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How-to install the Mac OS X operating system on a thumb drive and then boot from most Intel-based computers. In other words: a thumbdrive Hackintosh.

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“Creativity Machines is a free weekly email.   Our promise: Creative apps, tutorials, and gizmos. No spam.”

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Each chapter of The Awesome Foundation has 10 members. Chapters are organized geographically or by topic. Every month chapters pony up a $1,000 grant to one crazy brilliant idea.  No strings attached. The foundation doesn’t own the idea or wish repayment.

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While already ancient in Internet years, these three stood out after a recent video viewing catchup binge:

Sport:

If this hasn’t been on repeat on ESPN can anyone really even utter the word “sport” anymore?

Meatspace:

The 600 Years from the macula on Vimeo.

Video Projection Mapping for the 600th anniversary of the Astronomical Clock in Prague — it’s a video of video projected on the clock itself.

Art/Architecture/3-D computer modeling/Music Video/Or something like this:

(via BoingBoing)

Jeremy Wood makes digital marks — drawings if you will — by walking around with a GPS.

From his site GPSdrawing:

Jeremy Wood is a multidiscipline artist and map maker whose diverse work is an expression of the poetry and politics of space and reflects upon how we treat our travels and interact with location.

The New York Times mentions Wood and his tech:

Mr. Montelongo shares his maps on everytrail.com. The iPhone is the fastest growing GPS tool of the site’s user base, according to Joost Schreve, the site’s founder. “But if you look at the quality of the maps, the best trips still come from traditional GPS devices,” he said, noting that the iPhone tends to draw less precise lines and to lose its signal under trees and near large buildings.

Jeremy Wood, an artist based in London, coined the term “GPS drawing” nearly a decade ago and continues to maintain gpsdrawing.com, a Web site compiling his and other GPS-produced images from around the world. Whenever he leaves his house, Mr. Wood takes his GPS device with him. He has mapped all of his movements since 2004 and views GPS drawing as an extension of a long-standing human tradition.

“People have been doing this for centuries, making big drawings so they could be seen by the gods,” he said, citing the ancient Nasca geoglyphs in Peru as an example.

Part 1 of “The dreaded ‘Idea’” spouts freely new notions concerning Twitter and iPhone/iPod Apps & iOS along with a short treatise-like rant on ideas.

Media

• Monetizing great content stuck on crusty websites

An opportunity exsists for acquiring old, but authoritative content that ranks good.  This written treasure is often buried on neglected websites.  There’s plenty of great information hiding on pages two, three and four of Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) that could be providing more benefit.

Some would just offer to buy the whole site and domain outright.  But dealing with some of these codgers is tough.  They’re often sentimentally attached and want far too much money.  And trying to strike these deals is a time suck.

Why not go after smaller slices of the pie?  Go after the valuable content and leave the relics and ruins of entire sites designed in 1998 to Gramps.

A service company could “crawl” (old) websites for good, well ranking content. Offer to buy (the rights for) it. Both buyer and seller sign a (mostly pre-formatted, pre-made) contract and payment is rendered.

The purchased content “goes to work” for the benefit of the buyer and will hopefully reach a wider, improved audience. Value for all involved.

Doing this manually wouldn’t be worth it.  Either an automated program could seek out the content, or go the other route and get content holders and publisher to come to your site and sell good articles to you.  Some sort of valuation system and/or algorithm would be ideal to kill the many man-hours of sifting through content to determine worth.

• Web video channel

The great video programming on Cable and Satellite TV comes with commercials and it’s expensive.  The Internet offers way more video entertainment options than Cable, but herding all the sprawling internet video is often difficult and time consuming.

The move is on now to make traditional TV more Internet interactive-like while the Internet players — like Apple TV, Boxee.net, Google TV – continue with vast menu systems.

I say go the reverse direction.  I want to fire up an Internet video channel that’s just like an old TV station.  Hit play and walk away.  That’s it.  No sign up, no account.  Instant, continuous Internet Boob Tube with zero interaction.

Unless you want interaction.  (Stop reading here if you’re already sold, but it’s not likely because viewers will probably want some control.  Some other stuff to do.)

Just hit a button and an interactive, overlaid interface could come up (– and/or this interactive interface/menu would show up on a mobile phone app that could also double as a remote.)

Naturally this optional menu for the video channel would contain all the lofty features we’ve come to expect from our Internet media applications:

• learning your view tastes and preferences
• ability to share what your are watching
• skinning & customizing appearance
• fetching programming info and recommendations
• option to integrate and merge with other media sources and service

How will this happen?  How the hell should I know.  That is why nerds exist.

A master/parent channel would be set up and programmed by the company who creates it.  This tech could be used as a platform for others to build and program their own (custom, branded) channels.

The general idea here is switch on an internet TV channel and plop down on the couch.  Less choice, less control, less hassle is the primary intent.  But that won’t fly for everyone who may like it, so also offer hidden menus and controls that’d also empower a premiere, TV-like Internet video channel with a more meaningful interactive experience.

• Video mute button

Add a Video Mute Button to web video players.  Press it and the video folds down, or hides, but audio still plays.

Perfect for the workplace where you want to listen but not watch or fiddle with minimizing, maximizing, resizing, popping out, or otherwise hiding video.

• Simple mass photo sharing

Most everybody wants widespread sharing of their photos and there’s a slew of photo sharing services. But everyone is not on the same photo sharing services.

Why isn’t there a decent service to distribute your photos to all the popular (online) photo places?

We need a web service/app where you upload your photos once and your photos go all over: Flickr, Facebook, Twitpic, Photobucket, Picassa, etc, etc.

The user process would be simple:

1.) Sign up.
2.) Link up the photo sharing sites you’re already on to this new service — either using openID/OAuth and/or old fashion usernames and passwords — and give options to sign up for additional photo sharing sites.
3.) Upload photos once.
4.) Photos appear at the sites you’ve just approved. Like:

• flickr
• photobucket
• webshots
• Picassa
• shutterfly
• smugmug
• snapfish
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Posterous
• tumblr
• WordPress
• Blogger
• ireport

After upload is complete, there could be and option to:

• Email your photos
• Ofter to try to sell your photos — to perhaps Getty Images, Stock photo sites, etc. This proposed service could take a cut.
• Crawl/search for local, tradional media outlet (websites) to submit photos to.
• Send photo(s) as picture text (MMS)
• Fax your photographs to Grandma and insurance companies (Ha!)

Also, a setting to put copyrights/copylefts on all your pictures, like Flickr does would be vital.

• One-click micropayment button

Professional content creators bitch and moan how no one wants to pay to read.  But if rich people would get on it, they could overcome the hurdles of micropayments, namely, the high cost of individual transaction fees.

Once micropayments take off, there will likely be a button next to content and article teases/previews/summaries to click.  The button could say something like: ”Pay $0.005 with dippold@gmail.com (via Google Checkout) & read.” Click and you’ve just instantly paid for what you are now reading.  That’s it.  No other bullshit in the way.  If there is, people won’t do it.

Warning screen preference and all user settings could be configured from something like Google Checkout.

Subsequent installments of The Dreaded Idea will address reading, music, Computing/Internet/Telephony, and miscellany not fitting neatly into a category.

UPDATE: Now shipping!!

The web page for Blue Microphone’s plug-in mic for iPhone — known as Mikey 2 — still says its release date is 8/20/10, but the buy now text is not clickable.

The opening blurb on Mikey 2′s product page:

The all-new Mikey is the perfect tool for mobile recording. Featuring two custom-tuned Blue capsules for stereo recording, a line-input, USB pass through and a stylish updated 230-degree rotating design. Mikey’s three gain settings allow for a versatile recording experience for everything from a loud concert to a whisper. Record lectures, voice notes, live music, interviews, and more. Mikey also comes with its own soft carrying pouch for convenient storage and protection while on the go. Mikey turns your iPod or iPhone into the coolest mobile recording device around!

Pretty much ready to buy. Even called Blue a while back asking about it. Anybody have the lowdown?

BumpTop — a Mac program that converts your drab desktop from 2D into 3D —  looks interesting enough to try.

Tech Startups brings a “hands-on” review and opines.

The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

Slow moving but breathtakingly gorgeous.  HD, fullscreen it.

Full CG architecture and nature never looked more, um, (vibrantly) natural; although while gradually seeping into the surreal.

To delve into this further, visit The Third & The Seventh site and view the shorter Compositing Breakdown companion video below.

Compositing Breakdown (T&S) from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

So Microsoft labs in Cairo, Egypt, have developed a way to combine various videos shot live on separate cell phones, of essentially the same scene, and combine them into a single, wider video.

A college of mine referred to this as, “adaptive supersampled combinators!”

New Scientist has a write up.

Let’s take it one step further and add real time image enhancement to improve the final video result.  Serious tech.

Nearly A Nerd welcomes web programmer and enthusiastic new Droid owner Joel Doetsch who’s also blogged his favorite Android apps.

So, sick and tired of all the iPhone hype, you took it upon yourself to go out and buy a Droid today. Maybe you were ready to break into the ever expanding smart-phone market, maybe your friends were all laughing at your LG8300. Whatever the case may be, you now have a Droid. It’s sleek, it’s powerful, and…the ringtones are godawful.

In the old days, one would either pay the exorbitant amount of $1.99 for a new ringtone from an app store, or go the more tech-savvy route and install bitpim and illegally force your own ringtones onto it. Either way, the issue was solved. You can’t do that with the Droid. I know, you’re probably questioning that $200 purchase now. I mean sure it has a free GPS with turn by turn directions, but what’s that worth if I can’t even listen to my favorite Miley Cyrus song every time someone calls me?

Well fret no more. Here are the simple instructions for getting all your crazy ringtones onto your phone.

First, we prepare the phone.

The Droid comes with a 16GB SD card already installed. It should also come with a USB cable. You’ll want to attach it to your computer and to the Droid. If you can’t figure out which end goes where, please contact your nearest tech savvy friend.

From the Droid, at the top of the screen you’ll see the USB connector icon. If you pull that down on the touch-screen you’ll get a box called “USB Connected”. If you then click that box, you’ll get the option to “Mount” (you’re a dirty person by the way). Hit that, and now you’re connected to your PC.

In your PC, go to “My Computer” and you’ll see a Removable Disk. If you click on that, there will be a number of files and folders already on the SD Card. Create these folders if they aren’t already there

Create a folder called media inside that folder create another folder called audio

Finally, inside that folder create 3 more folders:
ringtones
notifications
alarms

Those 3 folders will take care of all the different types of ringtones you’ll need on your fancy phone.

So now your phone is prepared to take in music, now how do you get it there?

Go to the marketplace and download an app called Ringdroid. This is an application that allows you to cut pieces of an mp3 out for use as a ringtone. It’s also free as of this writing. Also useful would be to download an application called Astro, which is a file manager. But it’s not completely necessary

Once you’ve done that, take your Miley mp3 and copy it into the main SD Card directory (what you saw when you first opened the removable disk). Use windows “safely remove hardware” button to unhook your USB and then turn off the USB on your phone the same way you turned it on.

Open the Ringdroid app, and select your song. From there it’s basically straightforward. Pick the start and stop points, and hit save. You can also delete the original mp3 from the top directory to save space. Rinse and repeat for any other In my experiences, it’s automatically saved it in my ringtones directory. If that’s what you were going for, then stop. You’re done. Congratulations!

If you want it in a different directory you can either

A) Reconnect your USB, go to the ringtones directory you created earlier, cut and paste the file into the directory you want it to go into (notifications or alarms)

or

B) Use the Astro file manager to do the same thing. It’s a fairly intuitive program, so I won’t get into the details of that. If you can’t get it to work, you’d best go with option A.

I hope I have enlightened, entertained, and otherwise enamored you with my instructions. Have fun, but don’t hold me responsible when your co-workers beat you within an inch of your life for having “The Safety Dance” constantly play when you’re called.

-Joel Doetsch

I follow Robert Scoble (@Scobleizer) on Twitter — why, I don’t really know — and usually just pass over his copious twittering. But the other day his mention of BuzzVoice caught my eye.  BuzzVoice takes the stuff you read and reads it aloud for you.

Of course a computer voice does all the reading, but BuzzVoice still seems like it would be more convenient than current ways of doing this — such as copy and pasting everything into a Text to Speech thing.

And there is an app for that (this).  You can purchase the iPhone/iPod touch app or access BuzzVoice via their site.

Below, a comparison of Basic vs. Pro plans from BuzzVoice:

I watched some demo videos.  They accurately show how the service works, but why no samples stories.  Sure, you can easily register for free to check it out, but I see no reason why real, working examples shouldn’t be out front.