Eye-control headphones clearly the best invention of Mobile World Congress
Leave it to the Japanese. I’ve speculated before about what kind of creative sensors you could load in to a mobile device. How about headphones that pick up the tiny electrical impulses emitted by your facial muscles when you move your eyes?
Here is a live demo of a Docomo volunteer controlling a cell phone music player with “eye gestures”. Look right twice to fast forward, roll your eyes clockwise to increase volume. Perhaps inadvertently totally shuffle your music collection if two unusually pretty girls/boys happen to walk by in opposite directions…
Above this man’s left shoulder you can see a line showing the live eye-tracking direction as well as a few of the gestures.
So perhaps you yourself will not want to ever look [literally] this ridiculous in public. Nonetheless it appears that creativity is well alive in new mobile interaction possibilities.
Why and how to ditch your slow-ass hard drive for an SSD
The setup:
SSD are the single best upgrade you can give your computer. This one a Runcore device is even compatible with older 1.8″ PATA drive systems found in common ultra portables like my Dell D430 or the Macbook Air. Remember when Apple was trying to sell SSD upgrades for $900? This particular 64GB model is faster than Apple’s fist-gen Samsung SSDs and cost only $250 on ebay at time of writing. Took about 20min to physically install (the SSD even came with a USB adapter, external case and software to mirror your existing drive, easy!).
Boot times are 54% faster and everything about the computer is much much snappier. Waking up and hibernating the computer just takes seconds. Plus there’s now no fragile spinning disks to break down and steal all my data.
SSDs are the future. Recommended.
Why it’s Google that needs a Twitter too, more than twitterers need some new g-twitteroo
So what’s the deal with this new Google buzz thing.
Google’s core premise is the googlerank, that uncanny linking metric that derives all its notions of web page authority from what other pages and links of authority link to such pages. But, these days, with 90% at best of pages and links on the world wild web being churned out by spammers and search engine scammers, google needs more sources of organic and authentic web sharing behaviour. It’s getting harder and harder to hear the signal through the noise.
By not owning a twitter, Google is missing out on having visibility or being able to track and index a huge part of modern web. That huge part is the so-called “real-time web”, formerly knows as social presence. Basically all those status updates and link sharing that twitter has become the killer app for.
Google must be craving their own twitter just to be able to see and track all the links that real actual humans are sharing with each other and what real humans are talking about and finding interesting. They need this badly for their search results and their ad targeting. And even better to have such a source whose data they don’t have to share with Microsoft.
Thats google’s eminent reason anyway. What’s the rest-of-our’s reason for using buzz over twitter or fb? Who knows yet.
Aside: perhaps first thing twitter could do to defend against buzz? Publish a twitter interface that resolves and thumbnails web links, pics and videos inline with the twitter stream. Or maybe that would be sacrilege.
Forget the SuperBowl, the America’s Cup is on
Tonight, right now is the eve of the 33rd America’s Cup. Now two years late, this race is a culmination of 2 years of legal battles between Larry Ellison and Ernesto Bertarelli over the rules, venue, boats and every other aspect you can imagine. What it’s resulted in however is something spectacular for sailing and engineering nerds. What should have been a long contest between 20 countries match racing by elimination in 20 boats, is instead only a two boat race, 3 races only with the only rules becoming a sailing boat, 90 feet long, no limit on budget.
And what we have are two monsters BMW Oracle’s solid wing sail trimaran, and Alighi’s giant wave piercing catamaran. These boats were built at a cost of 500 million dollars to race for one week.
No one’s ever match raced boats this huge and fast before. These boats may go 40 knots downwind. No one knows what’s going to happen, all the ordinary match racing tactics go out the window. The boats are different enough that it could be a blow-out or a blow-up, gear failure is not unlikely.
There is no television coverage of the Americas Cup in North America, but there are plenty of places to watch the coverage online.
Throughout the week, also have an eye on the epic sailing blog Sailing Anarchy
Either way, first gun is at 10am Valencia time or 4am EST (ouch) on Monday, race two is on Wednesday, race three on Friday. We’re going to be brewing strong coffee and putting up the race on the big screen right at 4am, you know if you’re in the neighbourhood.
Got your ticket yet for PowerPoint Karaoke? [updated]
This Friday, my good friend Jay Goldman and I are organizing Toronto’s first PowerPoint Karaoke event. It’s going to be awesome. From the official description:
The Stage is Yours, the Slides Aren’t
PowerPoint Karaoke brings presentations from the conference room to the karaoke stage in an entertaining and competitive event. In PowerPoint Karaoke, contestants deliver PowerPoint presentations in a karaoke-styled venue. But there’s a twist: Presenters see the randomly chosen slides for the first time when they’re presenting. Presentations are on the clock and off the cuff.
PowerPoint Karaoke was invented in 2005 when a group of German artists combined Schadenfreude with Stagenfrighte to create an underground sensation that has since swept the world.
For your entertainment, 8 fearless speakers will be pitting their wits against decks of diabolically out of context slideware to tell you about important topics of our times. Presentations are 5 min each. We’ll have two heats of 4 presentations with the winners facing off for a final showdown. There may be fabulous prizes like a free beer (they’ll need it) or an ironic trophy. At least that is the plan so far.
This event is happening as culmination of the Toronto’s Participation in World Socical Media Week. We’ll also be pooling revenues from this event with the (sold out) CaseCamp Toronto this week for donation to Sick Kids Hospital (details).
After the tweets were out the bag last week, PowerPoint Karaoke is now almost sold-out as well. But I just put up another block of free tickets, well “free” with a $25 or more donation to sick kids.
LINK:Get your tickets for PowerPoint Karaoke Toronto here
UPDATE 1
PowerPoint Karaoke is SOLD OUT. And so far, you have raised $800 for the CaseCamp Sick Kids CCU Project – you guys rock!
UPDATE 2
Thanks to the awesome folks at Microsoft Office Canada ( @MSOfficeCanada on twitter) and to Crumpler.ca for donating the grand prizes for tonight’s event.
Here is the presenter lineup. Doors open at 8, presentations at 8:30pm sharp:
Heat 1 Bretton MacLean Rachael Segal Satish Kanwar Alain Lepofsky Heat 2 Liz Radzick Misha Glouberman JonathanLaba Saul Colt Finals: ?? vs ??
In Which Tom attempts to bond two DSL lines into single home internet pipe of great power like Voltron
It really only did take about nine minutes to actually set up. Two DSL lines, one internet connection. Not counting a few later hours of mild swearing and voodoo rituals to get it to work right on all the computers in the house. And not counting the few days it took for the Bell tech to setup the extra line, and the indefinite project to figure out how to tidy up all those boxes and wires. But it works! and it’s not that hard.
The goal was this, how to turn two regular off-brand 5MBit down/0.8MBit up DSL connections into one single 10/1.6MB super-pipe using a trick called multi-linkPPP (MLPPP).
There are a few side-effects of using MLPPP, the one being that Bell (who provides the last mile for all indie-ISPs) cannot, for some obscure technical reason, throttle, inspect, cap, “traffic shape” or otherwise abuse packets sent over MLPPP.
Monthly bandwidth caps are another tool the major ISP’s use to manage the dangerous risk of network congestion competition with their other digital services or lines of business. With dual Teksavvy connections I’ve discovered I now have silly-high (400GB) monthly bandwith cap. Not sure even what to do with that, but maybe I’ll think of something entertaining.
One last relevant side effect to mention is that with this setup your monthly bill gets doubled too. Combined with the requirement for two phone lines, two DSL lines and a customized router, you might think hey, that’s a pretty crazy way to try and keep up with Moore’s law. You’d right. By some accounts, Teksavvy is the only “major” ISP on the planet to offer MLPPP. It’s also a sad story to go through such trouble for a 10MB connection when Bell/Rogers are technically capable of easily providing a much faster connection through a single account. And lets ignore that 10MB is only 10% of the speed of the every day and generally dirt-cheap broadband you’d find places like Sweden, Japan or Korea.
The jury is very much out on whether, for practical purposes, a 10Mbit Voltron connection from Teksavvy is really better than a 16 or 20 MBit “ultra” offering from Bell or Rogers. It’s certainly no cheaper (each Teksavvy line is about $37/month). But pay no attention to creeping thoughts of rationality, the important thing is, it’s twice as fast as what you had before!
Besides, if you want the fastest pipe you can get from a friendly indie ISP, whether for practical or philosophical reasons, you just have to buy more than one. Crude and amazingly inefficient as that may be. But also kinda fun.
Because it’s hard to find elsewhere on the web, here are all the step-by-step instructions.
1. Call Teksavvy, tell them you want to order not one but two DSL lines and ask them to enable something called “MLPPP” on one of the lines. They will know what you are talking about. It doesn’t matter which line has MLPPP enabled, but it will charge you an extra $4/month on that line.
2. While waiting for your DSL to be set up, head to the store to pick worlds most hackable router, the venerable Linksys WRT54GL. You will have to flash the router’s bios. For those unfamiliar, this is a lot easier than it sounds, it is literally a one click procedure to effectively replace the routers operating system with this much better one that also supports MLPPP. If only upgrading the OS on regular computers were so easy. Or if this still terrifies you, you can buy a pre-configured WRT54GL straight from Teksavvy.
3. When the Bell tech comes to your house to provision your DSL, beg, bribe or if necessary pay ($100 is the official rate) the tech to replace one of your regular jacks with a two-line phone jack, if you don’t have such a thing already (and so you can plug in your two DSL routers conveniently side by side). Or if you are particularly handy, do the wiring yourself in advance.
4. Watch guspaz’s awesome youtube video on how to setup up bonded multilink (MLPP) DSL connection in 9 minutes or less:
5. If anything doesn’t work straight away, I can recommend gradual elevating levels of swearing and pejorative gesticulations. Of course while doing this, you might also quietly double-check that all the cables are actually plugged in, and securely plugged in, to where you think are plugged in. (a combination of these two approaches seemed to work for me)
Alternate setups:
Another ISP Acanac claims to be supporting MLPPP soon. If that qualified for their excellent $18/mo for 1 year plan, that would make dual connections pretty affordable.
Here is another asus router they say works if you want to try it.
Alternative energy thought of the day
Deep thought of the day: Say you were feeling green. Or lets say you’re just stuck with an unwieldy hydro bill every year and having exhausted any easy options for saving energy, you’re looking for other ways to offset what you draw from the grid. Why go to the trouble of putting solar panels on your roof if you were able to invest a comparable amount in some distant large-scale (and lets assume more efficient) alternative energy project, and use those dividends to subsidize your own electricity bill?
Who wants to start a fundable or CommunityLend social lending platform for such projects? Does that exist? or what would be the practical, regulatory or taxation considerations required to make that make sense?
Some jurisdictions (like Ontario) have promised some massive long term subsidies on feed-in rates for alternative energy. While there are a lot of projects underway, my friends in the industry tell me that, unlike in Europe, it is still challenging to find institutional financing in North America despite the revenue-side guarantees. A lot of home or condo owners might well enjoy both the income and warm&fuzzies of “owning” their own personal solar/wind/etc. project but don’t have the ability, roofspace, or ability to do it on their own.
img source: weekly vector/Shepard Fairey
Thomas Purves
is a technology designer, futurist and sometimes entrepreneur living in the great city of Toronto. Thomas not currently available for hire (though you are always welcome to try).
