Back in the days when Twitter and Facebook were fledgling social networking sites (2006-ish), I posted on my weblog more often. Like the way my brain sometimes works, it’s a mish-mash of all kinds of thoughts and ideas. Mostly games, gadgets, and other random thoughts. Well, recently I’ve been wanting more than 140 characters to express my thoughts, so I thought I’d throw a few of these thoughts back on here. This will probably be boring for most of you, but if you’re interested, sit back and enjoy the read.
First up is a thought spurred on from a friend’s Twitter post. He mentioned wanting a “cyborg communications tooth”. I think that is totally feasible with today’s technology and can’t understand why someone hasn’t done that yet. My daughter wears cochlear implants, so I’ve seen a few different hearing solutions. Bone Conduction is used in several applications such as SCUBA diving, construction, aviation, military, hearing aids, and even bluetooth hands-free devices. It basically converts sound into mechanical vibrations and sends them to your inner ear by conducting the sound over solid bone. It can also do vice-versa and send your speech to a microphone the same way. Ever notice how your own voice sounds different when you listen to a recording of yourself than it does in your head? Well, why can’t an implanted tooth do the same thing? Power requirements (batteries, charging, etc.) aside, the device components could surely fit into the form factor of a molar or two. Were it not for the batteries, Eleanor’s implant processors could fit on a disc the size of a stack of 3-4 quarters. I’d gladly trade a crown for a bluetooth.
Buy stock now. Apple sent out press invitations to an event on January 27th. The rumor is that they’re announcing a new device. Speculations are that it’ll be a tablet form-factor with a 10″ touch-screen, like a large iPhone (whose screen is 3.5″). The majority of the rumors are saying that it’ll fit in the market between a netbook and a smart phone. They’re saying the OS will be a scaled-up version of iPhone OSX, but not a full-blown version of Mac OSX. That’s very disappointing to me, if true. I have a MacBook Pro and an iPhone: full-feature and some-feature. I can’t see having a mid-feature device that fits a niche in my computing needs desires. If, however, it was a full-featured OSX device, I would probably carry it around like a purse man-bag organizer! Here are my biggest problems with the idea, though: Typing full emails, weblog posts, or documents on my iPhone is like shaving with tweezers. Your goal is to spell a word, maybe write a sentence, but not a full paragraph. Touch-screen smart phones have catapulted the success of the microblog (Twitter/Facebook) due to that fact. I can type fast on a keyboard, enough to write this post (complete with HTML tags). I wouldn’t attempt to do this on my iPhone. If an Apple tablet makes writing something like this easy, then it’ll do well. Another rumor is that it will have Ink-based input. Mac OSX has had Ink-based input available for a while. If that’s built-in, it could go a long way toward easy input. I’ve always wanted an Apple Newton MessagePad (nearly bought one in High School with my meager funds), so a true tablet with a stylus piques my interest.
On the gaming front, I’ve been playing a ton of Modern Warfare 2 on XBox. It’s a mind-numbing, frustration release, much like those squeeze dolls where the eyes pop out. It has a fun leveling mechanic and different challenges for when simply eliminating other players gets boring. My favorite is the “Cruelty” challenge, where you have to kill a player, pick up his weapon, then kill him again with it. It sounds easy, but most of the other players are significantly better than me, so it’s pretty difficult. Plus, you can’t just track down individual players very easy, so finding them the second time is difficult. The challenge mechanic is one that I seem to enjoy in several games, including those on iPhone. I’ve recently looked into the OpenFeint framework for iPhone games. It’s supposed to be like XBox Live for the iPhone with friends, chat, and challenges. Sounds like very fun stuff. The problem with the iPhone platform is that it’s not very good at heavy processing, so things seem a bit slow at times.
