John’s Crawlspace

Some “pranksters” have attached a GPS to the Google Street View car that is currently making its way through the streets of Berlin. A group called Free Art & Technology (FAT) created a map that allowed people to track the car. It looks like this only lasted for a short period of time (before Google realized what was going on and removed the GPS device), but it’s funny to see the tables turned – Who is spying on who now?

Check out live coverage of Apple’s latest product, the “iPad”, here.

I’m no Apple fanboy (I don’t even own an iPhone), but this thing sounds pretty cool.

The iPad was born out of the question “everyone uses a laptop and/or a smartphone – is there room for a third category device in the middle?” So far, the things that stood out to me about the iPad thus far (coverage is continuing):

• Multi-touch integration, “super responsive and super precise”
• On-screen keyboard. “It’s a dream to type on”
• Music… Itunes store integration
• View movies and TV shows in HD
• Half an inch thin, weighs 1.5 pounds. Thinner and lighter than any netbook on the market. 9.7 inch IPS display
• Powered by Apple’s A4 chip – “it screams”. 1GHz
• 16, 32, or 64 GB of flash storage.
• 802.11n, WiFi, and Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR
• Accelerometer, compass, speaker, mic, dock connector
• “We’ve been able to achieve 10 hours of battery life… It’s got a month of standby life…”
• Compatible with all existing App Store apps. New SDK out today including iPad tools.
• An ebook reader (“iBooks”) that looks to rival the functionality of the Kindle.

“At $499 a lot of people can afford an iPad. 16GB is our base model. For 32GB it’s $100 more, and for $100 more than that you get $64GB. The 3G models cost another $130.”

The WiFi models will be shipping in 60 days, and the WiFi + 3G models in 90.

Update: Watching the launch was kind of cool, but once the hype wore off, I realized that I really don’t need one of these. My money would be spent much better elsewhere. If you’re up in the air about the iPad, check out Gizmodo’s 8 things that suck about the iPad.

I didn’t know this until today, but Google has an open source web browser, “Chrome“, that will be released today at 18:00 (not sure why they felt the need for military time). This comic sort of explains what inspired the creation of the browser, and some of its features, and you can check out some screen shots here. Or, you could wait a few hours and download it yourself. Right now, google.com/chrome gives a 404 (not found) error, but I’m thinking you’ll probably be able to download it from there (or here) later today. This could be interesting… Each tab is ‘independent’, so if a website causes your browser to crash, only the offending tab will close – You won’t lose all of your other tabs, which is pretty damn cool if you ask me.