It'll have to wait for e-ink in color, but I'm looking forward to a digital photo frame that uses it. No power consumption while holding a static image - with a change per hour (or day even?) a slow refresh won't matter - high resolution, with an awesome field of view. It'll be a perfect implementation of the technology.
I had a dell Axim - windows mobile crashed at least weekly with anything more than the default software - reseting to default in the process, and I waited patiently for over a year for the linux drivers to enable wifi on it before giving up. I have a chumby and am happy with it - it makes a cool clock, wakes me up to MPR, flashes the weather, my google calendar, and hopefully at some point lots more (RSS feed to my online to-do list). Hopefully I'll never again live somewhere that I'd have to worry about checking on traffic before I get up, but it can do that, too. I'd like to program it to tie into a home automation system, so when I hit 'snooze' it brings up the lights (if it's dark) and turns on the heater in the bathroom (if it's cold), and has a screen to monitor and control the lights and thermostat manually - it's a few places down on my 'todo' list.
The resolution is pretty bad for photos, and the field of view isn't great - especially vertically, for some reason - but I still think it's great as a 'bedside computer', and love the fact that it's 'open' and has only begun to scratch the surface of what can be done with it.
I just got my 'Nerdkits' USB version (www.nerdkits.com) which includes an atmel chip, breadboard, misc wires / leds / fun stuff, and an LCD display to play with. My intention is to try some of the basics, and then see if I can follow along with some of MIT's 'open university' courses in electronics (The Nerdkits are sold by some MIT students, if I understand correctly). I'll eventually get an arduino to play with, but I thought the 'nerdkit' was a better basic starter. The 'serial wombat' also looks interesting - www.serialwombat.com. I have one of the older editions of 'The Art of Electronics' from my (largely failed) college days which I've been meaning to update to a current version and dive back into - my recollection is that it's a fine text. I've been told that a good quality soldering iron is a joy to use compared to the basic ones, but haven't made the investment yet.
Great thread; I'm going to compile a list and hit amazon later today.
My goal is to do more 'home automation' projects. Happy (hardware) hacking!
I've got one of the (now defunct) fingerworks keyboards (the precurser to the multi-touch, prior to Apple buying them out of existence) and it really isn't that bad to touch-type on - you just have to sit square to the keyboard, or your fingers don't hit the right area of the keyboard on the 'fringe' keys. I love the fact that you don't have to move your hands off the keyboard to use the 'mouse', and the chording makes for great keyboard shortcuts. There is nominal stress, since it takes just the slightest contact with the surface to register a keystroke. I think it would suck to have it on a screen that you were trying to use for a display, though - unless it were some version of the 'Optimus Maximus' with combo oled and multitouch.
I'd love to see a product with the idea someone had for multi-touch on the backside of a cell phone and a screen on the front, with a 'ghosted' fingerprint on the display to indicate where you were touching - no issues with the hand blocking the screen, reduced fingerprints on screen problems - very clever - although typing would require a whole new technique to be learned before it wouldn't suck.
I don't see why they couldn't take 2-3 pictures over a brief time period (a few hours, maybe a day or two), and 'diff' the people out of them - like the satellite images of the earth with the clouds removed. It would take a little longer, but remove pretty much all of the controversy - and give more un-obstructed views to boot.
Swatch actually called it '.beat' time - 1000 'beats' per day, written '@345' (the 345th beat since midnight at Swatch headquarters in Switzerland). I've still got my swatch '.beat' watch - with the groovy animated dog. I really liked the watch - it had the easiest to use extended features of any watch I'd had to date, but they really missed out in not including a simple way to convert.beat time back and forth to regular time. There should have been a way to (for example) set alarms in one or the other format and switch between them. All in all it was a nifty gimmick, and a great way to get the weirdest looks from people. WHEN?!?!
Note that the online activation is completely optional for the IronKey. I've had one for a while, and am satisfied with it, other than the time it's taking them to release Linux support (beta should be coming out shortly).
The anonymous browsing works well. I haven't had as much luck with the password-keeper feature. Note that so far only basic file access works on OSX, but it works easily.
I opted for the online activation, and used the password recovery successfully - and am glad I got to test that instead of the '10 guesses and the drive dies' feature.
In general, IronKey seems to have a healthy philosophy toward security; I've recommended it often (not that any one has listened). They are still a fairly new organization and I think they still have a few internal growth issues to work out, but they seem to be coming along nicely.
"If Congress didn't have the power (PackMan97)" - I agree completely, and so does the Cato institute - http://www.cato.org/pubs/handbook/hb109/index.html. I think the best route for removing corruption is to reduce (significantly) the power wielded by the federal government and the nearly endless bureaucracies that have grown uncontrollably underneath it. Just adding more layers of government to try and reign in the existing government is only going to make things worse. To the largest extent possible taxes should be collected, and decisions made to reallocate it as close to the taxpayer as possible - local cities, townships, counties, states - the further removed the decision to spend the taxpayer's money, the less accountable the decision maker is to the taxpayer and the more likely the ability to spend the money will be abused - and the more money will be available for abuse. A crooked city official may have a pet porkbarrel project, but his budget will be pocket change compared to federal dollars, and he'll have a much harder time hiding it from his neighbors.
I also like the way the 'fair tax' removes much of the governments power by doing away with the 'social engineering' aspects of taxes, and thus the temptation for special interests to influence government to manipulate the tax system to their benefit - www.fairtax.org.
I loved lessig's 'copyright culture' book - I wish him luck. I'd love to see someone with sense in a position to balance some of the idiocy currently generated in the US government - and hopefully serve as a role model to counteract some pretty dumb ideas being floated in other countries - http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/14/1626228
I'm looking for the same thing - but I'd like to leverage the hardware component, too. Is there a reasonably convenient way to use the RSA keys or something else on one of the 'trustbearer' devices? Having single-sign on to a handful of websites would be handy, but I'm more interested in tighter security for non-web stuff. If it is supported by OpenID I'd say that's a bonus.
I can confirm that - my iPod ('color' 30g) crashed at about 11000 feet (I think the specs rate it to 10,000). I managed to revive it, but I don't think it's been quite the same since. I'd suggest looking into an 'eee' pc - all solid state, and cheap enough to get a spare. http://eeepc.asus.com/
I'm glad that's working for you in Finland. The current reality in the US is that there are unbelievable amounts of detailed information scattered all over - medical information at various hospitals and with insurance companies, credit information with banks and credit tracking companies - and the IRS and Social Security, retail information with credit cards and various merchant cards for marketing purposes, phone and ISP records - the list is nearly endless. None of it is information I have direct control over (other than to use cash and communicate in person). It's tough to even discover an error, let alone be able to correct it. Even though it's all information *about me*, none of it is *mine*. Every time I visit a new clinic I have to fill out pages of medical history - which is generally inaccurate, since I end up doing from memory. Heaven forbid I get in an accident and a new hospital needs to try and find my medical records. Any credit applications are about as bad. You are fooling yourself if you think the government doesn't have pretty easy access to as much of that information as they care to sift through; I'd be tickled to be able to have that same convenience - it's not like I'm not already paying the price of compromising my privacy; where's my convenience?
My fear is that information will only continue to be more centralized and available to be used against me (at the very least by mass-marketers and spammers, even if the government can somehow avoid abusing the information), without my being able to make use of it myself - or in any way oversee how it is used, or even how accurate it is, beyond indirectly via elected officials, who have a poor history of making decisions based on the will of large campaign contributors regardless of individual privacy or constitutional limits.
I'd LOVE to have a 'database society' - as long as I was in control of all my own information. It could be certified for accuracy by a trusted outside party, and I'd have to authorize every query and could control the scope of information allowed to be seen. Any unauthorized query would be a punishable offense, any duplicate uncertified. An unworkable pipe dream of sci-fi proportions, no doubt.
I don't have a problem with the actor getting paid to make the movie, but why should he KEEP getting paid every time the movie is viewed? Would you agree to give $5 to the plumber every time you flush the toilet? Another $2 every time you turn on the tap at your kitchen sink? A monthly fee per faucet? For the lifetime of the plumber, plus 100 years? The plumber gets a cut when you sell the house - or worse, you can't sell the house - because you are only paying for the 'right' to live in it, not re-sell it, even though you *paid* for it? Pay extra for more than five guests to use your plumbing? You can pour water into a cup - but not a canteen?
I sure wish I could get paid every time a bit goes through one of the switches I've configured, for the rest of my life, plus 100 years.
This doesn't feel right without a car analogy... would you pay GM every time you pull your car out of the garage?
I was really impressed with the improvements we got by implementing some 'smoke and mirrors' from Riverbed (http://www.riverbed.com/). Granted, we've got some reasonably adequate bandwidth to start with, but it dropped the WAN traffic to our large (500 user) remote site by a good 80%.
They seemed mighty expensive for a plain dell server with CentOS, but there's no arguing with results./reminds self to look into riverbed stock
I'm anxiously awaiting FOSS to actually DO something in the cellular world. I'm about ready to learn how to write code just to help push things forward with the Neo1973 (as it is, I'd only slow it down). I can already taste full mobile access and synchronization with my google mail, contacts and calendar, asterisk sorting and routing the calls right on my cell phone, and cellular companies starting the long slide back to being just the carriers they started out as, and no longer dictating what I can do with my end-user device.
Oh - and I'm really enjoying seeing the MAFIAA slowly realizing that consumers just aren't buying DRM.
and I found "In Code: a young woman's mathematical journey" by Sarah Flannery to be a great read about how a young girl became a math wiz and develops her own cryptographic algorithm for a pan-european science project. It's written in the first person, and gives a great picture of what it's like to live a life that includes math. I'm not all the way through - I wanted to wait until I had access to the software so I could follow along with the examples in the book, but I was really inspired by what I've read so far. more info: http://plus.maths.org/issue14/reviews/book2/index. html
Best of luck inspiring young minds to take on these challenges when there are so many other flashier distractions.
I consider my right to travel anywhere I want freely a part of my right to privacy.
I frequently fly a small plane over rural (very flat) Minnesota, and there is no radar coverage at lower altitudes. I assume filing a flight plane for a local flight at low altitudes in mountanous terrain would be very similar and there would be little benefit over telling someone at the airport about where you are headed and about when you'll be back (which he did). If he was flying low there's a good chance he wasn't even able to make radio contact with any controllers.
Unlike most missing persons searches, Steve vanished with a 20' x 20' plane as a marker, which hasn't been spotted in nearly a week of searching. Good luck finding the more common single person using satellite (well, any satellite that the public gets access to, anyway). I don't think he's really being treated that much differently than anyone else.
I fly with the Civil Air Patrol, and think it's awesome that I can sit at my desk and help with the search without having to burn gas or worry about hitting a mountain.
I think you guys are awesome for pitching in - keep up the good work!
I've still got a FingerWorks keyboard in my Powerbook Ti - it was a drop-in replacement, and it rocks. I really love the fact you don't have to move your fingers off the keyboard to move the mouse (and that they offered a native Dvorak layout). I'd spend the night on Apple's front doorstep to be first in line to get a new Powerbook with an integrated Dvorak Fingerworks keyboard - but I'm not holding my breath. If they build it into the display, though - you still have to take your hands off the keyboard. Multi Touch does make playing games a challenge - where a 'normal' keyboard will detect two key presses independently (arrow up/arrow right moves diagonally), the FingerWorks sees one 'multitouch', so you have to define distinct functions for every required combination - although a seperate controller is the obvious solution for that.
Slashdot Mirror
It'll have to wait for e-ink in color, but I'm looking forward to a digital photo frame that uses it. No power consumption while holding a static image - with a change per hour (or day even?) a slow refresh won't matter - high resolution, with an awesome field of view. It'll be a perfect implementation of the technology.
I had a dell Axim - windows mobile crashed at least weekly with anything more than the default software - reseting to default in the process, and I waited patiently for over a year for the linux drivers to enable wifi on it before giving up. I have a chumby and am happy with it - it makes a cool clock, wakes me up to MPR, flashes the weather, my google calendar, and hopefully at some point lots more (RSS feed to my online to-do list). Hopefully I'll never again live somewhere that I'd have to worry about checking on traffic before I get up, but it can do that, too. I'd like to program it to tie into a home automation system, so when I hit 'snooze' it brings up the lights (if it's dark) and turns on the heater in the bathroom (if it's cold), and has a screen to monitor and control the lights and thermostat manually - it's a few places down on my 'todo' list. The resolution is pretty bad for photos, and the field of view isn't great - especially vertically, for some reason - but I still think it's great as a 'bedside computer', and love the fact that it's 'open' and has only begun to scratch the surface of what can be done with it.
Brian Capouch has set up something similar with low-end netgear routers and asterisk in rural Indiana - http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/etel2006/view/e_spkr/2202 He's given several presentations, but I'm not sure what the current status is.
I just got my 'Nerdkits' USB version (www.nerdkits.com) which includes an atmel chip, breadboard, misc wires / leds / fun stuff, and an LCD display to play with. My intention is to try some of the basics, and then see if I can follow along with some of MIT's 'open university' courses in electronics (The Nerdkits are sold by some MIT students, if I understand correctly). I'll eventually get an arduino to play with, but I thought the 'nerdkit' was a better basic starter. The 'serial wombat' also looks interesting - www.serialwombat.com. I have one of the older editions of 'The Art of Electronics' from my (largely failed) college days which I've been meaning to update to a current version and dive back into - my recollection is that it's a fine text. I've been told that a good quality soldering iron is a joy to use compared to the basic ones, but haven't made the investment yet.
Great thread; I'm going to compile a list and hit amazon later today.
My goal is to do more 'home automation' projects. Happy (hardware) hacking!
I've got one of the (now defunct) fingerworks keyboards (the precurser to the multi-touch, prior to Apple buying them out of existence) and it really isn't that bad to touch-type on - you just have to sit square to the keyboard, or your fingers don't hit the right area of the keyboard on the 'fringe' keys. I love the fact that you don't have to move your hands off the keyboard to use the 'mouse', and the chording makes for great keyboard shortcuts. There is nominal stress, since it takes just the slightest contact with the surface to register a keystroke. I think it would suck to have it on a screen that you were trying to use for a display, though - unless it were some version of the 'Optimus Maximus' with combo oled and multitouch.
I'd love to see a product with the idea someone had for multi-touch on the backside of a cell phone and a screen on the front, with a 'ghosted' fingerprint on the display to indicate where you were touching - no issues with the hand blocking the screen, reduced fingerprints on screen problems - very clever - although typing would require a whole new technique to be learned before it wouldn't suck.
I don't see why they couldn't take 2-3 pictures over a brief time period (a few hours, maybe a day or two), and 'diff' the people out of them - like the satellite images of the earth with the clouds removed. It would take a little longer, but remove pretty much all of the controversy - and give more un-obstructed views to boot.
Swatch actually called it '.beat' time - 1000 'beats' per day, written '@345' (the 345th beat since midnight at Swatch headquarters in Switzerland). I've still got my swatch '.beat' watch - with the groovy animated dog. I really liked the watch - it had the easiest to use extended features of any watch I'd had to date, but they really missed out in not including a simple way to convert .beat time back and forth to regular time. There should have been a way to (for example) set alarms in one or the other format and switch between them. All in all it was a nifty gimmick, and a great way to get the weirdest looks from people. WHEN?!?!
Note that the online activation is completely optional for the IronKey. I've had one for a while, and am satisfied with it, other than the time it's taking them to release Linux support (beta should be coming out shortly).
The anonymous browsing works well. I haven't had as much luck with the password-keeper feature. Note that so far only basic file access works on OSX, but it works easily.
I opted for the online activation, and used the password recovery successfully - and am glad I got to test that instead of the '10 guesses and the drive dies' feature.
In general, IronKey seems to have a healthy philosophy toward security; I've recommended it often (not that any one has listened). They are still a fairly new organization and I think they still have a few internal growth issues to work out, but they seem to be coming along nicely.
"If Congress didn't have the power (PackMan97)" - I agree completely, and so does the Cato institute - http://www.cato.org/pubs/handbook/hb109/index.html. I think the best route for removing corruption is to reduce (significantly) the power wielded by the federal government and the nearly endless bureaucracies that have grown uncontrollably underneath it. Just adding more layers of government to try and reign in the existing government is only going to make things worse. To the largest extent possible taxes should be collected, and decisions made to reallocate it as close to the taxpayer as possible - local cities, townships, counties, states - the further removed the decision to spend the taxpayer's money, the less accountable the decision maker is to the taxpayer and the more likely the ability to spend the money will be abused - and the more money will be available for abuse. A crooked city official may have a pet porkbarrel project, but his budget will be pocket change compared to federal dollars, and he'll have a much harder time hiding it from his neighbors.
I also like the way the 'fair tax' removes much of the governments power by doing away with the 'social engineering' aspects of taxes, and thus the temptation for special interests to influence government to manipulate the tax system to their benefit - www.fairtax.org.
I loved lessig's 'copyright culture' book - I wish him luck. I'd love to see someone with sense in a position to balance some of the idiocy currently generated in the US government - and hopefully serve as a role model to counteract some pretty dumb ideas being floated in other countries - http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/14/1626228
I'm looking for the same thing - but I'd like to leverage the hardware component, too. Is there a reasonably convenient way to use the RSA keys or something else on one of the 'trustbearer' devices? Having single-sign on to a handful of websites would be handy, but I'm more interested in tighter security for non-web stuff. If it is supported by OpenID I'd say that's a bonus.
I can confirm that - my iPod ('color' 30g) crashed at about 11000 feet (I think the specs rate it to 10,000). I managed to revive it, but I don't think it's been quite the same since. I'd suggest looking into an 'eee' pc - all solid state, and cheap enough to get a spare. http://eeepc.asus.com/
I'm glad that's working for you in Finland. The current reality in the US is that there are unbelievable amounts of detailed information scattered all over - medical information at various hospitals and with insurance companies, credit information with banks and credit tracking companies - and the IRS and Social Security, retail information with credit cards and various merchant cards for marketing purposes, phone and ISP records - the list is nearly endless. None of it is information I have direct control over (other than to use cash and communicate in person). It's tough to even discover an error, let alone be able to correct it. Even though it's all information *about me*, none of it is *mine*. Every time I visit a new clinic I have to fill out pages of medical history - which is generally inaccurate, since I end up doing from memory. Heaven forbid I get in an accident and a new hospital needs to try and find my medical records. Any credit applications are about as bad. You are fooling yourself if you think the government doesn't have pretty easy access to as much of that information as they care to sift through; I'd be tickled to be able to have that same convenience - it's not like I'm not already paying the price of compromising my privacy; where's my convenience?
My fear is that information will only continue to be more centralized and available to be used against me (at the very least by mass-marketers and spammers, even if the government can somehow avoid abusing the information), without my being able to make use of it myself - or in any way oversee how it is used, or even how accurate it is, beyond indirectly via elected officials, who have a poor history of making decisions based on the will of large campaign contributors regardless of individual privacy or constitutional limits.
I'd LOVE to have a 'database society' - as long as I was in control of all my own information. It could be certified for accuracy by a trusted outside party, and I'd have to authorize every query and could control the scope of information allowed to be seen. Any unauthorized query would be a punishable offense, any duplicate uncertified. An unworkable pipe dream of sci-fi proportions, no doubt.
I don't have a problem with the actor getting paid to make the movie, but why should he KEEP getting paid every time the movie is viewed? Would you agree to give $5 to the plumber every time you flush the toilet? Another $2 every time you turn on the tap at your kitchen sink? A monthly fee per faucet? For the lifetime of the plumber, plus 100 years? The plumber gets a cut when you sell the house - or worse, you can't sell the house - because you are only paying for the 'right' to live in it, not re-sell it, even though you *paid* for it? Pay extra for more than five guests to use your plumbing? You can pour water into a cup - but not a canteen? I sure wish I could get paid every time a bit goes through one of the switches I've configured, for the rest of my life, plus 100 years. This doesn't feel right without a car analogy... would you pay GM every time you pull your car out of the garage?
I was really impressed with the improvements we got by implementing some 'smoke and mirrors' from Riverbed (http://www.riverbed.com/). Granted, we've got some reasonably adequate bandwidth to start with, but it dropped the WAN traffic to our large (500 user) remote site by a good 80%. They seemed mighty expensive for a plain dell server with CentOS, but there's no arguing with results. /reminds self to look into riverbed stock
I'm anxiously awaiting FOSS to actually DO something in the cellular world. I'm about ready to learn how to write code just to help push things forward with the Neo1973 (as it is, I'd only slow it down). I can already taste full mobile access and synchronization with my google mail, contacts and calendar, asterisk sorting and routing the calls right on my cell phone, and cellular companies starting the long slide back to being just the carriers they started out as, and no longer dictating what I can do with my end-user device. Oh - and I'm really enjoying seeing the MAFIAA slowly realizing that consumers just aren't buying DRM.
I'd like to add a couple -
/ item.aspx?itemid=2805613
. html
as a kid I really enjoyed the 'Cosmos' TV series by Carl Sagan. It's available on DVD -
http://stores.channeladvisor.com/Movie-Mars/items
and I found "In Code: a young woman's mathematical journey" by Sarah Flannery to be a great read about how a young girl became a math wiz and develops her own cryptographic algorithm for a pan-european science project. It's written in the first person, and gives a great picture of what it's like to live a life that includes math. I'm not all the way through - I wanted to wait until I had access to the software so I could follow along with the examples in the book, but I was really inspired by what I've read so far.
more info: http://plus.maths.org/issue14/reviews/book2/index
Best of luck inspiring young minds to take on these challenges when there are so many other flashier distractions.
I'd just like to point out a couple things:
I consider my right to travel anywhere I want freely a part of my right to privacy.
I frequently fly a small plane over rural (very flat) Minnesota, and there is no radar coverage at lower altitudes. I assume filing a flight plane for a local flight at low altitudes in mountanous terrain would be very similar and there would be little benefit over telling someone at the airport about where you are headed and about when you'll be back (which he did). If he was flying low there's a good chance he wasn't even able to make radio contact with any controllers.
Unlike most missing persons searches, Steve vanished with a 20' x 20' plane as a marker, which hasn't been spotted in nearly a week of searching. Good luck finding the more common single person using satellite (well, any satellite that the public gets access to, anyway). I don't think he's really being treated that much differently than anyone else.
I fly with the Civil Air Patrol, and think it's awesome that I can sit at my desk and help with the search without having to burn gas or worry about hitting a mountain.
I think you guys are awesome for pitching in - keep up the good work!
(back to searching...)
I've still got a FingerWorks keyboard in my Powerbook Ti - it was a drop-in replacement, and it rocks. I really love the fact you don't have to move your fingers off the keyboard to move the mouse (and that they offered a native Dvorak layout). I'd spend the night on Apple's front doorstep to be first in line to get a new Powerbook with an integrated Dvorak Fingerworks keyboard - but I'm not holding my breath. If they build it into the display, though - you still have to take your hands off the keyboard. Multi Touch does make playing games a challenge - where a 'normal' keyboard will detect two key presses independently (arrow up/arrow right moves diagonally), the FingerWorks sees one 'multitouch', so you have to define distinct functions for every required combination - although a seperate controller is the obvious solution for that.