Public Service Announcement: Here’s why it’s not a good idea to load a child into a washing machine …

You just can’t make this stuff up …

Monique Braxton’s one year old son Samir was taken to this laundromat by her husband’s girlfriend who, in turn, was accompanied by the adult male seen loading the child into a washing machine at the Federal Laundromat in Camden New Jersey. The claim is, apparently, that a previous customer had left money in the machine which meant that it was ready to roll when the door shut.

Links: Google map to Federal Laundromat at 2320 Federal Street Camden, NJ 08105 | WWLP’s Terror in the laundromat

Leap motion control seems to have Kinect beat …

The claim: “Leap represents an entirely new way to interact with your computers. It’s more accurate than a mouse, as reliable as a keyboard and more sensitive than a touchscreen. For the first time, you can control a computer in three dimensions with your natural hand and finger movements.

This isn’t a game system that roughly maps your hand movements. The Leap technology is 200 times more accurate than anything else on the market — at any price point. Just about the size of a flash drive, the Leap can distinguish your individual fingers and track your movements down to a 1/100th of a millimeter.

This is like day one of the mouse. Except, no one needs an instruction manual for their hands.” Watch the video …

Bike path: Beth Page State Park to Massapequa Preserve

Our next challenge: Eight miles of paved bike path along the Beth Page State Park, all the way down to the Massapequa Preserve.

Set your GPS to park at N 40.752654, W 73.465834. An Empire State Pass is probably required before 6pm on weekends and holidays — or a daily park entry fee may be levied.

From Jerricho Turnpike go South on 135 Seaford Oyster Bay Expressway, take Exit 8, left over the Expressway. After the ramp back North on the Expressway take the first left into Bethpage State Park, Picnic Area, Polo Field & Bike Path (opposite 20 Manchester Drive, Bethpage, NY 11714).

DRM: Defective by design …

An e-mail lottery: The Listserve …

 

“One person a day wins a chance to write to the growing list of subscribers. It could be you.”

They suggest an audience of a million, but at the time I joined there were less than 16,000 subscribers. I’m keen to read what others make of this platform and somewhat apprehensive of what I’d say come my turn. Ok, not really.

Join the lottery here

UPDATE: July 7th, 2012. In my short time on the list, several posts have been very thought provoking, perhaps a few too many have run with the treacle of you can do it, live free and all will turn out well in the end. Today’s message, however was jarring: A message which asks religious people to consider suicide?

From: Frank Mul
Date: July 7, 2012 12:59:46 PM EDT
Subject: [The Listserve] Win win

If every person who’s convinced that there’s a glorious and eternal afterlife would take a voluntary shortcut right now, many global problems that humanity is facing would be a lot easier to solve.

Frank Mul
frankmul@tele2.nl
Amsterdam, The Netherlands

I’m a bit uncomfortable with it, especially if young people are subscribers, but if they’re not editing/censoring at all, I guess I’m okay with free speech on the listserve — for now.

Aggregating your cloud storage with Otixo …

Now that you’ve signed up for 5Gb of free cloud storage from Google Drive, adding that to the several gigabytes of DropBox storage you’ve managed to accumulate, on top of what you might have from Mobile Me (going away soon), SugaSync, SkyDrive, Box, Amazon S3 et al.: How are you going to manage all of these itty bitty storage spaces? Possibly through one storage portal called Otixo?

Reminiscing: On being chairman of our homebrew computer club … thirty years ago!

In researching my earlier post on the Ideas BBS, I went looking for its inception date and phone number in my copies of old Tac2 newsletters. On browsing the May 1982 issue I was reminded that I served as it’s chairman for a handful of years … in the mid eighties. That was a whole lot of fun!