 Brighthand has the scoop on a new Bluetooth Pocket PC coming from HP. The long-rumored iPAQ h2200 will have a 64,000 color transflective LCD screen, up to 128MB of RAM, a 400MHz processor, have an SDIO expansion slot for adding peripherals like digital cameras and WiFi networking cards, and run the newest version of the Pocket PC operating system.
Read
[Gizmodo]
6:29:21 PM
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I pulled a nice one cutting an english muffin in half this morning. I should have noticed that the muffin was already "fork split."
3:33:41 PM
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The ApriAlpha personal robot.
 New personal robot from Toshiba called the ApriAlpha that has face and speech recognition, a voice synthesizer, built-in WiFi and Bluetooth, and runs on a fuel cell rather than batteries. It's not clear what the ApriAlpha can actually do, though it does kinda resemble one of those old Welltron 8-track cassette players.
Read
[Gizmodo]
1:36:03 PM
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NYT on mobile tech and frontline war reporting, kevinsites.net suspension. An item in today's New York Times by Amy Harmon on technology and war reporting, which also discusses the suspension on Friday of the www.kevinsites.net warblog.
 Reporters covering the war in Iraq are at one with their technology as never before. Television reporters are toting hand-held video cameras and print journalists have traded the 70-pound satellite phones of the 1991 Gulf War for svelte models that can be held up to their ear. High-speed Internet lines in the desert and more satellites in the sky mean journalists can make a connection almost anywhere. As the conflict unfolds, they are tapping into the global communications grid regularly.
News gatherers say the smaller gadgets and bigger bandwidth have broadened their reach in a way that is sure to change how people perceive the war. Just as television forced the world to confront graphic images of war for the first time during the Vietnam War, today's digital devices are beginning to provide a more intimate and multifaceted view of the war in Iraq than would have ever been possible before.
"Technology has advanced to the point where the only limitation is in the imagination of the correspondent," said Frank Governale, the vice president for operations at CBS News. "Given access by the military and willpower of the people, we can pretty much go live from wherever we want. It's a scary thought."
Image (NYT): A system used by NBC that provides Internet access and multiple telephone connections. Link to NYT story (registration required), Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]
1:35:55 PM
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Cellphone with the world's longest standby time.
 For those with cellphones that keep dying on them: A new cellphone from Philips that has thirty days, or 750 hours, of standby time. The only problem is that it looks like the Xenium 9@9 ++ (that's really what it's called, which makes you wonder if they're actually trying to give it a ridiculous name) is only coming out in Asia.
Read
[Gizmodo]
1:35:39 PM
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Profile of HyperSonic Sound inventor. Fun profile of Woody Norris, inventor of HyperSonic Sound, a technology that "beams" sound so that it sounds like it is coming from inside your head.
Woody Norris aims the silvery plate at his quarry. A burly brunette 200 feet away stops dead in her tracks and peers around, befuddled. She has walked straight into the noise of a Brazilian rain forest -- then out again. Even in her shopping reverie, here among the haircutters and storefront tax-preparers and dubious Middle Eastern bistros, her senses inform her that she has just stepped through a discrete column of sound, a sharply demarcated beam of unexpected sound. ''Look at that,'' Norris mutters, chuckling as the lady turns around. ''She doesn't know what hit her.'' Norris is demonstrating something called HyperSonic Sound (HSS). The aluminum plate is connected to a CD player and an odd amplifier -- actually, a very odd and very new amplifier -- that directs sound much as a laser beam directs light. Over the past few years, mainly in secret, he has shown the device to more than 300 major companies, and it has slackened a lot of jaws. In December, the editors of Popular Science magazine bestowed upon HSS its grand prize for new inventions of 2002, choosing it over the ferociously hyped Segway scooter. It is no exaggeration to say that HSS represents the first revolution in acoustics since the loudspeaker was invented 78 years ago -- and perhaps only the second since pilgrims used ''whispering tubes'' to convey their dour messages. Link NYT Mag Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]
1:35:16 PM
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DIY Jean-Jacques Perrey. Jean-Jacques Perrey is a pioneering electronic music composer with a whimsical sound. He did the theme song for Disney's Main Street Electrical Parade. This is a fun little Flash app that lets you string together little trademark snippets of his songs. Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]
1:35:06 PM
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Lance Knobel: "Embedding reporters might be merely a recognition of the reality that much of the reporting media has already embedded the coalition's assumptions into its work."  [via Scripting News]
8:44:22 AM
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© Copyright 2003 nick gaydos.
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