...more recent posts
$150 cassette deck for your computer for ripping those old tapes to your hard drive, or dumping mp3 mixes back onto that old standby format.
Cool one wheel scooter design.
Looks like the free VoIP application Skype (from the kazza people - I mentioned it last September) will be coming to OS X. From the Skype forums:
May 18th: In response to all the requests: there WILL be a Skype version for Mac OS X. No info is publicly available about when exactly it will be out, but it's already in the work
May 24th: I will contact you when we have something to send to you, which is not in next week but quite close. Thanks for patient waiting. :-)
For David Stotts, computing needs a new face: yours. He'd like to hook you up to a partner miles or continents away, pipe live video of each of you onto the same computer desktop, and let you hash out your ideas, pointing to work on the screen, hearing each other's voices, and watching each other react....
...The key is transparency, which is wired into today's high-performance graphics hardware. By tapping that capacity and the human brain's ability to organize visual patterns, Stotts and his team found a way to let you peer through transparent images of yourself and your partner at the same time you're watching your work on the screen. (If you've ever looked through your reflection in a pond and noticed a fish swimming under the surface, you'll have the idea.)
Here is way more than you want to know about how web browsers and web servers negotiate their connections, and how the browser parses the resulting data stream into something that looks to you like a page. Written by the guy who leads development of Apple's Safari browser.
There is a lot going on under the hood to make this all happen. <understatement/>
To see what our mobile devices are going to look like in the near future, you just have to look at the mobile processors being previewed today: "Qualcomm pushes technology limits with new designs."
...Qualcomm announced the release of three new baseband processors that combine multimedia capabilities with support for GSM, GPRS, and wideband CDMA (W-CDMA) on chip....These chips will be available to cellphone manufactures in the 4th quarter of 2005 and into 2006.
All three of the processors are equipped with a multimedia processing block that can support up to 6-Mpixel cameras, 30-frame per second VGA support, and a gaming core from ATI Technologies that can handle 4 million triangles pr second. The chips also come equipped with interfaces for 802.11, Bluetooth, MDDI, TV, and USB.
I was sitting outside two days ago drinking a coffee and waiting for a friend. A young lady sat down next to me. And then a moment later a very confused looking family ("you're not from around here, are you?") dragging lots of luggage stopped in front of us asking if we knew where the 4 points Sheraton Hotel was located. I just shook my head, but the woman next to me offered to call and find out. Who says New Yorkers aren't helpful?
Anyway, she calls information, gets connected, but the number is busy. At this point I'm still doubtful, but I click to the browser on my Treo 600, point it at google, and go. About 10 seconds later I have the address (luckily I got the address right on the google results page without having to click through.) And I got it *before* she was able to get her voice call through!
After they left she looked at my phone and asked, "Is that the Treo? Mine is on order, but it's taking forever to get here."
:-)