Linkspam: Bop Spotter

Bop Spotter is an interesting little curio; take an Android phone, set it to run Shazam on a loop, and then hide it somewhere (in this case San Franciscos’s Mission district) with a solar panel attached and suddenly you have the the culture-tasting equivalent of ShotSpotter, generating the unique soundtrack to a particular location. San Franciscos’s Mission is, of course, a very particular environment with a distinct feel too it, so it’d be interesting to see how it would contrast with other locations around the world – though I do suspect that most would end in the brief bang of a controlled explosion.

Doomsday Machines

My current-thing-of-the-moment is ‘Doomsday Machines‘ by Alex Wellerstein of NukeMap/Nuclear Secrecy Blog fame. Fairly new, it looks at the post-apocalyptic world in both fact and fiction and, if you’re looking for a starting point, then I’d suggest ‘The end of The Road‘ – a look at Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and McCarthy’s own take on the themes of the novel.

Linkspam: Starring the Computer

Starring the Computer is a fun – if somewhat geeky – site recording the use of various computers in films and television. As long with the usual suspects – such as the Apple Macintosh SE and the Commodore 64 – they have some more obscure devices, such as the Thinking Machines CM-1 pictured below. It is really worth a look.

The Thinking Machines CM-1 in The Fly, looking like a super-computer should look.