Category Archives: General

I have to make up for that last post.

I’m excited about this one, even though it might be a while before we see it. Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have been working for years to develop a thin material that can be wrapped around buildings or other things and provide climate control to what’s inside. Think of it as wallpaper or packaging material that air conditions (or heats) whatever it surrounds. It would revolutionize the way we condition the air in our homes and businesses.

Great invention – kind of boring to talk about.

Something not so boring – they’re going to try to scale the idea down so they can use it in product packaging. Welcome to the world of the self cooling soda!

Imagine! No more refrigeration needed! Left the soda in the garage last night? No problem! You live in Phoenix? Still no problem! It’s ice cold! The can cools the soda for you! I guess it could heat beverages too – so bring on the always-hot soup or coffee.

This reminds me of an article I read a few years ago about a self-cooling beer can using a different technology. There were some UK companies that played around with the idea but I guess it didn’t catch on… too bad.

This is incredibly technical, and I have to admit I don’t really understand how it all works, but it looks pretty sweet. The link is thanks to Ian A. Walker, who explains, “Apple puts a 3D motion sensor in its laptop hard drives, so it can lock them to protect from damage in falls, jerks, hits, and vibration. People have found all sorts of interesting “unofficial” uses for that sensor including…a seismograph, a light saber sound generator, and a Marble Madness game that you play with tilt control.”

This is what mice say according to about 74% of Swiss people who speak German. They make some cool ones. Mice. Swiss people make them…for computers. Ok! Bad pun ended!
Really, though, go check out Pat Says Now. They make some really funky mice, and if those aren’t good enough for you, they do customs as well. I particularly like the duck; it’s just a thing I have. I love seeing more companies who let your personality shine through your gear!
Thanks to 3Yen for pointing out the Koi mouse.

As you are all aware, today is a very special day as it is America’s birthday (or something like that). July 4th is one of those days that really epitomizes the summer season. When I think of July 4th, I think of many things; baseball, hotdogs, but one thing that really symbolizes this time of year is ice cream, more specifically ice cream cones. One problem I have alway had with ice cream cones is the fact that it takes way too much effort to eat an entire cone. Well…not anymore. Now,thanks to the motorized ice cream cone , now the only effort you have to make is scooping the ice cream in and sticking your toungue out (wow,that just doesn’t sound right).

Seriously, this invention has so many positive aspects, I don’t even know where to begin. First off, no one eats the cone anyways, I’ve scavanged through many a garbage cans and I can’t tell you how many half eaten cones I have come upon. Think of the fact that there will be considerably less garbage which will in turn help the environment. Plus, we can send all the cones to third world countries to help feed the needy. No one would eat a half eaten cone, but now with this clever invention, those less fortunate can dine on complete, uneaten cones. Secondly, the clever colours reminds all those using this ingenious product that they are indeed eating a product that originated from inside a cow. So in other words, this product, feed the needy, saves the environment, and teaches children about the nature of food. How many products can do that?I’ll save you the time to look it up…none.

Look at the complexity of this! It’s mind-boggling! In addition to the above helpful uses, by not having to actually turn the cone around to lick, the energy you save could perhaps be the difference between rescuing a cat from a tree or a baby from a burning building. Think about it, how tired do you usually get eating an entire ice cream cone? I know i’m both mentally and physically exhausted to the point where I can barely keep my eyes open. Not anymore…

Coming to you with another wacky and useless product, this is Merv.

After a hideous amount of soul-searching, I buckled and got Palm’s Lifedrive.  I needed a palmtop for when the laptop of doom couldn’t come, because my ability to keep written notes crumbles under my tremendously bad handwriting.  After a few months of beating the tar out of it, I’m as pleased with it compared to a “standard” PDA as I am with my Mac laptop as opposed to a Windows laptop.

It’s stunning for work, in particular it’s voice recorder.  The pic-up mic is clear and catches everything that gets dropped within a space up to a decent boardroom, and the storage capacity of the drive pays for itself in being able to keep just about every interview, voice memo, or bootleg I need both on my PC and on the Drive.  Sometimes, I just have to remember what someone said when I’m on the bus — getting home is too late!

The video playback, predictably, isn’t worth a tick’s fart.  It’s cute that I can move my Samurai Champloo grabs onto it, but there’s no real built-in tools to manage or view video the way I want to.  Mp3 playback isn’t a problem, and playing the voice memo audio files in their native format is cake, but the machine puts them out as .wavs naturally — which means that if I take a voice mail from the palmtop to the desktop and back, I have to change it into an Mp3 midstep.

Media functions, so, blah.  It’s nice there’s software built in to let me do something other than just put voice memos onto that 4 gig drive, but the media functions just aren’t up to snuff.  Although ease of transfer is light-years ahead of the PSP, the PSP looks at least that much better.

But, for someone who needs all the basic Palm functions and would be carrying a voice recorder anyways, this is a fantastic machine.  Essentially unlimited storage for voice, with plenty of space leftover to make it a decent back up disk for essential docs,  and the default handiness of a Palm have come together better than I’d hoped for when I got it.

Other than my glee at a device not just being for fun, where I’m going is deliberate.  The PSP and the Lifedrive are both hyper-designed; a ridiculous amount of money and research went into making each one a solid multi-media platform with a core functionality.  PSP’s is games; Lifedrive’s is organization.  But neither product actually benefits from the periphery abilities except for very specific users, such as myself.  Isn’t the lesson here clear enough that Sony would realize that foisting blu-ray onto the console war is going to hurt them — that insuring a clean, core gameplay accesability is more important than what are essentially expensive widgets for everyone but a few teritiary market members?

On that note, I’m going to go borrow a DS for the trip into Berkeley.  Sorry if the spellings off today; this was a quick one before ribs.  And ribs, we can all agree, come before perfect spelling.

I must fess up an say I don’t really listen to podcasts.  I know they are supposed to be great and all, but I just listen to too much music.  I have a Pioneer in-dash receiver capable of playing WMA files, so about 10 CDs keeps me fresh with about 60 discs worth of music.  I have Sonos at home with a Maxtor NAS, giving me access to the 800 or so CDs I ripped a couple of years ago.  I generally listen to Rhapsody or now Pandora when at work.  Leaves me very little podcasting time.

But, it’s fun to be in a podcast!  Matt Whitlock at TechLore (if you don’t know Techlore.com, they are a great resource to check out if you want to learn how to maximize the use of your consumer electronics gear) did a great roundup of portable television, and you’ll find me there around the 11 minute mark.  I do sound like I am using a cell phone from 1987 and inside a wind tunnel somewhere near a train station, but there I am in full digital glory.

World of Warcraft.  Even if you’re not interested in gaming, consider that it’s roughly six million people, paying a minimum of 12 dollars a month to play the game, and climbing.  There’s estimates that it’s fifty percent of the Massive market.  Blizzard actually will give their players a free month if they get someone else to sign up.

But have they gone a step too far?

The game has had technical issues since launch, in part because they grossly underestimated how many players they’d get. Fair enough — everyone did.  One of those issues has related to servers being under- or over-loaded, with extremely limited character transfer services.  Now, players can pay to move their characters from one server to another.  It’s a microtransaction model that Blizzard has been talking about for some time.  But…

They haven’t really fixed the problems with their free, limited transfers.  The list of servers you can go to is still very, very limited. And, the biggie issue, is that it’s a 25 dollar fee.

Forget about any other fears about microtransactions, or people paying ten bucks to get a cooler sword.  25 bucks — per character transfer, not for access to the ability to transfer — is the better part of a whole ‘nother video game, a DVD and some coffee, or a pretty decent lunch in downtown SF.  With Blizzard putting forward this relationship between fee and service, they’re setting a standard — a gold standard — that will only accelerate the cost of games for a consumer base that’s already tired of coughing up blood trying to find the cash to upgrade their systems, pay for the games, and finding the time to play.

In other words, it’s a great time for one of the MMO second-stringers to step up and simply by offering their service at a nominally reasonable price, look better than WoW.