Monthly Archive for October, 2009

I’m trying to convince Maija to ditch her 2 year old white Macbook and get a netbook. She’s almost sold on the idea… and once I find the perfect model, I know she’ll go for it. Why ditch the Macbook? Because she was looking for a small machine… and it’s 13.3 inches is really not that small anymore… and it’s quite heavy for it’s size. It’s dog slow… ever since she bought it, and it’s falling apart (casing cracks in multiple places, stopped charging the battery this week).

So… I’m hunting for the perfect model. It needs:
- an 8-10 inch display
- graphics powered by Nvidia ION
- Windows 7
- multitouch swivel display
- upgradeable RAM
- full size (or close, >85% size) keyboard
- other obiqutious features that don’t really need listing (webcam, enough usb ports, etc.)

So far the Asus T91 seems to be the only machine sporting the tablet-style display with multitouch, but it lacks ION. There aren’t too many Nvidia ION powered machines yet, though the HP Mini looks good (but lacks the touch display and Windows 7). I think we’ll have to give it another few months…

Picasa 3.5 just came out… Picasa being the fantastic photo management software from Google. 3.5 features, among other things, photo tagging. Which is all fine and dandy… except that once you’ve started tagging people, it figures out what their face looks like and tags the rest of your photos automatically. It’s insane. I mean… I tagged 1 photo of a friend of mine, and within a couple of minutes (I have many thousands of photos) it pulled up another 15 photos of the same person… perfectly matched.
It’s not foolproof, and you’ve got to keep tagging and fixing incorrect tags, but it’s flipping awesome. Download it today. Oh, and the tags can be integrated with your Google Contacts… so you’ve got lots of fun options for stuff.

I came across World of Goo this week, because it was featured in an article on Slashdot. For its1 year anniversary, the makers of the game decided to sell it for a limited time, at the price of your choice. It’s basically donation-ware. This proved so successful that they’ve extended the “pay what you want” period till October 25th… and I highly recommend you get this game. I paid 5$.

In World of Goo, you get a certain number of goo balls in each level, and you must build a goo structure, by linking the balls together, to reach the pipe that indicates the end of the level. You’ll be crossing chasms, climbing walls, and all sorts of bizarre variations on the theme. It’s physics based, super easy to learn, and very addictive. Oh, and it’s available for PC, Mac, Linux and Wii!

goo

I love living in Finland. The approach to all sorts of social, economic and political problems is refreshingly different from that of Canada. The latest in a line of intriguing citizen’s rights: 1MB broadband

It’s not clear yet exactly what that means for actual consumers… but it’s interesting to note.

People have talked about what the future may hold, for computer interaction. The keyboard and mouse are stalwart input warriors, but surely their days must be numbered. Lots of people talk about touch and multi-touch as they future… but there are plenty of problems to be addressed there. I’ve just seen a video of the most impressive and potentially realistic solution to this problem… it’s certainly worth your while:

http://10gui.com/video/

10/GUI works by providing a hardware and software platform, so a considerable rethinking of the entire process has been done. It works by using a multi-touch interface that is separate from the screen, but has a 1:1 ratio. So you can rest your palms on the desk, in front of your keyboard, and use this surface as a multi-touch input area mapped to your screen.

There’s a tech demo, which is quite impressive.