A friend at lunch the other day showing off his iPad 3G brought back this wave of tender nostalgia.

For three years I too carried a tablet around. It was the tablet that time forgot (no not the newton), the original Microsoft full slate tablet PC. That’s me chewing on a tablet pc stylus in my longtime blog/twitter avatar.

The tablet was the ideal restaurant, couch or streetcar or meeting pc. Meetings or lectures with the tablet were a special case. Having a screen on your knee or flat on a table is a much less obtrusive way to have a screen open when someone is talking. Tablets reduce the social and physical investment required to use a computer, leading you to use a computer in more contexts, more of the time.

Despite hardware in some ways more advanced, there are some ways the old tablet didn’t come close to measuring up to the new iPad, the size and weight (3lbs, just a bit too heavy for comfort), the screen (same resolution but terrible contrast and viewing angles) and price. At the insane cost of ~$3000 it’s no wonder they didn’t sell like hotcakes. And, well, the app ecosystem.

You would have thought being able to run any windows app ever written would have been a good start. But the problem with MS Tablets was that they tried too hard to be seamless with desktop Windows without letting the tablet just try to it’s own, new thing. And that’s where the iPad really seems to shine in ways that Windows Tablet PC Edition never could be back in 2003. The iPad is a single purpose device. The iPad only tries to be what it is, a connected screen, a window on the cloud and a constellation of apps purpose-built for the form factor.

That’s not to say the MSTablet didn’t have some killer apps. Mostly thanks to it’s stylus (multitouch nearly 5 more years away). Photoshop and paint tools were unexpectedly a disaster. The poor screen quality made colors hard to judge while the slight parallax error of the stylus made sketching worse than it should have been. What did work amazingly well were mouse-intensive apps like powerpoint and excel. Without having to constantly switch from mouse to keyboard, laying out decks and whipping out excel models was a dream on a tablet. Try that on an iPad.

Microsoft Word, worked okay on a tablet but only in combination with voice recognition (the pen also making quick point and click corrections easy). For me this was important as I was getting over a nasty bout of RSI at the time. But as my arms improved, I found myself needing a “real” computer to get any real writing done.

The main risk I see of the iPad is the same problem I have with an iPhone vs a Blackberry. The screen-only-not-so-good-for-typing form factor risks turning us all in to predominantly consumers rather than creators of media. It’s no coincidence that soon after I started this blog, and a new business, that I inevitably ended my long experiment with tablets.

Inevitably, Michele and I will have to pick up an iPad. The question is whether we can hold out for the inevitably much improved v2 version next year. We’ll see how that goes.

You know, I do still have that old tablet pc kicking around someplace. It even sort of still boots up. Anyone out there wanna trade?

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.

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.

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.

CRTC, want to fix something? fix this.

ps cablecos, broadcasters, crtc – a pox on all your houses

Got a couple of big update announcements for you regarding Lift@Home Toronto happening on Nov 17th. The first being that we have finalized our speakers list. We have an awesome roster future-minded designers who have bravely stepped up to impress you with Demos from the year 2019. On top of which we’re super excited to announce our special guest for the evening Scott Smith Futurist, Technology Forecaster and fellow Lifter.

The other important news is that we’ve had a venue change. We are no longer at the Drake. Sticking true to the theme of “epic time-warp”, we have shifted the venue to the Canadian Corps Association, that’s on Niagara street just south of King and a couple blocks west of Bathurst. This venue has a certain special flavor of character which you may remember from recent Spacing parties and/or for their almost-inordinately generous beer prices. Prepare to be transported to a retro-Swiss-conference-disco-chalet from the future.

Presenters for Lift Presentations @ Toronto

Special Guest: Scott Smith @changeist
Founder of the excellent Changist the design research and human foresight consultancy based in North Carolina.

2019 Demo Presenters:
Matthew Milan @mmilan Partner & Design Director at Normative
Leila Boujnane @leilaboujnane Founder & CEO Idée
Ann Poochareon @miserychick Maker of interactive stuff, Director Aesthetec
Jonathan Laba @J_LabIntern, Brightspark
Anatoliy Kats in/anatoliykats Grad Student, UofT
Sabaa Quao @xsabaa VP Strategy, The Hive
Matthew Lincez & Ricky Thomas WEREPIDEAS

Click here for the complete twitter list of Lift@Home Toronto presenters

More Announcements!

Special Guest Retro-DJ from the Future: Duarte Da Silva @modernmod =)
Food: Presentations will be followed Music, “networking”, delicious Swiss-themed nourishment, and bar service. Though you may also want to grab a quick bite on your way.
Volunteers: We need some! to help with setup and the door and sundry. 5 volunteer tickets have been added to the guestlist app. These tickets of course come with free admission – thanks for your help!

Wireless Sponsor for Lift@home:

I was wondering today what it would be like for motorsports if you took the drives out of racecars. And made them remotely piloted or autonomous. We are on the cusp of this idea being technically possible. I bet those cars could go around the track even quicker if they didn’t have to haul around -and try to keep alive- a human driver while hurtling around a track. They could go really fast.

Engineering challenges aside from making a driverless or fully autonomous racecar, would it still be fun to watch? Can you get emotionally invested in a contest of robots?

If at the next airshow they had predator drone racing, would you go see?

Of course without the risk to human pilots, you could take it a step further. Those racecars could really battle each other. Or my personal vote, machine gun-mounted robot biplane dogfights. Now that would be a sport.

Partly related: Darpa Grand Challenge

^{Originally tweeted, reblogged here for posterity.}

1. Boy the iphone has a really slick/easy interface for buying little chunks of apps and content that are not only super easy to find yourself buying, and also don’t even cost that much. (Blackberry just announced one too)

2. On the web, ad revenues are out of whack with the value of content. I get a ton of value out of a lot of web apps like gmail or web content through my feeds and so forth. If there was an easy enough, low-friction enough way, I’d be happy to pay some amount for a lot of this stuff. At least more than the nano-cents worth of ads I’ve ever never clicked on.

3. The long tail is getting killed by ads. You need a sick amount of traffic to make sense as an ad-supported business model. Um, whatever happened to the long tail, or at least the whole middle of that tail?

3b. Optimizing for ad revenue makes for for crappier content (celebrities, gimmicky top-ten lists, link-jacking and other attention mongering cheap tricks) and crappier user experience (superfluous page views, popusp, sites plastered like nascars).

4. There’s a recession coming. This fits in somewhere.

5. Only the valley is crazy enough to still be funding the get-the-eyeballs-first-we’ll-figure-out-the-business-model later

6. If you’re not in the valley and you want to monetize digital content, what’s your plan exactly?

7. Where is our app store for the greater interenet? who will make it happen?

Link: Woe to Web 2.0 Start-Ups: Too Few Ads to Go Around

Epilogue/Spoiler alert: You know that worlds are converging right? Cloud/web computing has far-reaching implications that may make this question the answer to it’s own question. We are moving to a world where regular folks will may many screens large and small and one seamless web environment. But that’s a subject for another post.

“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things:
Of shoes–and ships–and sealing-wax–
Of cabbages–and kings–
And why the sea is boiling hot–
And whether pigs have wings.”

And you could have thought I was the only tech/design blogger somehow also talking up both puppies and hadron colliders. Well I am but a rank amateur. Matt Webb weaves together both, in the most moving post on sub-atomic physics you are likely ever to read. Meant to post this link a while back.

Suddenly he would leap to his feet and trot, tail wagging, a few paces before hurling himself at the carpet, twisting as he did so to roll and throw himself around and generally have a good old time right there in the hall. What was it Indigo, hey? What did you see, did you see a ghost who said -Come play? Why that moment, hey boy? Just as quickly he would stand and shake himself down, and come back to his spot near the kitchen where I could see him and he could see me, and I’d be laughing. Where did it come from, that abrupt desire for play? How come that exact second for decanting some of the internal flywheel into rolling about with his belly in the air and legs waving? It reassured me that I couldn’t see any cause, that it was something inside. It meant Indigo had his own internal life, and so I could love him more.

…

I was 10 years, 9 months, 3 weeks and 3 days old the day they activated the Large Hadron Collider. I was at college in a lecture the day I found out they’d found the Higgs boson, which gives particles mass. Mass gives momentum, and momentum is what keeps you moving. The Higgs is where it comes from:

the universe is a house, and you’re a particle – let’s say a proton – and the house is packed full of ghosts, from wall to wall like a carpet…”

I last met Matt (one half of Schulze and Webb) at Reboot9 (pictured).

To bring the story full circle with the most recent news: Silver is turning out a wonderfully precocious pup, only 12 weeks old now already fetching her first Frisbees, and though among the youngest, miles ahead of her puppy school class. Brains, energy and it looks like we’ll have our hands full with this frisky dingo. The LHC, unfortunately, had a problem and is down for maintenance for several months. We hope to see it up and chasing subatomic frisbees again soon.