Fairly Useless…

When I was kid I was fascinated with the future, I could not get enough of it. I remember thinking that I would be living on a moonbase by the time I was thirty (according to the television show SPACE:1999). I was always ordering things out of the back of comic books; magic tricks, jokes, and plans.

One of my few mail order successes was from a company called “Wijit Works” in California. I had ordered he plans for building 4 complete “space crafts” for $3.95. These were the plans for making hovercrafts out of vacuum cleaner motors. I still have the plans to this day, along with two broken vacuums waiting to transformed into personal space crafts.

BoingBoing Link
WIRED article

I can’t wait for June! Hopefully more answers will become available as we get close to the release date.

1. Why do we have to wait for a widescreen video iPod? (You don’t need FCC approval for that.)
2. Can you use it as portable storage, like the iPods now? As a USB drive?
3. Can you access/share files via bluetooth?
4. How about Bonjour for sharing?
5. How about Bonjour for printing?
6. Or bluetooth printing?
7. Support for a bluetooth keyboard and mouse?
8. Other bluetooth headsets?
9. How about Bonjour for music sampling?
10. How about Bonjour for discover other iPhones?

Read the rest of this entry »

I was just talking to a co-worker yesterday about “glance” applications. We were talking about the future of information design and I mentioned I was playing around with Quartz and trying to build a glance screensaver. I was playing around with the idea of a aquarium scene with the number of blue fish for hours and the number of air bubbles in minutes with sea grasses for the days of the month and so on. Ambient has already created a number of cool “information pr0n” display gadgets.

The newest one grabs your google calendar/schedule and maps to the clock face meetings encircle the time period while dots lead up to the event estimating the travel time based on google maps. Add a bit of color for warnings and you have a cool glance information device.

AmbientClock

Here is a project I might try to build, WiMP. I will get to it after I finish building a laptop picture frame. Or after hacking a juicebox.

http://devices.natetrue.com/musicap/
http://wiki.openwrt.org/
http://www.musicpd.org/

I would use this on DVDs and xbox games from the library, so I don’t have to pay any fines. I had something like this for my video cassettes, my argument was that it would save wear and tear on my vcr motor for rewinding tapes on separate device, I sure it would be the same for DVD players.

DVD Rewinder

This first thing I did when I got my bluetooth phone was to start uploading ringtones and images.

Here is the Kill Bill wallpaper for my Motorola V551 that I use with my ringtones that I made from the soundtrack. I used Audacity to convert the CD track to an mp3 for the phone. Here are the two audio files that I use.

• Ironside.mp3
• Banister.mp3

Is this considered fair-use?

Its kinda hard to explain. Just go to the site and have a look, if you don’t grok it never-mind, stop reading now. I am not sure what I would do with one, but half the fun is finding out. It seems like the perfect marriage of Maker and Crafter. A ambient device with personality. I think it would be fun to turn one into a physical avatar. Right now they have a sign-up list on their site to get a sample prototype. I have filled one out already, I wonder if multiple submissions would help?

I hope I get one!

Recently spotted on engadget a MythTV media center for $650. Not a bad deal, I spent $600 building my own using a Shuttle case, add $150 for a dvd burner and $125 for a video card. That was 3 years ago and the software wasn’t as polished as it is now. I have now added a RF remote, mediaMVP, and upgraded the hard drive to 300 GB. If you don’t mind tinkering or hacking those old computers into something useful, then I recommend rolling your own with KnoppMyth. Otherwise the Monolith Media Center is a great deal.