What’s next? Cop cars that run on powdered sugar?

From an
article in the NY Times: “He will then start the vehicle on regular
diesel, and after a few minutes, when the vegetable oil becomes more viscous
in the heater, a manual switch will direct it to the diesel engine. From
there, the only detectable difference will be the faint odor of French
fries, and a noticeable lack of diesel stench.” (Thanks for the link John)

Interesting article in eWeek about IT business
analyst:

“…an IT business analyst acts as a liaison between non-IT
employees who have a business problem to solve and the IT department, which
is charged with finding the solution.”

Of course this is a self-serving comment from me, but I certainly agree that
this is a key position in the enterprise.

(Thanks Ted for sending me the link [where's your blog ;-])

In a follow-up to my post about the Evolution of interfaces I found this article in ExtremeTech (via BoingBoing) about a vertical keyboard that helps prevent Repetitive Stress Injuries (RSI):

“… the vertical placement of the keyboard allows the user to type while keeping the forearms in a neutral position (with the thumbs up). With a standard flat keyboard, in order to type the hands are rotated so that the palms are parallel with the floor (this is called a “pronated” position). In the pronated position, the bones in the forearm twist with the wrist and scissor. This scissoring of the bones causes extra pressure to be forced upon the Carpal Tunnel.”

The concept makes sense, but it appears to require more physical space compared to convention KBs and doesn’t necessarily seem to be a very portable input device.

Perfect or those times when you need to send in your laptop for repair or need to recover data from you laptop hard drive. (via 0xDECAFBAD)

Wired news article about Using Visible Light for Data Transfer.

“Ultimately this technology will make it possible for households in small communities to reach an enormous amount of information, at the speed of light, of course.”

More interesting discussions about this on Slashdot (Thanks for the links John)

Patrick from TechTV tries the “Switch”

“The biggest problem with switching isn’t the Mac or OS X. It’s when you have to deal with the Windows-centric parts of the world. If you can avoid them (most folks don’t need compatibility with odd applications in the office), you could be all set right out of the box with your Mac.”

The Slashdot thread about the article is also interesting

Yoz reviews Microsoft’s Three Degrees Beta, which is a new IM/chat/P2P/MP3 player designed for and apparently by teens.

Great quote: “As you’d expect, it’s all wrapped up in the kind of huge lurid skinnable UI that will have Alan Cooper wandering around the Redmond campus with a rifle.” (link via Ben)

Wired News: “The human gene pool should be incapable of producing enough idiots to financially support the vast number of spammers whose scat litters so many inboxes. ”

“…most spammers make money selling e-mail addresses to other spammers, who then sell those same addresses to others. It’s like the legendary snake eating its own tail. “

According to this Cnet article, I may someday soon be able to download my dreams and review them later (TiVo style) <grin /> (via Slashdot)

Wei-Meng Lee and Brian Jepson over @ O’Reilly detail how to convert your Laptop into a Tablet PC (cheaply!)

Today Doc posts about retiring an old “1980-vintage Panafax PX-100 fax machine”.

However, I have a bigger request. When will we rid the planet of fax machines entirely? I mean, technically do they really have a purpose these days?

It seems that the workflow for faxing is ridiculously wasteful for most fax transmissions.

Basically, I print something just so I can fax it. Why waste the paper? When all I really need to do is email or “remote print” the document.

Then if the receiver actually needs to use the content of a fax they would have to re-type it or OCR the page (Ugh!)

Please! What a waste!

Don’t we really need cheaper network-accessible remote printers? I believe this will lead to fax extinction!

Quote pulled from a Slashdot thread about Engineering
Careers Short-Circuiting:”The computer pond is shrinking, but
that’s because it’s been overstocked for quite a while. The talented,
smart, crafty, dedicated fish will always be in demand, the ones who are
simply looking for a paycheck will be walking an unemployment line.”

I’m not sure if this MPEG Movie is a real XBox commercial, but either way it’s just plain bizarre.

UPDATE: Well, I guess this is old news, because the commerical was banned in the UK back in June.

Oh man! It would be such a coup to route all my telemarketing calls through MIT’s new AgoraPhone

Sigh … Thanks to R-Studio, I was able to recover a corrupted disk partition on my laptop. It didn’t hurt that I had a recent back up too.