April 22, 2006, 3:37 PM PDT
Woz plays Segway polo
Posted by: Rafe Needleman

Spied at the Maker Faire: Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak playing Segway polo on a small patch of grass with other folks from the Silicon Valley Aftershocks polo team.

Compared to regular horsey polo, Segway polo is a bargain. You need only one Segway, not a trailer full of horses. Still, the sport is not big. I talked with player Victor Miller (writer of the first Friday the 13th movie). I asked him how many players there were worldwide, and he snapped back, "28." That's about enough for two teams. But it's a good sport, he says. Since "all Segways go the same speed," the rider's skill makes the difference, not the stamina of the mount.

The Segway polo players occasionally play demonstration matches during regular polo games, so next time you're relaxing at the Silicon Valley Polo Club, keep your eyes open for them.

Update: More photos and a video.

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April 22, 2006, 3:04 PM PDT
Better blogging coming to Six Apart
Posted by: Rafe Needleman

"Do you have a blog?" Anil Dash, VP at blogging company Six Apart, kept asking as people came up to his booth at the Maker Faire. Some people did, some didn't. At least everybody seemed to know what blogs are.

I have a TypePad blog (TypePad is Six Apart's paid blog hosting service), so I took the opportunity to say so and to complain about the service's first-generation blog-writing interface. You just enter text into a small box. There are a few buttons for formatting, but overall it's not very Web 2.0, and there's no excuse for such a primitive interface when great online word processors such as Writely, Zoho Writer, and ThinkFree are proliferating.

I was told that Six Apart will soon be rolling out a more contemporary blog entry tool, which I am happy about and anxious to try. I hope it's as good as Writely. Also, I asked if the company was going to offer people the opportunity to print their blogs, like you can do with the beta product Blurb. I'm told that this, too, is in the works.

These are positive developments. Previously I have complained about the lack of an advertising engine for TypePad. That was fixed. I also went off on a rant about how hard it was to hack other tools and code into a blog, and TypePad added "widgets." I'm not saying my cocktail-party complaints made the difference, just that I appreciate that the company listens to its users and appears to be adding the tools and features we want.

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April 17, 2006, 2:19 PM PDT
File under cool: Monome MIDI interface
Posted by: James Kim

I happen to love and appreciate music hardware (such as the JoMoX XBase09) and software (such as Ableton's Live), so I was immediately attracted to the Monome 40h MIDI control interface. Designed and produced by "a group of people creating versatile hardware interfaces that emphasize user adaptability," the Monome is a simple device with a grid of 8-by-8 buttons (green when activated) that can be programmed to trigger a variety of audio and video functions or scripts. I've seen my share of MIDI controllers, but this beautifully minimal object behaves in many nontraditional ways. Just check out the video. A 16-by-16 version is in the works.

You can check out the Monome and many other cool inventions in person at Maker Faire, which is happening this weekend in San Mateo, California.

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