pampelmoose: sparks + innovation — sparks + innovation

Tattooed for a Day, Wild for a Night

LAURA EASTWOOD dropped by Linda Mason’s makeup boutique in SoHo last week, looking to add a bit of sizzle to her look. For a night on the town, she was wearing a strapless Gucci cocktail dress, a relic of the Tom Ford era. She planned to turn up its glamour by having her shoulders stamped with a constellation of press-on tattoos.

To her mind, the fakes are a fashion accessory no more unsettling than hair extensions or her favorite Dior snakeskin pumps. A temporary tattoo is “a way, for one night at least, of not looking like everybody else,” Ms. Eastwood said. She was on her way to dinner at a restaurant with her daughter, Graylen, 13, whose grandfather is Clint Eastwood.

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AT&T Expanding Free Wi-Fi Offer

AT&T Inc. said Wednesday it will make its 10,000 Wi-Fi hotspots free to nearly all of its broadband Internet customers starting early next week. Only subscribers to AT&T’s premium broadband services previously had free access to its hotspots, leaving out the majority of high-speed users, who have the 1.5-Mbps service.

Now, more than 10 million broadband customers, most of AT&T’s high-speed Internet subscribers, will be able to use the hotspots free of charge. ”It’s a differentiator for us when people are choosing between competitors,” said AT&T spokesman Fletcher Cook. Most Wi-Fi hotspots — in restaurants, airports and other public places — charge daily or monthly fees for access.

AT&T wireless customers who use Apple Inc.’s iPhone currently must get a Wi-Fi package to use their iPhone at AT&T hotspots, but they now can use their iPhones at hotspots for free if they are AT&T broadband Internet subscribers.

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MacSpeech Dictate

MacSpeech Dictate is fast and accurate, pouring correctly transcribed text into any program where you ordinarily type, as fast as you can speak. When I read a 1,000-word book excerpt, the program transcribed only nine words incorrectly — 99.1 percent accuracy. (I had read the four-minute training script and fed the program a folder full of documents I’d written, which is how you introduce special terminology and names to the program’s dictionary.)

You get a giddy feeling the first time you see Dictate in action; you can’t help contemplating how much more e-mail you’ll be able to plow through in a day, or how your aching hands will no longer have to keep up with your brain when you’re writing.

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Alicia Keys Is No. 1 as CD Sales Plunge

So far 2008 has not been a good year for music sales. This week Alicia Keys, below, stays atop the Billboard chart with “As I Am” (J), but the number of copies that CD sold is barely above the historic low for a No. 1 album. Nielsen SoundScan reported that 61,000 copies of the album sold last week; the least number of weekly sales for No. 1 is 60,000, set by the “Dreamgirls” soundtrack a year ago. (The numbers are rounded.) This week the “Juno” soundtrack (Rhino) is at No. 2 with 58,000, Mary J. Blige’s “Growing Pains” (Geffen) is No. 3 with 52,000, and Radiohead’s “In Rainbows” (ATO) is next with 46,000. The R&B singer Raheem DeVaughn opens at No. 5 with 45,000 sales of “Love Behind the Melody” (J) and John Legend’s new “Live From Philadelphia,” available only through Target, reached No. 7 with 33,000.