Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

...and so he blew the Time Trumpet.

Do you remember petrol? The 2012 Olympic hoax? Look back at the good old years 2005-2025

Nostalgia from the future...

(Cips from Armando Iannucci's new TV series. Real Player required...)
My favourite is the rolling news on the day there's no news...

Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End talks about "localisers", a technology that goes beyond today's RFID. His localisers use an ad hoc wireless mesh to link low power sensor and processor chipsets (like Intel's and UCB's "smart motes") attached to dumb objects. You can then use a localiser to find something, in relation to all the other objects around it...

Now HP Labs have produced a chip that could help build localisers...

The chip, developed by the Memory Spot research team at HP, is 2-4mm square and current versions can hold up to 512 kilobytes of data.

HP said the amount of memory onboard the tiny chip was likely to grow in future versions.

Data can be moved in and out of the chip at speeds of up to 10 megabits per second - far faster than is possible with other short-range radio systems such as Bluetooth or Radio Frequency ID tags.
[...]

"This really bridges the digital and physical worlds," said Howard Taub, associate director at HP Labs. "The digital data is attached to the physical object it's related to."

[...]

All the components to make the chip, including modem, antenna, microprocessor and memory, can be fabricated as a single unit helping to keep unit costs low. HP speculated that once in production the devices could cost as little as one dollar each.

Not as cheap as RFID (where arphids are now coming in under 12c a shot), but a lot more capable...

As I'm doing a lot of writing about Windows Vista at the moment, I've finally got round to hooking my 64-bit Athlon Vista box up to my dual monitor rig. My old KVM wasn't able to handle a dual-head set-up, so I did a little research and ended up purchasing a shiny new Belkin dual-head capable OmniView Soho 2-port KVM. Unfortunately I didn't do my research well enough, and failed to spot that Belkin have a completely new set of cabling for USB-enabled KVMs, so I had to wait a few days while a new set of cabling arrived.

Ten minutes of crawling under my desk untangling cables and adding the new Belkin cables (they also do sound and additional USB devices) and things were ready to go. Press a button and I'm on a different machine, press another and it's back again. I don't even need to reach down to the KVM - it'll recognise certain key combinations as instructions to switch machines.

(One thing to note - the KVM is unable to cope with multiplexed USB devices, so I can use either the mouse from my Wireless Laser Desktop 6000 or the keyboard - not both. I think I might be able to hack it with two wireless USB dongles, but that's experimentation for another day.)

Expect to see the old four port KVM and some coaxial VGA cables on eBay soon!

marypcb and I collaborated on a review of the latest rev of the Nokia 770's Linux OS for Tom's Hardware.

PDAs and smartphones can browse the Web, but small screens and poor support for JavaScript and plug-ins can make browsing a cramped and unsatisfying experience. UMPCs give you a standard browser but they're still too big (and expensive) to carry all the time. Nokia's 770 Internet tablet fits - not necessarily neatly - in the middle, in terms of size, price and features.

Read the rest.