Embedded above is the our latest Syyn Labs project. We built a Rube Goldberg machine to advertise Google’s global Science Fair. We’re also being featured in Fast Company this month.

Our previous RGM: OK Go’s This Too Shall Pass

About us

Tecca is a consumer electronics content and commerce startup based in Santa Monica, CA. We’re building a new online destination in the personal technology space and are looking for smart and creative folks to be a part of our freelance writing team. Do you love gadgets and call writing your craft? Read on for details on how to apply.

About you

You should have lots of interest and expertise as well as, ideally, some experience producing content in the realms of personal technology and consumer electronics. You should enjoy working in a fast-paced publishing environment and have the self-discipline to operate in a distributed virtual environment. You must have a fun, friendly, and positive attitude, and should love helping others solve technology problems and learn more about the industry.

Writers

We are building out our team of freelance contributors. We need people who can speak to all levels of technology consumers, from the experienced to the technophobic. You will be part of a large team crafting fun, easy to understand guides to and original feature columns about topics in consumer electronics. You’ll be covering both the buying process and usage after purchase. You’ll need to excel at working in a virtual environment and covering a broad range of topics. We expect you to both tackle assigned tasks and bring your own original ideas to the table.

How to apply

Send an email to apply AT tecca DOT com with the following information:

• Your background — let us know what you’ve been working on, what you feel your skills are, what your experience in the realm of personal technology/consumer electronics is, and what interests you about this position.
• Your contact information — full name, email address, phone number, instant messenger handle, where you’re located, the best methods and times to reach you, and your general amount of availability for freelance work.
• Example work: 3 or more bylined writing samples linked somewhere online. No attachments, please!
• Column pitch(es): You are also encouraged to pitch us on an original feature column idea (or several). For each column you’d like to pitch, please give us the overall theme and title for your column and between 5 and 10 example topics you would feel confident covering that fit within the overall theme.

We look forward to reading your application!

One of the birthday gifts I received was an unopened package of ALF trading cards a friend had picked up at a thrift store. It was a funny gift, but after opening them—ingesting the gum, YEARGH—I wondered what to do with them. I searched around for some magnetic sheets and found this package of 12 8.5×11″ sheets to be the best deal. They’re $10 (unfortunately $17 after shipping). I stuck the cards to the adhesive backing and trimmed them out with a hobby knife. It was really easy to work with and I think they’ll hold up great. I’m now looking around the apartment for other things to make fridge magnets out of; I found my Nevada license, old business cards, and maybe I’ll pick out some Magic cards.

Google rolled out Buzz recently and it’s started messing with my inbox (my Google profile). The first issue is that by default it puts an item in your Inbox every time someone comments on something you’ve posted or on something you’ve commented on. This item looks like a new email and I get an alert on my phone for new email. My group of friends is already used to commenting on Shared Items in Google Reader so I’ve been getting these emails all the time. I created the filter above in Gmail to take all of these items, which start with Buzz:, and tuck them away in the label ‘bz’ (‘Buzz’, like ‘Inbox’, is a reserved system label).

If you absolutely hate unread counts, you can go a little further. You have the option of hiding the Buzz label in Gmail’s Label settings. This will tuck it away next to Spam in the more labels drop down. That way you can check it at your leisure instead of being compelled by the unread count.

UPDATE:

If you just want to turn Buzz off, you can find it at the bottom of Gmail.

I never really used Google Reader’s ‘like’ feature. I mean it just seemed like a black hole to me: click the button and who sees it? It’s not like Digg where the votes are the focus and easily visible to the content creator. If I like something enough, I’ll add it to my shared items.

There are some cases where it does turn up useful. Pictured above is a screencap from Netflix’s New choices to watch instantly RSS feed—you can find all Netflix feeds here. Netflix added about 160 films to Instant last night so by the time I saw the feed this morning it had been augmented by everyone’s ‘likes’ (yes, I already knew Goonies was good). This is handy since the feed doesn’t show you your predicted rating. I usually end up thinking, “Is that a movie I heard about… was it good?” which leads to me clicking through and finding out, no, no it’s not. Now at least I can see what other people dig.

My love of Tumblr was pretty obvious in my previous post where I built a theme to do exactly one thing. One of my favorite aspects of the service is how quickly you can launch a new blog, attach a domain, and add contributors.

The Tumblr community has noticed this and has launched many many very niche themed sites… which I absolutely love. One of the first I remembered was FUCK YEAH SHARKS. There are quite a few “Fuck Yeah” sites like this on Tumblr, so I launched Fucking Curated a while ago to post a new niche Tumblr site every day. Recent favorite examples of this type of site are: three frames and Hot Chicks Picking Up Dog Poop.

I’ve started a few more sites that are usually an IM or lunch table joke that I turn into a blog in ~5 minutes. Tattoos that make your belly button a butthole was thrown together as filler for Fucking Curated. I setup Twisdom for Lon after he sent me one too many examples of Twitter asshattery. Headline WIN! was launched on a day with some particularly hilarious blog headlines. Look at this fucking hacker was started right before Defcon and is a spoof of the classic Look at this fucking hipster.

While most of these are throw away sites, I’m certainly glad that Tumblr provides free tools for taking a joke too far.

1. Download oneshot.v1.tumblr.txt
2. Select “Customize” on your Tumblr dashboard
3. Cut and paste the code into the Custom HTML window under Themes
4. Update the Google Analytics “UA-ACCOUNT-PROPERTY” at the bottom
5. Click “Reset default colors” under Appearance to import the defaults
6. Edit the HTML for your site’s Description under Info (this will be the hidden text)
7. Change the “Post count” to 1 under Advanced
8. Save Changes
9. Bonus: Leave your site’s URL in the comments

I’ve submitted this to the Tumblr Theme Garden. I hope they like it. Asides: While building this I discovered the person behind isitchristmas.com put his code on GitHub. Also, isitmfbt.com is the most recent sss I’ve discovered and current favorite.

First person shooter video games often have the option to “invert Z axis” as part of the controller scheme. Normally when you press down, the character’s gun points down. When inverted, the camera will look up when you press down. Inverted Z movement was actually the traditional behavior in games. Players using joysticks with flight simulators would naturally pull back on the stick to bring the nose of the plane up. It was when gamepads became more abundant that regular Z movement became standard. The stick/pad is much shorter and you just point where you want to shoot. That doesn’t mean inverted Z is “wrong” in newer games. The game is showing you the perspective of the player. If you think of the view being generated by a camera on a tripod you would push down on the tripod’s handle to make the camera look up. I used to play with Z inverted, but I’ve learned to play normally with recent console generations.

Right now I’m typing this on a MacBook. I use two fingers on the trackpad to scroll. As I sweep down, the text on the page goes up. Sweep up, and the page text moves down. When I switch to the iPhone or the ADP1, my fingers and the text move in the same direction. On these devices, the direct interaction with the text “makes sense”, but going back to standard scrolling on a computer just seems odd.

I wonder if we’ll start inverting Z again.

There’s no shortage of press coverage:
Webware
Wired
TechCrunch
Battelle
Search Engine Land
WSJ
Fox
Winer
D5 AllThingsD
ZDNet
CK
Jason

Another aspect of the robotic ‘uncanny valley‘ that we’ve already run into is the chrome not matching the intelligence; manufacturers of real looking human skin for robots have found a lack of acceptance because the robots appear to be mentally challenged humans (sorry, I couldn’t find reference for this). In software, this is Microsoft Bob.