It’s funny, when I was in Mexico a few years back, I drove down the pacific coast and through a few different military checkpoints.  At a few of them, the soldiers asked us to exit the car, go stand ten feet away and then waved this very device at the car.  They claimed it was a bomb detector.

Seems the cat is out of the bag and these are nothing more but completely random snake oil.  That millions upon millions has been spent on these, and been used, in various countries (including thousands bought by the US for Iraq) is just shocking.

Does no one actually test these devices before buying them?  Is this massive corruption or just wishful thinking?  How many bombs were let through, and how many innocents had their cars torn apart because of these?

It is stuff like this that makes me so angry when looking at how much we spend on defense.

Very cool site, not just because of its minimalist design, but also because the music is pretty dang good and from independent artists.  This is a pretty awesome replacement for Pandora, you get a fun selection of new and from my experience, good, music while being able to instantly support the artists by buying the album in a few clicks.

As with all these things one wonders how stuff like this starts scaling long term.  The artists that get played the most will be rewarded more and of course who knows how that is determined.  But it is a great start, and certainly will expose more new music than the equivalent Pandora or Last.fm options.

The release of the 5Dmkii and the 7D have really started shaking up the digital video industry.  The 7D, a $1600 camera can take video that compares with some of the highest end DV cameras, while the 5D, with its huge full frame sensor actually captures more detail than all but the most specialized rigs.  Both of these are within reach for the serious enthusiast and a whole industry has been born to modify them for video use.  From custom eye pieces turning the rear panel into a viewfinder to rigs completely changing the ergonomics of the cameras, the stuff being done is amazing.

Philip Bloom is one of the pioneers using these to make some breath taking footage, so much so that George Lucas himself invited him over to show what he could do.  He shares his experiences here, including an amazing video of the footage he took.

Exciting times for the film industry.

Set of tools to facilitate data collection, aggregation and analysis.  Their Android client is interesting, short on polish but the idea is really cool.

Don’t have any immediate plans to build a product that uses notifications on the iPhone, but if I did, I’d look here first for sample code to deal with it all.

Pretty nice set of icons, freeware if you link back, but otherwise with a free license.  Having a consistent set of icons can make a big different in the look and feel of an app.  These aren’t exactly my style, but they aren’t bad, and the price is right.

Pure, unadulterated genius:

All that you need for my diet is graph paper, a ruler, and a pencil,” Steve would explain. “The horizontal axis is time, one line per day. The vertical axis is weight in lbs. You plot your current weight on the left side of the paper. You plot your desired weight on a desired date towards the right side, making sure that you’ve left the correct number of lines in between (one per day). You draw a line from the current weight/date to the desired weight/date. Every morning you weigh yourself and plot the result. If the point is below the line, you eat whatever you want all day. If the point is above the line, you eat nothing but broccoli or some other low-calorie food.