INERTIA 183 DIY: Wi-Fi Radio
Shannon The SEXIEST gamer you’ll ever meet!
CES See all of your favorite tech straight from
LAS VEGAS
SUCKS US TO BE
What’s in store for todays youth
CONTENTS Features 134
SUCKS TO BE US
158
STAR POWER
162
Future Home
Departments Nuts & Bolts Shannon
Meet the girl who is turning the gaming world upside down
Topshelf CES 2012
Check out our list of favorites from this years Consumer Electronics Show!
Workbench Wi-Fi Radio
Check out the lastest DIY Project
iPad Repair
What to do when your tablet has a tumble and more
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IN Nuts & Bolts Shannon :age: Twenty-One
:sex: Female
:game: Battlefield 3
:biography: As with most young girls, Shannon’s love affair with video games began with brothers. Years of playing led to the more than 100 hours of in game time and over 50,000 kills. You definitely do not want to run into her!
Game Crazy MEET SHANNON AND HEAR HER LIST OF TOP 10 GAMES OF 2012
Shannon Valdez, also known as Pixxel from the all-girl gaming team, the Frag Dolls, is a hardcore gamer hired by Ubisoft. Originally hailing from the Big Island of Hawaii, Pixxel made the journey across the Pacific to pursue a career and education in her two biggest passions: gaming and technology. She now lives in San Francisco, CA studying Computer Programming by day and can be found racking up achievement points, as well as exploring the city, by night. Pixxel has held a controller in her hands from the moment the minimum dexterity require-
ments were met. Her mother raised her on Super Mario World, and from then on, Pixxel was hooked. She also owned an NES and enjoyed classics such as Duck Hunt and the original Mario at a young age. At age 8, she found her love for RPG’s as she picked up the first game for her Playstation, Final Fantasy VIII. To date, this is still her most beloved genre. After years of playing on consoles, Pixxel turned to PC gaming where she discovered RTS’s, FPS’s, and a slew of MMORPG’s. For Pixxel, the sense of community and the social aspect of gaming has always been
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IN Top Shelf
New Tech INT. CES IS THE 1 :Netgear N600: WORLD’S LARGNETGEAR N600 Wireless EST CONSUMER The Dual Band Router offers the TECHNOLOGY & high-performance wireless TRADESHOW. Internet access needed for demanding applications. FEATURING OVER Simultaneous Dual Band is 2700 EXHIBITORS the ultimate in flexibility and performance networks.
4 :SE MBW-100: Sony Ericsson and Fossil joining forces to bust out sexy Bluetooth watches. First off, there’s a straight-up analog watch face, while a small OLED display below helps you manage the Bluetooth functions, shows incoming caller and notifies you of new SMS.
7 :Beats HD Studio: Beats By Dre Studio and producers spend countless hours fine-tuning and mixing music to get it exactly how they want their fans to hear it. But the majority of headphones can’t accurately reproduce the intricacies produced in the Monster beats.
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2 :HTC One V:
With HTC One V, you never have to decide whether you’re in work or play mode because it becomes seamless to switch between productivity and fun. From emails to the social circle, and brilliant beats audio, this phone has it alll and more.
5 :Marshall JVM410: In a nutshell, the Marshall alltube, 4-channel JVM410H 100Watt tube head is the most versatile Marshall amplifier eve made. It also boasts more gain than any other Marshall to date and that’s really saying something.
8 :Finepix X-100: Fujifilm unveiled the FinePix X100, a compact camera with an SLR-size APS sensor and traditional analogue control dials, that hides groundbreaking technology inside a retro-styled body with looks to die for!
3 :iPod Nano:
The newest edition to the iPod family this is one of the smallest iPods to date and offers the unique touch screen interface that can be found on both the iPhone and iPod Touch devices.
6 :HP X510: The HP Data Vault is effectively a MediaSmart Server X510 with a new name badge slapped on it. The hard drive capacity and available configurations are the only notable differences in both hardware and software.
9 :Intel i7 Processor: The 2nd generation Intel Core processor family delivers visibly smart performance you can see with improved adaptive performance that adds speed when you need it and built in visual capabilities for a better laptop experience you can see.
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Las Vegas 6 4
:when: January 10-13
:where: LVCC / Venetian
:stuff: Exceptional quality. Recordbreaking numbers. By every measure attendee quality, media attention, markets represented and special events CES is incomparable. It’s all in the numbers
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IN Workbench
Wi-Fi Radio JEFF KEYZER FROM MIGHTYOHM HAS COMPLETED HIS DIY WIFI RADIO BUILD. THE FINISH IS FANTASTIC AND WE HAVE THE DETAILS
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what you need According to Wikipedia, in 1993 the first internet radio program began distribution. At that time, radio programs were manually downloaded to be played later on the user’s home computer; the user experience was far from that of listening to a traditional broadcast radio receiver. It was not until several years later that streaming radio became common, giving birth to internet radio stations that could be listened to much like traditional radio, but with several advantages. Most notably, internet radio stations were (and still are for the most part) largely devoid of on-air advertising, and stations anywhere on the globe could be received by anyone with access to the internet. Over time, improvements in audio compression (such as MP3) and larger end user bandwidth improved the fidelity and reliability of internet radio. The birth of common standards like Shoutcast made it possible to listen to many stations with a single player program, like Winamp. Today, most music playback software supports streaming radio in some way. iTunes features thousands of streaming radio stations and even supports Shoutcast streams so that users can easily add additional stations of their own.
:Altec ACS90 Speakers: took the speakers apart and threw away the plastic speaker boxes. Inside one is a small stereo audio amplifier that runs on 12V @ < 2A and delivers 4W per channel. I couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t ask for a better amp for this project
1 :LCD / Interface Circuit: carefully transferred my AVR microcontroller-based LCD driver / tuner control circuit from my breadboard to a piece of electronics protoboard.
Advance :difficulty: January 10-13
:time: Over 56 hours
:info: 2 :Asus Wl-520gu Router: removed the USB and DC power jacks from the WL-520gU PCB. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m planning to use the USB port solely to talk to my SYBA USBAudio adapter, so I removed the USB connector from the SYBA as well and wired the USB lines directly to the router.
3 :Power Supply: To supply power to the radio, AVR microcontroller, and amplifier, I needed a power supply that could provide both 5V and 12VDC.
4 :Custom Built Housing: Mounting all of the components inside the radio box took a lot of time, epoxy, velcro, and hot glue. Eventually I was able to get everything except the power supply to fit.
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This project is for advanced DIY enthusiasts. For all the programming information please see the website we have provided below for all the intricate details
SUCKS TO BE US Noreen Malone
The reality that faces todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s college graduates: theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re screwed, coddled, self-absorbed, mocked and a surprisingly resilient generation.
Every generation finds, eventually, a mode of expression that suits it. Cavemen drew lines on their cave walls. Sixties kids marched. My generation, we Gchat, a million tiny windows blinking orange with hopes and dreams and YouTube links, with five-year plans and lunch plans. So as I began to search for a single phrase that could, preposterously, describe our entire cohort, post-crash, I did what I always do in moments of crisis. I Gchatted my 24-year-old sister Clare, who happens to be living back at home with our parents while she looks for a job:
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sucks to be us Being young is supposed to mean you have the luxury of time. But in hard times, a few fallow years can become a lifetime drag on what you earn, sort of the opposite of compound interest. Because the average person grabs 70 percent of their total pay bumps during their first ten years in the workforce, according to a paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, having stagnant or nonexistent wages during that period means you hit that springboard at a crawl. Economist Lisa Kahn explained to The Atlantic in 2010 that those who graduate into
Maybe I don’t have to make a splash. Maybe I’ll be okay with just keeping afloat a recession are still earning an average of 10 percent less nearly two decades into their careers. In hard, paycheckshrinking numbers, the salary lost over that stretch totals around $100,000. That works out to $490 or so less a month, money that could go, say, toward repaying student
loans, which for the class of 2009 average $24,000. Those student loans (the responsible borrowing option!) have reportedly passed credit cards as the nation’s largest source of debt. This is not just a rotten moment to be young. It’s a putrid, stinking, severalmonths-old-stringy-goat-meat moment to be young.
Fighting Debt Earlier generations have weathered recessions, of course; this stall we’re in has the look of something nastier. Social Security and Medicare are going to be diminished, at best. Hours worked are up even as hiring staggers along: Blood from a stone looks to be the normal order of things “going forward,” to borrow the business-speak. Economists are warning that even when the economy recuperates, full employment will be lower and growth will be slower—a sad little rhyme that adds up to something decidedly unpoetic. A majority of Americans say, for the first time ever, that this generation will not be better off than its parents, and so we find ourselves living among the scattered ashes and spilled red
wine and broken glass from a party we watched in our pajamas, peering down the stairs at the grown-ups. This is not a morning after we are prepared for, to judge by the composite sketch sociologists have drawn of us. (Generation-naming is an inexact science, but generally we’re talking here about the first half of the Millennials, the terrible New Agey label we were saddled with in the eighties.) Clare has us pegged pretty well: We are self-centered and convinced of our specialness and unaccustomed to being denied. “I am sad, jaded, disillusioned, frustrated, and worried,” said one girl I talked to who feels “stuck” in a finance job she took as a stepping-stone to more-fulfilling work she now cannot find. Ours isn’t a generation that will give you just one adjective to describe our hurt. It might be hard, in fact, to create a generation more metaphysically ill-equipped to adjust to this new tough-shit world. Yet some of us, somehow, are dealing pretty well. Our generation is the product of two long-term social experiments conducted by our parents. The first sought
//Average student debt of graduating seniors in 4-year degrees//
23,200 24,000 17,350 18,650 12,750
$
$ $ $ $
2002
2003
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2004
2005
2006
Students in Debt The average student now averages 25,000 in debt before they graduate. With the economy in shambles and with national debt and credit card debt on the rise the rising student debt is a concern for anybody attending college.
to create little hyperachievers encouraged to explore our interests and talents, so long as that could be spun for maximum effect on a college application. (I would like to take this forum to at last admit that my co-secretaryship of the math club had nothing to do with any passion for numbers and much to do with the extra-credit points.) In the second experiment, which was a reaction to their own distant moms and dads, our parents tried to see how much self-confidence they could pack into us, like so many overstuffed microfiber love seats, and accordingly we were awarded clip-art Certificates of Participation just for showing up.
Experimentation The finite supply of actual brass rings meant that the first experiment would never pan out, but the second was a runaway success. Selfesteem among young people in America has been rising since the seventies, but it’s now so dramatically high that social scientists are considering whether they need to find a different measurement system—we’ve broken the scale. Since we are not in fact all perfect, this means that the endless praise we got growing up, win or lose, must have really sunk in. (Meanwhile, it’s this characteristic that our parents’ generation—which instilled it in us!—so delights in interpreting as “entitled.”) I’ve got a working theory about what’s happening as our self-esteem surpluses collide with a contracting world. A big chunk of our generation, the part David Brooks a decade ago collectively labeled the Organization Kid, more or less happily embraced very hard work within the system. (Brooks was focused on elite students, but I think the term applies equally well to your typical
first- and second-honor-roll strivers.) If you were an Organization Kid and have prospered despite the economy, landing one of those jobs that come with an embroidered gym bag, you’re obviously fine. The big change is that when you describe yourself as lucky—a word that comes up a lot with friends I know like this—you may actually mean it more than you would have before. (Before, it would have just been codespeak for “privileged.”) If, though, you set track records and made summa cum laude—if you earned praise not just for effort but real achievements— only to land back in the same bedroom where you drilled for the SATs, then you are unmoored. Your less-decorated peers, feeling the love regardless of results, came to believe they’ll always be appreciated. Whereas you have had your worldview kicked in. You become a little like my friend Lael Goodman. “The worst thing is that I’ve always gotten self-worth from performance, especially good grades. But now that I can’t get a job, I feel worthless,” she says. Lael, who is 27, was the valedictorian of her high school and did very well in college too. Unable to find a position that paid a de-
Student loans have reportedly passed credit cards as the nation’s largest source of debt
Top 10 states with the highest debt New Hampshire $31,048 Maine $29,983 Iowa $29,598 Minnesota $29,058 Pennsylvania $28,599 Vermont $28,391 Ohio $27,713 Indiana $27,001 Rhode Island $26,340 New York $26,271
Top 10 States with the lowest debt Utah $15,509 Hawaii $15,550 New Mexico $16,399 Nevada $16,622 California $18,113 Arizona $18,454 Georgia $18,888 Kentucky $19,375 Tennessee $19,957 Wyoming $20,571
cent wage using her English degree, she got a master’s at the University of Michigan in environmental studies. She does technically have a job, for now, filling in for a woman on maternity leave at a D.C. nonprofit, but it’s not one that prevents all her go-getting from seeming for naught. Lael feels like she’s stranded on the wrong rung. “All the
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sucks to be us
Department Spending Department spending makes up over 4 trillion dollars every year. As the Baby Boomers continue to retire the need for Medicare and Social Security is expected to double within the next 15 years.
What do our children owe? On top of the ever growing need for student loans grow, what else will the future workforce owe?
National Debt 12.5 Trillion in the year 2010. Projections estimate the debt rise as much as 3 Trillion by the year 2015
Medicare As more and more baby boomers retire, the working force will dwindle. Forcing todays youth to shoulder the ever growing financial need
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18%
20% Medicare & Medicaid
Social Security
16% 10%
18% 18% Defense
Public Debt
articles in the newspaper say that investing in an IRA now means I’ll have hundreds of thousands of extra dollars down the road, so I should just scrimp and save,” she says. “But I can’t scrimp and save because I’m doing that just to afford housing and groceries. So I’m screwed now, unable
This stall we’re in has the look of something a bit nastier. to enjoy young adulthood in the way that I feel I was promised, and screwed for the future.”
My Friend Sam Then there is my friend Sam (not his real name, because he felt that if I used his real name, he’d truly be unemployable). In high school, Sam was the sports captain who set all the curves in calculus. I used to call him up the night before physics tests to figure out what I should know. Sam went to the best college he got into, for which he took out $50,000 in loans. He signed up
Treasury
All Other
for some abstract-math courses, was cowed by classmates who worked theorems for kicks, and majored in poetry writing rather than fall short in the subject he’d built so much of his identity on. After graduating, he took a job as a woodworker’s apprentice, not the expected outcome for a grade-grubbing gunner, but also not all that unusual back in the days before every decision about which major to sign up for or job to take started to feel make-or-break. One thing about being the boomers’ heirs growing up in boom times was that it used to be okay to take a lifeenriching sabbatical. There was no reason to think you wouldn’t eventually be able to get back on track. Sam found out that woodworking turned out to be mostly vacuuming up wood chips, and so after a few months, he moved on to a series of other gigs, none of them exactly a career. When he finally got sick of bouncing around in his broken-down $200 car and living with his parents— who kept pressuring him to
revisit his math-and-science aptitude—he got himself a $25,000 bank loan, which he used to cover expenses while enrolled in continuing-ed classes in engineering at one of the U.C. schools. He ran out of money pretty quickly. He then found a job working in urban education, but was laid off after a year and a half. “That was the point in my life where I was like, I need to get a career, I need to make that move,” he told me over the phone, in the mellowed-out East Bay patois that had crept into his voice since I last spoke with him. These days, he’s going to networking events and desperately applying for jobs in the tech world, hopeful that landing something very entry-level will put him back on a navigable route to success. He’s had creditors calling him at all hours. He is rather earnestly worried that he might end up on the street. His brothers are managing to stand on their own feet, and he can’t bear to move back home with his parents. “I have a lot of regret about going to college,” Sam, the person in my high-school class who’d been most obsessed with getting into a good college, now says. “If I could go back again, I think I’d try … not going to college”—our generation’s ultimate blasphemy. Sam blames himself for his predicament, not the economy, mostly. But other people in similar straits are coming to see their personal hardships as the product of broad inequalities. How many young people will put themselves into that category
is a big test for Occupy Wall Street. One of its advocates created a Tumblr, “We Are the 99 Percent,” to collect accounts of being screwed by the recession. The posts from twentysomethings take stories that sound something like Lael’s—“I worked hard (40 hours a week during most of my education), for what? Tell me what I need to do to get ahead, because I did everything right!”—and make them a call to arms.
could make activism cool for kids again, a factor he views as a key difference between the U.S. and places like Egypt. “Even just the physical style, the types of chants, the stuff that they’re eating, the granola—it’s just so derivative of the sixties,” he said. “It’s like, ‘Guys, let’s do something that’s more our generation.’ ” What’s not clear is exactly what that might look like. It’s not that this is a generation that doesn’t want to improve
Making a Stand
Our generation is the product of two long-term social experiments
The unions, we know, are heeding that call, but a broader youth movement has yet to materialize.* The Obama 2008 campaign was the high-water mark for twentysomething political involvement. The activism it entailed felt like work—not a turnoff for us. Dialing your way through spreadsheets of getout-the-vote phone numbers is something you can add to a résumé; getting escorted off the Brooklyn Bridge in those plastic handcuffs is not. But we’re done with that kind of engagement, for now: While this is by some measures the most politically progressive generation ever, young people have never been more disillusioned, as a group, about their ability to bring about meaningful change through the electoral process. Sam Graham-Felsen was the Obama campaign’s chief blogger last cycle and now lectures about youth activism all over the world. When we spoke during the early days of the protests, he wasn’t convinced Occupy Wall Street
the world—been to a college activity fair lately?—but ours is a fractured involvement. The Cold War sort of settled which was the superior economic and political system, leaving youthful calls for revolution to be shouted in the context of gay rights and women’s rights and pro-Palestinian-hummusin-the-campus-cafeteria demonstrations, which are really about improvements to the status quo, not a wholesale overthrow. In the sixties, that generation’s protesters wanted a blank slate, economic and political chaos out of which they could build something new. We’ve got that chaos, and all we want is a way to get back to the structured prosperity that preceded their marching. It’s hard to build a potent counterculture when some of the people it’s meant to appeal to are just hoping for the
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