Wednesday, September 29, 2004

Lawrence Lessig

Lawrence Lessig

If you are interested in freedom of ideas & expression, if IP law pisses you off and patents stick in your craw, check out Lawrence Lessig's blog. He's the driving force behind the Creative Commons project, trying to provide a way for people to open up access to creative content. He has three free books available as pdfs. I've read one of them, Free Culture, and it's particularly excellent. Go check out his blog!

Tuesday, September 28, 2004

elgooG

elgooG

Just like google, but way more geeky!

Monday, September 27, 2004

IDEA: Snapshot/Revert

I've been playing some computer games in the last few days, and I've also been using VMWare for work. I realised this morning that VMWare's snapshot/revert function (where you can snapshot the machine at any point, then later revert to that state as often as you like) would be excellent for gaming. You know those games where there is no save point for ages, and there's something really hard well into it that keeps killing you, so you have to keep redoing large parts of the game over and over again? Imagine if you could press a "Snapshot" button just prior to the really hard bit, which would freeze the machine, save all relevant things (memory particularly? Maybe some HD changes? What else?) away to disk somewhere. Then the machine would unfreeze. Then you play the hard bit, get killed (again!), press the "Revert" button, the machine freezes, the stuff that was saved away is restored to memory, etc, and you are suddenly sitting just before the hard bit, ready to do it again. You get killed again. "Restore" again. Repeat until you make it through.

How awesome would that be? Of course, I have no idea how to make it work. It's an excellent case for trying to play games in a VMWare session actually. I'll try that when I get my stonking new laptop.

Monday, September 20, 2004

BEAM From the Ground Up

BEAM From the Ground Up

BEAM Robots... it's the agile development approach to robotics.

Friday, September 17, 2004

PhysOrg: Spinach May Soon Power Mobile Devices

PhysOrg: Spinach May Soon Power Mobile Devices

Spinach powered solar cells... awesome stuff. Check out the article, it's got good info.

Wednesday, September 15, 2004

Article: Self-sustaining killer robot creates a stink�| New Scientist

Article: Self-sustaining killer robot creates a stink�| New Scientist

A fly eating robot. OMG! Things like this restore my faith in humanity.

Tuesday, September 14, 2004

Geek Angel!

I came across the term "Geek Angel" in the Washington Post today, as below:

"I haven't a clue how the average person is going to keep up with any of this, unless they have a geek angel," said Elcome, who is retired from IBM and spends his time helping his friends and family keep their computer systems running. "

What an awesome term! Great business name if you were going to fix people's home PCs, ey?


Monday, September 13, 2004

Advanced Effect Maker - Download Advanced Effect Maker Freeware Edition

Advanced Effect Maker - Download Advanced Effect Maker Freeware Edition

I need to check this out, see if it's any good for making flash animations.

World Builders Home Page Build Your Own World!!!

World Builders Home Page Build Your Own World!!!

Thursday, September 09, 2004

IDEA: Dog phone

I was reading an article in the messenger (local newspaper) about problems with barking dogs in the suburbs, it talked about complaint processes, monitoring their barking through recording devices, etc. Last line said they bark because they are bored or anxious.

And I had the sudden idea... Dog phone! The dogs are lonely, and worried that they are abandoned. You put a mobile on their collar, so the owner can call them and talk to them, and the owner can hear the little doggy noises.

The demographic is the yuppie singles or dinks who have a dog instead of kids, but work long hours. They buy gadgets, more money than sense. They can talk to the dog periodically! Sell it as the caring approach for dog owner as parent. Also think pink dollar...

Maybe camera too, lots of accessorising possible. Add a GPS, and you can show where the dog is, meaning the dog wont get lost.

Or if someone finds the dog, the collar might have a "call my owner" feature.

* you could have a zapping device attached, like an electric fence, that encouraged the dog not to veer too far from home. Or, you could send an sms to the owner if the dog strays from home.

It's all options, ey? Each option becomes an optional add on, think $$$

Maybe don't emphasise "dog". These are for people who think of the dogs as their children. Language used by these people needs research.

Wednesday, September 08, 2004

Howstuffworks "How Laughter Works"

Howstuffworks "How Laughter Works"

Interesting article on how laughter works.

The New Yorker

The New Yorker

A wonderful article on how people really vote, including numbers.

"Skepticism about the competence of the masses to govern themselves is as old as mass self-government. Even so, when that competence began to be measured statistically, around the end of the Second World War, the numbers startled almost everyone. The data were interpreted most powerfully by the political scientist Philip Converse, in an article on “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” published in 1964. Forty years later, Converse’s conclusions are still the bones at which the science of voting behavior picks.

Converse claimed that only around ten per cent of the public has what can be called, even generously, a political belief system. He named these people “ideologues,” by which he meant not that they are fanatics but that they have a reasonable grasp of “what goes with what”—of how a set of opinions adds up to a coherent political philosophy. Non-ideologues may use terms like “liberal” and “conservative,” but Converse thought that they basically don’t know what they’re talking about, and that their beliefs are characterized by what he termed a lack of “constraint”: they can’t see how one opinion (that taxes should be lower, for example) logically ought to rule out other opinions (such as the belief that there should be more government programs). About forty-two per cent of voters, according to Converse’s interpretation of surveys of the 1956 electorate, vote on the basis not of ideology but of perceived self-interest. The rest form political preferences either from their sense of whether times are good or bad (about twenty-five per cent) or from factors that have no discernible “issue content” whatever. Converse put twenty-two per cent of the electorate in this last category. In other words, about twice as many people have no political views as have a coherent political belief system."



Science Made Stupid

Science Made Stupid

A brilliant site!

Thursday, September 02, 2004

ufoskeptic.org

ufoskeptic.org

A serious investigation of the ufo phenomenon by a serious scientist... very interesting!