March 20, 2005
The Flickr blog just announced that Yahoo! has finally acquired Flickr. While Flickr is the only really useful photo sharing website on the net, it might be good to finally have a major player behind this. Let’s just hope that big Y does not cripple the platform as it did with it’s on groups before. It will also be interesting to see if and how Flickr will be integrated in Yahoo’s soon to be launched Blog Platform. The event is also discussed at Flickr Central.
Del.icio.us is a great web application, but the interface is just plain ugly to most users. Jeff Bostick has a short tutorial on how to make del.icio.us look a lot nicer. You need Firefox and either the URIid or the chromedit extension, as well as a stylesheet originally developed by Jon Hicks for use with the Mac.
March 19, 2005
In a five minute screencast, Jon Udell demonstrates the power of the social bookmark service del.icio.us. This is a great example of structuring and organising information by tagging and sharing.
TrackIR is a head mounted decvice that keeps track of a persons head movement. It allows to control FOV in racing and flight simulator games by simply moving the head. It works with infrared light and a camera on top of the display that recognizes the heads position. Price range is from $109 to $139 for the pro version.
Siemens have developed a a bluetooth powered device called Com Badge Home Communicator, which serves as a voice controlled remote for home communications and automation system. It can be worn like a badge or pin on clothes and is supposed to recognize 30,000 words. The user has to press the button on the device to activate it, which kind of resembles a well known Star Trek device.
Building complex structures from nanoscale objects is one of the bigger problems of nanotech scientists. A new approach developed at UW-Madison uses single bacterial cells to build bio-electronic circuits. According to UW-Madison professor Robert Hamers, bacteria might be used as templates for building more complex systems. Other than non organic nanoobjects, bacteria and other living cells are capable to interact with antibodys due to their cell surface. This natural ability to dock with different kinds of molecules provides new opportunities to construct complex nanoscale structures. Full article and 11 Mb Video at Physorg.com.
Japan based NEDO offers a variety of robots. One of the more remarkable ones is the reception robot ACTROID, who actually looks like a japanese woman. It’s purpose is to sit at a company’s reception desk and give advice to visitors. ACTROID is said to communicate in a natural way in Chinese, Korean, English and Japanese, with realistic looking gestures and facial expressions.
Update: Allthough this company seems to be on the cutting edge with their technology, their PR is horrible. Obviously the link above no longer works (as someone pointed out in the comments), and on their homepage I couldn’t even find any indication they are producing robots at all.
There is a tag at Flickr called whatsinyourbag where people post pictures of, surprise, their bag’s contents. Looks like a lot of geeks postet their stuff there, with loads of mobiles, notebooks and PDAs. Joi Ito gets the Geek Of The Week Award with an incredible heap of gadgets. The Minimalist Award goes to this guy.
