I'm just back from a trip to Florida, during which I had a chance encounter with one of JetBlue's new BetaBlue planes, equipped with free WiFi access.

I somehow missed the much documented inaugural flight, so I was shocked and psyched to see the BetaBlue pamphlet, but saddened to read that the WiFi provided no actual web surfing, but only email and instant messaging…and only through Yahoo!?!

According to Engadget, "If all goes well in what is admittedly a beta test, more aircraft will receive the WiFi makeover, and more features […] will be rolled out, along with additional service providers besides Yahoo."

Well that's a relief! JetBlue, if you're listening, keep in mind that we'd rather have the option of paying to get service-agnostic access than be limited to an account with a contacts list that's about three years outdated, eh?

Of course offering WiFi at all — especially free WiFi — puts JetBlue light years beyond any other airline (and just reinforces their status as my all-time favorite airline), but seriously: We get that you don't want to give unlimited internet access, but don't tell us whose servers will be holding our emails and IMs.

Oh, and btw: What on earth does free Yahoo! email and IMing on your planes have to do with an RSS icon? If we can only log into Yahoo! email and Yahoo! messenger, we pretty much by definition cannot access our ballooning number of unread items in Google Reader. Ya know?

Wow, there are way more barcode fans out there than previously imagined!

As a follow-up to barcode arts & crafts, here are some of the interesting links I received in response:

Roger from the QR code-obsessed London-based site 2d code sent me this hilarious video from The Voice of the Street explaining how their project, which gives street artists QR codes, is supposed to work. Get a load of the voiceover.

And Jerry of Bar Code Nerds (tagline: "Yep. Not only do we admit it, we're damn proud of it.") sent me a link to his massive online collection of old-school barcode graffiti and art, including this awesome picture of a print (I think?) called spaceball by someone named AlmaZ.

spaceball by AlmaZ

Closet barcode lovers, take heart. Kindred spirits abound on the WWWs.

So two weeks ago when we were all having a chuckle at Google ad sales people's surprising faith in the future of scannable barcodes for tracking print ads, I wanted to post a few notable barcode arts & craft projects. As I commented on Sean's post, geeky artists and are way more likely to increase the virtually nonexistant adoption of barcode cameraphone scanning in the U.S. than…uh…advertising—and it's still a long shot.

But then I got extremely distracted by the primaries, so I never posted it. Well, now that Super Tuesday is over and our hopemonger (best new word ever) is finally ahead in the delegate count of everyone except The NYT (which seems to be refusing to count even one more delegate until Hillary starts wining), voilà!

QR code needlepoint

This awesome needlepoint QR code by tikaro apparently uses semapedia to point to the wikipedia article on pillows [via craft].

QR code cake

Flickr user Magitisa must have an incredible amount of patience, because she stenciled a QR code onto a cake [also via craft].

every barcode

In case you forgot what barcodes used to look like, there's the non-cameraphone-compatible Every Barcode animation by the barcode-obsessed Scott Blake of Barcode Art. He's got plenty of other barcode goodness, but Every Barcode is definitely the best—how can you beat a flash animation that cycles through all 10,000,000,000,000 possible barcodes (if you let it run for ten years, that is)?

space invaders scarf

This extremely geeky scarf, made by a strange collaboration between British knitwear designers Office Lendorff and "mobile enthusiasts" (although it's not really clear what they do when not encouraging knitwear enthusiasts to knit QR codes onto scarves) Kaywa features a secret QR code knitted below a pixelated Space Invaders pattern. According to one purchaser, the code reads "insert coin for new life."

eRuv: A Street History in Semacode

And, of course you all remember the previously kenspeckle eRuv project, in which Elliott Malkin bravely plastered the Lower East Side with semacode posters that pointed to old photographs of the former Third Avenue El.

"memory box"

I'm not totally convinced by the idea of universal serial bus as a metaphor for non-computer-related connectivity, but I really wish someone would make working flash drives based on these conceptual pieces [via ffffound] by dialog05.

"eternal love" ("it's all about give and take — synchronize!")

Except I'm not sure what the "female" piece of the ring set above would be. Obviously it should be a reader, but where does it output the data?

"data injection" ("not only for data junkies, also in the event of a virus. or simply for your daily data rations!")

From the statement on dialog05's site:

USB, an abbreviation for a technical user interface, is nowadays often used as a synonym for a universal connection. originally only used by computer experts and nerds, this so-called former high-tech standard has developed into an every-day item and low-tech symbol for such universal connections.

this is an example of technology being clearly understood and accepted by the general public. something democratic evolves and develops and therefore often even receives a totally different usage than was originally intended. given the current, often exotic use of USB, it would even be argued that there is a 'USB subculture'!

"french connection" ("unplug and play!")

Tellingly, the metaphor works best in reverse, with "french connection," the bra with USB closure pictured above. But they definitely should've thrown in some sort of joke about hot swapping.

Happy 2008! How better to celebrate than with some kenspeckle tech art that crossed my desk in December 2007?

Camera Obscura 1-∞

To create Camera Obscura 1-∞ [via Network Research], Przemek Zajfert and Burkhard Walther auction off two holes of a pinhole camera on eBay every week. The camera is sent first to one high bidder to take a picture with it, then to the other bidder to take another, usually in a different part of the world, creating an overlapping composite picture.

The example above is from Pinholes #207 and #208. The right shot (#207), called Higher Education, was taken by a John Earl Jones in Schwenksville, Pennsylvania, and the left shot, called Higher Hey du Kaetzchen (unfortunately Google translator renders this as "Higher Hey du kittens") was taken by Manfred Rosenthal in Stuttgart, Germany.

Sounds fun, but I couldn't find any current eBay listings.

Why are numbers so comfortable?

Cody Trepte's hand-quilted binary blanket, Why are numbers so comfortable? [via rhizome] needs little explanation (except for the fact that the binary pattern actually represents the title of the quilt, unless you are actually a computer), but here's his statement on his binary work (which also includes binary needlepoints):

With only a one and zero, all information can be described in binary; it has become the universal language that connects both physical and technological spaces. Binary is so fundamental to our everyday lives, yet when seen out of context it appears abstract. While computers use binary as an efficient method for processing data, I am interested in the process of manually executing information, bit by bit, to explore the differences between human and technological expression. Each cross-stitched piece is the artifact of a performance of inefficiency, an attempt to hold onto the rapidly disappearing human hand in modern life. As each piece is stitched, a bizarre combination of new and old technologies is mixed together to form an image of information, the literal translation of the title into binary.

Encyclopedia of Radio Waves

Encyclopedia of Radio Waves [via information aesthetics] is a book of fanciful drawings by Ingeborg Marie Dehs Thomas of radio technologies (Bluetooth, DMB, GSM, RFID, Wifi, and Zigbee, to be exact) represented biologically. Pictured above is the drawing of Bluetooth from her book.

Ingeorg created the project for Timo Arnall's research project, called Touch, which "investigates Near Field Communication (NFC), a technology that enables connections between mobile phones and physical things."

Timo refers to the book as resembling "an age-old dusty guide to flora and fauna," but I think these drawings look more like microorganisms. At any rate, I love the latin names she gave her radio "species":

Bluetooth: Nevrotis Dentus Aquarae
DMB: Spherum Elektrum Multanum
GSM: Spherum Magnea Globalum
RFID: Raptus Arphadus
Wifi: Videus Fidelus
Zigbee: Nevrotis

data.tron

I admit, after reading the installation description, I have no earthly idea what data.tron [via rhizome] actually is, but all those numbers look awesome in a sort of monolith-from-2001: A Space Odyssey way, no?

Here's the explanation, such as it is:

How many points are there in a line?
What is the number of numbers?
How can we verify that the random is random?

data.tron and data.film are parts of the datamatics project, which is a series of experiments that explore such questions, physically and mathematically. Visitors will experience the vast universe of data in the infinite between 0 and 1.

data.tron is an audiovisual installation, where each single pixel of visual image is strictly calculated by mathematical principle, composed from a combination of pure mathematics and the vast sea of data present in the world. These images are projected onto a large screen, heightening and intensifying the viewer’s perception and total immersion within the work.

Blogs buzzed this week with a headline that sent high school English teachers everywhere running in horror: Passive Voice is Redeemed for Web Headings.

Usability super-guru Jakob Nielsen's claim isn't actually quite as incendiary as you might think: He just backs up a somewhat accepted sentiment that passive voice is ok when it's necessary to bring keywords to the front of a headline with sexy eyetracking research showing that web readers, fanatically scanning the thousands of unread items in their RSS readers or whatnot, often read only the first two words of a paragraph.

Active voice automaton I may be, but even I can get behind the occasional passive construction of absolutely necessary for grabbing readers' attention. Unfortunately, though, I'm not convinced by either of Jakob's primary examples.

First off, the in-text example:

13 design guidelines for tab controls are all followed by Yahoo Finance, but usability suffers due to AJAX overkill and difficult customization.

According to Jakob, the words "design guidelines" carry the most weight in this sentence, and "13″ is short enough to not count in the "first two" rule of thumb.

So why not make 13 design guidelines the subject rather than the object?

13 design guidelines for tab controls make Yahoo Finance easy to navigate, but usability suffers due to AJAX overkill and difficult customization.

And activating the construction of that the-medium-is-the-message headline of Jakob's piece is even easier:

Passive Voice Works Best for Web Headings

…or does it?

screenshot of my Google Reader bringing me the hilarious October 10, 2007 installment of xkcd

Gentle reader, if you've been with kenspecke since its inception, you'll remember that when Google Reader first arrived on the scene in October 2005, I was hopelessly smitten, then dismayed to find that I couldn't select which blogs to read via my painfully constructed hierarchy, as imported from bloglines.

The disappointment was so sudden and crushing that I didn't even bother to check out the second release of GR around this time last year—until now!

Well, my baby's back, with users' folderization appropriately prioritized. Ok, fine, Google likes to think it's tagging, but you know we're really talking about folders here. But the clinching factor in my renewed GR passion is the fact that new posts won't be marked as read until you scroll past them.

I know, I know, this is old news for everyone else this side of a continuously lit-up monitor, but I literally have been ignoring all GR news since my initial disappointment and I'm still glowing with anticipation about how much more reading I'll get done now that I don't have to worry about whether or not I have time to read all 318 new items in a feed before clicking on it. You really have no idea how many times an evening I look longingly at the bold, three-digit numbers by my feeds in bloglines but decide against starting to read because (que comic irony) I don't want to miss anything.

The only thing GR is missing now is one-step search feed subscription. I still kind of resent the fact that the unsurpassed dominator of the search engine market forces me to leave its RSS aggregator to get the path to a blogsearch feed and manually subscribe instead of seamlessly incorporating blogsearch subscription.

Oh, and yes, to you nay-sayers, I did have some difficulty in clearing out my previously imported subscriptions before importing my new OPML file. The mass unsubscription process is a little buggy.