Beautiful Red

I am hooked and waiting on new episodes for Beautiful Red podcast by Darusha Wehm, hosted at podiobooks. I started listening and before I knew it I had listened to all 6 episodes which have been released so far, and am anxiously waiting for more episodes to be released. The story is set in a near future Technical Utopia, where technology has made crime mostly irrelevant. But then you start to be immersed in this technological utopia, and start to see some of the cracks where everything is not so nice and utopian.

Great science fiction podcast!

OLPC Human Interface

Last night I just watched a couple of videos [here] and [here] about the new OLPC Human Interface - Sugar. While reading the article from the Washington post "Low-Cost Laptop Could Transform Learning" I couldn't stop thinking about Ender's Game and the computers that the kids all used, which was refereed to as their "desk". The laptop they are proposing is very interesting, and I would actually be tempted to purchase one for myself at some point in the future. I think this new design of the human interface, which they are calling sugar, is very interesting and does seem to be intuitive and understandable. It will be interesting to see how it actually performs and is regarded by kids who are the primary user of it. This will be one topic that I'll be keeping an eye on.

Startup Connects Multiple Monitors Over USB

How cool is that?
extremetech.com article
They say it won't handle the bandwidth for playing intensive games,
but it's still awesome.

JFreak

Multi-Touch Input

A couple of months ago I saw this awesome demo of a multi-touch input screen demo on Slashdot - The Ultimate Dual-Hand Touchscreen. Needless to say I was amazed and blown away by the reality that a lot of new and innovative interfaces could actually be this close.

Remember the interface used in Minority Report, well it demonstrated a similar style interface to that.

Then I was trying to remember it this week and telling a co-worker about it, and Rembrandt how awesome it actually was and what it could actually mean for things we could see out in the next couple of years.

So I went digging and found one site that had the video and a number of tidbits that people have collected together on it at http://multi-touchscreen.com/. I sat and watched the whole video again twice tonight, in amazement and wonder of what might be reality in the next couple of years!

Now for some details that I saw in browsing and reading about it.

One person behind some of this is Jeff Han at NYU's Department of Computer Science
The other is Yann Lecon Professor of Computer Science, The Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University

Multi-Touch Sensing through Frustrated Total Internal Reflection pretty cool demonstration.

This was presented in March 2006 at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference during a session called The Future of Interfaces Is Multi-Touch

Blog entry at Makezine.com Multitouch interaction research
Blog entry at Makezine.com The Future of Interfaces Is Multi-Touch

A Very interesting area and I plan to keep track of it as time goes by and when I can figure out a way to justify it I'm getting one for my computer!

Just ran across a very interesting post linking to Lemur - The Multitouch Control Surface


And one last link to some continuing research on Multi-Touch Interaction Research

Enjoy the interesting Information

Interesting Technology

TrackStick GPS Data Logger

Found this interesting device in my browsing online today. It is supposed to run on 2 AAA batteries and it tracks where it's been. Then when you connect it to your computer you can retrieve where it's been. Pretty cool device

Think Geek - TrackStick GPS Data Logger
TrackStick.com


Wi-Spy
Interesting Spectrum Analyzer for the Wi-Fi spectrum. It is a USB dongle with a CD that is runnable under windows as well as software for running under Linux. The neat thing is it's only $99. It give you an interesting look at the Wi-Fi spectrum.

Think Geek - Wi-Spy
MetaGeek - Wi-Spy

Graphical Relationship exploration

Just had a request by a friend to see if I remembered any software that would allow you to explore relations graphically and drag them around on the screen and see the relations dynamically.

After a bit of digging I remembered where I had seen it before.

It was the old pmbrowser for exploring category research citation chains, and related documents. After a bit more digging around I ran across what looks like the core functionality at http://www.touchgraph.com.

This is useful visualization tools that are provided and available. I'll have to check this TouchGraph out some more when I get a bit of free time again. Especially going to have to explore TouchGraph Google Browser

kdissert - interesting mind mapping tool

Marcel's Linux App of the Month : kdissert

Thomas Nagy's kdissert is an application referred to as a mind mapping tool. Its purpose is to help you create complex documents such as a thesis, or a dissertation, or a presentation. And yes, perhaps even an article or a book. You do that by creating a map of your ideas, a mind map, that allows you to structure the ideas you already have into the basis for producing a high-quality, well-ordered document.

I think I'm going to have to go investigate this further....
kdissert home page