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[ Comments Off ]Posted on March 5, 2011 by admin in Technology
Saturday, March 5th, 2011
Your first life wasn’t enough, so they created Second Life. Apparently that wasn’t enough for you either. No worries, soon you can augment your reality and live in your “Internet of Things”.
Having trouble recognizing
reality? There’s an app for that. |
Reality just not real enough for you lately? Having a hard time identifying the objects around you? Well, no worries. There’s an app for that. Or at least there will be before too long. We’ve talked about Augmented Reality before, but another concept is gaining traction as the next big thing. It’s called the Internet of Things . It’s based on the idea that since the coming IPv6 addressing system for the web will make it possible to encode 50 to 100 trillion objects, well heck, we just might as well. And since the average person only has about 1000 to 5000 objects around them, we’ll just give all of them addresses so we can attach information to them, since there are plenty of URL’s for everyone! We jest of course. In (ahem) reality, these technologies make some amazing stuff possible. One implementation of the idea that has gotten some press is Green Goose, an activity monitoring system that uses green, egg-shaped sensors to track your activities and help you to reach goals that you select. Their tagline is “Play Real Life”. ReadWriteWeb covered the start-up in February of last year and again this year, if you’d like to learn more. Personally, I’m already busy enough living my life that I don’t feel a need to do it twice. But the system points to interesting possibilities. We’ve already seen some of the cool tools made possible by object or environment analysis and universal connectivity. The song recognition app SoundHound and Quest Visual’s instant translator app Word Lens are two popular examples. But in the future, we may be able to access information about nearly anything around us, with tools similar to the “terminator vision” used in T2: Judgment Day
. Let’s just hope this stuff works better than autocorrect. Below is just one example of the possibilities of having detailed information about the things and people around you with point and shoot simplicity. Just make sure you keep that antivirus software updated! Read the rest of this entry »
[ Comments Off ]Posted on February 25, 2011 by admin in Technology
Friday, February 25th, 2011
Sex toys for the Wii? Not really my speed, but I imagine there’s a wiimote possibility that I have a FRIEND who’s a customer. C’mon and ‘fess up with a product review.
Look, I’m no prude. I mean, not only did I go to a progressive grade school where we received exceptionally explicit sex ed in first grade, but I was also a teen in the era when your folks were considered puritanical freaks if there wasn’t a copy of The Joy of Sex
casually but strategically placed on the coffee table along with a copy of I’m Ok, You’re Ok
and Jonathan Livingston Seagull
. But in spite of this – or perhaps, to be more honest – because of this, I’ve never really understood the desire to introduce a lot of gadgets into the lovemaking experience. Especially the kinds we’ve featured as scary holiday workplace gifts. I mean, if one puts their existing digits, limbs, and lips to good use, the possibilities are quite extensive. And sure, the occasional oil, restraint device, or provocative apparel is a no-brainer. But will someone please explain to me who the people are in the target market for the Wii controllers and games Mojowijo and We Dare? I’m sure this customer is silently lurking amongst my friends; a couple of years ago I was amused to discover that an otherwise rather conservative female friend was staging regular sex toy parties and was into bondage. No biggie. Just kind of funny, to be frank. If you haven’t heard of them, Mojowijo is a controller that sends the gesture from your device to a remote recipient. Or wiimote wiicipient, as the case may be. And We Dare (it took me a while to get the “Wii Dare” pun) is a complete multiplayer game. A game that the developer Ubisoft apparently deemed too sexy for the prudish American market. Something that they’re so adamant about that as of this writing, they block the ability to even view the ad on YouTube in the states. We managed to embed it below anyway, thanks to IGN.com. To tell you the truth, at first we thought it was just a viral campaign; there’s no reference to the game on their main site. But here it is on their UK site . And about that “MojoWijo” device: Is it just me, or does it look more like a tool for alien probing or dental work than a sex toy (see below)? If you’re a Wii sex toy enthusiast, feel free to explain yourself in the comments. Wii won’t judge you. Wii just don’t get it. MojoWijo image and We Dare clip below. Read the rest of this entry »
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on February 4, 2011 by admin in Technology
Friday, February 4th, 2011
The iPhone finally comes to Verizon, but will it sound better? Time will tell, but have you ever wondered WHY the audio quality of cell phones is worse today than landlines were thirty years ago?
 
The only app I want on an iPhone is
the one that makes it actually
function for voice communication |
A friend asked me today if – since I’m a Verizon customer – I was FINALLY going to get an iPhone. Referencing “Convoy”, the 70′s novelty radio hit
and movie
about truck driver CB radio culture (here’s the trailer), I replied “that’s a big fat negatori, Rubber Ducky“. Yes, I’ve said it before. When it comes to technology, I’m a big whiny baby. Just see my Disappointing Technologies Part I and Part II. Or my explanations of why your mp3′s or your robots suck. But one thing I probably have found more annoying than anything – whether technology related or not – is the infernally faulty and obscenely expensive set of devices and services that we end up calling a “mobile phone”. Aside from the absurd prevalence of dropped calls (a friend of mine has a four square foot area in his Chicago apartment where his AT&T iPhone works that we call his “iZone”) I’ve always been astounded that in the 21st century, a device that is specifically designed to transmit your voice to another person’s ear does it less effectively than the walkie-talkies I played with as a kid. And this horrible sound quality is nowhere more obvious, in my opinion, than with an iPhone. This Wired piece explains that part of this problem will go away with an iPhone on Verizon’s networks, but I predict that the fundamental audio quality of cell phones – which is arguably a joke compared to landlines of even thirty years ago – will not get any better soon. Why? The first reason is that – as most of us would agree these days – a cell phone isn’t for talking, it’s for texting, web browsing, and apps. Verizon is well aware of this, and started revising all their data plans in preparation for the launch of the Verizon-compatible iPhone, which will add a new kind of load to their networks. And the second reason? It’s the fact that no-one seems to care about the atrocious audio quality of modern cellular/wireless networks. If it ain’t broke, why would they fix it? If you don’t know what I mean, you’re either a digital native who wouldn’t understand the old pin drop commercial of a couple decades ago, a very tolerant person, or perhaps just plain deaf. Remember when you were a teen, and in naively romantic moments in the wee hours on the phone, you’d play your boyfriend or girlfriend some cheesy song that expressed your complex teen feelings in a way that words never could? Well, forget it pal. If you have typical cell service in America and have ever tried to achieve anything beyond the garbled, delay-ridden talking that we’re used to, you know what I mean. But have you ever wondered why? You’d think it’s because the signal is being bounced through the atmosphere to a bunch of towers, maybe a satellite, and then a few more towers, right? Well, that is in fact part of the problem. But the real problem has two more elements. One of them is profit. Rather than investing in and building out high-quality capacity and then charging you for it, providers will continue to offer you the lowest acceptable quality to eek the most out of existing networks. And if customers don’t seem to care about the audio, they’ll continue to focus on non-voice data transfer. The other part of the problem is the audio compression codecs providers use to squish decipherable voice information into the smallest possible amount of data. Somehow, the rather shoddy codecs used for the 128kbps mp3′s you buy on iTunes became accepted as the industry standard for quality audio. That’s probably okay ultimately; studies show that the majority of people actually can’t distinguish that bitrate from higher quality sound sources. So fine. Let’s just say that’s acceptable audio. But if you’ve ever heard a song in say, a 64 or 32kbps bitrate, you know how bad things start sounding pretty quickly. And although simple voice data may even sound clearer around 32kbps (because a lot of people’s weird breath and mouth noises get compressed out) you may be surprised to know the actual compression and frequency response numbers for standard cell phone service. The bitrate is often 8kbps, and the frequency range being used is typically 400 Hz to 3500 Hz. For comparison, a decent stereo system has perhaps 60 Hz – 18,000 Hz capability. The 400 Hz – 3500 Hz part wouldn’t be so bad by itself, because aside from harmonics that affect the timbre and the sibilant sounds we make, the majority of vocal sounds are in that frequency range. The real problem is in all the other things the audio codecs do to compress the voice data. While it is in fact INCREDIBLE what audio engineers and programmers have developed over the years to facilitate various kinds of voice audio compression, the choice to continue applying the most “aggressive” of these algorithms and codecs is what makes your cell call sound like crap. Aside from the low bitrate and limited frequency response, the voice signal is further analyzed and hacked up with things like voice activity detection and linear predictive coding, which decide whether something is a voice, background noise, or silence. The codec then discards whatever it thinks is not useful voice information, further compresses the data, transmits it, and reverses the process on the other end. Thus the word “codec”, which is a portmanteau of “compressor-decompressor”. The result of all this secret-decoder-ring monkeying around? Well, when you combine it with the bizarrely un-ergonomic deck-of-cards-like shape of an iPhone and the tiny mic and specialized audio processing designed to compensate for it, the result is that horrifying shriek that interrupts your friend’s garbled voice when their child says something at a normal volume in the background. So no, I won’t be rushing to the Verizon store to pick up an iPhone. In fact, I’m thinking of switching to one of these little handheld CB jobbies
. It says the range is only four miles, but that’s without shootin’ skip.
Read the rest of this entry »
[ Comments Off ]Posted on January 5, 2011 by admin in Technology
Wednesday, January 5th, 2011
In addition to the blood of your firstborn, a retinal scan, and other biometric methods. Do you trust Facebook to be the issuer of your “Internet Driver’s License”?
Sometimes I feel like I’m Charlton Heston’s character in Soylent Green
, running around screaming “it’s made of people!” while the masses around me munch away muttering through full mouths “but it’s so yummy“. Recently I asked the opinion of friends on Facebook about which e-mail client I might switch to after having a nightmarish experience “upgrading” to Thunderbird 3 (an experience that many have shared, by the way). One thing that surprised me a little was that a few tech-savvy friends said “why not G-Mail?” to which I replied “because it’s a web service not an e-mail client” and added “besides, I don’t like all my messages eternally remaining in the hands of a company whose CEO has so much contempt for personal privacy“, to which one of these friends said “privacy is an illusion”. Which let me use one of my favorite ironic quotes, i.e., Obama’s Cynicism Is A Sorry Kind Of Wisdom. Because while it’s true that certain lifestyle choices insure that most of your life is an open book, that doesn’t mean we all have to roll over, shave our heads, get our citizen ID tattoo, and start living like we’re in the movie THX 1138
or something. Call me a Luddite, but in spite of the fact that I have nothing to hide, I’m not going to give all my trust to Google and Facebook when it comes to my personal communications, and I’m certainly not going to start “checking in” with services like Foursquare or Facebook Places. I feel like there are degrees of privacy, and that we’re all entitled to maintain as much as we like or are able. I was a little annoyed that Google captured me sitting on my porch a few years ago, but I’ve since moved, and clearly, I blew my own cover in that instance out of amusement. But how would you feel about Facebook being your Internet Driver’s License? That idea doesn’t appeal to me too much, for a few reasons. First, on top of the fact that Mark Zuckerberg has already declared privacy dead, ex-Googler and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg agrees, and is probably more eager to sell your data than Zuckerberg is. And since that’s a Gawker Media article I just linked to, let’s just take a moment to remember what can happen to millions of us at once when we entrust our personal information to a site that thrives on verified users but doesn’t care about their privacy. Facebook has done little to improve the security of your information as they’ve grown; anyone can still easily download this Firefox plugin and start hacking nearby users’ accounts with a method called sidejacking, and Facebook’s one time password solution for mobile users has a profound intrinsic flaw that I’m surprised hasn’t gotten more attention. My recent favorite was when I went to log in and Facebook put on a little Security Theater (see nice overview of the process here if you haven’t experinced it yet ) for me by asking for another e-mail, my mobile number, and then asked me to identify my friends in a lineup. Something that apparently has created real problems when people have been asked to identify friend’s dogs and Gummy Bears to get into their account. Becoming the sole single sign-on service provider so far remains the holy grail of huge tech companies like Google and Microsoft, but now it looks like Facebook has a chance of pulling it off. How would you feel about Facebook being the primary issuer of your internet traveling papers?
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on November 12, 2010 by admin in Technology
Friday, November 12th, 2010
Why anyone would use either as their primary e-mail service escapes me. And using a Microsoft Office product through a web browser, via a Facebook account is sort of like pouring gasoline down your horse’s throat, poking his eye with a cattle prod, and yelling at it to get on the freeway
You’ve probably heard by now that Facebook will be announcing a full-fledged web e-mail service with POP access and Microsoft Office Web Apps integration on Monday. Unless – ironically – you’ve been on Facebook all day, because they themselves are saying nothing about it on the site as of this writing. So, with the tech press being as predictable as it is (apologies to Mr. Arrington, at least he breaks the stories), everyone is of course debating whether the new Facebook service is a “Google Killer”. Which is an absurdly framed question, in my opinion. Yes, Facebook and Google are in a battle to dominate the internet in various ways, but I will eat poop on the day that Facebook gets search right or Google gets social networking right. Of course everyone with a Facebook account will activate an available username@facebook.com option. And of course this will siphon in millions in ad revenue and put a big ding in Hotmail, Yahoo, and Google e-mail ad placement dollars. But will that mean that Facebook e-mail will “kill” G-Mail? I personally doubt it, for several reasons. First of all, because I know an astounding number of otherwise intelligent people who still use Hotmail or Yahoo as their primary e-mail accounts. And secondly, of the larger group of people that I know who use G-Mail – especially if they use Google Docs – the last thing in the world they’re going to do is give up the reliable functionality of Google’s cloud services to use a Microsoft Office product through a web browser, via a Facebook account. Forgive me, but in my opinion that’s like pouring gasoline down your horse’s throat, poking his eye with a cattle prod, and yelling at it to get on the freeway. But ultimately, I remain befuddled as to why people would use G-Mail or Facebook as a primary e-mail provider in the first place. Facebook is the company that helps you build a trusted network of friends and then tells you the reason you can’t export their contact info is to protect them from you. Unless THEY are giving them to another service, which then lets you export them. And Google? Aside from the fact that from day one they’ve indexed your e-mails so they can place ads next to them, they are in many ways Facebook’s strongest competitor not so much in terms of services offered, as in the realm of corporate deceipt. In their founding documents they said “we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers“. Two years later they introduced advertising to their results, and now derive the vast majority of their revenue from ad services. In terms of how to access e-mail, I still use a mail client and my own mail-server accounts. I guess I have the advantage of owning domains and offering reseller hosting, but this is remarkably easy to set up if you need web-based communication, and your hosting company doesn’t scour your files as a prerequisite to storing them for you. Ah well. To each their own I guess. One thing I must admit I am looking forward to though, is the first friends that get lost in FB’s interface and post an excruciatingly private e-mail on someone’s wall. You know it will be happening in the first week.
