Kick ass pedal powered Panzers are fighting the good fight. The second annual Kensington Kinetic Sculpture Derby inspired a group of guys to construct a human powered Panzer Kampwagen III in 11 days for the purpose of crashing the party. By the time they were finished the tank, they were too tired to crash any party, so they just spent the night in the tank.

If you’re in the Philadelphia area, you can visit the tank where it is now being displayed as public art on the west side of Frankford Ave, just north of Norris St. This monstrous skeleton of gears and steel will be the first place you’ll want to go when the bombs drop.

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It figures. A year after I move to NYC from Philadelphia, the Comcast Center is completed and the finishing touches it has are beyond spectacular. When I go back to visit, I’ll have to get some footage of this $22 million high-def video wall in action. It’s 27′ x 87′, features 10 million pixels across various modules, has six LED digitizers and a boatload of video processors. Oh yeah, it contains 27 TB worth of data.

The purpose of this huge video screen? To one-up One Liberty Place and to keep security guards entertained. The 3-D animations are apparently a real hoot to see in person. Peep the video above or stroll over to Center City to witness all that video goodness.

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Reviving WiFi isn’t the only new thing Philadelphia is doing. As part of a city-wide campaign called “Drive CarePhilly,” which is against aggressive driving in Philadelphia, PA-100 junctions have been painted with fake speed humps. These said speed bumps offer an illusionary appearance of a three-dimensional barrier to any oncoming motorist while in fact the road is completely flat.

This is exactly what drivers need in the city of Philadelphia; additional obstacles to feed their ill-temper. The catch? It only works on a driver one time. I smell accidents coming.
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I’ve posted about the city-wide WiFi project in Philadelphia before but usually with bad news. This time around, I’m happy to report the project has been revived by a private group of investors. Boathouse Communications Partners LLC has big names from the area, including former mayoral candidate Tom Knox and a former Verizon executive.

Instead of using shitty bridges as I suggested, the plan is to revive the $17 million infrastructure that Earthlink built before pulling out of the Wireless Philadelphia project. No word has come out yet as to how the restructuring will work, but anything that helps the city out is good in my book. I’m sure fine folks over at City Hall would agree.

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Did I say pennies? What I meant was twenties. Yeah. Sorry about that.

But all humor aside, I am a bit ticked off about something here. I hail originally from Philadelphia and it will always be my home to an extent. About 3 years ago, I had a photo taken of me by an AP reporter. He explained that it was for a story he was doing on a new wireless Internet initiative going on in Philadelphia. I would later find out it was part of the now-defunct Wireless Philadelphia project.

It turns out that part of the reasoning behind the project’’s failure was concerns about cost and being able to broadcast an 802.11b/g signal across the entire city. Understandable, right? Seems like a genuine concern. (more…)

Falling under the conditions of the human condition, we’re born explorers. Sure, we’d love to seek out all of the hidden nooks of the world, but rather it be work or money, there’s always an excuse holding us back from traveling. GeoSim is launching their first complete city tour, starting with Philadelphia, which might one day lead to a whole new form of tourism.

There’s a whole sub-culture of tourism known as the “armchair traveler”. People who drift into travel books in the comfort of their own homes without lifting more than a finger to turn a page. GeoSim has completed a rendering of the city of Philly (where we hear Vince Veneziani Will Smith was  reportedly born and raised, though has been known to frequent the playground on most of his days), down to the current storefronts, architecture, even placements of trash cans.
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