Respect Authority

At this point in our country’s mad dash to the great big finish line in the sky, you’ve probably been forced to sell your car and are now effectively living out of your iPhone, so you might as well make your completely gratuitous fashion accessory as functional as possible. And for those of us who already spend a good portion of our time on the street, Peter Fahey, founder of Sneaker Pimps, has developed the iSkateboard application. It’s sure to be almost as popular as 2008’s fiendish iMLookingForADealer app.

iSkateboard harnesses the daunting, mystical powers of Google Maps for a purpose even more useful than trying to look in your ex-girlfriend’s apartment window with Street View. The application currently boasts a directory of 30,000 skate spots, skate parks and skate shops worldwide, with more listings being added every day. So much for that secret spot you and your buddies used to never get kicked out of.

Additionally, iSkateboard has a streaming news feed that pulls content from Thrasher, The Skateboard Mag and Transworld, amongst others, making it even easier to, you know, not support the industry by actually paying for the magazines.

While this font of information is certainly awesome to behold, clearly I have a few reservations about it. It’s a little bit like when the Nazis open the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark. My face is kind of getting melted off here, but not in a good way. Read More ›

Thanks to the Nintendo Wii, children no longer need to go outside in order to play sports or senselessly beat on giant cartoon gorillas. They can now do it from the comfort of the couch. And as the years pass, technology will continue to provide us with wonderful new reasons to stay inside, overstimulated eyes fixed to a screen while the muscles in our limbs atrophy (except, of course, those needed to click a remote or dig around in the bag of Cheetos). Obviously, a necessary step on the part of the machines in order to better rise up against and enslave their human masters.

However, with a newly sprained ankle and that little fucker Punxsutawney Phil using his evil groundhog magic to make another six weeks of winter, I have to admit Touchgrind for the iPhone looks pretty fucking awesome, even though every fiber of my being is begging me to realize it was made by dorks for dorks. Nonetheless, while playing with Tech Decks at 23 is about as respectable as eating one’s boogers, this, on the other hand, is probably my newest excuse to never read a book on the subway again. And think about how cool I’ll look doing it!

Plus, the commercial’s soundtrack is sooo awesome, that’s like, totally what I listen to when I skate. Rock music, yeah!! Drugs!!!

Creator of the infamous Nike Pigeon Dunk and overall design whiz, Jeff Staple, posted a new innovation on his blog last week, but this time, it won’t exactly have people fighting in the streets over it. If anything, it’ll keep them indoors and on their couches for extended periods of time. And no… it isn’t marijuana, that’s shit’s as old as the erf, my friends.

First of all, who watches The Patterson Film on their iPhone? Like, “Hmm hmm riding the subway, oh shit, I gotta take a minute and travel into the land of haunting mysteries because I still haven’t decided if Bigfoot exists or not.” YEAH RIGHT!!

Anyway, the iPhone might be ergonomically designed, but that doesn’t mean holding it for a Lord of the Rings marathon isn’t going to induce some serious hand cramping. The cramping caused by holding it with just one hand while watching Lord of the Nipple Rings is reportedly even worse. And that’s why there are plenty of hideous, over-priced iPhone stands on the market. Apple is really the ultimate economic stimulus package, creating products that require you to buy even more products.

Either way, this iPhone stand is small, extremely portable, and costs a whopping two cents. Of course, by the time you read this, Apple will have already sent out cease and desist letters to every Staples and Office Max in the country, ordering them to stop selling all binder clips as they may be used with an Apple product in an unsanctioned fashion. So grab your contraband office supplies while you can and get to work.

All you have to do is bend one of the legs into a slight J shape and you’re good to go. Of course, you could also just watch this crazy thing I heard about called TV. More on that as it develops.

[To Darren Hudson]

T-Mobile’s G1, the notorious Google Phone, was released in the UK yesterday and coldly cockblocks Apple’s path to world wide mobile domination. To be clear, by “cockblock” I mean the phone grabs Steve Jobs’ dick, rips it off, travels back in time and tricks young Steve Jobs into eating it when he wasn’t a slowly dying vegan. It’s that cold.

CNET UK, armed with a brand new G1 and a hopelessly passé iPhone 3G, staged a wireless data competition and found that the G1 downloaded webpages twice as fast as the iPhone 3G.

…we visited barackobama.com. The G1 took 45 seconds to load the page, the iPhone 3G took 1 minute 38 seconds…

They ran an additional test on their WiFi network and found the load times to be comparable, meaning that the software and processing capacities were about equal. CNET UK speculates that the O2 network, the iPhone’s exclusive carrier in England, is holding back the iPhone’s capacities. Well what about their chipsets?

The article makes the point of comparing another T-Mobile 3G phone to the G1 (I know, not enough Gs in that sentence, here’s another… aaaand his myspace for good measure). The point is, two phones on the same network had widely variable load times. So its not the network, its the chipset right?

Apple’s iPhone 3G uses an Infineon chip, which has no reported history of inadequacy, whereas the G1 uses a dual-core integrated processing chip from Qualcomm. Now, I have no idea what that means but I do know that they’re different and the sooner RA opens its coffers up and buys me a G1, the faster I can unlock it and test it against an iPhone right here in real America/keep it for myself.

And you’ll be damn sure I won’t be using any pinko websites to test the loading speeds. Country First loads as fast as freedom on this and any computer.

[Cheerio CNET]

Nerds everywhere shit their pants with joy today, as G1 — Google’s first attempt at phone-making and latest attempt at world domination — hit stores. Lines at T-Mobile locations, Google’s slightly-odd choice for the G1’s service provider, snaked around corners as overeager employees passed around trays of pastries to waiting patrons, who probably said things like “Fuck pastries, where is my phone?!”

Ironically, the phone’s release comes the same day that Apple said iTastic sales of the iPhone were responsible for its stellar fourth-quarter earnings. Profits jumped 26% as the iPhone 3G outsold leading smart-phone competitor Blackberry.

So the real question is — what are nerds to do? I picture this as the same sort of dilemma they would face if both Star Wars and Dune were playing on TV at the same time. (Although really, any self-respecting nerd would have all six Star Wars movies on special-edition DVD). Google has long been the purveyor of innovative search tools online, and things like GMail and Google Maps’ Street View have completely overhauled the way we think about the Internet. A true testament to the company’s technological prowess (and pop culture relevance), “Google” at some point became its own verb. Read More ›