Archive for the ‘Cool Technology’ Category

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Apple’s Magical Mouse

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010

I helped a friend set up her new 27″ iMac last weekend, and it came with the coolest new mouse… The Apple Magic Mouse.

magic_mouse

The mouse is the button, plus it has no scroll wheel, but you can use it to scroll up, down, diagonally and sideways. Comes in one color, wireless Bluetooth, but right now is only supported for use on a Mac (Windows support is coming!) The way it works is similar to the MacBook trackpads with multiple-finger functions, but that is a couple of steps above the trackpad on my getting-older-by-the-day PowerBook G4! I want one!

Actually, these would be great for use at work; seems like I’m replacing a mouse somewhere in the building at least once a week. The failures are usually with the scroll wheels, and the Apple Mighty Mouse with its tiny little scroll ball is the worst offender. The Magic Mouse with no external moving parts should be nothing but great! And as great as this mouse is, the tablet computer that Apple is expected to announce should be nothing less than amazing.

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I Want To Live On The Ocean

Friday, January 22nd, 2010

We were watching Scientific American Frontiers on PBS tonight; the episode was Mysteries Of The Deep covered several topics dealing with underwater exploration, and the last part featured Bob Ballard, an undersea explorer best known for finding the wreck of the Titanic. He had some fascinating stories to tell about deep-sea submersibles he’s designed & built, sea-bottom discoveries he’s made, finding the wreck of the Titanic… But the program closed with something that was almost an afterthought, but really caught my attention.

ALAN ALDA Now he’s off and running with a new crazy idea. If 70% of the globe is covered in water, it’s time we started living out there, he says. Here’s a marine habitation you tow into place, then tip up and anchor.

BOB BALLARD There’s no budget in America, zero, zip, for colonizing the world’s oceans. Nothing. They’re not even thinking about it.

ALAN ALDA You’re actively at work on this? I mean, you’ve designed..

BOB BALLARD Yeah, we’re designing it. See, also you can use heat exchangers, so that you can take advantage of the thermocline to have nice air conditioning. You can have this solar panels, where this thing…

ALAN ALDA You’re just moving cold air up, or you’re creating electricity or what?

BOB BALLARD Yeah, no. It’s cold! It’s freezing down there! Circulating air. You’ve got vanes that you can control so your solar panel follows the sun throughout the day. You can helo out to it. I want to put it in a marine sanctuary, and have rangers living on it.

ALAN ALDA (NARRATOR) I have to admit I was skeptical about the ocean colonization idea, but when I said so, Bob Ballard answered with the confidence of experience.

BOB BALLARD All my life, I’ve had these ideas, and people say, “you’re nuts.” ‘Til I do them. Then you know what they say? “You know, actually, that wasn’t a bad idea, but it’s the new one you have that’s nuts.” And then I go on with the new one and I do it, and then they go, “Well, actually it wasn’t such a bad idea but it’s the next one.” This is the one they think I’m nuts on right now.

Think of it… Living on the water, with all the ocean breezes you could want, fishing from your front porch, the constant but gentle swell of the sea under your feet… sure, there would be downsides, but the upsides would definitely outweigh them. Kinda like living in South Dakota. There was about a 30 second computer-generated video blip of the marine habitation Ballard has been working on — screenshots from it are shown below. Very cool concept. Not sure if it will go anywhere, but cool idea.

While looking for more/better images of Ballard’s work, I stumbled across this site for The Seasteading Institute. TSI seeks to create “permanent dwellings on the ocean – homesteading the high seas.” Another interesting concept, but why live on a tiny little man-made island in the middle of the ocean? “Because the world needs a new frontier, a place where those who wish to experiment with building new societies can go to test out their ideas. By opening the ocean as a new frontier, we hope to revolutionize the quality of government and social systems worldwide by enabling experimentation, innovation, and competition.” That set of goals sounds a little too utopian for my taste, but if something like this caught on it might be a good elsewhere for the likes of Alec Baldwin to go when elections don’t go their way!

seasteaders

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Cool Flash Presentation — International Space Station

Saturday, December 19th, 2009

space_station

Somebody posted a link to this interactive Flash graphic on the USA Today website that shows the growth of the International Space Station since the first piece was put in orbit in 1998. I knew pieces had been sent up and added to the station over the years, but I had no idea it had become that big. Amazing!

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The Differential; Now I Get It!

Friday, September 18th, 2009

I know my way around mechanical things pretty well, but an automobile’s differential is one of those things that I never quite understood… I knew what it did, and that it involved gears and whatnot, but the principles of operation were never laid out in terms that helped me to really get it. But this video changed all that. I now get it!

Thanks to Deane for posting about it on Gadgetopia. I think I owe you lunch!

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WordPress 2.8.4

Friday, September 11th, 2009

How about a break from politics today…

wordpress

I took the dive yesterday & updated my WordPress install. I’ve been a little lazy about that lately… Came to rely on Powweb’s InstallCentral to do the updates, but that method tends to lag pretty far behind. When I updated yesterday, InstallCentral only took it to v.2.7. While there was an interface improvement over the 2.6.x install I had been using for a while, it was still months behind the current version; with the security holes in earlier versions I wasn’t eager to find out how bad things could get, especially after the trouble the sfgroove.us website had a month or so ago — hackers completely took it over twice before we got the Joomla install updated & locked down. I’ll take their advice & stick to taking my vitamins and avoid the open heart surgery.
The upgrade wasn’t without glitches though; since upgrading, Google and the other search engines seem to have forgotten me. According to Sitemeter, yesterday saw 41 unique visitors and 78 page views; today, 5 and 5. Since most traffic here is from search engine referrals, things have been a bit quiet. Once I update the code for Google Adsense and all that, things should improve. Until then it’s just the handful of faithful direct hits from various places and the RSS subscribers; thanks for clicking, people!

The other glitch was with the Akismet antispam plugin for WordPress; it was deactivated by default after the upgrade, but when I activated it, all the admin pages came up totally blank. The site was working fine, but being able to see things on the admin side is somewhat important. Things were working fine before I clicked to activate Akismet, so I figured that wasn’t up to date, so I had to go in via ftp and kill the plugin folder for Akismet before I could get back in and see anything. Very pleased that it wasn’t any more complicated than that! And installing it again was again, easy.

One of the beautiful features introduced in v.2.7 is the one-click upgrades; inside the dashboard, WordPress will throw up a flag when an update is available, and present an Upgrade Automatically button that will do the hard work to bring an installation up to date. You can also download the update from the same screen, but why bother? Of course, it’s a good idea to use the Export Tool in the dashboard to back up all the data that makes my blog mine… Just in case, you know. Hopefully future upgrades won’t include surprises like today’s did.

Just for fun, I downloaded the current version and put a second install on my (hosted) server; had I realized it was that easy I wouldn’t have bothered with the InstallCentral dance… Why did I wait so long? And that’s another one of the goofy things with Powweb’s InstallCentral control panel; it will only do one WordPress installation for you. That second install is for testing and setting up a replacement for the Joomla-driven Groove website; I’m getting tired of wrestling with Joomla just trying to put up the simplest content, so I’m making the executive decision to move the site to WordPress. A couple of weeks ago I tried adding some YouTube videos to an article on the site, and for some reason Joomla decided after I pasted in the code to link the videos that one line of that code wasn’t needed. That would be fine if the embedded video would show up in the article, but it doesn’t. I tried every trick I could think of and searched around to no avail. Other articles with embedded videos continue to work fine… Anyway, I’m moving the site to WordPress because using Joomla is like having a bureaucracy the size of the Federal Government to manage a small company; way too complex and way too many hoops to jump through just to accomplish something simple. WordPress is a great tool with lots of expansion possibilities, and I think it’ll be perfect for Groove.

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How About A Local Area Network RAID Array?

Tuesday, September 1st, 2009

I was in the process of setting up another new iMac for a user at work the other day, and got to looking at the hard drive — the ‘entry level’ 24″ iMac comes standard with a dual-core 2.66GHz processor, 4GB of memory and a 600GB hard drive. Much of that capacity (other than that memory) just won’t get used. There will be times when the processors will peak a bit, but most of the time they’ll be just barely above idle. And the hard drive… 600GB? On a desktop machine? If the computer were used in a home setting, that might get utilized, but here… Boy could I use some of that capacity for other stuff on the network! I guess I could just buy some cheap 100GB SATA drives and swap them out, but I’ve seen the gymnastics necessary to replace a drive in an iMac, and I don’t want to go through that any more than absolutely necessary.

I remember back when Apple was first rolling out OS X, there was talk of these super apps that would allow us to tap into some of that unused processing power by creating a distributed network computer by linking the computers on a network together; if one computer had a huge task of some sort to complete and other computers on the network had spare processor cycles available, there’d be some sharing going on, and you could get more done. At least that was the idea, but I haven’t heard much about distributed computer grid clusters since the big splash about using a host of Macs to create a monster grid computer. Xgrid sharing lives on, and even has a checkbox to enable it in the Sharing Preference Panel in Mac OS 10.5 (and maybe earlier.) Years ago when it might take a raster image processor (RIP) multiple hours to chew through an eight-page layout I would’ve have loved to put something like this to work, but today with the typical tasks done on the typical desktop computer in a print shop or an office environment, and without some monstrously processor-intensive task that needs to be done, I don’t really see much point in messing with it.

What I would like to see though is some kind of distributed disk sharing; that iMac I set up today starts out with a whopping big 600GB drive; after loading all the software on it there was still an easy 500GB… And that computer is one of three that I set up recently, and one of five of the same configuration. If I were to partition the disks in each of those machines to set aside half of the available space I’d have an easy terabyte and a half of disk space that could be used for other stuff.

What if there was some way of joining the disks on multiple computers over the network to create a disk array of sorts… A local area network RAID array. Think of a RAID array with the network acting as the interface card and some software on a server striping the bits & bytes across the disks. In all my digging through Google and other search engines, I haven’t found anything like what I’m thinking of; either I’m not asking the right questions or it hasn’t been done yet. If not, that’s too bad, because I think there’s a lot of potential there, but I can also understand some of the obstacles to making it work. The biggest issue is probably that the network can be a lot more fragile than the hardware & software that it takes to make a RAID array in a server or external box work. A mirrored drive in a RAID 1 arrangement would probably work best, as the other RAID levels with the data striped across multiple volumes would require a higher level of availability for the disks than might be possible.

But you know, since it doesn’t look like using that disk space for live files will work any time soon, maybe I can still put it to use for backups; set Retrospect up to use that space for backing stuff on the server up to disk, just for extra redundancy… Hmmm… Might have to play with that a bit…

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Josh Wilson — Amazing Grace

Thursday, August 6th, 2009

I almost set the title to Josh Wilson — Amazing Guitar, but that’s not the name of the song…

Yvonne & I attended the Willow Creek Association Leadership Summit today (tomorrow too), and after our lunch break we were treated to a couple of songs by Josh Wilson. Josh is an incredibly talented guitarist who does some simply amazing things with his instrument (and some sort of foot-controlled electronic sampling gizmo on the floor.) Here’s a video of the same song, but in a different venue; have a listen, and enjoy!

(And hey; isn’t that a Mac Pro (or G5) in the background?)

When he was first introduced, I had no idea who he was, but I recognized his second song — Savior Please — just a few measures in. It was just him on stage with his guitar and the same sampling gizmo for this song, but he used a microphone to lay down background vocals with his own voice while performing. The sounds coming from just one guy and those two instruments was just… Wow! Here’s that song, again in a different venue and with his band playing along.

Even though he’s put his music up on Tangle and YouTube, I think I’ll have to go and buy it anyway, just to say thanks. I’d suggest you do the same; here are the iTunes links for Amazing Grace and for Savior, Please.

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Digital Music Pads

Saturday, May 9th, 2009

Here’s something quite cool; the Freehand Systems MusicPad Pro Plus. It’s essentially a Linux-powered keyboardless tablet PC that specializes in displaying music files. It uses a back-lit color LCD touch screen to display the music files that you load onto it by connecting it up to a Mac or PC. It can use music that you scan from sheet music, music files you buy & download from Freehand’s website, or transfer from an app like Sibelius.

The MusicPad Pro essentially replaces the sheet music a musician would use during a rehearsal or performance. It can hold an entire library’s worth of music, and if the user is playing outdoors there is no worry about having sheet music flying around in the wind. The user can also write notes on the music displayed on the MusicPad Pro and save those notes with the music. It’s a great concept, but at the price of $899, probably a little out of reach of most musicians and performing groups.

While I can’t take credit for this concept, it does remind me of something I thought up and sketched out while sitting through one of the kids’ band concerts years ago. I was bored out of my gourd (is it right to say that?) and my mind started wandering, thinking about all the work that goes into organizing sheet music for a band or orchestra; the conductor has the full score and most every player has a different set, and that’s duplicated for every piece the group plays. Just trying to wrap my head around the system needed to track all that paper makes me dizzy.

So I thought, what if the conductor had the music stored on a central computer — the server — with its display at the podium? And what if each musician had a wireless display — the client — that linked into that central computer & received the music from it? The musicians could tap a button on the screen or click a foot pedal to advance to the next page, or have the music scroll up as the piece progresses. For a stage performance, a tablet-sized screen would be great for the musicians, but when the cost of a display is usually keyed to the size of the screen, how about shrinking the screen down to the size of a recipe card — 3 x 5 inches — and attached directly to the instrument? I remember my older sisters using something like that for marching band back in the ’70’s, and the coronet that I used in junior high has an attachment that allows for that. With the display closer to the user’s eyes it doesn’t need to be very big (just look at the popularity of watching movies on iPods and other handheld devices.)

The difficulty I guess would be keeping the server & client pads coordinated through a performance… There are lots of things that could go wrong, and with a system like this, and going wrong in the middle of a performance… it would be ugly. Actually the real difficulty is in getting the concept to actually work in the real world, and to be able to sell it at an affordable price. The $900 MusicPad Pro is a great device, but it’s overkill for most bands and orchestras, and at that price just isn’t accessible to most primary & secondary schools and private organizations. An exhaustive three minute Google search shows that other than a few software solutions (like Music Reader) that can be run on a Windows or Mac computer, the Freehand device is pretty much the only game in town for digital music pads right now, so I think there’s potential for a system like this to really do well.

But the practicalities of the system won’t be my worry because I don’t know where to even start bringing an idea like this into reality, so I’ll leave the gritty details to someone more capable. I doubt I’m the first person to think of something like this.

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Flying Like An Eagle

Wednesday, April 15th, 2009

Or in this case, a hawk. Very similar experience, I’m sure. I’ve had incredibly vivid flying dreams before, and this reminds me a lot of those dreams…

Anyway, this fella strapped a video camera to the back of a hawk and let it do its thing, and came up with a stunning piece of videography.

For years I’ve had this idea of a robotic suit that allows the wearer to fly like a bird… kind of a single-person ornithopter. Turns out I’m not the only one with that idea. This guy, D.C. George, had the same idea and even committed the concept to paper. In 1972. It seems a pretty well-thought out design, reminiscent of the Icarus story in Greek mythology, although I’m not so sure about the h2o2 power source; I suppose he was counting on a method being developed to separate the hydrogen & oxygen and use them for clean combustion. And no worries about melting wax at altitude.

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Digital TV In Sioux Falls

Monday, January 26th, 2009

I’m way too cheap to spend the $30-plus a month for cable or satellite TV services. Besides, the kids & I waste too much time watching TV with the dozen or so stations that are broadcast locally, so why would I want more choices? To waste more time? No thanks.

With the impending conversion to digital TV looming, I finally bit the bullet, applied for my rebate card, and bought the converter box. Thankfully, I had submitted my application some time ago and beat the rush that caused the shortage of rebates earlier this month. The money for the program is gone, so until they get more appropriated, it’s a waiting list.

But I got mine, and after buying the converter box a couple of weeks ago, I wasn’t in a hurry to set it up because according to the clueless salesguy at Best Buy, there were only one or two stations in Sioux Falls that were broadcasting digital anyway. Why bother if that’s all there was? So the converter sat on a shelf, still in the box…

Until last week, that is. I got a burr under my saddle & decided to try it out, and it actually works very, very nicely! Add to that the surprise of finding 10 stations broadcasting locally in the digital spectrum. The expected local stations are there — KELO (CBS), KSFY (ABC), KDLT (FOX), KDLT (NBC) & three PBS stations (your tax dollars at work) — plus a few others that I hadn’t expected. UTV is one (broadcast on a KELO subchannel), KWSD (CW & RTN), and two bonus PBS stations, PBS World & PBS Create. Not a lot more channel-wise that we got on analog, but it’s an improvement. When I first hooked it up, a couple of the stations had good signal but were broadcasting absolutely nothing, and a couple others had very weak signals; I rewired things a little so that the antenna feed was going directly to the DTV box, and that gives us solid signal on all 10, and they all work!

Another thing I hadn’t expected was the picture; much better than standard broadcast TV! Many of the channels broadcast in HD, and although ours definitely is not a high-definition TV, it does make a noticeable difference. And the functionality of the little set-top box is pretty incredible. I got the Insignia brand box, and the remote that comes with it can be programmed to turn the TV on & off and control the volume; it only controls the volume of the audio signal going to the TV, so it’s still necessary to tweak the volume on the TV from time to time, especially when using the DVD player. The really neat feature with this box and digital TV is you can push a button on the remote to get TV-Guide-type info on the fly. You can scroll through the channels without leaving the one you’re watching and see what’s on now and what’s coming up next. If you see something you like, push another button (just one) on the remote, and you’re there! So cool!

So all in all, things are looking good for digital TV in Sioux Falls. Many who are already using cable and or satellite TV with newer TV’s probably are thinking, , but for someone like me with a 6-7 year old TV, and is too cheap to buy cable, it’s a great thing. My kids even like it!

One last thing; found a nice listing of broadcast TV info for the Sioux Falls area at RabbitEars.com. Not complete, but helpful.

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