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Despite only attracting "only" 110,000 attendees, there was still a lot to see and a lot of fun had at 2009's Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas. First impressions were downbeat, but we found things to look positive about and ended up having a great time with some of the tech toys we'll be seeing on the streets this year.
Top of the stack was the Pre, a good-looking smartphone that turned Palm's press from tragedy to triumph in a matter of hours. There are seven features that make it better than the iPhone. Don't miss Joel and John's hands-on coverage.
We also took a look at Sony's amazing Vaio P notebook. Though the company hates it when people call it a netbook, it's hard not to notice the resemblance: an Intel Atom-powered lightweight 1.4lb laptop with a 9" display, full keyboard and up to 6 hours battery life. Here's the announcement and the hands-on review. We fawned over it, we did.
LG came up with the first not-awful cellphone wristwatch; Casio announced a point-and-shoot digicam with the same features as the fancy EX-F1; Sharp announced televisions, and Netgear had a TV streaming box almost as small as a deck of cards.
There were hands-on playtime with the OQO model 02+ and other new pocket PCs and MYVU's latest video glasses. John had a strange encounter with Disney zombies and pirate play at the Toshiba press event.
We also covered new gear from Dell, Samsung, Toshiba, Monster Cable, HP (more), Netgear and Logitech.
Not enough? There was also another show called MacWorld, should you be interested in $3,000 laptops.
Boing Boing Gadgets at CES
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The girls, Vigneswari and Masiakanni, dressed up in traditional bridal finery -- gilded sarees and gold jewellery -- married the frog 'princes' in separate, elaborate ceremonies at two different temples in the presence of hundreds of villagers.Two minor girls married off to frogsAmidst chanting of vedic hymns, the temple priests garlanded the brides and tied the magalsutras on behalf of the frogs pronouncing the two as wives of the amphibians before the sacred fire at the auspicious hour.
The villagers threw themselves into the ceremonies with gusto. While residents living in the western part of the village acted as relatives of the brides and those from the eastern part play-acted as relatives of the grooms. The ceremonies had all the usual elements of a traditional marriage including a sumptuous feast.
However, unlike the fairy tale `Frog Prince', where the ugly toad turns into a handsome prince when the princess kisses it, the Villupuram village belles bid their amphibian grooms goodbye and lead a normal life thereafter. As for the terrified frogs, they are thrown back into the temple ponds after the ceremony.
Episode two of The Oracle, Max Keiser's irreverant, curmudgeonly finance show on BBC World aired yesterday and it's up on YouTube today -- all financial coverage should be this good.
Here's a useful primer on whole-house rainwater catchment systems:
In many areas of the country, a water-conserving household can provide for all its water needs from what it can catch off its roof. If the graywater and potentially the blackwater/humanure is also recycled for landscaping, each home can become an independent and sustainable part of the local ecology. We often speak of living off our annual income of solar energy, so it makes sense that we should try to live off our annual income of rainwater as well.
Does anyone have documentation on DIY blackwater systems?
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Enter the alternative universe of Jake Von Slatt, a leading Steampunk Maker, who turns modern technology into Victorian works of art. In the Maker Workshop, John Park mounts a remote control camera on a painter's pole to take stunning aerial photographs, and Cy Tymony demonstrates some sneaky uses for magnets. The Maker Channel presents a theremin orchestra, a smoke ring generator, a pulse-jet bike, and a video-hack method to paste yourself with a beer into congressional hearings on C-SPAN. Visit Blip to watch in HD.
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Jake Von Slatt invites us into the alternate universe of Steampunk. As leading figures in the Boston arts community, members of Steampunk combine the power of modern technology with the grace and intricacy of Victorian design. Working with brass, recycled items and found objects, Jake and other Steampunkers party like it's 1899, bringing old-world, steam engined-inspired touches to everything from computers to flatscreen television. Plus, watch the story of steam power, from the first crude water pump to a bionic arm. Watch the clip, and visit steampunkworkshop.com.
Get the m4v or subscribe in iTunes. Or watch on YouTube or Blip.
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Want to see the world from a decidedly different point of view? Join John Park as he makes a Sky Eye / Polecam. This pole-mounted camera is fashioned from servo motors, a digital camera, and a standard remote control. John took it to the zoo to snap some sky-high shots; where will you take yours?
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The companion PDF that will help guide you through the Pole Camera project. Be sure to watch the original segment!
The Podcast is available here..
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In this 'Sneaky Gadgets' segment, Cy Tymony demonstrates some innovative and sometimes stealthy uses for magnets. Tired of zippers and buttons? Make like Cy, and insert magnets into your clothing as an E-Z fastener. This prolific Los Angeles-based author and Maker also offers other accessible projects that are great to try with young makers; check out Cy at sneakyuses.com
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Here are this week's Maker Channel videos from Make: television.
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We need your video for our upcoming season! Tell us about it at makerchannel.org
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This week:
"One-Chip" Arduino, Making Dot Paintings w/ Bubble Wrap, More Decochari, Recotana's
AVR-based OSC Server, Gundam Bento, Life Preservers Replaced With Recycled DIY Flotation Devices, Making Glasses From the Bottoms of Bottles.
Photo credit: Rogers
Furthermore, today digest points to an interesting MIT experiment devoted to try out new teaching approaches. MIT is gradually dropping long lectures, and focusing on smaller classes where learners can collaborate and interact with each other more actively. A small and intimate learning environment is the best way to let students improve their skills.
And from such a view it should appear as comforting news that such a long-established and respected academic institution decides to try a different solution where teachers and learners can truly share their knowledge, instead of being just put together in the same room following the sterile approach "I teach, you learn".
If you want to know more on alternative teaching approaches, and understand better the disruptive changes that our educational system is facing, this weekly digest with George Siemens is a good starting point to get more involved.
Here all the details:
I’ve whined before about how web 2.0 was / is a threat to open source software. Open source is an ideology (although watered down from Stallman’s initial version) about openness, democracy, and participation.
Web 2.0 is about free of cost. It’s a soul-less version of open source that relies on certain external conditions for its existence. Ideologies can outlive many waves of change. It’s too early to say that web 2.0 is on the wane due to economic pressures, but a concept tied to external realities (markets, politics) will always be challenged to live in tumultuous times.
Web 2.0 Called; It Says It’s Just An Ad Platform Now: “Time and time again, many of the most innovative services online today run out of money before the huge number of potential and diverse users that could find value in them end up discovering them. Those services end up serving instead the world of advertising, or as is the case with many of the most awe inspiring research technologies - financial services professionals.”
Pew Internet’s recent report - Adults and Social Network Sites (.pdf) - doesn’t offer anything dramatically new for those who have been active in online social networking sites.
Of greatest interest is the growth over the last three years - 35% of adults have a profile, four times the number from 2005… but significantly less than the 65% of teens with a SN profile. As is often the case with new technology adoption, the percentages decline with age (down to only 7% for those in the 65+ category).
The adoption of SN sites does reveal some interesting distinctions by race and income: non-whites are more likely to use these services and use declines as income increases.
Aside from winning the most awkward new term - courseocentricism (why not just course-centricism?) - this article makes a compelling case for the limitations of current views of courses. The author appeals for ending course silos as a way to improve consistency across curriculum and thereby produce a more integrated or connected body of knowledge. From the article:
"At a time when amazing new forms of connectivity are made possible by new digital technologies and when much of the best recent work in the humanities has made us more aware of the social and collective nature of intellectual work, we still think of teaching in ways that are narrowly private and individualistic, as something we do in isolated classrooms with little or no knowledge of what our colleagues are doing in the next classroom or the next building and little chance for each other’s courses to become reference points in our own."I like the idea of thinning our classroom walls and allowing connections to be formed between concepts from other subject areas. But that responsibility shouldn’t rest on the educator. “Getting on the same page” (author’s words) seems a bit at odds with opening up class rooms. We need to all get on our own page, form our own connections, our own understanding of different fields. It seems that the desire still runs high for educators to apply increased organization when problems become intractable. What is really needed is a complete letting go of our organization schemes and open concepts up to the self / participatory / chaotic sensemaking processes that flourish in online environments.
The season of predictions is upon us. I’ve never been fully convinced of the value of predictions (if someone says 2009 is the year of the mobile phone, what does that mean to me? What should I do differently? Use my phone more? Text more?).
Ironically, the value of predictions is less in what they predict… and more in how they provide a framework for existing trends. Predictions that only look one year into the future are really a “pause and reflect” activity.
A few recent articles / predictions:
It’s encouraging to see universities adopting different approaches to teaching.
While research on the so-called learning sciences is not fully settled, enough is understood about learning to warrant significant reconsideration of how teaching occurs in universities.
At M.I.T., Large Lectures Are Going the Way of the Blackboard:
The physics department has replaced the traditional large introductory lecture with smaller classes that emphasize hands-on, interactive, collaborative learning. Last fall, after years of experimentation and debate and resistance from students, who initially petitioned against it, the department made the change permanent. Already, attendance is up and the failure rate has dropped by more than 50 percent.Changes of this nature still occur within the existing structure of universities. The next, somewhat obvious, question to tackle is “how should universities be structured when access to information and ability to create learning networks shift from instructor to learner control?”.
Conferences are terrific opportunities for meeting colleagues, encountering new ideas, and getting as sense of what’s happening “over there”. For dissemination of knowledge (information, really, but knowledge is the term most people relate to), few processes are more valuable.
But conferences can be frustrating. Very frustrating. Who hasn’t encountered the joy of sitting in a conference room, listening to droning presentations, feeling as if though they’ve lost the “which session is going to be the least bad” lottery from the program brochure?
Several years ago, I was asked to join the ED-MEDIA steering committee. As a group, they have been very willing to entertain different approaches for improving the conference.
Now, under the umbrella of AACE, we’re pleased to announce Spaces of Interaction: An online conversation on improving traditional conferences. (Ning site for the event).
The discussion happens February 18-20, 2009. It’s free. It’s online. And it’s open. If you’re a conference organizer, sit on a conference committee, or attend conferences, we’d love to hear your input on how the experience can be improved.
You may find this article - Conference Connections: rewiring the circuit - to be a useful lead up to the online event.
I met with an individual today who is creating a virtual world for young teens. The project is conceived as serving a niche market. Of course, we all feel our ideas are unique or our particular circumstance is different from others. I left the meeting with a sense of “why are people still building these things? why not take advantage of infrastructure that is already in place?”.
Operating systems and platforms that are used as the base of innovation are increasingly free. The value is in the creativity and innovation unleashed by many contributors. Google gets this. That’s why they announced OpenSocial. And Android. Competition based on openness.
Stephen Downes continues his reflection / future thinking with What Not to Build (this follows his important Future of Online Learning: 10 Years On). In this (shorter) paper, he offers advice to the elearning industry on what not to build… what is being built… what is a fad… and what might be worth building.
I don’t agree with all of his statements. iPhones are hyped, but I don’t think they are a fad… though Android and RIM may impact their market share.
Cloud computing will not be noticed because, well, that’s the point. The technology becomes transparent. People are already “using the cloud” without being fully aware of it. This may depend on how one defines cloud computing - i.e. if it includes Google Docs, Gmail, MobileMe, and other hardware / software applications that don’t confine computing to a particular device - then I don’t think it’s a fad.
Those two small points aside, Stephen has written a good article that will make edtech professionals rethink future / emerging projects.
To learn more about George Siemens and to access extensive information and resources on elearning check out www.elearnspace.org. Explore also George Siemens connectivism site for resources on the changing nature of learning and check out his new book "Knowing Knowledge".
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This past Thursday's Handmade music night was totally packed! Curious minds braved the cold Brooklyn winter to see some sweet projects firsthand. I managed to grab some video and chat a bit with the event's head honcho Peter Kirn which you'll see above. I know these gatherings are just going to get better and better - see you @ the next one!
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Why use the denigrating term "freaking out" to describe software publishers who act to protect their assets and revenues by using an effective DRM solution or by pursuing action against people that steal from them? Wouldn't you do the same?The term "freaking out" was descriptive and, I believe, accurate. Many software developers get so focused on unauthorized access and file sharing of their software that they miss out on the fact that there are business models they could adopt where that issue goes away. They miss out on the fact that throughout history, so called "piracy" has almost always opened up new, and much larger, markets. So, "freaking out" is proper. It shows a response that is out of proportion with what would be a reasonable solution, such as figuring out a way to take that activity and use it to their own advantage.
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One of the persistent themes I noticed at Wednesday's patent conference at the Brookings Institution is that most of the lawyers seemed to assume that if the legal system ultimately reaches the right conclusion—invalidating a bad patent, say—that this means that the patent system is working well. Some panelists suggested that the Bilski decision, which struck down one particularly egregious "business method" patent, shows that there's not really a problem, because the courts are recognizing the problems with bad patents and correcting them. They seemed not to fully appreciate how slow and expensive the legal system is. One only has to think back to the great BlackBerry showdown to see that having the legal system eventually invalidate a bad patent may not be good enough. Even if the law is on the side of an accused patent infringer, the time, expense, and uncertainty of litigation can kill the firm before its rights can be vindicated in court.
I think the right way to think about patent reform is not whether the courts eventually reach the right result, but whether the system is predictable enough that you can tell in advance what the law requires, without hiring a patent lawyer. After all, this is how well-designed property rights systems work. I didn't need to hire a property lawyer to tell me who owns the apartment I'm living in—the rules of real property are predictable enough that I could figure it out on my own. The vast majority of property transactions are the same way—lawyers only get involved in exceptional cases that involve large sums of money or tricky legal issues. By the same token, if we're going to have patents on software (or in any other industry), they should be few enough and clear enough that a smart entrepreneur can figure out in advance, without the help of a lawyer, which patents he needs to license. If our current patent system isn't living up to that standard, the solution isn't to come up with ever-more-complex legal doctrines trying to separate the "good" vague patents from the bad ones. Rather, the solution is to restrict patenting to those fields where it's possible to make things clear and predictable. If that's not possible in some industry (and I suspect it's not in software), then that's a sign that patents aren't an effective way to promote innovation in that industry.
Timothy Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.
Today on Offworld we saw an elaborate scientific study on gravity's weight in Super Mario's Mushroom Kingdom, looked at vintage game ads that brazenly promoted their (actually non-existent) gratuitous violence, and saw one developer doing recruitment ads very right.
We also read how the head of Harmonix wants to revive their original cult music-game Amplitude and move onto the iPhone, played Oregon Trail and other Apple II classics in our browsers, read more vintage tales on the making of Doom, and wondered whether the recession was the perfect time to create an indie game.
Finally, we saw a new designer art-pack coming to LittleBigPlanet, prepared for the Adult Swim debut of Offworld favorite brit-com Look Around You with its best games related clip, and, most wonderfully and belatedly, played Gravity Bone, a game that would have easily made The Offworld 20 if only I'd played it sooner.
Also: invites for our three-way Planetside blog-war should be going out soon -- I suggest joining Offworld's Facebook group for more coordinating and pre-game strategery.
Now, I have no problem with the company, Little Trees, that makes those "car-fresheners" enforcing their trademarks when there's a real violation of the trademark, but it seems quite odd to become so proactive that you would take out an ad specifically warning people that it's a trademark violation "no matter how you use it." That, of course, is false and a misstatement of trademark law... as is the information on Little Trees' own web page about its trademark, where the company incorrectly claims that "the law requires that we take action when someone is using them without permission."
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I like the looks of this electronic compass sensor paired with an Arduino protoshield. It would be fun to drive a servomotor with this data, to create a digital/analog compass.
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If you plan your panoramic shot sequences just a bit, there are some great Open Source tools that will help you to stitch the photos together into a single panoramic image. Here's a great tutorial on using Hugin and Autopano in Ubuntu to automate the alignment, correct for lens distortion at the seams, and adjust exposure levels.
I keep seeing these commercials for Windows Vista and their new panoramic photo maker. Knowing how the Linux hacker scene is, anything that someone makes there is almost guarenteed to be a Linux project to make something close. Well guess what, there is a really easy way to make panoramic photos from multiple still shots in Ubuntu! Further, not only am I going to tell you how to do this, I will show you with some shots of my own.
I've actually used these same tools on the Windows side as well, but getting everything installed and set up is a breeze in Ubuntu. The tools correct for a lot, but for best results it always seems to work better for me if I use a tripod and set everything to all-manual so that the photos don't have any major exposure or perspective differences.
Do you have any recommendations for producing the best panoramic photos?
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This is truly aggressive upcycling:
The De Vrouwe van Stavoren Hotel in the Netherlands salvaged four wine casks from Switzerland and converted them into rooms. Formerly filled with 14,500 liters of Beaujolais wine from the French chateau, each now holds a modest two-person room with standard amenities and even an attached bathroom and sitting room. Visitors from all around the world have traveled to the quaint northern port town of Stavoren to stay in one of these upcycled rooms.
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