Category: douglas kastle

Blinged iPod Shuffle, Huh?

Engadget has a link to a website that is reporting the release of a diamond encrusted, gold trimmed iPod Shuffle. Apparently it will retail for 48,000 Norwegian Kroner (around US$40,000) as reported on this site. Engadget make an excellent point who would want to bling up $99 of plastic. If you should find yourself plopping down US$40,000 on something like this maybe you have more money than sense and I would appreciate it if you could remove yourself from the breeding pool of this planet as you have nothing of worth to add to it any more.

BTW it wouldn’t surprise me though if this turns out to be a hoax.

Dennis Miller on the Family Guy

I used to be a huge fan of Dennis Miller. In recent times it is a pain to see him prostitute himself on Bill O’Reilly‘s show, while he acts fairly cordial with “papa bear” on screen some times I feel as if he has a pained expression on his face as he knows he just has to put up with that crap to make a bit of coin.

However “No Spin Zone” non-withstanding I thought this segment from the Family Guy was spot on. Some times when watching Dennis Miller you felt as if you had to go back to college for a master in pop culture just to keep up.

Snowboard Gmail

Here is an attempt at the google mail video. We tried to have me pass holding the envelope on the snowboard but even at the slowest speed, the envelope was only visible on screen for about a second. So we were forced to go to plan B.

Trivia night destroyer – wikipedia on the go

In 1951, or so the story goes, the Guinness book of records was conceived when Sir Hugh Beaver realised that there was no reference book available to answer the question which is the fastest game bird in Europe, the golden plover or the grouse?

Nowadays the Guinness book of records has been superseded by wikipedia and the answer to all question current and arcane, “TO THE WIKIPEDIA!” is a cry heard all to often when a polite conversation degrades in to a slagging match. For the record glass is not a very slowly moving liquid and you can’t see the Coriolis effect in a toilet bowl flush (also dropping sugar into a draining sink does not help determine rotation).

However till now to answer a questions of this type required a computer and an internet link. Which meant that in the rarefied environment of Pub Trivia it has thus far been limited to what was been carried around solely in the competitors heads. This is slowly been eroded away, first mobile phones arrived, so you could ring a friend near a computer to get and answer. Then phones became GPRS enabled allowing internet access which will work, but is expensive. These are slowly been replaced by wifi enabled phones, but then this is currently limited as there may be no access point available (the rule rather than the exception in my experience). Thus far, even though the technology exists and has for a while it is patchy, cumbersome or expensive.

So the solution is simple, instead of trying to get to wikipedia over expensive or patchy infrastructure, why not just bring it with you? An enterprising gentlemen, ttsiod, has written a program that allows him to access a local copy of wikipedia on his laptop. No matter where he goes in the world he always has access, albeit to a static version of the people encyclopedia.

Not many people know that you can download the entire contents of wikipedia, it’s current compressed size is 2.9 GB. After hacking around with few open tools ttsiod is able to browse and keyword search his local wikipedia. Admittedly his current implementation isn’t for the faint hearted. However, how long will it take to port to an even more portable device, like the iPhone (with 8 GB of space) or other smart phone, the N95 for example has a microSD slot and disks sizes already up into the 4GB space.

It will only be a matter of time before all that knowledge can be bubbled down and people will be able to carry the font of human knowledge in their pocket. At that point in time any office argument will be solved in seconds and all trivia night questions are a predictive text search away. Can you smell the future? Are you excited? Are you scared?

Update : Imagine no longer, 2 weeks later, the future is here.

Soviet revisionism for every one

How many time have you been out taking photographs and the perfect shot gets ruined by by people walking into frame or there is an unfortunately placed building in garish pink. Well now we can all have the ability to retouch pictures in a manner previously reserved for communist dictators with out the need to be some kind of photoshop guru. Slashdot is reporting a research paper released from Carnegie Mellon demonstrating how to replace arbitrarily shaped blank areas in an image with portions of images from a huge catalog in a totally seamless manner.

There is a paper (pdf) on their page that shows some good examples of the process, but it will remain to see if it can be deployed successfully. There is an excellent tool for stitching images, autostitch, that stitches image using spherical perspective rather than 2D stitching. I have used it to put together many panoramic images, but there are times when it can’t put two pictures that were taken side by side together. The scope planned by the Carnegie Mellon guys seems to be orders of magnitude bigger. At the very least the bigger there database if images getting the longer it will trawl to find the correct match.

However I can’t wait for it to come out that are some dissidents spoiling old birthday photographs of mine…

Dynamic mp3 pricing – Good idea, wrong way

A strange entry on slashdot today with a company, AmieStreet.com, announcing a partner ship which Amazon where they want to introduce a demand based pricing model. They are proposing that the price of an mp3 goes up the more popular it is, to a capped value of $0.98. This on the face of it is an interesting concept.

However those of us that lived through the first internet bubble might recognise this as the nonsense that pervaded before the bust (gardens.com was my favourite loser). Surprisingly enough this model exists already in different operator sectors. Some toll operators of tunnels and roads will change at different parts of the day. This however is not to generate revenue (though a lot of them are in the business to do this), it is also to act as a deterrent and give people an added incentive to avoid the tolled section unless you really have to.

Secondly this deterrent is required due to the physical nature of the non digital world. It is more preferable to find ways for people to use the resources more efficiently that to build new roads or power stations. I grew up in the Ireland, the ESB (the national electrical supply board) were always putting out ads for energy saving lagging jackets and power saving heaters. Why would a power company go out of its way to help you use less electricity (and thus save you money)? It’s simple when it is that or build a brand new power station, they ain’t cheap!

The digital world is not as constrained. A few years ago you may want to deter the download of a popular song because you server and/or bandwidth couldn’t keep up. This has pretty much been resolved, the rise of Flickr and YouTube are example of this.

However I think that there may be something in dynamic pricing, but the opposite of what AmieStreet.com are suggesting, the more popular the song the cheaper it gets. You start at $0.50 and the price decreases at $0.05 at sales increase you decrease it on some logarithmic scale. $0.05 decrease after the first 100 sales, then another $0.05 after a 1000, and so on.

That means the is stil a premium for music that exists in the long tail, which is reasonable it does cost money at some point to track it down, rip it, host it and make it available. If Amazon want to enter into a pricing deal with me, given me a call.

Hoverboard by 2015?

It is a common joke that the future predicted when we were young is not the present we currently live in. A lot of people are very agrieved that there are no flying cars or colonies on the moon. Well you can keep all that, the greatest abuse of my childhood dreams is that the Hoverboard has not yet been invented. Seen in Back to the Future II as a levitating skateboard. Robert Zemeckis toyed with my innocence at the time by saying they really existed, but had been band by parent groups, however they were lucky enough to get their hands on some.

I was to find out later that he was lying, all for the purpose of a joke, and there is no such thing as a hoverboard and a little piece of me died that day. However there may be hope yet, to Zemeckis credit there is still 8 years until 2015 (When Back to the Future is set and where we find the hoverboards) which means there is still time (no pun intended). That and the fact that scientists have announced that they have reversed the Casimir effect, so that it repels instead of attracts. The Casimir effect in attraction mode is supposed to the technique that geckos stick to glass or ceilings.

Already they have announced that this discovery could lead to frictionless micro-machines with moving parts that levitate. Why have Physicists such small vision? They should halt that work and start developing the hoverboard. As a personal message to any Physicists reading this, you have teased us with such fanciful futures now is you chance to prove it. That and it could be the “Tickle me Elmo” of 2015, think about it!

Dog renting in Sydney

I suppose it was only a matter of time before dog renting came to Sydney. An American company Flexpetz wants to start pet renting

In the US, members pay US$24.95 ($29) to hire a dog on weekdays and US$39.95 on weekends. Membership fees include an annual fee of $US99.95 and monthly fees of $US49.95.

Those foolish enough to sign up for this service probably deserve to be ripped off. However owning a dog in an apartment in Sydney is not a viable option in a lot of cases. There is an alternative for dogless Sydney-siders.

Doggie Rescue is a registered NO-Kill animal rescue charity, but receives no government funding. It is committed to rescuing neglected, abused and abandoned dogs from the death rows of Sydney pounds and finding them loving homes.

They also require people to help out with the dogs that they have in their care. This includes people to take out and walk the dogs they have. Listed on their website are the volunteer options :

“Pop in to Ingleside from 10am – 4pm Tuesday to Sunday, Drummoyne from 10am – 4pm Saturday to Sunday, or PetBarn at Alexandria on Saturdays only from 10am.”

A company like Flexpetz shouldn’t even be given the option to start a viable business when there is a free service available that will not only make you feel better but help out as well. If you live in Sydney and know of any body interested in dog walking pass on the details.

The black lung returns

It looks like the black lung is making a resurgence with the announcement today that office printers are bad for you. It turns out all those fumes that get thrown out and give you that mid afternoon high isn’t all the fun and games originally thought. These same printers throw out microscopic ultra-fine particle :

“Ultra-fine particles are of most concern because they can penetrate deep into the lungs where they can pose a significant health threat,”

As a result of this announcement printers are banned from all work places and pubs, they can only be used, outside, 10 metres from the premises. Disney also announced that it will no longer depict people in their movies using printers, with Miramax also committing to to curbing the use of printing to Tarantino films, last used to great effect during the crazy 88 fight in Kill Bill.