Wearable PCs

Shawn writes "Interesting article on wearable PCs. Brief mention given to Linux / Beowulf, and 'an undershirt with 64 linked processors.' " God I'm a sucker for this stuff. "Hi, I'm Rob, and I wanna be a borg". This isn't anything really breaking or exciting, but its still neat.

Comments

Tech support for my underwear(underware?)

[wynlyndd]

"Thank you for calling the Help Desk. How may I help you?"

"Well, when I try to reboot my underwear, it just gives me a wedgie."

"What OS are you running on your underware, sir?"

"Microsoft Windows for Cotton Blends"

"Sorry sir. We can't help you. To fix this problem would require us to be able to unravel the source code and Microsoft doesn't allow that."

"But I chose Microsoft because it seemed Microsoft-y and smooth against my skin! Without fabric softner!"

"We're sorry. May we suggest the new distribution of Linux from Procter and Gamble?...."

Re:Tech support for my underwear(underware?)

[jabber]

"Well, when I try to reboot my underwear, it just gives me a wedgie."

"What OS are you running on your underware, sir?"

"Microsoft Windows for Cotton Blends"

"Well, sir, the only solution is to change your underwear to MS-NTLongJohns"

"But it's the middle of August, and we're in the middle of a heat wave. Also, I don't think I need all of that fabric"

"I realize that Sir. But the NTLongJohns are the only version of MS-underpants what don't give you a wedgie. And you're much less likely to suffer the terrible blue-ball of death with these than with the MS-Underoos95. The NTLongJohns also come with a convenient back-orifice flap for examining core-dumps."

No keyboard, twiddlers

[NYC]

I have met Thad Starner, and he, as well as most of the wearable community, uses a Twiddler. The Twiddler is a one-handed chorded keyboarded, which is amazingly fast if one knows how to use it.
--Ivan, weenie NT4 user, Jon Katz hater: bite me!

Re:Don't sweat yourselves..

[jabber]

Har, har!

This will give a whole new meaning to 'electrical shorts', won't it.

"Honey, would you iron and format my pants for me?"

I suppose the shirt will be marked 'dry clean only' huh? 'Wash separately, with like OS flavors'. I HATE those! I bet it will only come in beige.

But if a friend offers to give you the shirt off his back, it will actually be welcomed.

Thank you, I do birthdays, weddings.. I'm here all week.

Just get rid of the keyboard...

[rde]

The question remains: do we want to slip into our computers the way we slip into our clothing?
Well, I know I do.
However, this sort of thing is not practical with a keyboard. An alternative is necessary; I'd like to see something along the lines of a cyberglove that's used with a piano-like virtual keyboard; I believe the guy who invented the mouse made one of these (no urls handy, sorry) but it never took off.

"Hi, I'm Rob, and I wanna be a borg"

[Stephen Williams]

As soon as someone designs a computer than can be implanted into the skull, I'm going for it. If it requires cabling, circuitry etc. to be attached to the outside of my head, so much the better. I have a morbid fascination with becoming a mechanical freak.

Re:"Hi, I'm Rob, and I wanna be a borg"

[remande]

It sounds neat, and I'd consider it, but people keep forgetting one little detail.

Once the technology comes out, and you pay a doctor to drill a 10baseT port in your skull, Microsoft will release Brain 2.0.

And then you have to go to the doctor for the upgrade, or all the new stuff will give you an incompatibility headache when you plug it in.

Remember: cyber upgrades hurt.

How do you scrub the hard disk

[georgeha]

on the undershirt cluster? Do you use fdisk or Tide?

George

Powering wearables

[Tau Zero]

... it would be neat if the energy generated by walking and breathing could be used to power the wearable.

That seems easy enough, but you'd have to get used to having your clothing tight so that it could pull against your movements. Especially in warm places like SoCal, I could see this being unpopular. The alternative would be to have spandex-like clothes, which might be unsightly for many geeks.

I have given some thought to powering a laptop from muscle motion, and I concluded that reflexively bouncing your knee up and down (with your toe on the floor) could be tapped to generate enough power to run a modest computer. This does, however, makes it difficult to put a laptop on top of your lap. As long as you're walking around it would be trivial to generate some tens or hundreds of milliwatts from the flexing of the soles of your shoes; I put over a kilonewton of force on my foot when I step down, and 5 mm of motion is 5 joules right there. I don't see similar possibilities from breathing.