Computing gets bulletproof guarantee. Sure, your fancy new laptop has the latest multimedia doodads. But can it stop a bullet? The latest in high-tech body armor promises to do just that. [CNET News.com: Personal Technology]

Having a bullet pass through your battery and then into you would be a horrible outcome, as the wound would be splattered with whatever type of battery you are running. This also serves to armor  portion of the user without adding too much additional weight.

9:52:35 PM    

I've decided don't want a Pocket PC. I don't want an iPod either. I want an all-digital Walkman that connects easily to my LAN, using 802.11b. $500. Anyone want to make one for me? I didn't think so.   [Scripting News]

Dave, we need wireless LAN cards to drop to about a $10.00 price point before we'll see that happening. The closest think you'll find to do this right now is Terrapin Mine, but that doesn't have the wireless that you looking for. Shit, wait, it does. But you have to supply the PC card.

UPDATE: No FM reciever built in, but there are a variety of teeny tiny FM radios out there. Besides, I already have the utility belt going, between the cell phone, Leatherman Wave (With flashlight), PDA, and carabiner of keys (which also has a small pen knife/flashlight combo, and an LED flash on the car keys as well). All I need to add is radio, a CD/cassette player, a digital camera, and a bluetooth PAN, and I'm a fully blown Gargoyle.

That Camera (I'm digressing, I know) Is sweet. Blutetooth it into your network connection, and you can upload files directly to your server. Run this in the field with an OQO and you've got your portable editing studio, and broadcasting system all in one. Tie the final/edited files into a p2p system and you've got your own broadcast network, all via the web. Or go gonzo and just have everything running as a video blog, without editorial supervision.

Step out a bit further and start publishing to servers in different countries, along the lines of what Jon Robb is doing with his Italian Blog, and you've got worldwide distribution of your "show" with all of your "affiliates" getting the latest "episodes" (enough with the "quotes", you get it) as soon as they are available. Since you've tied it into your blog, which has an RSS feed, people are automatically told where they can get the latest episodes as a part of their feeds.

2:28:21 PM    

Nintendo records record net profit - Boston Globe 05-30-2002. Nintendo posts record profit  - Nando Times
Nintendo Records $8.6B Profit  - Washington Post [Google Business News]

Go big N! I bought a Gamecube because it looked like it was going to have the wacky fun titles that I want in a gaming system. So far it has delivered, and I'm sure that it will continue to for the forseable future.

12:28:08 PM    

Great article on the centralization of radio (as in broadcast, hence the lower case r) here. Clear Channel (Doc's favorite corp, I believe) has lost $16.9 Billion (insert pinky into corner of mouth) dollars in the first quarter of 2002, though that has been write off's by and large.

"They're all pretty homogenous and not really very local. That's a cheaper way of doing business. The jury's still out on whether that's a successful way of doing it."
Mark O'Brien, Z104-FM as vice president and general manager (A non Clear Channel owned station)

12:00:06 PM    

Software shows uniqueness of handwriting. The study is already making an impact in US courts, where handwriting evidence is often challenged [New Scientist]

Given that the fingerprint is an easily hacked biometric, perhaps writing will replace it.

10:39:54 AM    

Cool, even before my new Italian Weblog (thanks Paolo!) was up, I was already getting coverage in Italy from Gaspar and Simplicissimus.  Thanks!  I am now publishing to two continents, simultaneously, using Radio.  Set up was very easy.  All I needed to do was create a new password, create a new category (John Robb's Italian Weblog), and drop an upstream driver (a 3 k text file supplied by Paolo via e-mail) into the folder for my new category on my desktop.  Simple.  Now I can publish to Italy and the US by clicking a single check box below my editing screen.  [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

This is huge step for weblogs. being able to shoot your entries onto local (national) servers will help to speed information as there will be less hops to get to the data, but at the same time all the servers stay in sync since everything is being updated all at once. While the idea is not new, the ease of doing so is, which is the killer part of this.

10:20:17 AM    

What's in a name? For FireWire, plenty. What Apple traditionally sold under the FireWire trademark has also been pitched as i.Link and IEEE 1394, but fresh competition is forcing the company to rethink its marketing. [CNET News.com]

A couple years ago now I was had lunch with a team of engineers from a company that specialized in Digital Video gear. I asked them which would be better for home video editing, USB 2.0 or FireWire.

The answer was FireWire, because at the time, USB 2.0 was all talk no action. Once 2.0 came out though, it was all a matter of adoption. If manufacturers got behind USB, FireWire, being proprietary, would be out of luck. Apple's move of letting a board control this is a huge step in getting this into more and more devices. The next step will be shrinking the chipset, so that much like voice control, it can become ubiquitous.

Imagine using one cable, let me emphasisze that, ONE CABLE to connect all your devices. No more custom cables for every device, just one loose end you hae dangling from your PC so that you can sync your PDA, sync your phone, upload music/sites/news whatever to your devices. If FireWire wants to do this, they need to push it as a standard and get it into as many devices as possible, really going after the marketshare that USB has built up.

9:43:08 AM    

Shuttle SS40G Mini-PC [Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters]

A tiny, darned near silent computer. Review here (currently Slashdoted). I could have a couple of these running as a render farm, or as a server farm in the house and I don't think my wife would mind since they are small, near silent, and not hulking huge grey boxes. Given the free PCI slot, you could KVM these into a small cluster for funky computing stuff as well. Throw in gigbit eithernet cards and you have some cheap/fast servers up and running for gaming. Sweet.

9:32:48 AM