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Wednesday, April 24, 2002 |
Cool - you can get Root Beer Tapper for your Palm! This is great, although Andy B. and I are still waiting for a version of Burger Time. Does anyone know if there's a PC version of Gorf (or better yet, a Palm version)?
11:23:53 PM Permanent link here
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Speaking of smart houses, Volunteers Will Move into House to Test Latest Technology
"Philips has opened a "laboratory house" to test technology on people in an everyday environment. HomeLab in Eindhoven is linked through hidden cameras, microphones and one-way mirrors to observations rooms. Researchers will be able to follow the occupants 24 hours-a-day to get a better idea of their needs and motivations.
It features home entertainment systems that can respond to human voice commands, or create digital fantasy environments for virtual reality games. And it combines various devices in one for managing activities such as recording a voicemail, watching a video or listening to music from any room in the home. TV pictures can be projected on to blank walls. Music will come from MP3s stored on the HomeLab computer jukebox, which can even recognise and play a hummed tune.
Most connections are wireless, with systems controlled by handheld devices as well as flat-panel displays. And the HomeLab's wireless Local Area Network has access to the outside world via broadband internet." [Ananova, via Lockergnome Bytes]
This sounds like a first step towards John Robb's vision for the next 5-10 years.
9:55:36 PM Permanent link here
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"As if cell phones weren't bad enough: Worried that the slew of in-car gadgets and computers appearing in cars today could dangerously distract drivers, General Motors is embarking on a three-year, $1.6 million endeavor with the University of Illinois to study drivers' cognitive and motor skills while operating electronic devices. Besides being concerned about customer safety, automakers also need to be sure they won't be held legally liable should one of their car's gizmos cause a crash. Already, driver distraction--caused by everything from lighting cigarettes to eating to applying makeup--caused 10.3 percent of all fatal crashes in 1999, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration." [ZDNet]
3:19:58 PM Permanent link here
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"There is an upgrade path from the Old to the New Testament, but it's difficult and unsupported."
"We were only able to get the first seven Commandments on the stone tablets. The last three will be in Commandments XP."
"You'll need more RAM to run all four horseman concurrently."
"I.S. says it will rain for exactly 20 days."
"The voice of God is a standardized protocol, but each prophet implements it differently."
"Yes, the documentation is poorly organized, contradictory and written by committee. It's still better than UNIX man pages."
"The Apocrypha? I'm sorry sir. We don't support third party additions."
"Yes we do offer a lifetime guarantee. As long as you registered yourself with us via baptism, you're covered. Yes, even then. Yes, we know it's quite a good deal. Why thank you, we like to think it's the best deal around."
Read the rest of this joke.
2:57:55 PM Permanent link here
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"Quigo Technologies, Inc., has announced today the launch of Flipper.com – the first search destination to provide true 'Deep Web' search capabilities. Flipper uses Quigo's revolutionary search technology that indexes the Deep Web (or Invisible Web). Flipper users will now be able to find information not available on any other search engine. In addition to ‘Deep Web’ results, Flipper also displays results from other search engines and from the Open Directory....
Quigo's proprietary search technology uncovers database-driven web pages from the most major and authoritative sites in the world. Ironically, most major websites such as IMDb or Barnes & Noble are those that suffer most from the 'Deep Web' problem. After 2 years in development, Quigo has introduced the first technology in the world enabling full indexing of Deep Web sites.
Quigo’s index combines paid and non-paid listings. 'Quigo now offers search partners like Flipper to use its search technology, and is quickly expanding its market reach', says Yaron Galai, Quigo's CEO, 'We share revenues generated from paid listings with portals and search engines that use our engine. Our search partners benefit from high quality results while generating new revenues.'
Flipper offers several unique features that help users find the information they are seeking faster. One of the features is the unique grouping of Deep Web search results. Relevant search results from a specific website are grouped together, enabling Flipper to display dozens of relevant search results in a single line of text. This is achieved by placing a drop-down list with multiple options within the search result title.
For example, typing the search term ‘Bruce Willis’ yields search results from Reel.com and other major websites. In the Reel.com drop-down list, the user will find links to all Bruce Willis movie pages available at Reel.com, including 12 Monkeys, Die Hard, Armageddon, etc. Dozens of relevant movies are packed into one search result line, making the information quickly accessible by the user. “Grouping results in such a way, maximizes utilization of screen real-estate for portals who use the service”, says Yaron Galai, Quigo’s CEO.
Another valuable feature is the “Preview” link displayed beside each of the Deep Web results. Clicking on this link opens a pop-up window with a snapshot of the information that the user can expect to find in the target page, thus pre-qualifying users and yielding higher conversion rates for advertisers." [URLwire]
Unfortunately, I don't have time to test it right now.
2:04:21 PM Permanent link here
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What's the fastest way you get notified when your internet connection goes down? Is it when your users start calling or when you lose all connections in your instant messaging application? It was a close race today, but if I'd been paying attention, chat would have won.
11:43:01 AM Permanent link here
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10. His foot had a heart attack
9. Kicked toaster out of frustration when it wasn't cooking his ham and cheese Hot Pocket quickly enough
8. Leg wrestling with Condoleezza Rice
7. Went for a goofy-foot 360 and ate it, dude
6. Stepped on a pretzel that had been coughed up by the president
5. Was stung by an Al Queda sleeper agent bee
4. Practicing pop-and-lock routine from 'N Sync video he bought from television
3. Robert Blake did it
2. Still kicking himself for taking the job
1. Strom Thurmond drove over it with his rascal scooter
[David Letterman]
8:47:33 AM Permanent link here
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"The quest for the killer mobile phone app is decidedly on at this week's Symbian Developer Expo, and of the various candidates spotted by The Register, the first wave of apps involving Beatnik's technology look like the ones most likely to get you killed. Think stupid ringtones, think of them becoming polyphonic, longer samples of your favourite music, excerpts from the speeches of Margaret Thatcher (and why not, indeed?)... Do you dare go into a public place toting a device primed to explode into Paranoid?...
Future generations of Beatnik apps are however much more intriguing. BAE [Beatnik Audio Engine] is a small footprint audio engine which supports the eXtensible Music Format (XMF), and essentially it works by delivering a content description over the air, rather than delivering the content itself. And it can support CD quality, so do you become intrigued? According to VP sales and marketing Jeremy Copp two and half minutes of Britney that took up four megabytes in MP3 could come down to 300k in XMF, so you now have permission to become even more intrigued.
The BAE can also bring quality sound to that other prospective killer app, the mobile phone game. This is another contribution to violence in public places, but it's a fact that decent audio has so far been missing from mobile phones, and that it'll also go down well with the kids.... Imagine musical, multimedia trading cards that can be swapped, acquire value... It works, no?
Currently announced partners for Beatnik are Nokia and Danger, which will be using it in its Hiptop, a combo mobile phone, internet and player device aimed at the youth market. But there will assuredly be more." [The Register]
Emphasis is mine. This is one reason the combination of cell phones + MP3 players will become popular.
8:42:58 AM Permanent link here
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While trying to fall asleep last night, my mind stretched a little further on John Robb's push back about convergence and the OQO. John wrote:
"Hey, let's stretch our brains a little more. If combined with a OQO PC, voice control of a weblog app, and a next gen P2P network, it would be possible to totally document a life in full surround sound, video, stills, writing, and audio."
One of the bad things about using a news aggregator is that you don't see the comments people leave on the original post at the other person's site. Fortuitously, I had visited John's site and read the comment by a reader asking who would actually use one of the devices John outlined.
I immediately thought of the combination of storage and a smarter PDA, which reminded me of the recent article about the evolution of storage. Sure it would be a specialized niche, but possible uses would include investigation of crime and accident scenes. In fact, it could provide a unique new version of director and actor commentaries on DVDs if you filmed everything from their viewpoints and could edit them right then and there.
All of this in turn reminded me of the movie Strange Days, and now I wonder how far away we truly are from recording our daily lives and reliving them through sensory playback.
7:51:18 AM Permanent link here
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"Flash + Pocket PC + GPS
= location based rich media content - Phillip Torrone is hacking together the future of flash on mobile devices and it's got some great potential. If you want a reason why webservices are the future then look no further than mobile applications like this - they're the perfect solution to retrieving content based on location." [Flash Blog]
This could tie in with m-learning, too.
7:36:43 AM Permanent link here
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"Going a stage further - if you could persuade, say for example, a number of UK based Criminal Justice or legal librarians & researchers to collaborate on one weblog, imagine how good a resource that would be. Imagine the networking opportunities. Most of the blogs I have seen from the UK seem to be created by individuals, so it is not too surprising that some very worthwhile blogs run out of steam, like Catherine Ebenezer's Mental Health Information UK blog. I'm sure Catherine is not the only Mental Health Librarian in the UK, perhaps if more people were involved the blog would be a bit more up-to-date." [infoblog]
Collaboration is difficult, though, as we're finding out in Illinois. It will take some time for blogging to burn into daily routines. We're not quite there yet, but I like the idea of a collaborative blog between experts in a field and librarians (one step further than what is mentioned above).
7:31:25 AM Permanent link here
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"ZDNet runs a review of the the ReplayTV 4000 (ReplayTV 4000: It's not ready for prime time). The reviewers make some justified comments about the difficulties of using ReplayTV, difficulties that are not unusual for first generation consumer technology. First generation in this sense: The interesting thing about ReplayTV 4000 is that it is the first Personal Media Recorder that includes broadband connectivity, including the ability to send recorded TV shows to another ReplayTV. This capability, of course, has gotten SONICblue, the parent company, sued (Press Release: SONICblue Begins Shipping ReplayTV 4000 to Consumers Undeterred by Lawsuit Filed by Major Television Networks, Studios)." [LawMeme]
I was reading this article yesterday thinking to myself, where was this when I needed it?! My brother bought a new ReplayTV for Christmas and he needed help to set it up for a broadband connection. Luckily, he already had a cable modem, but he didn't have a network (let alone a wireless one) and I couldn't find much online to help diagram everything he needed to do.
Eventually we got it to work though, and now he's another PVR convert! Next up, my Dad. If you're going to be buying one of the new Replays, definitely read this article first. Not because of the negative comments (which are somewhat off-base) but because it describes what we had to go through to get everything set up.
7:26:04 AM Permanent link here
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I'm going to have to talk to the kids tomorrow to set the record straight. Tonight at dinner, I was telling the kids about Frontier House and how I was going to tape it (can I use "replay" as a verb?) for us to all watch together. After a brief discussion of it, Kailee (8-years old) suddenly asked if "smart houses" exist. I was impressed that she knew the term, so I immediately answered, "Yes, sort of. By the time the two of you grow up, you'll live in them." They both got excited, giggling and noting how much they wanted to live in a smart house.
I was about to elaborate on the topic when dinner ended abruptly, but later in the evening I asked Kailee where she had heard about smart houses. She said she'd seen something about it on TV. This surprised me, so I asked where she saw it. Her answer was "zoog-disney-dot-com." (Note how the Disney Channel is synonymous with their web site in her mind.)
I paused for a moment and thought, well... they must have done a special on them or something. I explored further, though, and asked what zoog-disney-dot-com had said about smart houses, and she told me that it was really funny because the house had talked back to the kids and something about a meal on the doorstep and then she just dissolved into giggles.
Naturally that set off a red flag in my head, so after they went to sleep, I looked up the term on Disney.com and found out that the mouse house produced a movie called Smart House in 1999. Here's their summary of it:
"It's high-tech hilarity the whole family will love when high school science whiz Ben Cooper goes on-line to win a computerized 'Smart House' specifically designed to make life easier. But instead, his family existence becomes more troublesome than ever! When Ben tries to put a glitch in his widowed father's love life, the Smart House takes on a virtual motherly identity who not only becomes overly possessive of the Coopers, but replicates herself into PAT (Personal Applied Technology), an out-of-control 'mother like no other' ... smothering, stubborn, and dangerously un-delete-able It's up to Ben to match wits with PAT's central intelligence and 'outsmart' the Smart House once and for all!"
So now, I have to find a way to explain to the kids that they will not be living in smart house that "replicates herself into PAT (Personal Applied Technology)." Or wait... maybe they will....
12:45:34 AM Permanent link here
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"Jenny found true convergence. Digital cameras combined with personal storage (MP3 player). Next: Video/camera devices combined with copious, mobile personal storage. Add in glasses mounted displays and surround sound and you have a movie theater-like set-up that can span personal/family generated content to professional content.
Hey, let's stretch our brains a little more. If combined with a OQO PC, voice control of a weblog app, and a next gen P2P network, it would be possible to totally document a life in full surround sound, video, stills, writing, and audio narration." [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
My mind feels like Stretch Armstrong....
12:28:49 AM Permanent link here
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"802.11b News: Another card designed to switch between Wi-Fi and cell networks announced. Although the card isn't slated to ship til year's end, it's part of the momentum for seamless WLAN/cell networks.
How long until a Compact Flash version?" [Bryce's Radio Experiments]
This will be big because with the increase in storage we're seeing for portable devices, people will be carrying more and more information with them at any given time. When they can seamlessly access information via Wi-Fi or high-speed cell networks anywhere in the world (someday it will happen), what will they expect when they walk into your library?
That's right - lots of data coming to their devices via wireless access. Start planning now, because you're going to have to adapt to this in the future. It changes drastically our landscape and how we approach our services. More on that in a different venue at a later date.
12:05:57 AM Permanent link here
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© Copyright 2004 Jenny Levine.
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"I am in 
