alternative

There's a Web browser out there for everybody, and Avant should appeal to those users who like their customization in-house and built on an IE-rendering engine. Avant takes off in a different direction from Internet Explorer, though. It's IE if it were being produced by a small firm instead of Microsoft.

The browser is sufficiently zippy, preloaded with two dozen similar skins as well as tabbed browsing and modular toolbars. The Menu bar, though, is counterintuitively pinned to the upper-right corner, and icons for proprietary functions, such as an in-page search term highlighting toggle, aren't instantly comprehensible. … Read more

Remember the movie The Game, with Michael Douglas and Sean Penn as unlikely brothers, shot before the backdrop of vertiginous San Francisco?

Well, here's a new interface for the city by the Bay: SFZero is "a new representation for the data that's already there. Your mind is full of inaccurate representations that are affecting the way you use the San Francisco data flow, steering you away from interaction and collaboration and toward unproductive reflexive data loops.

SFZero designers are working double shifts to engineer this next-generation interface that will bring you together with your cohabitants to experience … Read more

Too cheap for a Flickr pro membership and scared of Zooomr? Check out TinyAlbum, a super simple and minimalist photo-hosting service that will let you upload as many photos as you want (at up to 8MB a file) into slick little albums.

The UI shares a lot in common with Flickr, and incorporates a handful of really user-friendly features like drag-and-drop reordering, on the fly rotation, and links to various sizes for download. It's missing an open API, something that makes Flickr so incredibly useful in conjunction with third-party services, but the speed and ease of use are top … Read more

Update 1:14 p.m. PDT: This has been edited to reflect some new information about what's in the package and its source.

Usually when I get a UPS package it's some boring book or prospectus. But the Express Envelope that landed on my desk Wednesday certainly got my attention.

Inside were the following things: a sticker with the words "Scientific Anarchy Now" and "Holomove;" a photocopy of a memorandum purportedly from Los Alamos National Lab dated January 30, 1985, regarding the termination of a scientist named Eugene Gough; and lastly, and most disconcertingly, … Read more

Flexenclosure is trying to wean the cell phone business in Africa off of fossil fuels.

The Swedish start-up has designed a base station for mobile networks that would run on sun and wind power. It all started with a request from telecom company Ericsson three years ago. The company needed an energy source for a potential project in Africa and wanted a more environmentally friendly solution than the conventional diesel generators that usually power base stations out of reach from electricity grids.

Right now, there are 40,000 base stations for mobile networks in Africa, most of them running on … Read more

Sure, the Apple iPod Nano is ultraslim, easy to use, and nice to look at, but it lacks desirable extras such an FM radio and a user-definable EQ, and the sound quality isn't exactly spectacular. Luckily, if you're not convinced you want to hop on the Nano bandwagon, there's a handful of worthy alternatives, and most of the ones I've rounded up for you beat out the Nano in audio fidelity. Of course, the important thing is selecting the best MP3 player for your needs, and I'm hoping one of these will do the trick.… Read more

A couple of years ago, I wrote a story about a company called Edoc Laundry and its line of clothing that featured a built-in alternate-reality game.

On Friday, I read about a new line of T-shirts available at Target that feature images from experimental games and which come with free CDs on which are the games themselves.

Boing Boing blogger Cory Doctorow wrote about the new shirts Friday, and it reminded me of the Edoc Laundry experiment, which, while innovative, never quite took off.

Apparently, the new T-shirt line comes comes from a company called EGPApparel, and each individual shirt … Read more

Thanks to modern technology, we can waste time in ways our ancestors could only dream of, while they were working down the mine, in black and white. Unfortunately our world of gizmos and gimmicks, doodahs and doofers isn't entirely free: Just ask the polar bears.

One way to save money and the planet simultaneously is to ditch the fossil fuels and electrical leash and seek alternative sources of power. That's where our new sister site SmartPlanet comes in: It reviews products on their quality, value, ethics, and greenness, so inconvenient truths are balanced by conveniently thrifty products. We'… Read more

For anyone who follows alternate-reality games (ARGs), it should come as no surprise that the latest entry in the genre, The Lost Ring, is the brainchild of, among others, Jane McGonigal.

Until now, it was only suspected--though with extremely high levels of confidence--that the game, which is centered on helping a fictional amnesiac woman named Ariadne discover her identity, was a promotional vehicle for this summer's Beijing Olympics.

But McGonigal, who is keynoting at the South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin on Tuesday, confirmed to me that the game was in fact designed in collaboration with the International … Read more