RealityPrime

My 4yr old Dell Inspiron recently fell apart, much like the car in the Blues Brothers movie. Bits and pieces had been falling off for years. But the last straw was when I removed the old Intel Inside sticker on the front. The sticker itself has been worn smooth of any color years ago, polished to a mirror sheen.

But somehow, this was the magic holding the the thing together. The next day, the screen hinges broke, making the screen angle float freely to any position, usually wherever gravity took it, including down on my hands. And then the case broke altogether.

I "fixed" it with my trusty glue gun. But alas, some of the glue migrated to one of the fans and now the thing overheats and runs in slow motion. It’s seen its last days.

So I’ve been looking for a new laptop. Price is certainly a consideration. But subtler issues surround the laptop choice. I tried a MacBook pro back in January. But it also had "screen hinge issues" that I described earlier. Apparently, they only tested using the laptop on a level surface. My wooden frame to hold the screen open when you tilt the laptop more than 20 degrees worked, but proved too much of a pain to use. So I gave the laptop to my brother, who needed a new mac anyway.

And so I’m still looking. One of the more recent considerations I’ve realized, sitting with a pile of laptop parts near my nightstand, is recyclability and greenness. So I found this ranking you might find interesting:

How the companies line up | Greenpeace International

Apple comes out near the bottom of the list, both for toxic parts used and for recycling of junked parts. So I might just stick with Dell, if they return to some sort of competitive pricing. Even with the 20% coupons you can typically find, the deals aren’t so great lately.

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Friendship Solar Array Project

I thought this was somewhat interesting, if a bit unlikely. Instead of building a security fence along the US-Mexican border, they want to build a long solar array. The idea is that the array would be more cost effective in the end (since it produces electricity) and be better for the environment. And I guess it would still need a fence, to protect the array, but now on both sides of the border…

I’m not sure what to think of it. I mean, by that logic, maybe we should build an open-air linear accelerator along the border so we can both do high energy physics experiments and zap anyone foolish enough to cross the beam?

No. But I like the idea of combining publicly-funded engineering projects with energy production. I wish New York, for example, would install big vertical blade turbines at the ends of every mid-town street to both capture the wind and reduce the pain for pedestrians in winter (and if the wind is high enough, reduce the pedestrians themselves). I wish the new 2nd avenue subway line was powered by treadmills and stationary bikes mounted both in the cars and on the platforms (maybe you can make the train come faster?). I wish Congress would install hot-air-powered turbines in the ceilings and the White House would install a bio-gas plant, for, you know, generating energy from shit.

Alas, it’s just a dream I had. I don’t think the solar array idea would quite work, nor would the proposed fence. But since the fence is getting built anyway, perhaps we can put some revolving doors in it, you know with generators attached.

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Wired News: YouTube in Copyright Cross Hairs?

Here’s an alleged quote from the head of Universal:

"The poster child for user-generated media sites are MySpace and YouTube," said Morris, according to a transcript obtained by Reuters. "We believe these new businesses are copyright infringers and owe us tens of millions of dollars."

Let’s put aside the fact that kids using commercial music in their YouTube videos will generally help music sales — I would have never heard Numa Numa had it not been for YouTube (not that I went out and bought it, but I’m sure someone did). Let’s put aside the fact that using music in 2 minute amateur videos does no harm — no one in their right mind listens to their music collection by playing an assortment of video clips on YouTube.
[Read more →]

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Will Google find its way onto an iTV near you? | Googling Google | ZDNet.com

It’s just wild speculation. But if you recall, we were talking a few weeks back about how Google ideally wants a way to replace the commercials on your TV set with custom picked ones (otherwise they’re stuck using a microphone and your PC as their co-advertising tap, which you can always just turn off). Customized ads will of course get more money from advertisers because they theoretically work better, generate more sales, etc.. And Google wants to tap that market like they did with web ads for very big bucks.

Well, this iTV thing, or whatever it’ll be called next year, could make that happen, for Apple, and even Google, if they play their cards right. The set top box doesn’t need a lot of horsepower, just the ability to monitor and switch sources from the given broadcast to some computer-spewed commercials and back, which it seems it can do programmatically, even wirelessly.

Still, it’s a dangerous thing for them to try. If software running on your computer can detect when a commercial is starting well enough to replace that commercial with a more lucrative one (hint: the 2x volume is a sure giveaway), some other (hacked, perhaps) software can just as easily replace it with the weather, or a blank screen, or a multi-channel preview during those 2-3 minutes.

Now that’s what I’d like to see. Sure, it’ll kill commercial broadcast TV, no revenues and such. But it’s not as if TV offers us any sort of public service value anymore. Stuff like "The Path to 911" is a perfect example. They’re lost in their own fantasy of being anything more than a free time killer for most people. Let it die.

Of course, using HDMI input and with the DMCA strictly in place, maybe we’ll be legally required to watch commercials from now on. Maybe our TV sets won’t even turn off anymore? Apple, for all its fanatical followers, doesn’t have the greatest track record when it comes to DRM and transparency. Oh well.

But at the very least, can they please fix the "volume problem?"

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Given the advanced state of modern technology, is it possible to write software that understands what what volume I like to listen to music, tv, video clips, and so on and KEEP IT THERE?

Consider that every single clip on YouTube has its own unique level. How hard would it be for YouTube to set the level of clips on upload? Or at least adjust in the player?

Consider that every app running under Windows manipulates the global volume sliders, sometimes the master volume, sometimes the “wave” volume, and two running apps will “fight” over what setting to use depending who touched the slider last. And if you switch apps, like between TV, movies, and music player, you’re constantly adjusting or forgetting adjustments of the volume. Can’t we do better?

What would happen if “master volume” worked from a user-centric viewpoint and let you set the final output volume at which you’d like to listen, and told other apps to raise or lower their volume to match? They could still have app-specific adjustments to balance, say a loud TV app with a soft email ding.

But all it would take from an engineering point of view is for apps to determine the final system output level and adjust their own levels to meet the user’s criteria. It’s a kind of “quality assurance” monitor that mimics the human wife going “Avi, will you please turn that down?” when I never turned it up! I don’t even mind if there’s a little hysteresis in the algorithm, an occasional delay in tuning an over-loud sound down or a super-soft sound up for audibility.

Such “advanced technology” might even solve this annoyance with commercials being 2x louder than the TV program. What a concept.

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YouTube - Frank Lloyd Wright in Half Life 2 (via boingboing.net)

Since I was just there a month ago, I can attest that this is a very accurate reconstruction of Falling Water. The only thing it’s missing are the creepy groundsmen clones with Prince Valiant haircuts and the women at the information desk who make you wait an hour to get on a waiting list.

I’m thinking we can add them as enemy minions in the game engine and get our revenge.

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British Airways Flies With Google Earth - Forbes.com

It’s in the web reservation system, apparently. That’s pretty cool. Next, I want GE to replace that old in-flight map I see on most US flights, even if it’s just one computer driving all of the TV screens at once (on tour mode, for example).

Which reminds me of something old, that’s probably been tried already. I pitched an idea a long time ago (1992, I think) for an augmented reality system for airlines. The idea is to put cameras at various points around the plane, the nose, the wing tips, the belly, such that you get enough information to make a full spherical panorama, like in QTVR. The image stitching would be done by one computer, serving up images at some reasonable number of frames per second. Then each passenger could use their in-seat TV (or HMD) to pan around individually, giving the sense that they were flying (I mean, without the plane). With a good HMD and low-latency tracking, it would feel a lot like you were in the air with an invisible plane. How cool is that?

The closest I’ve seen is the nose cam channel on some airlines, which is pretty cool during takeoff and landing. Needs interactivity.

OTOH, DirectTV is much cheaper and a better brain-pacifier overall. Oh well.

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