ping

OK, so we suck at bringing you a show every week. But we promise that when we do, they'll be as explosive and ridiculous as this one right here! We revisit the idea of multitasking, but this time, we focus on functional clothing. That and we insult you a whole lot. Thou wimpled plume-plucked pignut!

Ping, a social networking garment

Hoodie buddy with built-in headphones (thanks Jacob!)

Sleeper hoodie (thanks Jacob!)

Beer opener dog collar (thanks Rodney)

How one soldier can carry a whole power plant on his back… Read more

Sure, you can "poke" a friend or "like" a status via your mobile phone. But that's sooo last season.

Ping, a "social-networking garment" from Seattle-based user experience designer Jennifer Darmour, is a concept hoodie that links to your Facebook account wirelessly and lets you connect to your minions by performing basic gestures.

Take off the hood, and you poke a friend. Tie the waist bow to accept a friend request. What's that? A vibration on your shoulder? You just received a new notification.

Darmour, the brain behind Ping and the site electricfoxy, … Read more

Seesmic, which makes Twitter and Facebook access apps, is buying Ping.fm, a service for updating multiple social services at the same time. Terms of the deal are not being disclosed. Ping co-founders Adam Duffy and Sean McCullough are joining Seesmic and will begin work on integrating their service into the Seesmic clients, said Seesmic CEO Loic Le Meur.

I covered the complexity and confusion of dealing with multiple personal networks in September 2008. A year and a bit later, there's been some consolidation of the players, but the game is still confusing: Pownce and Kwippy are gone, for … Read more

Simon (from Dejal Systems) is a reasonably priced, feature-rich site-monitoring tool, especially useful to administrators who need to keep track of multiple sites, servers, and applications. The app's primary interface is a straightforward Monitor window, which displays everything that you're tracking with stats on uptime, time until the next check, and time since the last change and failure--along with graphs, lists, and more details when you drill down. You can drag and drop URLs onto the Monitor window, or import from bookmarks, and Simon's services let you define what you want to test, from SMART status to … Read more

Twhirl (download) and AlertThingy, two social-publishing tools that run exclusively on Adobe's AIR, have been freshly updated to support more services and come with some cool (and useful) new features:

As we blogged about a few weeks back, Twhirl was working on giving Seesmic users a way to record videos, not just view them. The new version lets you do that and also adds Ping.fm support across the board, letting you cross post to other accounts you may have.

Other new goodies include a spell checker, Bit.ly link shortener, and an option to have any search pop … Read more

Two services I use, Twhirl and Ping.fm, and one I don't, Seesmic, are getting integrated this week in ways that will likely help all of the products.

First up, Seesmic CEO Loic LeMeur just announced that the multi-posting tool Ping.fm now supports Seesmic, a video microblog service. Seesmic has a new API, which has made it possible for the Ping.fm team to allow embed a recording function for Seesmic videos within Ping.fm. It's very simple to use the Ping.fm service now to create a Seesmic video, but the real benefit is that you … Read more

As is so often the case with networking problems, the firewall was source of the Verizon DSL problem I wrote about recently.

I had experienced problems making outbound connections at two Verizon DSL business customers and was told by another Verizon DSL customer that they too had a similar problem.

The problem first came up when trying to use NetMeeting from a Verizon DSL customer to remotely control a computer. Despite there being no firewall on the receiving computer NetMeeting still couldn't make a connection. Even a simple ping of the target computer failed.

I suspected Verizon was the … Read more

Recently, someone at a small business with a Verizon DSL Internet connection couldn't connect to my computer with NetMeeting. I've done this often enough to know that NetMeeting wasn't the problem, so I asked them to ping my computer - and it failed (timed out).

The TCP/IP ping command is a network debugging tool available on any operating system with TCP/IP (which is just about every operating system). It sends a simple command to the target computer which answers with a small amount of data. As the name implies, ping is just a tap on … Read more

In the spirit of Kelly Baby Watch, we explore the many reasons why now is a really good time to be a child. Us grown-ups can still have a little fun too. Listen now: Download today's podcast

Sega Dream Dog DX http://dvice.com/archives/2008/06/sega_dream_dog.php

Edible legos: Yay or nay? http://www.clevelandleader.com/node/5775

Ultimate Star Wars Lego Death Star http://www.core77.com/blog/object_culture/the_ultimate_star_wars_lego_death_star_10257.asp

Go ahead kids: Draw on the fridge http://blogs.cnet.com/8301-13553_1-9976657-32.html

Swim-Ring amphibious PC pool toy http://www.popgadget.net/2008/06/amphibious_pc_p.php … Read more