cheesebikini?

Stop using your Safeway Club Card. Use mine instead.

Safeway is one of those monstrous inescapable inhuman supermarket chains that saturates a regional market, peddling overpriced Frankenfood and driving smaller local merchants out of business.

One of Safeway’s more deceptive tactics is to raise overall prices while providing slightly lower prices to those consumers who agree to use a “Safeway Club Card.”

Safeway expects you to divulge a home address, a birth date and a bunch of other information in return for a card. If you want to avoid paying the highest prices you’re supposed to present that card every time you shop at Safeway, so the company can monitor and store your whereabouts and your purchase patterns.

In short: Safeway uses deception to extract an ongoing stream of private and personal information from shoppers, while providing nothing but smoke in return. Safeway marketing drones disguise this swindle as a selling point, as a humanitarian service that Safeway provides to the public out of kindness.

Don’t accept this abuse. Jam Safeway’s customer surveillance system.

One way to do this: throw out your card and use mine instead. Safeway doesn’t demand that you slide your card through the scanner; instead you can just enter your Club Card number (which is the same as your telephone number) at checkout. So write down my card number, and the next time you go to Safeway, type it in at checkout: 408-354-0579.

Tell your friends to do the same. That will hopelessly jumble together our purchase data and restore a bit of our privacy. Choke on that, fascist Safeway wonks.

What if you don’t live in Safeway’s shadow? Then join forces with your friends; use this strategy to protect your privacy from whatever giant card-wielding supermarket chain dominates your neighborhood.

For more about megacorporate “loyalty card” scams, visit nocards.org.

DISCLAIMER: Safeway occasionally sends piddling discount coupons and the like to cardholders. I’m not doing this as a scheme to get coupons. If I receive more than $5 worth of benefits (coupons that I actually use, or free bottle openers or anything) within six months, I’ll donate that amount of money to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. If you don’t want to use my card number at all, just use your own card with your friends and neighbors.

UPDATE: Not surprisingly, someone else is way ahead of me. Rob at cockeyed.com not only offers to let you use his Safeway card, he scanned the UPC code from his card and he printed it on stickers. He’ll send a UPC sticker to you so that you can stick it on your own card, effectively making your card a clone of his. NOTE: This isn’t necessary because Safeway will let you just type in your phone number instead of swiping a card. But more power to Rob.

From the Department of Utterly Impractical Ideas:

I don’t usually get jazzed up about clothing. But consider this amazing new glowing fabric from Italy.

Actually, it’s not a fabric in itself — it’s a new type of luminescent fiber that can be sewn throughout all sorts of fabrics. You attach the fibers to a microchip with a battery power source, turn it on and the whole thing glows brilliantly.

The fibers are colorless by default, but they emit whatever color the microchip instructs them to emit. Imagine adding optical sensors and a little intelligence, so that your glowing clothes constantly change colors to match your surroundings. Walk from room to room in a dark club and you’ll change colors like a chameleon. Or imagine using audio sensors to make the colors pulsate with the surrounding music, or in time with the wearer’s heartbeat.

Better yet, could you use Luminex to turn your clothes into a video display? Perhaps you could cover thousands of fibers with an opaque coating except for the tips, then distribute the tips regularly throughout the clothing to form pixels. Then a microprocessor could control it all to display any imagery you can imagine.

How about having tiny video cameras in the clothing that capture the imagery in front of you and behind you, then display that imagery on either side of the video-display clothing? People facing you at just the right angle would see a freakish mirror-image of themselves — or they’d see a freakish live image of what’s behind you, so that you’d seem nearly transparent to them…

A big question: how expensive is this stuff? The Luminex site doesn’t even hint at the answer, which probably means it’s very pricey. Let’s hope Moore’s Law drives down the cost soon because I’m dying to play with this stuff.

(Credit where it’s due: I snagged the simulated-invisibility idea from The University of Tokyo’s Optical Camouflage project.)

UPDATE, 3-10-03: Thessy reports that a Swiss distributor sells Luminex at prices much lower than the U.S. distributor’s: 40-60 Euros per meter, which equals about US$41-US$61 per yard. Details below in the comments.

UPDATE, 3-7-03: The U.S. Luminex distributor sent prices and details. In brief, it’s very expensive (fabric costs US$280-US$450 per yard, depending on the type of fabric used) and so far you can’t light up a fiber with any color on the fly. But the fibers are lit by LED’s at the base, and you can have two LED’s merging light of two colors into the same fibers to create the range of colors between the two chosen LED colors. Theoretically, I think it could be possible to create a triple-LED system to create any color, but apparently nobody has done this yet. Details below in the “comments” section, where the full sales message was posted. (By the way, I don’t know any Luminex people and I’m not getting any sort of commission or kickback.)

I want a small, cheap mobile device that:

People have predicted very complex “augmented-reality” systems that might arise in the near future, when many folks will carry around location-aware devices. But how about a simple thumbs-up/thumbs-down rating system?

Here’s how it might work: your device includes a green thumbs-up button and a red thumbs-down button, TiVo-remote style. As you move through the city, when you enter a favorite restaurant or club or cafe you click the “thumbs up” button. When you pass that restaurant where you got food poisoning or that stuffy overpriced bar, you click “thumbs down.” And if you enter an especially wonderful place, you click “thumbs up” twice to give it two thumbs up.

The key: you don’t have to interrupt your daily activities; just reach into your pocket and click one of two buttons whenever you think of it.

Each time you press the button, the device records your geographical location and the thumb rating. Soon you have a little database, a map that shows the spots around town that you love and the spots that you hate.

So what? So nothing, until people share their preference maps. Now you have a powerful concept.

Thanks to this network, you can share your preference map with anyone who wants to use it, and you can freely use other peoples’ preference maps. You decide which of your friends have tastes closest to your own, and you subscribe to those friends’ preference maps.

Software on your device notifies you when you’re near a spot that friends have rated positively; if a dozen of your friends rated a place highly, the device specifies via sounds or spoken words that the spot got a lot of thumbs up from the people you trust. And another thing — software maps this for you, visually overlaying the green and red thumb-clicks over a map of a city or a region or a building.

You can also form preference groups, just as you form e-mail discussion lists. Everyone who shares an interest adds their account to a particular list, and that list compiles all members’ preference maps into a master map for that group. Then anyone in the group can subscribe to the group map and use it or turn it off as desired. (Of course, if you no longer trust a person or a group’s tastes, you can filter out their thumb-clicks on your map by removing that person or group from your list).

For certain events you use time-sensitive preference maps with thumb-clicks that fade over time. This could be great at an art fair or an outdoor festival — you form a preference group with a bunch of friends who will attend the same event, and as you all explore the place, you each tag the coolest things and the most worthless things that you see. You might glance at a map and notice a dozen bright green blips at bandstand 3, which suggests that something amazing is going down there right now. Those green blips by the coat-check, on the other hand, have faded, so you probably missed whatever happened there. So you head straight to the action at bandstand 3.

(I’m reading the book “The Orchid Thief,” and I just finished a scene that takes place at an orchid convention. Word spreads through the convention center that “you’ve got to check out the orchid that smells just like grape Kool-Aid.” Frustrated flower freaks are milling around, blindly trying to find that particular orchid among hundreds of flowers on display. The orchid freaks would immediately know just where to find the most talked-about flowers in the show if they used such a preference system. That’s what sparked this idea.)

I’ve been envisioning freakish scenarios that are bound to arise soon, when location-aware devices embrace payment and auction systems.

Imagine driving in circles, seeking a parking spot on a busy block in a crowded city. Your device immediately finds four people who are preparing to evacuate parking spaces within a few blocks of you:

Lovely and talented Mie lives in Tokyo. Dashing, fleet-footed Dav lives in San Francisco — downstairs in my house.

Dav and Mie have a thing goin’ on…

Mie has one of those new cel phones with a digital camera built in. Dav arranged things so that Mie can take a snapshot anywhere, at any time, and that image will immediately appear on Tokyo Tidbits, a special blog site that he created.

Now Dav bought a similar device for himself. When it arrives, distant Mie will tune in to the latest images from Dav’s San Francisco life. Choke on that, Hallmark…
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Imagine listening to the mp3 music files stored on your PC or server, from anywhere, via your mobile phone/device. Just browse through your music via your device’s display, choose mp3’s to stream to the device, plug in your headphones and groove.

Why lug around gigs of expensive portable storage space when the music lives at your house, or on rented Web server space? Why hassle with multiple copies of your music, one on each device and computer that you use, when that music can live in one place?

Someday people will store their music and other files centrally and use them via multiple devices in multiple places; that’s almost a given. But don’t we have what it takes to make that someday today? Don’t plenty of people who regularly listen to mp3s have devices that can support such a system?

Someone just needs to build device-based client software that allows folks to choose and stream down their songs, and the corresponding server software that talks to the device and serves up the chosen songs from the PC back home.

So what do you think — is the bandwidth cheap enough to make this sort of streaming practical yet? Certainly during weekends, when minutes are free, no? Shoutcast streams mp3s effectively from PC to PC, even over modem connections, so I think we already have sufficient bandwidth. The device-side UI would be quite a challenge, but what a great capability this would provide…

More power to you:

• What if you could submit music search queries, right from your mobile phone device, to peer-to-peer networks like Gnutella? These queries would run through your Gnutella client on your home PC, and the files you choose would be downloaded to your home PC. Then you could stream those mp3s over your mobile phone too.
• Combine this with song-ID-and-download software; now you’ve really got something. Imagine this: one afternoon you wander into your favorite cafe and you immediately love the song playing in the background. You tell special software on your mobile phone to identify and grab the song. The software records a few seconds of the song and sends this digital sample to your server or home PC, where software identifies the song, fires up Morpheus (or whatever peer-to-peer software you prefer), runs a search on that song and downloads an mp3 of it. Later, in line at the grocery store, you’d love to hear that song that you caught just a bit of in the cafe. So you plug the headphones into your mobile phone and you stream that new mp3 from your server. Sweet.

  Here’s how the software would identify the song based on just a sample: it would query the online CDDB database, which contains titles of thousands of songs along with unique checksum signatures for each song. A special algorithm allows software to quickly scan any mp3 and come up with a unique “checksum” or signature, which applies to that song and that song only. So if you have an untitled mp3 on your PC, you can scan it and submit the resulting signature to the CDDB database. The database will spit back the name of the song, if it recognizes it. (I know: the ambient noise would probably screw up the whole scheme, and the checksums in that database probably require -entire- tracks, but can’t a guy dream?)

• How about a voice interface that lets you quickly request a given song by speaking it into your mobile phone device? Back home, the server software serves the track right away if it’s on your hard drive; if not, it tries to find it on Morpheus and streams it down to you as soon as it can.
• How about direct streaming from Gnutella users?

I can hardly wait.

Spoken-word audio version:
how2fix.mp3 – 4 minutes, 1.2 Mb.
Synthesized speech for your MP3 player.

Text version:
About once a month I join my fellow native Floridians in a massive group cringe as the latest piece of staggeringly shameful Sunshine State news rockets its way around the planet.

The latest election embarrassment hit me harder than most Florida fiascoes because Human Computer Interaction professionals and journalists were to blame, and I’m an HCI geek and an ex-reporter.

We didn’t learn a thing when Florida made itself the butt of barroom jokes from Stockholm to Singapore by ruining the 2000 presidential election. We made the same mistakes last week.

Let’s reflect on this for a moment, before we botch another election.
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“Some of the most revolutionary new ideas come from spotting something old to leave out, rather than thinking of something new to put in.”