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DRM-bricked paperback book

I had an idea for a book a few months ago that showed the parallel between old technology meeting new and the interesting paradoxes it created. When taking DRM and applying it to a regular book, it comes off as silly and is something we would never tolerate. Now it feels even more relevant after the Kindle fiasco.

I've also made the book available on lulu.com. It comes complete with reviews, a back-cover teaser about a dorm 50 years in the future, and 217 pages of obfuscated text with DRM notices on them.

My V Mez-Itz

I was asked to customize a Mez-Itz for Comic-Con and decided to give him a Guy Fawkes mask. Creating the miniaturized mask was a bit more involved than I had anticipated -- involving clay, silicone molds, plaster, and paints.

He's all done now and he decided to show me around New York a bit.

Here we are tresspassing (although the sign isn't legible)

I told him not to do it, but he had his reasons:

We got a ticket, which he promptly ripped up:

And of course, we needed some cash, so he held up a bank:

Hack for free Starbucks wi-fi on your laptop (if you have an iPhone)

If you have an iphone, you get complimentary access to any AT&T wi-fi hotspot. These hotspots are in several chains, including Starbucks.

The catch is, you have to browse through your iphone. I personally find this silly. If I have an iphone, and am paying for service, why does AT&T care whether I use my laptop or my iphone?

So I decided to figure out a way to use my laptop. The first idea was to simply fake my browser's user agent to look like mobile safari. I really thought this would work, but no luck.

It turns out it's even easier than I thought. You need to change your laptop's MAC address to the same as your iphone and that's it. Here's how to do it (These steps are for OS X (and possibly linux). If you're on Windows, it should be the same, but you need to find out how to change your MAC address online).

1. Go to Starbucks or an AT&T wi-fi hotspot

   Open up mobile safari on your iphone and try to go to any webpage. You should be redirected to a page that asks for your phone number.

   Don't fill that out yet. You need to get your MAC address on your iphone first. AT&T is nice enough to put it in the URL of the page you're on. Scroll through the URL until you see something like MacAddr=00%3a2A%3a12%3aA5%3aE2%3a12 (Make sure you grab this one, not NduMacAddr)

   Write down that address somewhere, and change the %3a's to colons. So it should look like: 00:2A:12:A5:E2:12 (6 hex couples)

2. Go through the AT&T wi-fi activation.

   Now put in your phone number. It'll then send you a free text message. Click the link in the text message and you should be able to connect to the attwifi from your iphone.

3. Boot up the lappy

   First, turn off your Airport.

   Now open up Terminal and type:

   ifconfig

   There should be a group of 6 or so lines that are indented from en0:

   If you see this, but it says en1, that's okay. Just change en0 in the next step to en1.

   Copy down the MAC address of your laptop (It's on the line that starts with ether).

   Now type:

   sudo ifconfig en0 lladdr 00:2A:12:A5:E2:12

   Make sure to change the MAC address to the MAC address of your iphone. You'll need to authenticate and then verify that your MAC address has changed by typing ifconfig again.

4. Turn on your Airport

   Turn your airport back on and connect to attwifi. If you don't see it listed, go to "Join Other Network" and type in attwifi.

That's it! Try to go to a website now on your laptop.

And hey, if it worked -- I accept tips

Some notes and disclaimers:

Do these steps at your own risk. AT&T most likely doesn't endorse this and they may get angry. I'm not sure what their reaction will be (but I'll probably find out soon).

You can reset your laptop MAC address by either restarting your computer or doing the step above with your laptop's MAC address. There's no harm, though, in keeping it set to your iphone's address.

Beating Heart

After many months of work, I finally finished and displayed my "Beating Heart" piece. You can view the video below.

It was shown at the American Heart Association's 2008 Heart of New York Gala yesterday. Everything (thankfully) went perfect and the responses ranged from disgust to joy.

Exploded iPod (still works)

(UPDATE: Thanks everyone for the great replies! Also, please digg this if you like it )

I love exploded diagrams of objects where you see every piece of the thing. I had the idea to try and make a real life version of one, and picked my iPod to be the victim. The catch was, I wanted it to work even in its exploded form.

I was a bit unhappy with the result because of the clarity of the resin. There were too many bubbles (and was an error on the last pour). At first I was just going to shelve it, but yesterday decided to at least put the photos online.

The most incredible thing about it is it still works perfectly. I encased the internals of the dock too, so it can be controlled, charged, and listened to, by a wire underneath (that sticks out a bit, hence the lego support legs).

Front view:

Side view:

Closeup side:

Bottom view:

Turned on:

New fichey feeds

I added 3 new feeds to fichey

They are:

• New York Times Top E-mailed articles - a pretty nice roundup of interesting articles on the times
• Random pages - randomly selects pages from everything fichey has captured
• Random pages (just today) - limits the randomness to just today

More soon!

The Most Expensive Drink at Starbucks

I recently received a coupon to get any drink I wanted at Starbucks. They do this if something goes awry with a previous experience as a nice gesture.

I decided to use the coupon for an experiment: What is the most expensive drink I can order?

Luckily (or unluckily), I happen to live in Manhattan and that makes Starbucks prices expensive. Yup, they fluctuate from region to region (and even store to store). The first thing I did was call a dozen Starbucks stores around Manhattan to see who had the most expensive prices. I used my regular order of a tall soy chai to make the comparison. I figured a Starbucks in Times Square would be more expensive than where I live on the Upper East. It's even a cool idea itself to create a Starbucks heatmap of Manhattan.

Boringly, most Starbucks in Manhattan (no matter where located) rang my drink up at $4.23.

My next problem was I needed to find out the most expensive stuff to put in a drink. I called up my sister Lauren who happens to work at a Starbucks. She told me that I definately need to go with the venti white mocha and to add as many shots as possible.

I then went to Starbucks to make my drink. I told the barista that I was there as part of a contest to make the most expensive drink. She played along, trying to squeeze as much as we could into a venti cup. She thoroughly enjoyed the problem at hand (although other customers on line were getting peeved).

And the ultimate yuppified result: A 13 shot venti soy hazelnut vanilla cinnamon white mocha with extra white mocha and caramel. It cost a total of $13.76 (with tax).

After she rang up the amount, I then presented her the coupon (which I didn't reveal beforehand). She laughed, comped the entire drink, and I left.

At first taste, it tasted just like a shot. The 13 shots in it were just too strong. However, when I got home, I mixed it more with a spoon and it became drinkable (even enjoyable to my girlfriend). It was very sweet and I'm still shaking a bit. I didn't attempt to drink the entire thing since I'd like to sleep tonight.
 
 
Here is a shot of the receipt (note: 2 shots come with the drink, so she only rang up 11):

 
 
And me wincing at first sip.

 
 
Think you can make a more expensive Starbucks drink? I challenge you to do it and post your shot of the receipt here. Bonus points if you do it with a comped drink coupon too. (note: you can inline images or link them)
 
 
UPDATE: We put it in the freezer and it's delicious frozen!
 
 

Ruler for iPhone

I created this as a digital ruler for your iPhone. Just add the image below to your pictures and sync it onto your iPhone (don't try to navigate to it online, the dimensions will be off). Now start measuring the world with your iPhone!

fichey is out

Check out fichey.com, my newest project.

Fichey saves pages from some of the top websites and shows them to you in a static "microfiche"-like format.

Therefore, your computer doesn't spend time rendering a page, requesting lots of separate images, running javascript, etc etc. You just get to see the content and move on (since most of the pages we see, we're not interested in.).

Then, when you see that magical page that you want to interact with, you can just double-click into the page from fichey and it's just like a normal page at that point.

Anyway, check it out, play with it, and of course, bugs/suggestions are always welcome

Hollywood Movie Generator

I was a bit bored today, so I scripted up the Hollywood Movie Generator to help out those poor producers out there in movieland