The Mail Order Tapeworm

Click here to listen to the official audio show

Mark, Wes, and guest @besz at Bo's BBQ in Lafayette, CA .

Sites of Interest:

• We make jokes about being sick because this recording was made when the Swine Flu scare was going on.
  
  
• Apple removed the Baby Shaker iPhone app from the app store.
  
  
• History of the word "computer". Comptometer operators should have had that title.
  
  
• Were the people who wired plug boards the first programmers?
  
  
• Purse that is a cross between a Nintendo and a Commodore 64.
  
  
• History of Commodore Computers and pictures of the Pet.
  
  
• The Remington Rand Univac was the first use of a high-speed printer.
  
  
• Early-day line printers used chains and other mechanical technologies to print one entire line at a time.
  
  
• Computer music using an IBM 1403 chain printer.
  
  
• Modern video of making music with vintage personal computer equipment.
  
  
• Will people pay for custom Facebook URL's?
  
  
• Mark thinks this is all bullshit bullshit bullshit: the Tapeworm Diet.
  
  
• Wes mentioned worms that eat infected flesh, but he probably meant medical leeches.
  
  
• Get your free "chimp id". Mark has one.
  
  
• The .tel domain suffix is kind of like a chimp id, but more organized for business use and it's not free. The price for a .tel domain name varies with the registrar; the cheapest Mark found for .tel is mydomain. @justinhayward does support for the .tel concept on Twitter. Mark has one, but he doesn't do much with it.
  
  
• In October, 2005, Steve Jobs was still saying there would be no video iPod.
  
  
• How to make a hole in one, right there in your office.
  
  
• Bes' HTC TouchPro phone and Wes' Blackberry can't even do these simple things that every iPhone can do: Pimple Popper, Dart Anyone, Table, Monkey-Fart, Parent Remote, Mr. Elephant Fart.
  
  
• The Time Magazine poll for the World's Most Influential Person was rigged.
  
  
• The 2 Girls 1 Cup video.
  
  
• Mark thinks this is a stupid name for a website about things you like (as opposed to things you lick): likaholix.com
  
  

Wes' iPhone Applications of the week:

• Wolfenstein 3D Classic - You are OSA super agent B.J. Blazkowicz and you must escape from Castle Wolfenstein and defeat the twisted Nazi regime!
  
  
• Vir2L® Base Jumper - Base Jumper does more to capture the spirit of the old beloved games than anything Nintendo has released in 13 years.
  
  

Mark's iPhone Applications of the week:

• 10 Balls 7 Cups - simulation of the Skeeball game, including winning prize tickets.
  
  
• My.tel - The official free app from Telnic to manage your .tel domain.
  
  
• Party Whistle - Just blow into your microphone and enjoy the realistic sounds and animations of a party whistle.
  
  
• KFC Grillz - Hold the iPhone in front of your mouth and talk as you impress your friends with your new grill. The grilled out mouth speaks in time with your voice!
  
  
• TweetStack - Group your Twitter friends, search terms, and TwitPics into fully customizable "stacks", all of which reside on the tab bar and show you the number of unread messages.
  
  

New Ways to be Gross with Twitter

Click here to listen to the official audio show

Mark and Wes in Pleasant Hill, CA at the Monsoon Masala restaurant.

Sites of Interest:

• Office chair that measures farts and sends twitters.
  
  
• Brain-Twitter interface. There have been similar machines that read brainwaves as an input device to a video game.
  
  
• There are websites where you type commands and a virtual actor obeys them. E.g. Virtual Girlfriend.
  
  
• Long before twitter you could leave community messages on cards.
  
  
• The Community Memory system of public terminals.
  
  
• Optical signaling is an ancient method of long-distance communication.
  
  
• History of the Vocoder instrument, first demonstrated by AT&T at the 1939 World's Fair.
  
  
• The Legend Group turned into Lenovo and acquired IBM's Personal Computer Division.
  
  
• Version 9.04 of Ubuntu Linux was released.
  
  
• Nintendo Gameboy turns 20. You can play the old games on emulators.
  
  
• For several days, the Apple.com home page was taken over by a counter supposedely showing the number of app downloads as this approached one billion.
  
  
• Apple iTouch 3.0 firmware will unlock the Bluetooth capability that was already in the hardware.
  
  
• Broadcom is first with a Bluetooth 3.0 chipset.
  
  
• Bluetooth and Wi-Fi share the 2.4 GHz radio band.
  
  
• How Bluetooth got its name.
  
  
• Donald Knuth's "The Art of Computer Programming".
  
  
• Acer confirms it will make an Android phone, but this guy is skeptical whether Android will become popular.
  
  
• Mark thinks this is a very weird name for a website about things you like: www.likaholix.com.
  
  
• Oracle is buying Sun for a mere $7.4 billion.
  
  
• Wes is trying to sneak Blackberry applications into Slurpcast.
  
  

Wes' iPhone Applications of the week:

• Yowza! - Launch it and it finds deals in your geographic area. Show the cashier the deal on your iPhone screen, they scan the barcode, and you save money.
  
  
• CraigsMobileList - Wes' favorite app for accessing the craigslist website.
  
  

Mark's iPhone Applications of the week:

• PocketMeter - It emits sound and measures the time it takes for the echo to return. Point it towards a wall or floor, touch the screen, and it will show you the distance.
  
  
• 3 Numbers - Currency & units converter, tip calculator, and calculator all in one. But the special thing about this app is the steampunk look. To understand the true meaning of "steampunk", visit the Kew Bridge Steam Museum in London.
  

BlackBerry and iPhone Battle at Strada

Click here to listen to the official audio show

Mark and Wes in Berkeley, CA at the Caffe Strada.

Sites of Interest:

• Where are they now? 25 computer products that refuse to die.
  
  
• Wes mentioned the vaporware Peapod electric car, and Mark pointed out that the Electric Time mini cars are available today.
  
  
• The Nopopo Batteries from Japan will recharge with urine, blood, and even apple juice! But remember, liquids only, no po po!
  
  
• RIM removed an application from the Blackberry app store, Wattpad eReader.
  
  
• History of the Hewlett-Packard company, starting with the sale of oscillators to Disney.
  
  
• 40th Anniversary of the Request For Comment method of developing Internet standards.
  
  
• Bill Gates and Paul Allen started their computer carreer with Traf-O-Data while they were in high school.
  
  
• Bill Gates rocks! (Starting at 4:23 into this video)
  
  
• The real portable Commodore 64, and Ben Heck's vision of what a Commodore 64 laptop would have looked like.
  
  
• How to turn the lit-up Apple logo on a MacBook into a second LCD monitor.
  
  
• Frequent IMs with your boss make you more productive.
  
  
• BumpTop reminded Mark of the old Microsoft Bob add-on for Windows. But now that he watched that video to remind himself what Bob was really like, maybe they're not similar at all.
  
  
• Wes' stupid $400 BlackBerry can't even run the most essential iPhone apps like iPimpler, i-Chirp, iTrigger Fart Version, I Crush Your Head, or Burpy.
  
  
• Wes' BlackBerry is so useless that he might as well get this or this instead of the real phone.
  
  

Wes' iPhone Applications of the week:

• i-c-LiveCams -Live streaming video from cameras around the world
  
  
• Howcast - View videos from howcast.com wherever you are.
  
  

Mark's iPhone Applications of the week:

• Skype -Phone calls and chats through the Skype system.
  
  
• SullysFlight - Mark has this, but it no longer seems to be available. It was a subset of X-Plane, which is still an active app.
  
  

Model Airplanes

Click here to listen to the official audio show

Mark and Wes in Moraga, CA at the Ranch House Cafe.

Sites of Interest:

• Steve Jobs maintains grip on Apple.
  
  
• Some Safeway stores now have free Wi-Fi as part of a rebranding marketing effort.
  
  
• Remember ICQ?
  
  
• Tesla is working on an electric sedan.
  
  
  
  
• Mark sounds skeptical that Tesla will ever ship anything, but they claim they have already delivered 250 of their Roadster model. Video of a real owner showing off his Roadster.
  
  
• The idea of battery-powered cars is older than you think.
  
  
• Solar-powered birdhouse with perch that lights up at night to attract bugs for the birds to eat.
  
  
• Submit an image to TinEye to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions.
  
  
• iPhone firmware 3.0 has been jailbroken, but you probably shouldn't try it yet.
  
  
• There are lots of rumors that new iPhone models will be out this summer.
  
  
• Is this article accurate about Obama's gift of an iPod to the Queen of England? No? How about this one?
  
  
• President Obama gave Gordon Brown a box set of DVD's.
  
  
• One of Google's April Fools jokes was that Google Apps can now be written in Fortran 77.
  
  
• Information and video tours of a typical Google data center.
  
  
• Flywheels are now used for Uninterruptible Power Supplies in competition to batteries. (Mark called these "gyroscopes" because he was thinking of something that spins.)
  
  
• The Apple 1 and a history of the Apple Computer Corporation.
  
  
• Nomee, TweetDeck, and PeopleBrowsr are software/websites that help you organize your feeds from various social networks.
  
  
• Wes likes the hi5 social networking system which claims to be the third largest in the world, but Mark never even heard of it. They are having a funding crisis.
  
  
• Mark couldn't remember the free dating service with the fishy name. It's PlentyOfFish.
  
  
• Write applications for .NET using the MONO IDE on Mac, PC or Linux.
  
  
• Mark likes the free SyncToy program from Microsoft, and mentioned it because it uses .net.
  
  
• Is voicemail obsolete?
  
  
• Mark's favorite voicemail transcription service is VoiceCloud.
  
  
• Western Digital goes solid state, acquires Silicon Systems.
  
  
• iFart was the #1 seller in the iPhone app store.
  

Mark's iPhone Applications of the week:

• Bump -Somehow it knows when you bump two iPhones together, and will transfer contact information.
  
  
• TapTapCards -Turns pictures on your iPhone into real picture postcards that are snail-mailed to your friends.
  
  
• Color Splash - give photos a dramatic look by converting them to black and white, while keeping your chosen details in color.
  
  
• iControl Cat - remote control for your cat, just like TV remotes. Mark particularly liked this because, believe it or not, he bought one of these and it didn't work either.
  
  
• Farthoven -this sort of fart app has been done before, but Mark liked the name.