You've probably seen the above picture before, it's been often on the net titled: Expendibility, Guess who's not coming back.

I was thinking about the above picture this morning.

Y'know Kirk is a real jerk. He beams down with his two best friends and Reddy there and Reddy never makes it back. Sometimes it's an especially dangerous mission so Kirk brings Reddy, Redstone, Redmond and Redgenald. Ain't noone in Red coming back. Kirk wins the day of course, but at the expense of the red shirts.

I think Kirk knows this. And that makes Kirk a jerk.

Way to go Reddy for jumping on the pad and beaming down with the bridge crew, that's gotta be fun but it's probably not worth it, not with Kirk wearing that yellow shirt.

You ever notice how rarely Ulhura (Red Shirt) and Scotty (Red Shirt) beam down?

They ain't stupid, those engines don't break that often, and noone really needs to work a switchboard in the 23rd century.

"Beam down with you Captain? um I have to work on the engines and run this transporter from this side."

"Beam down with you Captain? I've been hearing a lot of static on the com, I better stay up here and turn this knob back and forth."

Ulhura and Scotty are some smart red shirts.

(So think before you beam down Reddy, at least wait until they give you a Blue Shirt, alright?)

Multiple Monitor Madness

That USB additional monitor adapter worked so well that I immediately bought a second one (the box actually says you can use up to five.)

So the Red LCD monitor above is on the primary machine off of the VGA input. The Yellow and Cyan are both LCDs hooked to the primary machine using the usb monitor adapters.

The Green monitor at far right is actually a CRT I pulled out of storage (but I ordered a cheap 15" flatscreen online to replace it shortly) The Green and the Purple are hooked to a secondary PC.

The above mentioned 5 monitors on 2 PCs are also connected together via Synergy so that one keyboard and one mouse sweeps across the whole set-up.

There's also an iPad (Lime-Green), Phone (Brown) and a PocketPC (Orange) hanging out on the corner desk- The Pocket PC is nostalgic mostly.

It's not an expensive set-up. The components are pretty budget, excepting the iPad, you could probably do all the above for less than $1500 if you wanted to. It's kindof cool and kindof nuts all at the same time though.

We don't have flying cars but, the internet and computers are neat, if you squint, and blur things out of focus abit with a pencil filter for example, the present does feel very much like the future.

Maybe we'll get monitor paint for our walls, or VR augmented reality glasses that will bring the whole real world into a computer virtual reality soon enough. And when that happens this whole era will seem exceedingly quaint, but at the moment when you think of what it available on a modest budget it really is quite wondrous the tools and toys that are available.

Neat.

7 Steps For Creating Disruptive New Retail Experiences

What do we mean by “scripts”? Sociologists have spent years studying experiences and have noticed that there are shared rules that govern how we act. These scripts are unwritten and unspoken, yet greatly influence our day-to-day behaviors and interactions.

Scripts are why we know what to do when we go to the DMV. Unfortunately for the DMV, that script includes complaining to the people in line with us, expecting a bad photo to be taken, and talking afterward about how inefficient the process was. On the other hand, a birthday party is supposed to be a happy experience. We appropriately sing and smile, often in spite of how much is on our minds.

iPic

The Comfort Principle: Spend Money Where You Spend Your Time

If you don't work at home, you probably won't have as easy a time finding items that you use a majority of your day, but you still can. Start by making a list of what you do all day, then evaluating what equipment you need to do those tasks. For example, here's a generic list:

• 8 hours: (Work) Office chair, computer, office desk, monitor
• 2 hours: (Commute) Car, car stuff
• 1 hour: (Cooking) Kitchen utensils
• 3 hours: (Living room recreation) TV, video games, music
• 1 hour: (Reading) Kindle/iPad
• 1 hour: (Exercise) Running, treadmill, elliptical

Modern and Versatile Home Office Storage Unit

Republic Wireless relies on Wi-Fi for dirt cheap $19 mobile service

How To Create A World: Skyrim's Director On Building A Never-Ending Fantasy

Affordance An affordance is a quality of an object, or an environment, that allows an individual to perform an action.

Why we need to take computers out of computing — Tech News and Analysis

Click the link above, scroll to the bottom and watch the video. Good stuff.

Run a Simple Web Server on Your Android Device - Linux Magazine Online

On the Future of Books: A Discussion with Seth Godin 26 minute podcast.

The Hipsterfication Of America : NPR Cool article.

College Students Don't Study as Much as They Should - Education - GOOD

Do Me A Favor So You'll Like Me: The Reverse Psychology of Likeability - Forbes

Peggy Noonan On Steve Jobs And Why Big Companies Die - Forbes

When Whales Walked in Egypt

Google Drops The Price Of Chromebooks to $299 And Polishes The Interface I like the idea of Chrome, but it seems to be a long term bet by Google that hardware is going to get real cheap, since that seems to me to be the only way such an OS makes any sense in the next 10 years. There doesn't seem to be any institutional desire to make sub $100 laptop hardware.

Tata Nano - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia They can make a new car for $2,879. Think about that for a minute.

Hello Little Printer, the fun gadget that brings the web to you — Tech News and Analysis Cool little printer idea, hopefully it's very cheap and inexpensive when it comes out (although really, what are the odds of that?) I think I would use something small like this more than my standard printer. Basically a device like this would seem to be a digital equivilent of post-it notes.

Rasperry Pi A credit card sized Linux Box for $25? yeah that would be cool.

Catvertising Funny.

The difference between a UX Designer and UI Developer « Melbourne, as in the city. Great chart above, article is pretty good as well.

Tinkercad Gets Funding
source: Fabbaloo Blog

Tinkercad.com is a neat online browser based tool for creating 3D models. Fairly simple but quite powerful with it's addition and subtraction of various shapes construction model.

The Lost Art Of Design Etiquette
source: swissmiss

Good Article.

Copy Paste Character
source: swissmiss

Search Instagram
source: swissmiss

Search Instagram

Custom Projects Backdrops and Dioramas
source: thefwoosh.com

Some really neat ideas here.

FlicFlac: An Audio Conversion App That Does Not Require Installation
source: MakeUseOf.com

flicflac Nice audio conversion app, drag and drop dead simple.

Voice Recorder Flash Drive
source: Likecool

I picked up one of these really cheap on an Amazon deal a week ago or so. Neat simple one switch one task device.

Google catalogs brings all of your holiday perusing to your Android tablet
source: Engadget

Daria cosplay
source: Boing Boing

How to make a projector for your iPod/iPhone for about a $1
source: Instructables: exploring - technology - featured

Kickstopper: paying Hollywood studios to cease dumb franchise production
source: Boing Boing

Ha.

Make Your iPad Look Like an Apple I With Retro Docking Station
source: Mashable!

Neat. Although since the iPad's speakers are plenty loud, you could probably just build the wood stand.

Printed buildings based on Sim City 2000
source: Super Punch

I'm very geeked about the possibilities of 3D Printing when it gets really cheap in 2012 or 2013.

[UPDATE] WinScan2PDF V1.44
source: The Portable Freeware Collection

Haven't tried it yet, but you've got to love litle single purpose 40K size apps.

Animatronics at Work
source: Thingiverse Blog

Very cool. 3D printer used to create an animatronic shoulder mounted dragon.

Auto sliding door turns your house into the Enterprise
source: DVICE

Yeah, 3/4 of the public buildings in America have automatic doors, but still it's neat as a home project.

hmmm

Was going thru a pile of junk mail on the table… noticed that there was a new Thinkgeek catalog in it. I mentally noted "New Thinkgeek catalog, cool". then, rather than look at the catalog in my hand, I walked into the other room, picked up my iPad, launched the Google Catalog App and started looking at the Thinkgeek catalog on the iPad instead of the paper one.

This was all fairly unconcious.

Social Media

Social Media is no longer a seperate thing. It has been assimilated.

Institutions

The article I posted via Posterous on my blog before this one is really good stuff when it comes to institutions.

Balance

True Balance, homeostasis, equilibrium does not exist. It's desire is hardwired in though, and there are many things that take advantage of that.

The above makes alot of books not work.

But also you can have alot of fun with the knowledge.

It's December

I just sortof noticed.

We're almost to 2012.