Welcome to the Heterotopia Report for January 17th, 2006, a semi-regular feature at this site, where I spend the day simply pointing people to other interesting things found elsewhere on the internet. It's worth remembering, by the way, that I do not accept compensation in return for favorable mentions here (barring the occasional review copy of a product being reviewed), and that I disclose any personal relationship I may have with a person or company mentioned, whenever appropriate.

--Mac Mac Mac Mac Mac Mac Mac! Fuck!!! It ain't a Macworld convention, after all, without the entire blogosphere suddenly getting obsessed with the topic, and with even the tiniest rumors taking on the gravitas of hard news for a good four or five days. (Did you hear? Steve Jobs took a crap after breakfast on day 2, and didn't wash his hands! Apple shares had plummeted by noon.) Anyway, lots of other sites have already done a good job reporting all the official news, so instead I thought I'd point you to some Apple-related items that maybe didn't make a blip on your radar the first time, all of them in this case coincidentally coming from MAKE magazine:

1) Some smartypants gets NewtonOS to work on a Linux PocketPC. The Newton, for those who don't remember, was Apple's first foray into the world of Personal Digital Assistants (or PDAs), a commercial flop but still revered in a religious way by its users; so much so that they've never given up using theirs, years and years after Apple stopped making and supporting them, and have been continually working all this time to somehow port their classic functionality into modern devices. And hey, there's a big rumor floating around that Apple is about to make their second attempt at a mobile device (inspired by their recent trademark application for the term "Mobile Me"), so who knows if the old NewtonOS might suddenly become very relevant again...

2) A Mac/Intel motherboard is already taken apart, and an open-access technical guide published. That was fast, man.

And 3), yet another smartypants creates his own MacOS TabletPC. Hey, Apple, are you paying attention to this? I want so much in the world for my next computer to be a TabletPC with WiFi and Bluetooth, because it would be just the perfect solution for me - a full-sized screen with full-sized keyboard and the fast connection of WiFi, like a laptop, but with the screen touchable and the keyboard concealable, for quick use on the go like a PDA. But I'll be damned if I'm going to buy one of these running Windows, which means I'm waiting for you guys to build a MacOS one...so will you please hurry up and build one already? Jeez, I'm tellin' ya.

--And speaking of clumped recommendations, Boing Boing had a whole pile of cool stuff worth repeating at their blog this week as well, so I'm lumping those together too...

15-year-old girl podcaster becomes hot new darling of indie-rock world. Well, of course she does. Reminds me of my ex-girlfriend Katherine Hodges, who did a zine when she was 15 called Spiffy that was read by the executives of a bunch of indie labels like Matador, Touch and Go, etc. She was nationally famous for her article "I Made Dinner for Pavement," where she and her mom really did cook a full dinner for the band Pavement during an appearance in Iowa, and brought it to the club picnic-style that afternoon while Katherine interviewed them for the zine. (Her mom made a cake with a big P on top, too - "For 'Pavement,'" she wryly explained in the article. I've read it and it's fucking hilarious, with a very good reason for it becoming nationally famous.)

19-year-old successful entrepreneur blows $100,000, actually lives at Disney World for an entire year, just to see what it's like, records the entire thing in real time (although there's no blog, to be warned, just a real-time image). Just like Cory Doctorow mentions at his site as well, I too dreamed as a child of actually doing something like this, and it's almost too surreal to see someone actually trying it. (In fact, Doctorow's dream seemed so surreal to him that he wrote an entire science-fiction novel about it, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which was the first book of his to turn him from "one of those dorky Boing Boing guys" to "Literary SuperDuperStar.")

And the most hipsteriffic fashion accessory in the history of time: a '70s retro belt buckle that doubles as a legitimate iPod holder. Kapow, hipsters - yet another thing you must go out and own now!

--A great, great suggestion from Dave Winer, co-creator of such interesting inventions as RSS, podcasting and OPML: Instead of all these individualized feeds that news services offer right now for hypertrendy topics (those that only last four or five days, like the recent mining accident that's already no longer being talked about), where a lot of extra work is involved on the user's end (signing up for those feeds, that is, every time a new topic makes the news, then unsubscribing again after the topic has played out), why not start offering a "Current Events" feed at these services? Have the editors of the New York Times. for example, keep track of the two or three biggest hypertrendy news topics going on at any given point (which they're already doing for their jobs, after all), add them to a permanent feed you subscribe to, and have them manually remove the topics and add new ones as they become relevant. Isn't this the job, after all, of a news editor? And isn't this a really smart and value-added way to prove their relevancy, even in this decentralized age of information-gathering we live in? I'll take up Mr. Winer's call and say that I'd like to see this, too, as proof of what I've talked about at this site many times - that the days of professional journalists and editors are not over, simply that the job descriptions are profoundly changing in a very quick way these days.

--Dig it, daddy-o, courtesy of the Chicago Sun-Times: a new Beat Generation Museum. Make sure to mention Jason Pettus for $5 off tear-stained notebooks in the gift shop!

--And another interesting article from the Chicago media as well, this one from the Tribune: how the "International Baccalaureate" style of education, a challenging program that emphasizes global perspectives, diversity, critical-thinking skills and community service, and which up to now had been the exclusive privilege of wealthy private schools, is starting to make a profound impact on public education as well, in magnet situations where a student must specially qualify. And how glad am I, by the way, that the Trib now has a pervasive series of feeds up at their site, including ones just for Tempo, Metro, Travel, Food, just all the great stuff the Trib puts out, which they just started doing last week? And hey, the revamped version of their site even detects what kind of device you're on, and sends you either the desktop or the mobile version automatically (although that does mean, of course, that my links to their articles are the mobile ones, since that's what's sent to my device).

--An interesting article from Brightsurf, brought to my attention by Lifehack.org: A team of researchers in California recently proved that learning new things on a regular basis stimulates certain cells in your brain, causing better cognitive skills and especially ones involving spatial learning (like reading a map, giving directions, driving a car, etc). And even more interesting, lack of sleep will destroy whatever stimulation that learning caused in the first place. Hmm, food for thought...

--Okay, so apparently Google has this new mobile compressor that they've very quietly released recently with almost no fanfare; one of those sites, in other words, where you can type in any web address, and Google will get that page ready for nice, simple comprehension on a mobile device (including stripping the tables and other layout, stripping away the background and text colors, removing links to Flash animations and other embedded media files, shrinking images, etc). And I've been using such compressors from other services for several years, of course, because of me only having internet access through my own mobile device (a Palm Treo 600...and by the way, I have a campaign going on right now to maybe get a 650 for my birthday, with Java and Bluetooth, which I don't currently have, so wish me luck), so anyway, I can honestly say that Google's compressor works better and quicker than any of the others I've ever tried. So there you go, just in case you're ever tempted to think of Google's success as because they're huge or evil or whatever; that no, even still, it always boils down to building services that legitimately kick the asses of all their competitors. (And thanks to MAKE magazine, by the way, for originally pointing this out.)

--Snark Superb: WAP Review does a critical analysis of nine mobile RSS aggregators, and finds that six of them can't even pass the three basic requirements devised before the test (that you get a list of your feed's names when you log in, and indication if they have new items; that when you click on a feed, you get a list of its items' titles; and that when you click on a title, you get the full content of the article plus images, if you desire, and a chance to turn them off if you don't). In a nutshell: they really like Winksite, half-like Bloggo, kind of like Feedalot (which I don't, because they don't accept Atom feeds - which means, for example, that you can't follow any Blogspot page, or the feed here at this site that has the full content), and hate everything else. Meow!

--And finally, from the "Just Too Good to Not Link To" department, courtesy of the Discovery Channel news blog: that the infamous Donner party might not have been cannibals after all, but simply ate things like rats and their pet dogs while stranded on a snow-covered mountain. Oh, thank God! I thought it was going to be something, you know, gross.

(Got something you'd like to have mentioned in the Heterotopia Report? Let me know about it at ilikejason at hotmail dot com, although of course I can't guarantee that it'll appear. Yes, I also do critical reviews of such things as CDs, DVDs and software; please write for my mailing address.)