Today, on April 1 2006, Apple is celebrating its 30 years in business. Wired has an article on one of the major players in the history of personal computers. Started by a couple of college dropouts, Apple has certainly made it big - not only financially but also as an important innovative company bringing to life stuff like the mouse-click navigation and the ipod. At Machine Culture we are using all kinds of hardware and operating systems, but we have a long hsitory with the fruit company and therefore wish Apple the very best for the future.

You can read more on Apples history at www.apple-history.com, Apple Computer History Weblog, Wikipedia

Its not really news, but still worth mentioning: The Pong Mechanics project by Niklas Roy. In the project is the famous early computer game Pong from 1972 brought to life in a mechanical form. Doing this transforms the game from an invisible electrical process to an explicit meachnical process inspired by the ideas of Konrad Zuse. In the words of Niklas Roy: “Pongmechanik is an absolutely physical game. The game is realized electromechanically, and essentially consists of four elements: A relay computer, the mechanical movement with collision detection, the display and the acoustic components.” (see video)

The project is presently exhibited in Stuttgart and have on display many places since the first exibition in 2004. Clearly it has gotten the attention of a broader public, if for no other reason then for fun. Or as a friend of mine wrote as he tipped me about the Pong Mechanics project: “What a brilliant waste of time”.

By guest-author Lars Kai Hansen

Your cellular phone's microphone can be used for real-time monitoring of your personal sound environment. This could be highly interesting, e.g., for market research companies who want to estimate exposure to commercials and other consumer behaviors. A California based company has developed a mobile software system that captures frequent sound environment fingerprints that are transmitted back to a server for analysis 24-7. In return for their participation in the monitoring programme panel members are equipped with free cellular phones. (via The Wall Street Journal and The Intelligent Sound Project)

Lars Kai Hansen is Professor at Technical University of Denmark, where he is head of the group "Intelligent Signal Processing". His field of research is machine learning and signal processing for diverse application areas such as brain imaging and sound analysis.

As you can invest toy money on movies at the Hollywood stock exchange, you can now invest toy money in blogs at Blogshares. The website has indexed more than 8.5 mio blogs and the links between them, and this foms the basis on which the value of the fantasy investments are made. The Blogshares started out in 2003 and was created partly for fun and partly to investigate social and economical behavior. Since blogs may be regarded as one step closer to the virtual world than movies, the Blogshares may be regarded as one step further away from the real world compared to the Hollywood stock exchange. But I guess we aren't doing everything for a purpose anyway.

As reported by CNET, the anglo-italian band “Planet Funk" is on May 8 releasing a single titled “Stop Me” for mobile phones only. This follows closely Gnarls Barkley reached the top of the hitlists in United Kingdom by download sales alone. In that respect it marks yet another new feature in the music consumer landscape, which is rapidly changing.

So, what is your next car gonna look like? A 1974 Lear Jet maybe or at least now it is possible. A Chicago based limo company has bought a so-called Limo-Jet which is a rebuild LearJet fitted to stay on the road without wings but plenty of gear and atmosphere. The things are said to cost around 1 million dollars, so dont forget the visa card. (BendBulletin and Luxist via BoingBoing)

As World of Warcraft is approaching six million users, the number of complains about the server uptime are mounting. CNET reports, that many gamers has since late March have been experiencing massive problems and occasional un-anounced reboots.

As reported by CNET, a conglomeration of European businesses has this Monday reveiled the so-called "Clever vehicle". The Clever vehicle is a mix between a car and a motorbike specially constructed for urban transportation. It runs on natural gas and has a top speed of 100 km/h.

I can remember only two times in my life, at which my father hushed at me – and they were both in 1986. First one was in February, when the radio news announced that the Swedish prime minister Oluf Palme had been shot dead in Stockholm the night before. Second time was in April when the morning news warned of something even more alarming: The nuclear powerplant in Chernobyl had during the night had a serious accident of yet unknown scale.

The incident seemed to have went out of control very quickly, as this time line from the website www.chernobyl.info shows:

26 April 1986, 1:23:00: A test of the cooling system begins in unit no. 4 of the Chernobyl power plant
26 April 1986, 1:23:40: The emergency shutdown fails.
26 April 1986, 1:23:44: The reactor in unit no. 4 runs out of control and explodes.

A mere 44 seconds in time, but an uncontrolable situation of largely invisible danger; The disaster at Chernobyl is one of the grimmest moments in the history of machines gone wrong. The number of victims related to the Chernobyl accident is very diverse, with estiamtes from 56 to 90000 human lifes, but also trust in science, government and the good life was seriously wounded by what happened following that Saturday morning in 1986.

There are many many sources of information about Chernobyl on the internet and no list can be exhaustive. A few are:

http://www.chernobyl.info/index.php
http://www.chernobyl.co.uk/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster
http://www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/Focus/Chernobyl/
http://www.chernobyl.com/info.htm
http://www.uic.com.au/nip22.htm

The american National Public Radio (NPR) had a story April 24 on Tony Alleyne who got so much in to the Star Trek universe that he rebuild is apartment to be a reproduction of the Starship Enterprise. He has now started a science fiction interior design company, so if you would like your house to look like the death star, you now know who to call (Via BoingBoing)