Google mashes books and maps (Correspondents in San Francisco, JANUARY 29, 2007). ‘Clicking on words pinpointing certain places in books will connect readers to maps of the spots, Google engineer David Petrou said. Titles already augmented with interactive maps include Around the World in Eighty Days, War and Peace, The Travels of Marco Polo, and The 9/11 Commission Report, according to Google.’
Australian IT
Oy: London buses’ inter-stop informal gaming system. ‘Oy is a system of between-stop informal gaming, played for small stakes, the price of a text message, or just for fun with fellow passengers onboard. Oyster card holders (London Transport’s smart travel card scheme) can sign up in their existing online account to play for top-ups to their card.’
pasta and vinegar
Robotics lets a girl be part of the class. ‘Through an innovative system called PEBBLES (Providing Education by Bringing Learning Environments to Students), she is represented in class by a baby blue, child-size robot with a two-way live audio/video feed that makes her part of the classroom action.’
The Boston Globe
Cell phones vital in developing world. ‘Based on market research in China, India and the Philippines, consulting firm McKinsey & Co. found that raising wireless penetration by 10 percentage points can lead to an increase in gross domestic product of about 0.5 percent, or around $12 billion for an economy the size of China.’
Smart Mobs
Researchers craft microscale robotic hand for surgeries. ‘The hand, which is said to be a “feat of microscale mechanical systems (MEMS),” measures just one millimeter across when closed into a fist, features four “fingers” made of six silicon wafers each, and touts four gas-powered balloons acting as the muscles at the wafers’ joints.’
Engadget
Sweden to be first country with official embassy in Second Life. ‘There are reports today that Sweden plans to open the first officially sanctioned embassy inside Second Life.’
Boing Boing
Peer Pressure. ‘The positive printer helps generate positive rumours about you in the office. It filters your email inbox (all you have to do is tick the bocks of the key words you want to trigger the “print” function”) and automatically prints out all your positive emails (invitation to exclusive parties, requests from the press or producers who fell in love with your new projects, etc.) When your colleagues pick up their print from the shared printer, they accidentally see your print and get the gossip going.’
We Make Money Not Art
Hourglass Watch Concept Design. ‘tells time using LCD pixels like so many trickling grains of sand.’
Gizmodo
Remote-Control Color-Changing LED Light. ‘This is a simple LED lightbulb, but it includes a remote control to change the color on the fly.’
Gizmodo
Stalk Your Contact List with UpScoop. ‘Upscoop is designed to help you figure out which networks your friends belong to, based on their email address. You give Upscoop your email credentials (including the password) for your AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo email account. Upscoop grabs your contact list, and then searches across a number of social networks and tries to find profile pages of people that you know among the 10 million profiles they’ve indexed across the major social networks. The process of searching is not instantaneous – it actually takes a few hours.’
Techcrunch
Virtual/Real World Control Panel In Second Life. ‘The real and virtual controllers are “entangled together through a Python web server” so that turning a knob on the physical controller affects the same knob on the virtual one. Pushing buttons on the virtual controller can light LEDs on the physical one. ‘
3pointD.com
Japanese department stores trialing virtual makeover machines. ‘Sure, we’ve seen hypothetical approaches before, but this rendition lacks the mess and time requirements of previous methods by allowing customers to snap an image of their face, and then scan electronic tags of interesting looking makeup in order to dash their on-screen persona with whatever they please. The system allows the user to test endless combinations of products without causing a mess, using up samples, or demanding extra help, and the “before and after” feature should do a number on same-store sales.’
Engadget
Explay’s nanoprojector gets a little face time. ‘Explay’s unit utilizes “a combination of laser and LED light sources,” otherwise known as an Advanced Spatial Light Modulator (ASLM), and in the time they had to view it in action, there were quite impressed. They noted the relatively low 320 x 240 resolution, but were satisfied with the image quality from one to two feet away, and praised its ability to remain in focus regardless of distance from the screen.’
Engadget
Mini-Box unveils VoomPC-2 for in-car computing. ‘Mini-Box has unveiled the second rendition of its VoomPC, and aside from bearing an eerie resemblance to your average automotive speaker amplifier, looks to pack a decent set of specs into a tight package at a reasonable price.’
Engadget
Get Visual Voicemail Without the iPhone. ‘There’s even a widget version (OS X and Yahoo) that lets you hear messages in any order you like. Along with that, Callwave also sends you a text message and an email telling you you’ve missed a call.’
Gizmodo
Download of the Day: DropCopy (Mac). ‘When you drag a file over the drop zone, you’ll see your other networked computers running DropCopy pop out to the side. Just drag the file to the computer you want and release; DropCopy will send the file to a user-defined folder on said computer.’
Lifehacker
Tax Takers Send in the Spiders. ‘A five-nation tax enforcement cartel has been quietly cracking down on suspected internet tax cheats, using a sophisticated web crawling program to monitor transactions on auction sites, and track operators of online shops, poker and porn sites.’
Wired News
Americans think downloading no big deal. ‘Only 40 percent of Americans polled by Toronto-based Solutions Research Group agreed that downloading copyrighted movies on the Internet was a “very serious offense.” That compares with the 78 percent who said shoplifting a DVD from the local video store was a very serious offense.’
Reuters.com
Nobody Really Cares that Big Brother Is Watching. ‘Almost three-quarters of those surveyed, 73 percent, reported that they are as likely or more likely to use the Internet at work for personal reasons than they were two years ago, and 68 percent reported the same in regard to personal e-mail.’
Eweek
Researchers catch a whiff of “aroma fingerprints”. ‘The team has uncovered that each human has at least 44 chemical compounds in their odors that can be distinguished, and aside from assisting in identification, can be used in forensic studies to determine true causes behind crimes, deaths, or other misdemeanors. It’s even stated that this new technique can assist officials in learning about one’s “gender, lifestyle, whether or not they smoke, recent meals, and stress levels.”‘
Engadget
Mike Love’s Geneaology of Influence. ‘Genealogy of Influence allows you to visually trace the connections between the most influential writers, artists, philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians of Western culture.’
Boing Boing
Futuristic High-Density Molecular Memory Chip Unveiled — But will it ever make it into your computer?. ‘The circuit, which stores 0s and 1s by switching clusters of molecules between two states, contains 160,000 bits jammed together at a density of 1011 bits per square centimeter. Conventional microchips are at least 10 times less dense.’
Scientific American
Agere revives Intel ‘personal server’ handheld concept. ‘Called BluOnyx, the device contains not only storage – Flash or hard disk – but also an SD IO card slot, USB port, Bluetooth 2.0 and Wi-Fi for connectivity. There’s a 600MHz processor running the VXWorks embedded operating system to give the unit the ability to crunch numbers and run the media streaming code, and a battery to keep it running when you’re out and about.’
Reg Hardware
Virtual world on mobile phones. ‘Mini Friday is a small research project on virtual worlds on mobile phones. We are trying to find out if real-time virtual worlds make sense on mobile devices. Mini Friday is a very simple virtual world – one small bar for now.’
pasta and vinegar
PopCatcher MusicDock MD-601 Sorts Songs From Commercials, Records. ‘its software is able to tell the difference between music, speech and commercials, and the company’s MusicDock MD-601 automatically captures those songs, storing them as 192kbps MP3 files onto its docked MP3 player.’
Gizmodo
Duct tape, embodiment and pervasive gaming. ‘The player uses tape, stickers and scissors to create his own playground on a wall. The system grabs the scenery and creates a virtual level for our jump’n'run video game. The grabbed playground is extended with items and enemies and is projected back to the original scenery.’
pasta and vinegar
D’Groove. ‘D’Groove (Digital Groove) is the world’s first digital haptic turntable. It controls the playback rate and position of digital music (MP3′s, WAVs, CDs). It also uses “haptics” to provide information about the music through the sense of touch.’
SPIN
The Electric Sheep Screen-Saver. ‘When these computers “sleep”, the screen saver comes on and the computers communicate with each other by the internet to share the work of creating morphing abstract animations known as “sheep”. The result is a collective “android dream”, an homage to Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Anyone watching one of these computers may vote for their favorite animations using the keyboard.’
networked_performance
Backing up important physical data. ‘The service allows you to scan and upload documentation to your Online Safe Deposit Box through a web browser. Is it secure? KeepYouSafe says they employ military grade encryption to keep data safe. There are also multiple servers worldwide so that if anything happens; there will always be a copy available.’
Web Worker Daily
Jellyfish Screen Shows Video In Living, Pulsating 3D. ‘Gemotion is a soft, ‘living’ display that bulges and collapses in sync with the graphics on the screen, creating visuals that literally pop out at the viewer. Yoichiro Kawaguchi, a well-known computer graphics artist and University of Tokyo professor, created Gemotion by arranging 72 air cylinders behind a flexible, 100 x 60 cm (39 x 24 inch) screen. As video is projected onto the screen, image data is relayed to the cylinders, which then push and pull on the screen accordingly.’
WIRED
Track That URL… forward. ‘This online space creates a unique URL when your original URL is entered into the field. Your URL is tracked to let you know how many people clicked on it, did they forward it to others, and whether those people forwarded it to other people.’
Web Worker Daily
Scrivener v 1.0 released (Mac). ‘Scrivener makes the anarchic approach to writing a little less chaotic by letting you create any number of “index cards” which contain a title and a short synopsis of what that index card is meant to contain. These cards live on a “cork board” and each can be moved around, nested, put into folders, and so on, very much like real index cards, but with a big bonus.’
Lifehacker
Playskool, Creative Start the Tots out Early with DAPs. ‘The Infant Gym is a ceiling mobile and MP3 player that comes loaded up with some baby tunes or lets you put your death metal playlist on it if your heart desires. The Day To Dream Soother is a similar device but it sits on a table and projects lights on the ceiling while playing the tunes.’
Gizmodo
Concierge: Like a GPS For Your Shopping Cart. ‘The folks at the Canadian-based company are looking to bring those rattling dinosaurs into the 21st century by pairing them with a touch screen LCD that will keep track of your purchases and also tell you what aisle to go to for your Doritos fix.’
Gizmodo
IntelliScanner Mini: Scan Your Life, One Barcode at a Time. ‘The Intelliscanner has been miniaturized, and now it’s called the Intelliscanner Mini, a palm-sized barcode reader to keep you organized. It’s quite a bit smaller than the last time we saw it, and now it’s been voted Best of Show at MacWorld 2007. Using its included software, you can automatically organize just about anything that’s been tagged with a barcode.’
Gizmodo
Gaming for Fines. ‘Yesterday I had the pleasure of meeting a teen librarian who keeps Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) set up all the time so she can invoke it as need be. For example, if a teen has overdue books, she will dance-off against the person, and if the teen wins, the librarian will waive the fines. In addition, when the kids get into squabbles amongst themselves, she tells them to take it to the mat and dance off against each other. It’s a great way to channel some of their energy.’
The Shifted Librarian
Big Labels Offer Free Music to College Students. ‘The service, from Ruckus Network, will be supported by advertising on its Web site and on the software used to download and play songs. The four major record labels and several independent labels have agreed to license their music to Ruckus at lower rates than they charge other mass market music services on the theory that college students would rather steal songs than pay the $10 to $15 a month that such services normally charge.’
New York Times
Using nanodots for data storage. ‘scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Arizona, Tucson, have made nanodot arrays that respond to magnetic fields with record levels of uniformity and that could be key for future nanodot-based drives with at least 100 times the capacity of today’s hard disk drives.’
Primidi
Researchers condense entire image into single photon. ‘One of the key components of the process is the particle-wave duality nature of light: by firing a single photon of light through a stencil — we presume one heckuva small one — the wave carries a shadow of the image along with it at a very high signal-to-noise ratio, even with low light levels. The light is then slowed down in a cell of cesium gas, where it is compressed to 1 percent of its original length. This is where the storage aspect of the device comes in, as the researchers hope to be able to delay a single photon almost permanently, resulting in a device that can store “incredible amounts of information in just a few photons’
Engadget
RFID Audiobar brings enjoyment to audio art. ‘Each tagged RFID bottle responds to the reader installed in the table, and the housed computer channels the appropriate audio clips to correspond with the bottle movements.’
Engadget
packetgarden. ‘Packet Garden captures information about how you use the internet and uses this stored information to grow a private world you can later explore.’
packetgarden.com
ET wearable RFID gear turns everything into toys. ‘The ET (Everything Is Toy) is a “wearable computing system designed to change our daily lives into play,” basically transforming the RFID tags on everyday objects into random bits of fun.’
Engadget
Smart appliances have minds of their own. ‘Based on boundaries set by Brous on a Web site devoted to the test program run by the federal government in coordination with local utilities and several participating companies, his appliances shut down, turn on, or take a break when electricity prices or strain on the power grid are high.’
Reuters.com
Printing designs in 25-foot-high falling water. ‘The Jeep Waterfall is a 25-foot-high sheet of falling water that can display arbitrary bitmaps in falling water, using a mechanism “similar to an inkjet printer”‘
Boing Boing
Nyx LED Music Skirt CES 2007 Video Report. ‘Nyx makes LED elements on a flexible substrate that can be integrated into clothing. Nyx already sells custom jackets with scrolling text messages, which starts at $900. ‘
I4U News
Suzuki’s Flix Concept – Movie-theater-style concept vehicle. ‘After parking at the optimal film-viewing destination, Flix’s clamshell roof can be opened, revealing a maximum-size moonroof that serves as a 40-inch movie screen. Additionally, the XL7 concept’s front roof panel vents, giving way to a high-density digital projection system to display a family’s movie of choice.’
gizmag
Plan Will Allow 911 and 311 Lines to Accept Digital Images. ‘The city will be the first in the nation to incorporate digital images into its 911 system, Mr. Bloomberg said, calling it a “revolutionary innovation in crime fighting.” “If you see a crime in progress or a dangerous building condition, you’ll be able to transmit images to 911, or online to nyc.gov,” the mayor said in his annual State of the City address. “And we’ll start extending the same technology to 311 to allow New Yorkers to step forward and document nonemergency quality of life concerns, holding city agencies accountable for correcting them quickly and efficiently.”’
New York Times
Thumb-Print Banking Takes India. ‘A pilot program will put 15 biometric ATMs at village kiosks in five districts across southern India. The machines are expected to serve about 100,000 workers who will use fingerprint scanners, rather than ATM cards and PINs, to obtain their funds.’
Wired News
Students’ new best friend: ‘MoSoSo’. ‘Baruch College sophomore Yelena Slatkina in New York City recently rustled up an emergency sub at work by typing a plea to her entire work group on her cellphone. University of South Florida sophomore Nate Fuller routinely uses his cellphone equipped with Global Positioning Software (GPS) to find recruits for his intramural football team and locate friends in Tampa, Fla. Texas 21-year-old Brittany Bohnet uses photos she and 20 of her networked buddies snap on their phones to locate one another, using visual landmarks they spot in the pictures they send.’
csmonitor.com
timescope. ‘The basic idea of the “timescope” is a virtual journey in time via telescope. The device contains additional controls that enable viewers to view a place in the past or future time through its eyepiece.’
ART COM
Seagate Claims Fastest 2.5-Inch Hard Drive. ‘Not only is Seagate touting its new Savvio 15K as the world’s first 2.5-inch hard drive with platters that spin at 15,000 RPM, but it is also saying that the drive is a full 12 percent faster (seek time) than comparable 3.5-inch 15K-RPM drives on the market.’
Extreme Tech
Kingmax Announces 4GB Capacity on a Tiny MicroSDHC Card. ‘There was no mention of price or release date, but the anouncement added that the dual-channel card uses Samsung’s 63nm process, and will rock a read speed of 22.5MB per second. It wasn’t too long ago that this sort of throughput was only possible with a 20-pound disk array.’
Gizmodo
Speed through airport security by going Clear. ‘Private company Clear Registered Traveler prescreens you and lets you zip through security quickly. After your boarding pass matches your government ID and special “Clear Card,” you put your Clear Card in a kiosk which will then scan a fingerprint or your iris.’
PSFK
Alltel Launches Celltop. ‘Celltop is free-of-charge and features 10 “cells” that come pre-installed and via download. Each cell is a category-specific half screen comprised of graphics and text that provides shortcuts for wireless users to navigate through information and applications including: call log, weather, news, baseball, basketball, football, rodeo, stocks, text messaging inbox and ringtones. ‘
I4U News
Jigg That Music. ‘Think Digg for music, plus lots of Flash functionality. Songs are presented on the home page and can be “jigged” by members. Songs can also be embedded into web pages (I’ve done so with one of the popular songs below), commented on, etc. Songs are tagged for easy browsing, and there are most popular and recently posted areas as well.’
Techcrunch
Hands On the Netflix Download Video Service: Thumbs Up. ‘I downloaded Real Genius. The 1 hour, 40 minute flick took about 16 minutes to finish on my 6mbit connection, which was being tapped at about 2mbits. And the stream started playing almost immediately. Netflix claims it can scale quality based on your bandwidth, and how hard their servers are being slammed, so quality will vary. Quality was outstanding, with very few compression artifacts visible in either solids or motion. I’d guess the resolution for the standard def movies was at to be roughly 800 wide, by 480 tall. So, native DVD resolution. It looked good fullscreen on a 1280 by 768 11-inch Vaio, but probably would hold up on a larger screen.’
Gizmodo
Mirror, mirror on the wall, is this dress for me?. ‘A New York-based designer has come up with a mirror equipped with infrared technology that sends a live video feed to any cell phone, e-mail account or personal digital assistant device selected by a shopper. [...] Using the interactive mirror, a shopper’s friends can then text message back with comments about the outfit.’
Reuters.com
Samsung SCH-W559 touts vibrating VibeTonz touchscreen. ‘The unit’s QVGA touchscreen is meant to be a hands-on experience, and whether you use a stylus or the tips of your finger, the phone will provide a vibrating cue, which can be adjusted and customized within the phone’s software, whenever you touch a virtual button.’
Engadget
Browse and recommend books with Shelfari. ‘Web site Shelfari lets you build your own virtual bookshelf, then create a social network where you and your friends can review, tag, and recommend books.’
Lifehacker
UmNyango Project. ‘Through simple text messaging, women will be able to report any violation of their constitutional rights. The project will also enable women to produce their own radio programs. The programs will be made available to local community radio stations, and distributed over the internet as “podcasts.’
networked_performance
Solar power eliminates utility bills in New Jersey home. ‘Strizki runs the 3,000-square-foot house with electricity generated by a 1,000-square-foot roof full of photovoltaic cells on a nearby building, an electrolyzer that uses the solar power to generate hydrogen from water, and a number of hydrogen tanks that store the gas until it is needed by the fuel cell.’
Reuters.com
iCache: All Your Credit Cards, One Device, Fingerprint Security. ‘letting you register all your credit card numbers online and then to hell with all that plastic—you carry this one device that has all your credit cards’ magnetic strip signatures on it.’
Gizmodo
Sunrise Toaster Concept Provides Artificial Sunlight, Delicious Toast. ‘he Sunrise wall mounted toaster emulates the sun for those kitchens that do not have windows. It will glow bright when the toast is ready to be consumed.’
Gizmodo
Fractional Ownership Portal. ‘Sections include supercars, jets, yachts, property, residence clubs, condo-homes, vineyards, racehorses and even handbags. There’s a great reference section for consumers giving advice on what to look for through comparisons and articles from respected journalists, and also the important questions to ask prior to joining a prospective asset-sharing Club or purchasing a fractional interest in something.’
gizmag
Continue Plug Design Promises Infinite Outlet and Electric Fire. ‘Here’s a concept for a karmic-ly aware powerplug that makes an outlet for every outlet it consumes.’
Gizmodo
Geni Launches. ‘The initial product is a very easy to use Flash tool to create a profile and a family tree – including siblings, spouses, cousins, aunts and uncles, and their families. When you add a relative, there is an option to add their email address and have the tree sent to them as well. They can add their own data, extending the tree, and Geni will launch tools to merge overlapping trees.’
Tech Crunch
Wearable Finger-Based Cellphone Concept. ‘Each joint in your hand (save for the thumb) corresponds to 12 buttons.’
Gizmodo
Crosslink flexible lighting could change the look of the future. ‘SuperFlex can be formulated to emit light in both the visible and near-infrared (NIR) spectrums and can withstand being twisted, punctured, torn or scrunched-up without losing its ability to light up. The first commercialisation of the technology will be in the form of easily-transportable softwall shelters for the military with the lighting system semi-permanently attached to the inside of the shelter.’
gizmag
H.P. to Report an Advance in Adaptable Circuitry. ‘Hewlett-Packard researchers have developed a novel way to create flexible electronic circuits that could make it routine by the end of the decade to modify and upgrade the circuitry in computer-based consumer products even after they have been sold. The technology grows out of an advance in nanocomputing, which involves creating circuitry on a molecular scale and making it interact with today’s silicon wires and transistors.’
New York Times
Ambient Video Awareness…Big Idea? Or Big Brother?. ‘The idea is that a distributed team of webcam-equipped collaborators monitor one anothers’ work environments — at home, in the office, on the road — using hexagonal windows that tile nicely on a computer display.’
Web Worker Daily
Graphic designer creates “Annual Report” on his life in 2006. ‘Designer Nicholas Feltron has created a 13-page annual report for 2006 — offering oodles of maps and graphs outlining how he lived, what he did, and what he consumed in the last year.’
collision detection
SeeEye2Eye Fixes The Webcam Stare. ‘with SeeEye2Eye and its periscopic technology, you can look at someone’s mug while looking at the webcam simultaneously.’
Gizmodo
Sharp’s 4k x 2k 64-inch ultra high res monitor. ‘gazing into this 4096 x 2048 (8.3 megapixels) picture is an experience more reminiscent of sitting by a window, and not by a display.’
Engadget
Luxeed Keyboard is Like a Rainbow Under Your Fingers. ‘Each key has the option of one of 512 colors to choose from for lighting and there are even downloadable skins to really make your keyboard look like a rainbow.’
Gizmodo
Could invisibility beat encryption?. ‘”Data that’s protected by PCMesh Hide Files and Folders is not visible, so it can’t be attacked,” the company claimed. “In fact, the software itself does not even run continually, so it does not announce its presence to snoopers and hackers. The only time the software is active is when it’s being used to hide or reveal protected files or directories.”‘
The Register
Devolo dLAN 200 AVdesk HomePlug AV network adaptor. ‘The dLAN 200 AVdesk looks not unlike an old-style external analogue modem. There are a series of LED status lights behind a wide blue panel on the front, and the 100Mbps Ethernet and power ports on the back.’
Reg Hardware
Concept to prototype in three days. ‘Post-keynote on Tuesday, MacWorld attendees handed in their doodles at the mophie booth. Tuesday evening, the votes were tallied and the top three concepts entered the engineering and industrial design phase. Wednesday, roundtables were held at the booth to discuss concepts with show attendees. Input was noted and final concepts and names were voted on mophie.com with the plan to build a prototype of the winning concept. Thursday, Team mophie transformed the booth into a full-scale model shop with branding and packaging of the winning product. Sales collateral was developed. On Friday, the products were launched.’
gizmag
Boys and Girls Use Social Sites Differently. ‘The study found that, while older girls use such sites the most, older boys are more likely to meet new people through them. Sixty percent of older boys, for example, say they use the sites to make new friends, while only 46 percent of older girls do. And older boys are more than twice as likely to say they use the sites to flirt.’
New York Times
Find what you lost at TheFoundBin. ‘Did you lose something? Try looking for it at TheFoundBin, a Google Maps mashup of lost and found listings.’
Lifehacker
MINI USA rolls out RFID-activated billboards. ‘Catering to every person’s egotistical side, MINI has begun a pilot advertising campaign in Chicago, New York, Miami, and San Francisco, which gives select Cooper owners the chance to get an RFID keyfob in the mail, and moreover, a reason to consistently drive under MINI billboards. Users can select a custom message to be encoded on their RFID chip, and when they cruise near an overhanging MINI billboard, their particular message lights up for the world (or at least nearby motorists) to see.’
Engadget
Actiontec unveils range-extending Wireless FMC Router for mobile / WiFi hybrid phones. ‘it facilitates call switching between the mobile and home WiFi networks as users move in and out of the house, giving you the option to connect via your cellular network or over VoIP with the same handset and same number.’
Engadget
PayPal to combat phishing with key fobs. ‘The devices, which display a six-digit code that changes every 30 seconds, will be made available free to all PayPal business users, and will cost $5 for all personal PayPal account users. Those who opt in on the key fob will have to enter the six-digit code when logging in to PayPal.’
Ars Technica
Memory Infinite ‘Stackable’ USB Flash Drive Concept. ‘Instead of having to use multiple USB flash drives when one fills up, this flash drive has a female connector on one end and male on the other. When more storage is needed you simply attach another Memory Infinite flash drive.’
Gizmodo
Read this later —Procrastination a growing trend: Diversions like electronics at work, home are to blame, study shows. ‘After 10 years of research on a project that was only supposed to take five years, a Canadian industrial psychologist found in a giant study that not only is procrastination on the rise, it makes people poorer, fatter and unhappier.’
King County Journal
Download of the Day: Trailfire (Firefox). ‘The Trailfire Firefox extension lets users create trails of web pages with comments. The idea behind Trailfire is that you put together several related pages by assigning them the same “trail name,” annotated with your own comments.’
Lifehacker
Radio goes the open source route. ‘A new generation of broadcasters are to join the world’s airwaves after the launch of open-source software which allows people to run a radio station from a single computer for free. Campcaster takes a regular PC and turns it into a tool for managing every aspect of a radio station broadcast.’
BBC NEWS
Driin Mobile Phone Holder. ‘The Driin Mobile Phone Holder makes a little table under an electrical outlet where you can park your cellphone, PDA or PSP while it’s charging.’
Gizmodo
Get things done in Outlook with Jello. ‘After you add Jello.Dashboard as your new homepage in Outlook, you can create contexts and projects and assign any Outlook item to a context or project seamlessly inside Outlook. ‘
Lifehacker
CellSwapper Solves A Very Annoying Problem. ‘The site, which calls itself “the eBay of cell phone contracts” takes advantage of the fact that all U.S. cell phone carriers have clauses in their contracts that allow users to get out early, without the early termination fee that can range up to $250 per phone, just by transferring your account to someone else. Of course, finding someone else to take over your cell phone contract isn’t easy, and that’s where CellSwapper comes in. The recipient avoids activation charges on a new account of $40 or so, and often the transferring party gives extra incentives. In going through the listings, there are many offers of giving away the phone with the contract, and/or a cash incentive as well.’
TechCrunch
Digital Billboard Up Ahead: New-Wave Sign or Hazard?. ‘The problem, safety experts say, is that the new billboards may work too well, adding yet another distraction for drivers. There are currently about 400 digital signs across the country. But within 10 years, about 4,000 billboards may be converted, according to the Outdoor Advertising Association of America.’
New York Times
A Printer Meant to Produce Images That Last a Lifetime. ‘Epson says these will produce prints that last 98 years, three times the life span of earlier inks. It also says the 1400 will print three times as fast, with the ink yielding three times as many prints.’
New York Times
Build your own web-based tour with Mapwing. ‘Design your map, add photos, captions and connect them to points on that map. Embed your completed Mapwing tour onto your site (similar to YouTube videos) and let friends leave comments on it.’
Lifehacker
Touch Me, Tease Me: HP TouchSmart PC. ‘Throw out the bulletin board and the post-it notes, HP’s new TouchSmart is designed to be parked in your kitchen or living room and help coordinate your life. 19 inches of touchable goodness on top, 320 gigabytes of space for your porn document collection underneath.’
Gizmodo
100,000 users per day. ‘This AsiaMedia article reports from Korea that “the internet real-name system, designed to prevent cyber crimes such as libel and privacy infringement, will be applied to Web portals and websites of public organizations with over 100,000 visitors per day.The system will require Web users to identify themselves with their real names when posting entries and commenting on others’ articles, the government said yesterday.’
Smart Mobs
Send voicemail fast-like-text with Pinger. ‘Free web service Pinger lets you send instant, straight-to-voicemail messages to anyone in your contact list.’
Lifehacker
Hands-on with the Portege R400 and UWB port replicator. ‘wireless transmission to all your peripherals so you never have to plug your DVI monitor, Ethernet, keyboard, mouse, and other USB peripherals into the laptop when you return to the home or office. Just take a seat and you’re in — simple like pie. The Toshiba Wireless Port Replicator (as it’s officially dubbed) will be available in the second quarter of 2007.’
Engadget
Vonage’s router concept design. ‘Vonage has been showing off a design here at CES for a nifty-looking wireless router/VoIP adapter with an integrated touch screen LCD for displaying caller ID info and assisting with initial network setup.’
Engadget
New York spa offers “Blackberry Thumb” massages. ‘The Dorit Baxter spa in New York is offering Blackberry Thumb and Tech Neck massages to help you release the muscular tension brought on by your gadgets’
Boing Boing
Make free conference calls with Foonz. ‘After providing your e-mail address, cell number and IM screen name, you’re given a personal Foonz phone number, which you dial when you want to invite others to a call. Those invitations are delivered instantly via text message, IM or e-mail. If the other parties aren’t available, Foonz leaves a message so they can dial in later.’
Lifehacker
Tattletale site to complain about bad drivers. ‘PlateWire is a fun Web site where you can enter the license plate numbers of cars you encounter and post your comments about the incident.’
Boing Boing
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