Thursday, November 27, 2008

Typing Drum

I want a keyboard, a computer typing keyboard, big enough to type on by drumming with your hands, like each key is a bongo drum.

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Think E-Ink screen plus Intuos = poor man's Cintiq?

Seems like it might be possible to place a real thin e-ink display on top of a Wacom Intuos graphics tablet and have a poor man's Centiq.

Anyone know if this will work?

Monitor Camera hybrids made from grids of lenses mixed with light emitters

I've read recently of flat lenses made from a grid of extemely small lenses.
Here's the link: http://www.physorg.com/news125159442.html .
Stanford electronics researchers, lead by electrical engineering Professor Abbas El Gamal, are developing such a camera, built around their "multi-aperture image sensor." They've shrunk the pixels on the sensor to 0.7 microns, several times smaller than pixels in standard digital cameras. They've grouped the pixels in arrays of 256 pixels each, and they're preparing to place a tiny lens atop each array.


It would seem that if you can make an imaging system from a grid of lenses, then you ought to be able to make a grid that has lenses interspersed with normal light emitting elements like LEDs , and thus end up with a monitor that is also a camera.

This would be good for teleconferencing systems in that it would enable you to look directly at someone's eyes in their image on the monitor and your image on their monitor would look like they were looking right at them.

If the lens grid is a 3D imaging system such as the one discussed at the linked article, all the better.

Sunday, November 16, 2008

The laundry is started

, I have the laundry going and the timer set to tell me when to go to the laundry room and move the clothes from the washer to the drier.

I'm listening to music on Jango, which is a music service similar to Pandora. I have no opinion to offer as to whether Jango is better or worse than Pandora. I don't remember signing up for Jango, though I suppose I must have. I'm also signed up with Pandora. My Jango account was created using the "not the real me" email address associated with my "not the real me" virtual world identity. So there's two things to do when I get to it, create a Jango account associated with the gmail identity this blog is associated with, and find my Pandora account; I think I have a Pandora account for my real world self, although if I do, it was created with my "family and bills" gmail account.

The Flock blog editor is much much nicer to enter a post with than the blogger post editor. There's no lag in the typing with the Flock editor. There's another thing to do: get a Flockstar badge to add to this blog.

The idea behind using a Google blog is that it is easy to put Adsense into your blog. Unfortunately , Google only wants you to use one Google ID with Adsense, and I made an Adsense account for my alias identity. I've only got 4 cents in that Adsense account, so cancelling it it not a a problem financially, but it's one more thing to do, and if I'm going to have to do stuff, I ought to do something more important, like figure out what I'm supposed to do with my daughter's college financial aid stuff.

Dealing with my mail in a sane person's way is another thing I need to do. That's connected with the daughter financial aid stuff I haven't done.

Another thing I need to do is the dishes, putting them in the dishwasher and starting it. My college daugher is coming back in mid-December, and the entire apartment is a wreck. I never have any energy to clean the place up. If I don't clean it up there will still be trash in the same spot it was when she went off to college. That would be embarassing. I'm used to being embarassed or even ashamed by my many failings and abnormal behaviors, but that doesn't make it feel good.

So, let's see, I have a Second Life and a Vivaty account under the name Sharcel Bellic, and a Hipihi account under the name Sharcel. I should be able to embed my Vivaty scene in this blog post, in some way or another. Heh, I'm still logged in at Vivaty, my ugly avatar is still there leaning back and forth in the default animation.


Defunct view of no longer existing Vivaty scene has been deleted.

The above embedded piece of code appears to want to take up a giant chunk of space in the post; I'm guess you are supposed to be able to get the scene displayed at a usable size there. I haven't done any customization to my Vivaty scene yet; I just got the account today, and in the Flock browser, the Vivaty scene is running very slowly. Possibly it would work better with a different browser and or a reboot of the computer.

Time to post this.
Blogged with the Flock Browser

Second Post, using Flock's post editor

The typing in the blogger post editor was unbearably slow, so now I'm posting using Flock's blog editor.  Another choice would be Microsoft's blog post editor, which I've used before on other blogs and found to be ok.   There are some other post editors available as Firefox addons.  Most of the Firefox addons seem to work ok so far with Flock.

I need to do my laundry, darn it, and it's cold outside.  I think this is the first day of winter weather here, perhaps yesterday.  Cold enough to make me unhappy stepping outside in my sock feet, and even cold enough to make me unhappy stepping out with sandals on.  I had to get the shoes out.  It's been so long since I wore shoes instead of sandals that I couldn't remember the slick way to tie shoes that never comes untied but is still able to be untied just by pulling on the ends of the strings.  I should get some with velcro straps or even better those springy plastic buckle latch things like my sandals have, although I've never seen those on shoes that I can recall.

It's nice having a blog with a title that doesn't suggest that your posts will be about some topic, or be interesting, although I guess "Words In Posts" does keep me from just posting random sequences of letters, or posting only images. 

Having said publicly that I need to do my laundry, I guess I will commit myself to doing it.

I don't know if Flock has the tag function in the blog editor working properly with Blogger.  I guess I'll find out now, I'm going to go ahead and post this, then start some laundry.
Blogged with the Flock Browser

Starting another blog, sigh

I'm starting yet another blog, this time because of the way Google thinks you should only have one account, and won't let you be logged in to one email account in one tab while writing a blog associated with a different Google email address in another tab.

I want one Gmail account for my family and my bills, the important stuff, that I'd like to get minimal spam in, and one for signing up with social networks, virtual worlds, software betas, etc. I know that Google thinks this is not necessary, but Google and me don't see eye to eye on this matter.

Now that I've created this new blog and am writing this first post, the Blogger WYSIWYG post editor is lagging way behind my typing, making typing torturous.

I have a feeling that Flock, the social web browser, also can't quite grasp the concept of having two Gmail accounts. I can use Zenbe to access my family and bills Gmail acount in one tab, and have my other "internet junk" Gmail account open in another tab, and this blog, which is associated with the "internet junk" gmail account, open in another tab, without disturbing Google or Flock.

The typing lag in this Blogspot post editor is intolerable, and the autosave is very annoying; perhaps I can find a way to change that, so I'm going to end this post, and I apologize for how boring this first post is, but that's life. Can't all be winners.