The end-user license agreement is up at McSweeney’s: Congratulations on purchasing the newest iteration of our electronic readers, the Kindle Genius Browser. We have made this new device compatible with all previous versions of the e-book, but there are some new features we’d like to introduce.

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Introducing the Kindle Gutenberg Bookreader

Via Inhabitat .

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SEED awards

Seth Godin says what we’ve all been thinking : “Am I the only person who wants a Hi Def telephone? A headset that sounds better than the handheld receiver” It’s true. Twenty years ago, a hard-wired phone line sounded just fine. After a bumpy start with the 40-50 Mhz bands, cordless phones started going places at 900 MHz in the 1990s, too. Then our local EM fields got too busy, supposedly, for this wavelength to work well. Cordless phones moved to higher frequencies, which meant less interference–but the quality never seemed there, notwithstanding the cascade of technobabble printed on the boxes. I’ve owned at least a dozen 2.4 GHz and 5.8GHz models, but none have ever matched the audio quality of a Panasonic 900MHz model I still own to this day. In a house packed with strange EM fields, it sounds just fine , too. Thence to cellphones. I thought Sprint was bad, but then I tried to make calls on my wife’s iPhone. AT&T voice quality is just abysmal: it turns Apple’s amazing handset into a joke about the inverted priorities of futurism. So what do we do with this stuttering, fading echo of the human voice? We pipe it through BlueTooth , just to make sure it sounds as bad as it possibly can.

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Phone audio quality sucks

Your response to our Gadget Fiction contest was amazing: there are so many good stories that it’s gutting to have only three prizes to give out. A few interesting trends cropped up throughout the entries. You like bad sex and bad coffee. You are ambivalent about your relationship with consumer electronics. You have read William Gibson a lot. Winners after the jump. 1. The Norm Cloud , by Al Jones The idea of celebrity endorsements hadn’t occurred, but the A.I. had grown fond of Cheers over the years and began to speak in a pronounced Chicago accent with a distinct knowledge of the rigor of accounting bisected by house work. The Norm Cloud in other words had produced a type of desire that made it perfect for calculating the angles of construction while maintaining a rouse of socialability that made it the world’s preferred drinking buddy. Excess and typos almost kill it, but something about this old-school cyberpunk concept haze won me over by the end. 2. The New Machine , by Brian Easton “It is a metal man,” someone exclaimed. Almost on cue the coppery being stepped out from behind Daniel Martin. It was obvious, a metal man stood before them, tall and spindly with a broad chest that narrowed into a waist that seemed impossibly thin. Again the crowd buzzed with conjecture and speculation. “It could replace the negro!” 3. Brush with Greatness , by Sean J. Jordan A woman behind her tapped her on her shoulder and said, “I think your phone’s going off.” Carolyn reached into her pocket and pulled out her phone. The screen was lit up. “R U in line for Eqlzr?” it said. Apparently her phone could do something besides make calls. She hit the “next” button. “Buy me one, pay u back,” it said. The phone number associated with the message, she realized now, belonged to her teenage son. Special mention must also go to ” Imaginary Software, ” by Startling Moniker. If I weren’t in a formal fiction-reading mood, this purple cow would have won by a space mile. Rather than endure any attempts to describe it, just go and check it out . Other excellent entries miss out on swag only because of capricious and arbitrary reasons meaningful only to me. Hippocratic Oaf’s Joy , DW_Funk’s ” Love is best expressed in analogue ,” and Martin Rusis’ Meta-Switch are among those that make me feel bad for having so few prizes. I want to run another competition just so Timely Handclaps has an excuse to revise Orange Juicer . Bram Gieben’s Search Engine reminded me of work. Mr. Andrews’s Month with the Terio TX-i9 Sonic Toothbrush and JD_Paradise’s Seventh Sin story about a clever huckster bring the lulz, and I honor the spirit of Alexander Honkala’s ” The Nigerian Prince ,” winner of the inaugural Atlanta Nights Award for Nice Try. The Norm Cloud, by Al Jones - Link The New Machine, by Brian Easton - Link Brush with Greatness , by Sean J. Jordan - Link Orange Juicer, by Timely Handclaps - Link Joy, by Hippocratic Oaf - Link Love is best expressed in analogue, by D. W. Funk - Link Meta-Switch, by Martin Rusis - Link Search Engine, by Bram Gieben - Link Seventh Sin, by JD Paradise - Link A Month With the Terio TX-i9 Sonic Toothbrush, by MCM - Link Makin’ Copies, by Darcy Fitzpatrick - Link Time and Time Again, by R. Adamson - Link Untitled, by Hadlock - Link Prize winners, please email : rob at boing boing net.

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Gadget Fiction: The Winners!

Old media coverage of cutting-edge toys is increasingly hapless. If you ever have trouble sleeping, just read the gadgets column in a lifestyle mag. The big newspapers’ gadget blogs are phoned in, too: they want to beat techie sites like Engadget and Gizmodo, but they stick with a stuffy approach at odds with the enthusiast subject matter. This blurring of “blog” and “newspaper” also makes mistakes look like journalistic misrepresentations. A great example of all this is at Digits , the WSJ tech blog. The Journal’s Ben Charny writes about a dinner hosted by the people who run the Consumer Electronics Show. Slipped into a post so perfectly unexciting that it reads like an AP news item, Charny offers an amazing fact: ” Apple plans to attend the show’s 2010 version, marking the first time in memory the Cupertino, Calif., consumer-electronics giant will be there. ” Wow! But there’s a problem. Not only is there scant evidence this is the case, CEA president Gary Shapiro denied the rumor at the very event Charny attended. And there’s no source, named or otherwise, for that claim. Engadget’s Ryan Block, who also attended, takes it down, hard . But while Block strikes each debunking note with excruciating precision, the way he did it was a missed opportunity. It’s as if Block, far more popular and credible than his target, thought the reverse was true. Responding to a one-line mistake with a big wall of text feeds the assumption that old newspapers are the ones with reputations to live up to, and that bloggers are better at reading than they are at reporting. But the truth is that blogs like Engadget , Gizmodo and the Crunches are coming close to supplanting traditional outlets entirely when it comes to technology news. It’s time for bloggers to stop chipping away at the credibility of fusty rivals, assume that they have no credibility advantage left at all, and simply get on with the job of out-writing them. After all, responding to something at all grants it a measure of equality, and responding to it at greater length offers it primacy. This is why scientists are so leery of smacking down flat-earthers and the like: it gives them credibility they don’t deserve. A better way to put a screw-up in its place it is to make fun of it, or give it a quick kick in the balls. It’s not just about technology reporting, either: online news will polish off its traditional counterparts by ignoring, rather than reacting to, their mistakes. Instead of attacking its credibility when it wanders into our yard, it’s time for us to invade theirs–before they get a clue.

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Old media tech coverage is stupid. Time to stop biting its ankle and rip out its throat

Unfortunately, the villain wore a hat . [WaPo]

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Surveillance video of botched Apple Story robbery

Unfortunately, the villain wore a hat . [WaPo]

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Surveillance video of botched Apple Store robbery

CNBC says this : Apple’s stock had tanked in January, falling as low as $78.20, when Jobs said he had a hormone imbalance. The chart, pulled out by John Gruber , says this: Bravo, CNBC! So sly.

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Tanked

When people ask why the media only covers bad news, a traditional way of illustrating why good news usually isn’t newsworthy is to reply “When did you last read the headline, ‘Plane lands safely?’” Here’s a sign of the times: a few hours ago, an airline captain died over the mid-atlantic, apparently of natural causes, and the world knew about it immediately. The co-pilot, and a third qualified pilot who happened to be aboard, have taken the reins, and CNN is covering the landing live . Condolences to the friends and family of the as-yet unnamed captain. Is it doubly cynical that coverage of good news here is merely the opportunistic result of something awful?

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Plane lands safely

( Download MP4 / Watch on YouTube || Warning: NC-17, cartoon-cholo ultraviolence) Boing Boing Video proudly presents the world-premiere of a third video, above, from the N.A.S.A. music project (here was our first , here’s the second ) — “A Volta,” featuring Sizzla , Amanda Blank & Love Foxxx . Video by Logan , with art by The Date Farmers . NASA , short for “North America South America,” is a music collaboration project assembled by Squeak E. Clean (aka Sam Spiegel, brother of film director Spike Jonze ) and DJ Zegon ( Ze Gonzales , professional skateboarder). Buy the album, The Spirit of Apollo, here . More than 40 music artists are featured, including David Byrne , Kanye West , Ghostface Killah , Yeah Yeah Yeahs ‘ Karen O and Nick Zinner, M.I.A. , Santogold , E-40 , Tom Waits and Kool Keith . Music videos for the project involve a similarly diverse team-up of visual artists and directors. Logan , the folks who directed this video, create TV commercials and music videos, content for video games, and experiment with animation and visual effects. We caught up with Alexei Tylevich of Logan for a conversation about how this unusual music video — more like “GTA: Fresno” — came together with the Date Farmers . The text of our interview follows (+ more after the jump ). Video #2, embedded below ( Download MP4 / Watch on YouTube ) : Logan’s mockumentary web-film about the making of this NASA video. [Q] XENI JARDIN / BOING BOING VIDEO: When I was struggling to explain your “A Volta” video to others, I found myself referring to it as an “8-bit narco nightmare.” What’s the story we’re seeing here? [A] ALEXEI TYLEVICH / LOGAN : I hope that the “narrative” is not taken too seriously. It wasn’t meant to be a great “story” but just another structural device to keep the viewer occupied. It’s a music track with a “plot” thinly stretched over it. I thought it might be clever to turn this video into a mini-film with a semblance of a plot. A plot that has the same level of strategically naive incompetence and misdirected energy that is implied in the work of Date Farmers . At first there was no plot, just a setting: an isometric metropolis inhabited by deranged inhabitants, full of senseless violence and anarchy. Then it sort of evolved into a semblance of a story. We started imagining what these characters could do and the plot sort of developed on its own, little by little. [Q] Can you walk us through the creative process behind this video? A collaboration between Logan and the Date Farmers , but — how did these characters morph into digital form, what came first, the music or the story or the look and feel… how did it all unfold, who did what? [A] It began with looking at the Date Farmers ‘ work, and trying to figure out a way to bring it to life that would not fight against their aesthetic. It’s always hard to adopt an accomplished visual style from a static medium without compromising it. Their world is devoid of perspective, decidedly two-dimensional. Their visual vocabulary is a mix of pop culture references and cholo folklore, a violent combination of corporate iconography, found objects and jail tattoos. The smelly back alley of our collective subconscious soaked in pop culture detritus. It’s pretty disturbing, but somehow endearing at the same time. They don’t seem to be taking themselves too seriously. Besides paintings and collages, they make these robots out of scrap materials. There’s a whole series of them. The lineup in its entirety is like a medieval bestiary. Video #3, above ( Download MP4 / Watch on YouTube ) : A soft rock introduction to the Coachella Valley, CA-based art duo of Carlos Ramirez and Armando Lerma, better known as the Date Farmers . (Interview continues after the jump…) [LOGAN] …I actually preferred NOT knowing the full intent or story behind each character before making up scenarios in which these robots could exist and interact. What is the cinematic equivalent of the Date Farmers’ pictorial universe? A blunt storyline, trite genre referencing and Scarface quotations. Compulsive borrowing and regurgitation of pre-existing elements. Lack of any sort of narrative syntax and the overall “flatness”. “Poor acting” on the part of the characters that have no range and no faces. Canned robotic voice-over. A patchwork of elements and layers that make up a saturated cacophonous experience of visuals, music, plot, voiceover and subtitles… And so on and so forth. What would normally be considered negative connotations could actually be used to attempt a different approach. It was really liberating. [Q] How did you come to collaborate with the Date Famers? [A] The idea of our collaboration with the Date Farmers I believe came from Syd Garon and Sam Spiegel , who chose the pairings of artists and directors for each of the tracks on the NASA album . I am not quite sure what criteria was used to make the pairings. Maybe they thought we had some similarity in our work, or maybe it was just the opposite. Or maybe it was a random juxtaposition. We didn’t get to pick the music track from the album either. I guess the whole thing was conceptualized as a bit of an exquisite corpse. In any case, I am quite pleased with the way it all worked out. I recently saw the Date Farmers work at a group show and it really stood out. It has freshness and immediacy that makes it instantly recognizable as theirs, despite the fact that a lot of it is based on found or appropriated imagery. They seem to have found a magic formula. [Q] Did you all work in the same space at any time, or was the collaboration virtual? [A] We were free to choose and remix anything from their body of work. The Date Farmers weren’t really involved in the making of the actual video. We borrowed the robots, photographed them and recreated them in CG. A lot of their paintings and textures were used in the model of the city. They saw the video for the first time at the February Flux screening at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, after it was finished. Photo (courtesy Flux ): Left, Alexei Tylevich of Logan; Right, Carlos Ramirez and Armando Lerma, aka The Date Farmers. [Q] The theme at hand — extreme narcoviolence — is, sadly, very timely. This piece is fictional / fantasy, but did real-world news stories influence this piece? [A] Maybe on a subconscious level but not intentionally. In retrospect it seems like an obvious parallel but it wasn’t originally meant as any kind of commentary on current events. I guess everything is ultimately interconnected. I wouldn’t want this video to be viewed in that context because the real events that are taking place are not that funny. [Q] Part of what I love most about the video is the messed-up isometric perspectives, the loopy, angular, dizzy POV shifts. As if you’re navigating this world from the perspective of one of these 8-bit narco characters — after a few snorts or puffs of something stimulant and hallucinogenic. Was part of the aesthetic intent here to simulate that kind of charged, psychically-altered state? [A] The look was really important to me. I immediately thought of the isometric approach simply because the Date Farmers’ work has no perspective — it’s really flat. Even the dimensional figurines are “flat”. Their faces are crude and not articulated. Their behavior is not motivated by any sort of emotional response, it’s just pathological. The camera movements had to be repetitive and mechanical to illicit the sense of anxiety and paranoia. I wanted it to have a Q*bert feel with a bit of ” Street of Crocodiles ” mixed in, a video game with a stop-motion feel which seemed right for the track. The subtitles where designed to be part of the stimulation overload… like watching Santo movies on VHS late at night. # # # Previously: BB Video: “The People Tree,” David Byrne feat. Chali 2Na, Z-Trip … BB Video: “Way Down,” N.A.S.A. feat. RZA, Barbie Hatch & John … (Special thanks to Susan Applegate and Syd Garon )

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BB Video: "A VOLTA" from NASA Project: Narco-Cholo Game Ultraviolence