Monday, April 21, 2008

Wanted: print magazine publisher wannabes

Do you have high value content you've always wanted to publish in print, but never knew where to start? Do you have a likely distribution in the 100s or 1000s?

I have a limited number of invites to an innovative magazine publishing service in private Beta. Sign up over on MagCloud, and include a brief message about why you think MagCloud will be good for you. Don't know what MagCloud is? Nobody does -- but tell us what you need. There will be a few of you who fortuitously fit our current limited feature set and can start right away in the private Beta. Others will be free to play as soon as we open up for business, which we hope will be Real Soon Now (TM).

ps -- The ideal publisher will have no fear of producing a press ready PDF (but probably should!); MagCloud uses HP Indigo digital presses for awesome full color output.

Sunday, April 06, 2008

HAPA rocks

Spent a week in Oahu a while back, and was delighted to hear HAPA playing in lobbies everywhere while there! A friend convinced me to go see them in Santa Cruz a bit over 10 years ago and their live show was f*ing amazing. It ain't their live show by any means (despite the tasty solo Flanagan offers at the start), but here's a good fix: their classic "Haleakala Ku Hanohano" (lyrics).

HAPA lives at http://www.hapa.com/

Wednesday, April 02, 2008

Revolutionary White Reflectance Standard for Metrology

Colleagues know I can be cynical and skeptical about some of the work coming out of HP Labs. Finally something to be proud of:


Revolutionary White Reflectance Standard for Metrology: "Figure 1. Pressed halon (left) compared to the proposed new white standard (right)."

...

"Once the standard has reached the end of its useful lifetime, it must be disposed of. This is one of the key strengths of this standard in that the disposal is achieved by ingestion. There may be variation in the exact number of standards that can be disposed of at once, but current experiments by the authors show that up to five white standards can easily be disposed of at once while other sources have shown that this number could be as high as seven. This is fairly close to the 51 gram manufacturer recommended serving size. The targets are suitable for use in compost piles or can be given to children."