two-twenty

gotvoice will travel • post/haste

Two-twenty's toes are often bloody from tap-dancing on tech's edge, but ditching our trusty landline is one switch-ball-change we're not yet willing to make. Sure VoIP is cool, and everyone we know who has Vonage loves its price and interactive online functions. Nonetheless, we were here on that day and during the black out and... sorry, getting defensive.

Anyway, for those of you who are as equally committed to dedicated wires as you are to mobility, GotVoice might be the coolest thing you've seen in a long time.

A free account lets you access your landline and mobile voicemail from anywhere via the internet. You can check your messages on their website, or have your messages e-mailed as mp3s. Or both.

Enjoy.

how to get mp3s from your mac to your moto razr | joanna • post/haste

Ash surprised me yesterday with an effing awesome two year anniversary gift: the phone I've been coveting for six months, a Motorola Razr V3.

The means by which Ash was able to procure not one, but two, of these fancy gadgets is, sadly, not my story to tell. I can only say that it involved Craigslist, the Shake Shack, and a nice lady he's pretty sure is Russian. He is a very savvy consumer.

Anyway, and maybe needless to say, the phones didn't come with a manual. Finding one was easy enough on the Motorola website (though I had to dig my copy of Explorer out from under a haze of digital dust to download it), but even as far as manuals go, this one sucks.

The one and only bit of information I desperately needed was how to take advantage of the mp3 ringtone capability. Not in the manual. So I turned to the web. Sure, the info was out there, but not in one place. Not until now...

How to use your Bluetooth enabled Mac to transfer Mp3s to your Motorola V3 Razr:

1. Get the Moto ready to say hello to your Mac

In the your phone's Main Menu, go to Settings, then select Connection, then Bluetooth Link, then Setup. Change Power to On, and then go up to Find Me and select. You can name your phone while you're here, too, but unless you've got another unnamed phone vying for a connection, it isn't necessary. Keep your phone open.

2. Get your Mac to think different about your Moto

In your Mac's System Preferences, select the Bluetooth pane (under hardware), toggle to Devices, and click Set up new device... The Bluetooth Setup Assistant will pop up. Click Continue to get to Select Device Type, and toggle Mobile Phone (not trying to be insulting, but some people prefer not to think while they follow instructions). Click Continue. Your Mac should then find the phone. When it does, click on it -- the name, if you named it, or a bunch of numbers. Hit Continue.

3. Get the Moto paired with your Mac

On your Mac, a pin code will appear in the Bluetooth Assistant. Check out your phone. It will ask you if you want to bond with your Mac. Tell it yes, then enter the pin number. If for some reason something goes awry, it's likely because it took too long -- go back to Find Me and select it again.

4. If you're like me, decide not to decide

Your phone and Mac are paired, now, so you're about ready to put mp3s on it, but your Mac wants to know if you want it to sync your address book and calendar with your phone, and if you want to use your phone to access the internet. If you do, go for it. I did not, so I just unchecked the boxes and moved along. I mean, Continued and, quit the assistant.

5. And, finally, get a freaking mp3 ringtone on the phone

In your Mac's menu bar, click on the Bluetooth icon and select Browse Device. Click on your phone, and then on Browse. Double click on the audio folder, and then, once you're in, the Send... button. If you've had a Mac for longer than it took for you to read these idiotic instructions, you will know how to finish this part of the very rewarding task. Just know that your ringtone has to have the .mp3 extension. Moto no say hello without.

Your ringtone is now with all the other ringtones that came with your phone, so just go back to Audio in your phone's Settings menu and select it as your ring.

The whole process takes about an eight of the time it took to write down for you. Jesus. No wonder manuals are so awful.

planned obsolescence, part i: iBuy therefore iAm • post/haste

Remember, like, over a year ago when everyone realized that iPod batteries were neither replacable nor designed to be particulary long lasting? We do, cause we wrote about it. And you do, because, well, everyone did!

Well, in typical mainstream newscycle fashion, New York's CBS Channel 2 just discovered the game, and they are shocked! Shocked, I tell you! So much so that they have made Apple a target of their "Shame On You!" series, hosted by Arnold Diaz (we have to point out here that the guy is kind of creepy looking - we'll give good odds that if you said the words "schiesse video" to him, you wouldn't get a blank stare in return. Kidding!)

image from www.cbsnewyork.com

The gyst is that Apple plans for the batteries to die after about 18 months, and plans for you to just go out and buy a new iPod rather than deal with the hassle of sending it back to them and paying $99 for a replacement battery. Worse, it turns out if you send yours back you will not get yours back- you will get someone else's crappy refurbished iPod in return, and lose all of your music. The story implied that you might even get an older generation iPod as a replacement.

For all of those reasons and more, Apple has joined the sad company of the NYPD, school bullying, and stealing money from a baby in Arnold Diaz's Hall of Shame.

shame, shame, shame!

Incidentally, the story featured the Neistat Brothers, whose iFilm (made on an iMac) "iPod's Dirty Secret" we linked to in our above-mentioned post in early 2004.

The good news: we learned that there are now service professionals dedicated to preserving our beloved iPods- at sites like iPod Mechanic and iPod Parts Center you can buy replacement batteries starting at under $30, and even have them installed. And there's always eBay.

But you probably already knew that.

The "Shame On You!" video clip is now up on CBS 2's homepage, here.

Shame on You! | cbsnewyork.com

ain't nothin' but a g thing • post/haste

How to get a free gmail account, the hard way:

1. Troll craigslist for ads like this one in which someone asks you to entertain them in exchange for an invitation.

2. Enter a dialogue with the invite-blessed in which you volunteer a film of your girlfriend singing a song about the Blessed in Grand Central Terminal.

3. Forget to make the film. Grow a little desperate.

4. Begin letter writing campaign to various bulletin boards, being sure to include, when relevant, previous work in conflict zones such as Iraq.

5. Succumb to Free Ipod (Scam?) in which the Blessed offers an account in exchange for your pact with Satan. Sign up, but find that your status never reflects having completed an "offer". Receive numerous e-mails from Blessed asking if you've completed the process.

6. Wait patiently. Bide time by attempting to win account from now-defunct "gmail machine" that would ostensibly grant an account to the lucky fuck who selected the correct four out of ten numbers.

7. Receive account from empathetic soul for whom "needing the account for working in Baghdad with high res images" was reason enough to kick down.

8. Repeat entire process for girlfriend who goddamnit wants one too.

How to get a free gmail account the easy way:

Ask us for one.

poo knew? • post/haste

Two-twenty just spent almost $100 to buy a pound of Redworms and a Tumbleweed Pet Poo Converter. Apparently, if starved, the worms in the box will eat anything, including Atlas' shit, and convert her waste into "worm castings". The resulting worm poo can then be used to fertilize our garden. So disgusting, but so cool. And who do we have to thank for this miraculous invention? The Australians.

doesn't it get tiring being so ahead of the curve? • post/haste

Is Friendster the 'Next Big Thing'?
Why millions are jumping on this online bandwagon
By Philipp Harper

blah blah blah

Philipp Harper is a free-lance writer who lives in south Georgia. He has written about business, the economy and politics for national and regional publications. He is also a loser.

Social networking in the digital age | mobilemomentum.msn.com

pc phone home • post/haste

The Swedes who invented KaZaA have just introduced Skype, a peer-to-peer application that allows users to make calls over their computers to anywhere in the world... free.

This should have come as fantastic, timely news to Joanna, who just last night used gphone's essentially identical services (tech-wise, anyway) to call her globetrotting photojournalist boyfriend Ash in Guadeloupe; free apparently costs almost twenty cents less than $0.197 a minute (vs. $2.86 on Verizon). Unfortunately, Skype only runs on Windows and Ash is the only one at two-twenty with a PC. Did we say he was in sunny Guadeloupe? Harumph. Anyway, Joanna and the rest of us Mac users will sadly have to keep paying for calls until someone even nerdier than two-twenty's geek-in-residence figures out how to get the app working on multiple platforms.

igod you devil • post/haste

If ever two-twenty has bowed down before a false iDol, it most certainly was an iPod.

Amen.

empty-handed.com: and the same goes to you

robotiXXX • post/haste

Like Dr. Octagon, we at two-twenty are seeing robots every day. First there was an item in our monthly issue of The Face that introduced us to "clunkies" -- people who want to screw robots and/or get off by dressing like robots and screwing, and to roboho, a game that lets you program your own sex-bot in multiple techniques of pleasure (to borrow a phrase from Star Trek's Commander Data). Then today, the Times featured a story about robotic healthcare for old Japanese people on the front page.

Toshiki Shibahara, above, said, "The temperature is just right -- the bubbles are really comfortable". We think something may have gotten lost in translation; doesn't her smile say something more than "comfortable"?

Maybe it was The Face, or just our dirty minds, but there appear to be a lot of people getting turned on by robots. Enough, even, to constitute the beginnings of what Malcolm Gladwell calls a "social epidemic" in his book "The Tipping Point". We looked around for evidence and came up with a load of freaky shit. Usenet -- ever the digital clubhouse for people who can't even tell the old Groucho Marx joke because no one in their right mind would offer them membership elsewhere -- hosts alt.fetish.robot, a newsgroup "dedicated to the discussion of the concept of sex with or sexual attraction to robots and robot-like beings". Self-proclaimed "mad artist" Brent Harris sculpts Robot Chicks that retail for $400. Angel Heartz, a shop in (where else?) Japan, hawks the Vibe-inu, a modified Sony Aibo robot dog that will "come" and make its master, um, you know. Robot porn abounds. "Tomo", a film about a sex-crazed robot, won the jury prize for international short at Sundance. And this woman, The Robot Girl of London walks around like this all the time:

If we're to follow Gladwell's theory, the tipping point may come when "I, Robot", currently in post-production, is released later this year (no doubt on July-4th-Big-Willie-Weekend -- yeah, it stars Will Smith). The only problem is that the only person who seems to be able to tolerate Will any longer, let alone find him attractive, is Jada, and even she didn't look too pleased with him at the Oscars.

Not that it matters, he's not playing the robot.

For the record, the only robot two-twenty thinks is hot is Vicki from Small Wonder.

the bots will eat themselves • post/haste

In case you needed more evidence that sac is on to something, Wired points to a program designed to search out original thought on the web before it is contaminated by evil Decepticon blog bots.

Warning: Blogs Can Be Infectious | Wired.com
Blog Epidemic Analyzer

but limewire gives us our silence for free • post/haste

40 GB iPod: $499
Bose QuietComfort 2 Headphones: $299
iPod Carrying Case With Belt Clip: $39

Silence: priceless. Well, actually 99 cents.

The Sound... Of Silence | As The Apple Turns
Sounds of silence for sale on iTunes | MSNBC

ps: ipod battery? craptastic.

will two twenties get us in? paypal? • post/haste

Last week Google (no hyperlink necessary) e-mailed a slew of invitations to orkut, its new Friendster rip-off . Our presence was not requested at this exclusive grand opening, leaving two-twenty stuck behind the velvet rope like big-haired, khaki-sporting, bridge and tunnelers. We're not saying we want in, really we're not. We just, like, want to know what it looks like inside. You know, to see who's there 'n' stuff.

orkut | via trendcentral

virtual shock and awe • post/haste

Ha ha ha ha! There's like this really funny thing where, like, if you enter "French military victories" on Google, and then hit the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, you get... uh, yeah, we all know where this is going.

The Times today has a feature on "google bombing", the internet search engine phenom that gave us such humorous gems as the above example. Craig Silverstein, Google's director of technology, is quoted as saying, "We're only seeing it with obscure queries where there's really not that much action on the Web about them... I don't think it's possible to do this sort of thing on queries with well-defined results..."

Uh, yeah Craig? You mean unimportant, ill-defined queries like "weapons of mass destruction", which returns the infamous error message? Oh, wait, maybe you're right, since last year's "weapons of mass destruction" are this year's "dozens of weapons of mass destruction-related program activities." Ill-defined indeed.

Engineering Google Results to Make a Political Point | NY Times

your new pet rock • post/haste

California-dwelling owners of Apple's iPod are pursuing a class action lawsuit against the company because the digital music player's warranty fizzles out before the battery. Meanwhile, in New York, the Neistat Brothers have taken a cooler, more iPod-like, less typically litigious revenge tactic. Seen those billboards spray-painted with "iPod's unreplacable battery lasts only 18 month$? That's them. See their movie here...

iPod's Dirty Secret

asciiraq • post/haste

This morning the New York Times swapped out a real live photo from Iraq for this super-fancy digitalized masterpiece to serve as its primary image on their Struggle for Iraq page:

Yeah, big props for Mister Tom Zeller and his artful shoving of that old bearded-Saddam pic through a Photoshop plugin.

Just for fun, two-twenty made our own html-ified version of one of Ash's photos in today's Times using Text-Image.com's conversion tool. And you thought ASCII art had gone the way of, say, illustratated war coverage.

iMpose your music on the radio • post/haste

You're at a party and the music sucks. Or you're working in Baghdad and the music really sucks. Transmit your iPod's tunes through any radio with iTrip.

Griffin Technology's iTrip

how do you say, le portable supercool • post/haste

Colette, the only shop in which I've ever seen jet-setting hipsters silently question their own cool-quotient while mentally comparing the store's stock to the stuff they have in their multiple pied a terres, will start hocking the new Nokia 7600 on December 8th.

What's it do? What doesn't it do. Put it this way, Paris could have used it to make the video AND answer Fred's phone call AND post the whole thing on the web. Break out your black AMEX; Colette will sell an all-white, limited edition of the super-phone for 850 euros.
Nokia - Nokia 7600 Phone