tech ronin

Toyota's car with feelings

This is so amazing I have to comment. The New York Times published a story a couple days ago about 4 Toyota inventors who filed a patent for a car that can wink, cry, laugh, wag its antenna, raise or lower its body height and vary the intensity and color of its headlights. This would allow a driver or the car itself to have a broader, more granular palette of communications tools available to express subtleties of meaning.

From what I can tell from the article, though, the car is going to collect data and then express the feelings without input from the driver directly. Here's where different AI approaches would have different options. If you think cars are smart, you want the car to be able to express some things on its own (?). We know the humans are smart (some of them anyway), but how do they control the car's emotional palette while driving? I didn't see the a discussion of how the driver could control the communications in the article.

All this time we've been struggling along with just honking and flashing our headlights. The Toyota guys forget perhaps that we drivers can gesticulate to clarify meaning such as yell, glare, flip the bird or give a thumbs up. But, since many of us are enthralled with technology, there will be people who will want to do it the high-tech way.

The inventors say they think driving will be more entertaining with cars that can express the driver's feelings. I agree. I wonder what could *emerge* from this. What if everyone is sitting stuck in traffic? What kinds of *conversations* might occur if the driver can select the direction and emotion expressed somehow. Perhaps biofeedback could be used.

I love it as an experiment. It's certainly going to be a selling point for the first cars that can do these things. My guess is that it will be quite some time before this kind of thing is implemented - as I recall Apple filed some patents related to machine emotions a while back. I'm glad we've got some inventors thinking outside the box, though. You gotta read the article, the details are fascinating. I read the original article in the NY Times and then promptly forgot it. Gizmodo has a bit about it today that had me link back to NYT and marvel.

iPaq H6315 combo handheld tradeoffs

They've done it all - cell, wifi and bluetooth. The coolest thing is that it switches automatically from one wireless modality to another depending on what's available. You get cell if wifi isn't available, for instance.

Now the downsides. It only runs at about 200 mhz to save juice. I was hoping it would be running the 624 mhz processor. It is still at 240 x 320 instead of the much more desireable 320x480.

This is a pretty wide phone. I'm not sure I want the compromises. But it's probably an awesome little device. Should compete pretty well against the cell-only Treo 600 and P900.

T-mobile is selling these for $499 starting in mid-August running GSM-GPRS. You can buy the phone sans a contract for $599. I will be surprised if many users don't get a second cell phone to go along with this which then makes the compromises in processor speed and screen size/pixels unnecessary.

If you had to make only one cell/wifi device, this is probably the way to go as option 1. People who love their current devices which are probably in this power range sans cell access, could jump for this handheld.

Option 2 would be the heavy hitter 624 mhz and 320x480 or even higher rez. It would be nice if T-mobile would accommodate these Option 2 customers by offering a cell plan for two devices and one set of total minutes for a single person.

[via Brighthand]

Zire 72 leprosy - me too

That wonderful rubbery blue paint coating is coming off fast. Too bad. I still love the little machine. At a certain point, I'm going to tear that skin off. This is what 2-1/2 months of use does to it.

Anyone know if there's a rebate or something? I think $50 would work.

People are being creative. Taking the device apart so they can paint it after pealing off the blue material. Besides tearing the paint off with your fingers which works. You can also get it off easily if you gingerly use a razor blade. Then use a very small amount of brasso and shine it up. Read the thread below for the original posts.

When I was doing the research on the Zire 72, I realized that this coating was untested and that the Zire 72 was one of the first devices using it. I knew I was taking a risk when I bought it, but it was so cool that I went for it. You win some and you lose some.

[via PocketFactory]

eBooks Rock

eBooks are slowly but surely moving into the PDA space. When I read blogs where people talk about their PDA use lately, I'm seeing people say that reading eBooks is a major use of their PDA. Some say this is their most valued and frequent use. And I can understand why.

Maybe what turned the tide for me is the 320x320 bright TFT screen of my new Zire 72. The text looks great and is easy on the eye in most lighting. Maybe even more important is the instant gratification. You shop online, purchase with a credit card and download the book and synch to your Palm. And you are reading your book. I love it!

I've been trying eBook reading out and exploring the last few weeks. I'm currently reading Snow Crash. This is the furthest I've ever gotten into the book and I've tried a few times before. There's something about reading a book like Snow Crash on a PDA. It's the type of book that you want to have electrified.

It's exciting to explore this new eBook thing, I've started with eReader Pro which is associated with the biggest eBook seller, eReader.com. I expect to use others soon enough.

Here's what I'm enjoying so far:

• Highlighting.
• Bookmarking.
• Taking Notes - mostly just quoting.
• Go-ing to particular chapters, pages, etc. instantaneously.
• Finding words Just highlight the word and hold to get a menu that lets you find the word in the book starting from the beginning. That way I can be reminded what an acronym stands for or who a particular character is.
• Having it remember my place and start where I left off.
• The small size of my book. Anyone running out of pocket, backpack and briefcase space?
• This weightless, virtual medium allows me to bring along an encyclopedia's worth of books wherever I go. Without a laptop!
• Ability to copy and paste from books - you can't do that with ink and paper without OCR scanning.

This could be a huge market but for some current limitations:

• The price of books seems too high. Without any distribution costs to speak of, can't they do better on pricing?
• There should be steeper discounts once the book has gone into paperback.
• If I buy an eBook for my PDA, shouldn't I be able to use it free on my computer kind of like iTunes?
• And how about a discount if I want to buy the hard copy book? The infrastructure for such things isn't there yet, but it's bound to move in that direction.
• Some books aren't available as eBooks. I am dying to have Getting Things Done and Ready for Anything by David Allen as eBooks. I want to have them at hand wherever I go to support me in getting better organized, but there are no eBooks, just audiobooks which are very different because the audiobooks - even the digital variety aren't nearly as random access - I can't look things up easily.

OK. We've got some good things going and more in the works. But, why not take it a step further? I can't be the only one thinking this. Since this is not a hard copy book and the printing costs are nil, how about:

• more extra features
• a biography of the author
• an informed discussion of the book
• lots of illustrations and photos or even video clips if appropriate

I see this going the way DVDs have gone with extra features.

Gmail is really growing on me

I've been forwarding my email to Gmail and then keeping up with it as a backup email system including *reporting* the spam and archiving things once they no longer constitute something that is needing my current attention - something *in progress*.

I have a total of 52 emails in my in box and I've been using Gmail for about a month now. This is a wonderful experience. Compare that to my having something like 7000 emails in my regular inbox. Because I transferred my *sent* mail folder and and few other things to gmail and I'm forwarding all emails to gmail, I've got about 1700 messages on gmail already. But there's only 52 that are sitting in my inbox! This is a great feeling. A place that's not overwhelming.

The reason this is working is that I *believe* that I can find mail that is archived without having been labeled (the equivalent of filing it in a particular folder). I have a backup which is my regular email system on Apple Mail, which by the way I'm treating more like Gmail and moving inbox items into an *inbox archive* folder. Maybe because I have thousands of messages in my inbox, I'm not really keeping up with it like on Gmail.

I'm getting less spam. The spam filters are starting to work. Of course, I haven't checked my spam to make sure it's all really spam. My sense is that they're pretty conservative about removing spam, but I should check it I suppose. I just checked and there have been 7000 messages put into spam so far. Whoa!

I found that Camino .8 works better than Safari, at least on one key point. There's a bug in Safari that doesn't allow you to move down your list of messages with the *j* keyboard equivalent once it needs to scroll down. It just doesn't work. So, tonight I tried it on Camino and it worked perfectly. Guess I use Camino for Gmail access.

Camino seems very fast too. The only problem with Camino that I've found so far is that it is listing ALL of my bookmarks assigned to the bookmark bar - wrapping to three rows which uses up too much space on my Powerbook. I should just do some major edits on my bookmarks, obviously. But, I liked the way that Safari keeps them available with the arrow at the end of the row. That way, the most important ones get to be visible and the rest are nearby.

Back to Gmail. I'm happy with the speed. It's been performing well lately. I'm just liking it more as time goes on. I'm liking the threaded aspect as it makes my list of messages shorter.

Now, the problem is that I can't really make it my main email because:

• My main email is [email protected], my own domain name. I want to use that. I suppose, eventually, Gmail may offer a way to allow you to use your own domains?
• The adsense/privacy thing. I don't even notice them, but I still am not comfortable exposing my clients to that *intrusion* of sorts when I certainly can afford my own *for pay* email account that doesn't force my clients to have their mail analyzed by some *bot* somewhere. If there's a 90% acceptance rate on Gmail, then I would feel comfortable.
• It's online. I still feel nervous and limited by that. I've always been able to work on my email while unconnected.

Moto A630 - Love at First Sight

I'm in love with this new cell phone from Motorola announced Thursday. I'm fickle, I know. But this thing's got the keyboard and the numeric keypad combined into one. This first pic shows the qwerty keyboard and horizontal 65k color, 176 x 220 pixel screen.

It's Bluetooth, tri-band, 3.5 oz., vga camera, automatically activated speakerphone when the clamshell opens, available Q3, Hot little number! Motorola calls it a "a fusion of the best of the mobile and messaging worlds without sacrificing weight, size, or most importantly, style." If only it had a memory card slot. According to Mobiletracker, it will be available on Cingular as an exclusive later this summer in the $200 to $300 range. The price point is quite appealing for all this phone! Hope there's a good data plan.

Motorola MPx220 looking good

MobileMag, among others, says Motorola has officially introduced the MPx220. OK. This is probably a bit too much phone for me price-wise - around $450. I want a relatively small Bluetooth phone to mate with my Zire 72 PalmOne. Here's what I like about this upcoming unit, though:

Clamshell - compact for your pocket but opens up to a better size for talking on the phone. Also, you get more space total for screen plus keypad. And the keys are protected from accidental presses without your having to lock and unlock the keypad.

Light weight: just under 4 oz.

Has a miniSD memory card which can be as large as 512 mb. Yet another card format, but at least it is *sleave*-compatible with the standard SD card. And a roomy 64 mb flash ROM. Those are great specs for a modest-sized phone.

Big, bright screen for a cell phone at 176x220, 65k colors.

1.2 megapixel camera - I don't *need* it (I already have a 1.2 in my Zire), but it may come in handy when I want to immediately take and send pix and I can always hope this will be a better camera.

As a Mac user, I won't be helped by Outlook integration, but those of you with PCs might like it. That it's running Windows Mobile software is not necessarily a plus - I would prefer Palm.

It's got the right buzz words for my taste: quad band, GSM/GPRS phone. Too bad it doesn't support EDGE.