Tag Archives: technology

Kevin Kelly's other blog

I have been a long-time subscriber to “Cool Tools”:http://www.kk.org/cooltools/index.php, a blog on Kevin Kelly’s site, “kk.org”:http://www.kk.org/index.php and highly recommend it. Basically any time he or someone else finds something they think is cool or especially useful, up it goes. I’ve discovered some great things reading Cool Tools (The “‘Allen and Mike’ camping books”:http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/000704.php and the “Sierra Stove”:http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/000012.php being two that have led to very wise purchases) but I didn’t realize there was more greatness to be had.
On the left side of the Cool Tools page there is a navigation menu of all the other things found at kk.org and one day for some reason I was actually on the site (instead of just reading the RSS feed) and I looked at all of them. The other blog I found was “Street Use”:http://www.kk.org/streetuse/index.php and it has been on my daily read ever since. This blog explores how people adapt objects and technology to suit their particular needs. For example, “this article”:http://www.kk.org/streetuse/archives/2007/01/phone_charging_booths_in_ugand.php is about improvised phone charging booths in Uganda.
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Keyboards: Dvorak

The layout of a QWERTY keyboard is a strange thing, I’ve always known that. Why have so many of the important keys not on the home row? Why force a single hand to type whole words like _million_ or _greatest_? I didn’t know the answer to this question but for some reason I spent most of this afternoon finding out. During my explorations I rediscovered the Dvorak keyboard layout, or DSK. My roommate Dave made the switch to Dvorak in college when he’d worked out how much faster he could type (all the world-record typists are Dvorak typists) but quickly abandoned it out of frustration that no other computers used the layout and he was often in and out of campus labs.
Well it turns out that the reason we are all using QWERTY instead of the clearly superior Dvorak is because the designing imperative back when the first typewriters were made was to *slow down* typists, trying to avoid key jams. Jared Diamond, the author of the seminal _Guns, Germs and Steel_, wrote a really insightful piece on the evolution of keyboard design in Discover magazine which you can find “here”:http://discovermagazine.com/1997/apr/thecurseofqwerty1099/.
I highly recommend the article and maybe even trying Dvorak out for yourself, I just switched myself and while slow at first I can see how this will be much better.

Exploding laptop batteries

Laptop batteries have been exploding for a long time, but it’s been a phenomenon I’d largely ignored until now when I read an “Inquirer article”:http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=38176 about a MacBook exploding this morning. Then I went in search of evidence. I found this “video”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeWq6rWzChw&mode=related&search= and I realized that when they say exploding, they actually do mean *exploding.*

According to an article on the subject at “Howstuffworks.com”:http://computer.howstuffworks.com/dell-battery-fire.htm , these explosions/meltings/fires are caused by small amounts of metal floating in the lithium fluid piercing the separation walls between the cells, causing a short circuit. Bad luck eh?

Russian theatres jam cell phones

Here’s a “link”:http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=38057 to a posting on TheInquirer.net about two theatres in St. Petersburg who got so frustrated at patrons not silencing their mobiles, they simply jammed the signal. Sure it violates some rights, but it might be less annoying than those ‘turn off your cell phone’ PSAs they run in the movie theaters in the States.

South Korea to draft first "Robots' Rights" legislation

A five-member committee will release The Robot Ethics Charter in Rome sometime in April. Obviously South Korea is the most technologically advanced and connected in the world but I didn’t think this was going to happen for quite some time. Artificial intelligence and the ethical ramifications of ‘machines with dreams’ have long been the subject of science fiction work starting with Isaac Asimov’s “rules of robotics” from the 1942 story, _Runaround_ that featured in _I, Robot_ . I’m very much looking forward to the Charter’s announcement and will report it here when it happens. In the meantime, here’s a more in-depth look by the BBC. “article”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6425927.stm

Linux phone line-up

Mobile phones sold by US providers are routinely handicapped and DRM-ed up to their retractable antennae. Whether it’s only playing Verizon songs on Verizon phones or the ridiculous per-MB data rates they charge, we in the States are way behind the technology curve. That’s all about to change. The world of cellular communication is about to be revolutionized by the increasing capacity of WiFi enabled phones and VOIP applications. At the forefront of this movement are “these phones”:http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2007/03/eight_great_lin.html reviewed by Wired Magazine. All of them are open source and therefore user-modifiable. I can hear the sirens’ song of ‘free calling’ already. I can’t wait to see how corporate America kills this golden-egg laying goose.
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The Gupp Phreedom

Bullet-proof, the new trend in laptop marketing

They say good things come in threes. Well if that’s true then sometime in the near future there’s going to be a Sony Vaio sporting a bullet wound because Panasonic and Apple already have their scars. In one of the stranger coincidences to hit mobile computing, there have been two stories this month about computers stopping bullets for their owners, the first was this Panasonic Toughbook used by US soldiers in Iraq:

It’s sad when our military personnel have more heavily armored computers than humvees, but I think that’s a different discussion. The second computer to take a licking was this MacBook Pro which, according to this “Wired article,”:http://blog.wired.com/cultofmac/2007/02/bullet_doesnt_s.html earned its purple heart in a Brazilian mugging.

It seems there is actually a reason that people pay a premium for titanium computer casing, this thing still works!

Miniature chain mail invented by University of Illinois scientists

Science fiction counts on certain facts, one of those is wearable technology. Clothes that change color to match the wearer’s surroundings, external health monitors à la Starship Troopers, and even full body computers like the ones sported by gargoyles in Snow Crash. All of these presume that we can in fact wear technology. Well, today we mortals are one step closer to that reality as scientists at the University of Illinois have invented a fabric made up of 500 micron wide chain-mail links capable of transmitting electrical signals across its surface. Brilliant!
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A link to the “University of Illinois homepage”:http://www.uiuc.edu and “another”:http://www.newscientisttech.com/article/dn11220-microscopic-chainmail-could-link-wearable-gadgets.html to a New Scientist article about the discovery.

The easiest way to win a war is to say you've won

In a move straight out of George Bush”s playbook, Sony has declared the format war between HD-DVD and Sony”s BluRay. Apparently BluRay outsold HD-DVD 2 to 1 in January and are using the numbers to declare their platform to be the victor of this quick, Sumo-like clash of the titans. I didn”t actually think of this story, or the analogy, both come from the irreverent technology news site “the Inquirer”:http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=37592 .