Mozilla Labs Blog » Blog Archive » Prism

The awesome dev team at Mozilla have released an alternative to widgets called Prism. It will run any web application on your desktop and it's built on the firefox engine. Give it a shot.

Back in 2001 I made a film with some talented NYU and Northeastern students about the emerging hip-hop scene in small town outside of Havana, Cuba. Alamar, dubbed "The City of Hip Hop" was bursting with talent but their talent was kept in a prison. The political censorship and bureaucracy of the music industry gave little chance to their style of music. When buying a cd meant giving up almost a week's salary, it was difficult to gain support. Fortunately through the internet, everyone around the world can hear the brilliant and raw talent of Doble Filo and RCA (Rappers with Crazy Attitudes). Big ups to Filippo Chia and Ben Solomon for getting me involved in the making.

Click here to watch the entire short film. 23min.

Forward IMs to your Mobile Phone - AOL Mobile
This is a free instant message hack from AOL that forwards your AIM messages when you are idle or offline to your mobile phone via SMS Text Messages.
The same page also has a good tutorial on texting with T9 input. If you don't know how to T9, this lesson will greatly speed up your messaging.

For the past three months Sprint has been overcharging me for my cellular service. Now I've been a loyal customer for over five years, so I feel the need to express myself here. If you don't want to hear me rant, stop here. But I think this is an unfortunate sign of Sprint's customer service pushing away loyal customers. And it highlights what sounds to me like a problem of mismanaged IT projects, because Sprint has been trying to integrate billing platforms with Nextel.

Prior to the mistakes, I had been charged the same amount for the past year and half. Since I never go over on my minutes, my bill month-to-month has been the same. Until...
Month 1, back in August I received a bill that was $20 higher than the previous bills. So I call customer service and they notice that a monthly credit was not applied. They gave me a credit.
Month 2, my bill is $24 dollars more than it should be. I call again and 20 minutes later they explain that it was simply an automated billing error and promise to correct the problem. Credits were applied, although they only credit me $20 instead of $4. I figure it's not worth another 20 minutes on the phone to get 4 bucks.
Month 3, $22 over. This time I call and their customer service says that my credits have already been applied (I presume they only saw their own corrections from their past two mistakes). I suggest they look at my past bills for the last, oh, year and a half and check why my bill all the sudden looks different. It takes them 20 minutes to reply, "sir we don't see a problem." I explain myself again...back and forth, finally they say I must explain myself to another department. Why is this my job? Isn't it your mistake?

Rolling Stone : Radiohead Reveal “In Rainbows” Download Details, We Anxiously Salivate Into Our Keyboards
This morning Radiohead will offer their new album as a DRM free download with a "pay-what-you-wish" business model. The downloads are offered as a compliment for the deluxe cd/lp boxed version that costs 40 pounds. This is a bold experiment from one of the hottest bands in the US. And it sounds like other bands may be following Radiohead's example, and see Mr. Richmond's insightful blog entry "How Radiohead killed the record labels."

Techdirt: RIAA Wins Case, Gloats
Read the comments in the story above for a recent litmus test on what people think about RIAA and the current crisis of intellectual property in the music industry.
It seems that not much has changed legally in the last year. Most people's perception of the law is that it's way out of step with reality. From a historical perspective, it's interesting that usually the companies who complain the most about copyright infringement actually benefit the most. When will we wake up?

A friend of mine sent me to this site the other day:
Hitech cat-door uses facial recognition technology.
(Hat-tip to Paul for the link)

Coming soon for humans.