Forget Jayson Blair, Jack Kelley and Stephen Glass. What happens when you can’t even trust the words of a food critic? Bart Ripp, restaurant critic of the Tacoma News Tribune, has quit ”after 32 years in the newspaper business, 15 of them here as a features writer, historian, postcard savant and restaurant critic.” Now, according to … Read more
In a box accompanying a Loose Wire column two weeks ago I mentioned TikiMac’s Devil Duckie Flash Drive, a “red, horn-toting 4 1/2″ rubber duck with hypnotic blinking eyes” that houses a high-speed USB 2.0 (1.1 compatible) personal data storage launched in March. Sadly, since writing the piece the Devil Duckie has died. A press … Read more
Burn and Foam. Starbucks is now offering a service where customers can browse music on computers in their outlets and then burn a CD of the music they like. Using its own Hear Music brand, Starbucks has launched the service in its new Hear Music Coffeehouse in Santa Monica, Calif. The service will be extended … Read more
In case you didn’t think there was a future in paying for music downloads, Apple have announced that music fans have purchased and downloaded over ten million songs from the iTunes Music Store since its launch just over four months ago, averaging over 500,000 songs per week. The ten millionth song, “Complicated” by Avril Lavigne, … Read more
Interesting story on Wired about how a university is taking the original recordings of Supreme Court cases, converting them to MP3 and putting them online — for free. The Oyez project, run by Northwestern University, is aiming to convert nearly all the oral arguments recorded since 1955. So far it has done about 2,000 … Read more