Month: May 2006

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Your RSS Feed is for the Birds

The flocking behavior of birds (schooling of fish, swarming of insects) have long intrigued and inspired scientists exploring the cybernetics of systems and how they can self-organize. While these ideas are frequently applied in artificial intelligence and robotics, researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee have devised a way of applying flocking to RSS feeds streaming through cyberspace, with similar content automatically grouping together. Explains the piece in New Scientist:

“When a new article appears, software scans it for words similar to those in existing articles and then files the document into an existing flock, or creates a new one. The team has used the system to categorise online news stories from CNN and the BBC. The next step will be to allow people to click on a bird to display its document.”

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Use the Sudden Motion Sensor, Luke!

Ever since geeks discovered the sudden motion sensor in Mac notebooks, they’ve been trying to figure out what cool things can be done with it. Many dumb ideas have followed. This is another one of those. MacSaber turns your laptop into a lightsaber! Sorta. Okay, not really. It makes the lightsaber whoosh-whoo sound as you flail around, swinging your multi-thousand dollar investment perilously close to heavy furniture and cowering friends and co-workers. And no, they’re not fleeing in terror ’cause they’re overwhelmed by your Jedi prowess, they’re being repelled by the sheer pathos involved in a grown human being having stooped so slow. So very, very low.

Thanks, Jay!

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Voice Recorder Round-Up

Regular readers of Street Tech might recall that I’m a big fan of the digital voice recorder as a brainstorming tool, especial the Olympus line. DenGuru takes a look at three Olympus models: the VN-120, the WS-320M, and the DS-2200. They liked ’em all, for different reasons (price, storage capacity, PC-interfacability, etc.). They have a link in the piece to Overstock Warehouse which is selling the low-end VN-120 (shown here) for an amazing US$30 (factory reconditioned). If you want to try out a DVR to see if you take to it, this might be a way to go.

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Sean Carton’s Short AttentionScan

Street Tech Co-Founding Father Sean Carton is back in Baltimore, now working at idfive, a Baltimore design and communications firm. He and idfive have created a group blog called AttentionScan. It’s filled with rebel advertising and marketing ideas, high weirdness, cool tool discoveries, and Russian drinking games — basically Sean’s usual interests. Here’s a Top Ten List (of corp creativity tips) that he posted (via Stefan Engeseth):

1. Hire people who have different talents than you.
2. Install a random control in the elevator so that everyone ends up on the wrong floor. Get a head start by pressing the wrong button today.
3. Exchange Filofaxes with each other.
4. Bring your children to work.
5. Invite your customers to participate in projects at an early stage.
6. Invite someone from the street to attend your next meeting.
7. Mix people in meetings: for example sales people and marketing people.
8. Change the setting of the meeting. Why not hold your next meeting at a kindergarten?
9. Create imbalance. Stand on one leg during a meeting and seek imbalance. Seek imbalance in the marketplace.
10. Use simple language. A good idea thrives on simplicity.
11. Always go the extra mile and do a little more than what’s on the list.

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3D Printers Draw Ever Closer

Azon, a printer manufacturer known for printers that print on difficult surfaces such as metal, plastic, wood, and fingernails (you heard me), has now come out with a printer, the Micro Cylinder, that can print directly onto nearly any cylindrical object (up to 17cm long and 14 cm in dia). They show examples of printing on everything from candles and ashtrays to glasses, coffee mugs, and golf balls.

This kind of printing doesn’t come cheap. The Micro Cylinder currently sells for 10,000 EURO (about US$12,800). But before you know it, these babies will be $120 and we’ll probably be telling you about a REA 3D printer that costs $12,000 and can print you out a new set of designer dinnerware or the scaffolding on which to grow yourself that new kidney that you need.

[Via Gizmag]

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New Ben Heck Retro-Portable NES

Ben Heck, the hardware hacking wizard who likes to make the ’80s handhelds that never were, has done it again. He’s turned one of those NES-on-a-chip joysticks found in a thrift store into a SCHWEET handheld gaming system dubbed the nPod. See his photos of the build here.

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Textcasting: Think It’ll Catch On?

Slate has come up with an interesting twist on podcasting. They’re now offering daily feeds of their popular “Today’s Papers” column as a podcast. But the cast is not in audio. The headlines and summaries of the day’s top news from papers across the nation are displayed as text within an iTunes audio file. Even on my nano, readability isn’t half bad. I may go ahead and subscribe so I’ll always have something to read if I get stuck at a bus stop, the doctor’s office, the county jail, with nothing better to do. Not really sure if this “textcasting” will catch on, but it might be a cool, albeit kludgey, way to get subscribable e-books on your Pod.

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Baby Needs a Diaper Change & A Fresh Batt for the Cellie

I might think this was an April Fool’s, if we weren’t halfway through May. A British company name Communic8 is hawking the BabyMo, a mobile phone for toddlers. And we’re not talking about a Fisher-Price special that makes cute little ring-a-ding sounds while junior drools into the handset. We’re talking about a working, pay-per-minute, “let’s do Vienna sausage and strained peas for lunch” mobile phone. It can be programmed with five numbers and those numbered are dialed by the three buttons on the phone. This looks to be a basic repackaging of a phone for kids that showed up in the UK several years ago, but went ‘bye-bye” in the wake of phone radiation hysteria. Wouldn’t want the little tykes to scramble their eggs while tooling around on the Big Wheel. After all, that’s what TV is for.

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Programmable Robot Ready Rampage on Your Desktop

The Robovie-I is a 6″ high programmable robot from Japan’s VStone, makers of robot soccer teammembers and robot components. Robovie-I can walk, right itself when it falls over, duke it out with other Robovies, and yes, play soccer. No word on if it’ll be available in the US or how much it’ll cost. Check out the video on Akihabara News. It has a very strange way of counterbalancing its movement. I love the two bots playing Sumo on what looks like an overturned Chinet dinner plate.

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Not So Jazzed by Google Notebook? Try JetEye

TechCrunch offered their take on the newly released Google Notebook yesterday. Their verdict? Ho-hum. One of the things they missed was tags. We agree. An unfortunate omission.

Another, competing notebooking service is Jeteye (ah… Obi-Wan, I think I get it: “THOSE aren’t the Notebook tools you’re looking for… Move along.”). It offers much of the same capabilities as Notebook, though Google has a “Note This” link on all search results that’ll send a listed item directly to your Notebook list. Jeteye DOES offer tagging.

TechCrunch wonders whether Google Notebooks could possibly survive if it wasn’t Google behind it. We wonder what this means for Jedi… er Jeteye. We do like the look and feel of their product better. Problem is, there are suddenly so many of these Net-based, Web 2.0 organizing tools available, at some point, you just have to pick one (or two) and stick with it, or you’d spend all of your time setting up new services and porting your e-life over to them.