Author Archives: DigiDave

John Battell says it best: Search is no longer a stand-alone application, a useful but impersonal tool for finding something on a new medium called the world wide web. Increasingly, search is our mechanism for how we understand ourselves, our world, and our place within it. It’s how we navigate the one infinite resource that drives human culture: knowledge.

And he should be able to say it pretty good by now, cause he has been working on his book about the search industry for years now. Seriously John, I need this book!

Today I think Yahoo has taken us a step closer to realizing what John was talking about above.

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Wine. The nectar of the gods. At least, it tastes that way until it turns to vinegar and piss.

What’s amazing about living digitally is that sometimes it applies to more than your laptop or how you listen to MP3s. Here is a story I looked into about how scientists at U.C. Davis took MRI technology and learned to test the contents of a wine bottle without opening it.

Gates probably has a few expensive bottles which have been in storage since he made his first million. Twenty years latter this might be the only technology saving him and Jobs from tasting sour grapes.

So here is something that art geeks might really love. A cheap 3D scanner. This scanner only costs $90, which is a reasonable price. 3D scanning tech has been out there for awhile, but not really within a reasonable price range.

The scanner is run on open source software, so you aren’t tied down to any OS. Check out the story on how this little toy was made.

On a related note, art geeks (who would love to get their hands on this 3D scanner) met up in Los Angeles this weekend for DeviantArt’s first members summit. I went down to LA for fathers day and decided to cover the event for Wired as well. Here is my coverage. All in all, they might be artsy, but deep down they are still technocrats like us.

I was in New York a couple weeks ago visiting a friend who is a teacher. Watching her class made me wish I was in 3rd grade again. Not because they are care-free, or still small enough to hide underneath a desk, but bcause they already know how to operate OSX. They use the Smart Board.

The Smart Board is a touch sensitive screen hooked up to a computer. The monitor is projected onto the board and it becomes like a computer chalkboard for the class. The picture above is a first grader using iMovie to show her class a project she worked on. I wonder if her mother helped her.

Read up on the Smart Board to find out more of the cool things it does and how going digital helps education.

Some researchers at Columbia have an interesting proposition for you. MusicLab will let you download songs legally and for free if you just answer a few questions related to the songs. None of the bands are really huge though, so don’t go looking for the latest Radiohead album. But apparently they are going to use the data from the study to do scientific stuff, so think of it as a good deed for science at no cost to you. The worst thing that could happen is being exposed to some crappy music. But I’m sure there are some gems hidden in there as well.

I recently went to New York and now I wish I had read this Guardian story before I left.

The point of the story: How to have adventure in a city you don’t know equipped only with a BlackBerry 7100t and Nokia’s 6682. The Guardian writer decided to spend 48 hours in New York using bloggers as his tour guide.

After all, who knows the underground in’s-and-out’s of New York better than the city’s bloggers. There is a wealth of information on the Web and with an Internet enabled device no bigger than a pack of cigarettes, what’s to stop you from knowing where the place to be is.

It just goes to show all the different ways our little gadgets can change the way we work, communicate and even travel. Next time I go to a new city, screw the Lonely Planet’s Guidebook, I’m going to rely on a WiFi travel guide.

No matter how great our digital camera technology gets, one ancient rogue will ruin our pictures.

The ever dreaded closed eye shot. It could even make Paris Hilton look like she belongs in special ed. But now there is a way to always avoid it. A new camera developed at the University of Electro-Communications, on the outskirts of Tokyo, Japan will forever rid your album of mid-blink photos.

The camera takes 15 shots in .5 seconds and special sensors can detect which pictures caught you mid-blink and which found your best face forward.

Yes, we also read in paper

Clive Thompson – The New York Times
“Wiener was both brilliant and personally intriguing, an absent-minded professor straight out of central casting. As a character, he was larger than life; as a scientist, he was smaller than history.”

Publishers Weekly
“One of the central concerns of the current “information age” is the difficulty of ordering and making sense out of the glut of information that flies at us from every direction, at all hours, in increasingly creative and invasive ways. Wiener, the man who gave us the tools to create and nurture this age by founding the science of cybernetics, has fallen prey to that glut, with his legacy and impact largely forgotten and misunderstood. “

Let’s face it one of the greatest things about the Internet is the free, mindless entertainment it can provide. Especially when you are bored at work. Sites like the Cyborg Name Generator are so stupid that I question my intelligence for finding any joy in them, if only for brief and fluttering moments. But hey, if you get bored at work like me, check it out. It might make you want to stimulate your mind and get back to work.

Here is the cyborg name for LiveDigi.

Today Nokia launched their first non-phone product. The Internet Tablet has absolutely no cell phone capabilities. What it can do, however, is surf the Internet and let you perform basic Web functions like check your email.

You:But I can do that with a mobile phone.
Nokia Salesman: True but the new 770 Internet Tablet will let you surf the Web cheaper and quicker than your clunky Nokia phone and now for the low-low price of $350 you can get one of these Wi-Fi friendly Internet Portals for your very own to cut down on that expensive Internet cell phone bill.

Ever notice how long winded salesman are?

The new Internet Tablet is perfect for a home that has one computer, but several people fighting over who gets to use the Internet. It’s the new modern dilemma. In the old day’s brother and sister fought over the bathroom, now it’s who gets to stream movies. But with the Nokia Internet Tablet the younger (weaker) sibling doesn’t get a Charlie horse, just a smaller screen.

Technology Review covered Motorola’s next big ambition. To be the pioneers of nano-emissive display (NED) technology, replacing any need for LCD’s. They unvieled their prototype on Monday at the Society for Information Display (SID) conference in Boston.
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I’ll never forget that one scene in Terminator II where California’s governor cut off his hand to reveal a metallic skeleton (Man that’s a weird sentence to read).

The idea is starting to take shape though. Shadow Robot Company has just released a robotic hand for public consumption. They say it’s “the worlds most advanced Dexterous Hand.”

Now all we need to do is learn to put it under the skin and we can make real Terminators. Or, make them adamantium and we got Wolverine. Sorry, I love taking real science and seeing how close to sci-fi it gets us.