I saw my first 100 Mpixel display today, on a visit to Calit2 at UCSD.
It’s 55 standard displays, with a bank of Linux machines to drive them. So the pixels are the same size as on your normal display, but you need to walk around to examine the whole image. Very cool.
Click the picture for a couple more images.
I keep some of my notes in electronic form, and some on paper. This is a pain. I’d prefer to have everything electronic, but there are three situations where paper wins out:
So I think I’m going to be using my Moleskine notebook for a while, but I’d love to be able to keep an archive of it on my laptop, even if only as a sequence of images. However, I really don’t want to have to scan one page at a time.
I could use an Anoto digital pen, but I’d be bound to lose the pen, and anyway it doesn’t work with a Mac. It does now work with a Blackberry but only via a paid subscription service. Not for me.
“Aha!”, I thought recently, “I could go back to my old Filofax.” It’s loose-leaf and so I could take the pages out every couple of weeks and put them through the sheet feeder on my scanner. But it turns out that they’re too small, and the feeder doesn’t really like them.
Surely there’s a market here? There’s no shortage of Filoxfaxes and similar ‘personal organiser’ systems in the world. Does anybody make a scanner that can cope with them? Or, come to that, with index cards? That would be invaluable for many academics, as well as for devotees of the Hipster PDA.
If nobody else makes one, watch this space, and I’ll let you know when mine goes into production…. 🙂
The time has come. My old and beautiful DVD player – a Pioneer DV-717 for which I paid £600 a long time ago – is starting to fade. It lost the ability to play CDs some years back, and it’s now regularly having problems with the scratches on rental DVDs as well, while other drives play them just fine. It was time to replace it. I could, of course, have bought a replacement at the supermarket for half the price I once paid for a region-free mod for my Pioneer. But they don’t make them like they used to – anything looks like a piece of junk when placed next to the 717. And, anyway, DVD’s are so last-decade….
My friends at Newnham Research have started to get some news coverage, from PCW and from ExtremeTech.
Their problem is that you really don’t get a feel for how well this stuff works until you see it in action – it’s hard to do it justice on paper. But it’s good to see that Newnham is coming out of stealth mode at last…
Thanks to Seb for the links.
I was at John‘s a couple of nights ago, and we both happened to check our Blackberrys at the same time. Tom, John’s son, laughed and grabbed a camera…
Yesterday I updated my Blackberry 7100t to v 4.1 of the OS. I also updated the OS on my TomTom Go 500. One, or other, or the combination, means that I can now use the TomTom as a hands-free kit for the Blackberry, something which wasn’t possible before. This posting will probably be of very little interest to anybody not Googling for ‘TomTom Blackberry’!
The Blackberry update is not generally available yet, but one provider, Hong Kong CSL, had a version for the 71xx series. You can find links here. Note the bit about deleting vendor.xml . There are few obvious benefits on the surface, but quite a few under the skin. One thing I haven’t yet managed, though, is to use the BB as a modem for my Mac 🙁
The NYT reports that the iPod accessory market is a $1bn business. And that’s without counting the
ultimate iPod accessory…
Is this, perhaps, the most stylish way to carry your files around? Well, it would certainly go nicely with my riding crop and hip flask…
Available from Red Envelope. Thanks to Adam for the link.
The iWood is a rather nice-looking wooden case for the iPod Nano.
My friend Andrew asked today if I knew anywhere in Cambridge where he could buy a slide rule. I couldn’t help him (though I do own a rather nice one).
But I did stumble across the website of the UK Slide Rule Circle, an ‘informal group of slide rule enthusiasts’.
If you consider yourself a slide rule enthusiast – and who, in their innermost thoughts, does not? – then this might be just what you’re looking for…
Here’s a bit of nostalgia. Anyone remember Digital? How about the AltaVista search engine?
I was browsing through some of my old mail and came across a message from the dim recesses of January 1998. I had just tried the AltaVista translation service to convert a
Spanish review of a Digital laptop into English. It did some wonderful things like occasionally translating ‘desktop’ as ‘tablecloth’ and I thought the results were
quite charming. Here are the first few paragraphs:
“An equipment of high benefits that competes seriously
with those of tablecloth – by Abel Manto’n”
To the good thing one is accustomed immediately. Portable 575 HiNote VP
stand for casks is so powerful, that one week whole without igniting the
desktop computer can be happened nor remembering for anything him.
One is a cacharrito of 3.4 kilos of weight, with 2.16 gigas of hard disk and
one piece that combines in the same space the disquetera and the reader of
D-ROM.
From the last name comes to him there bent to this machine of 765,000
pesetas in its standard configuration. The computer that we have proven bond
something more, because it included an extension of memory, happening of the
16 megas of the basic equipment to 32.
The memory difference, as already it has been written so many times, is
fundamental to shoot the yield. Unfortunately, the extensions of memory
accustom to being specific for each model and the prices notice it.
An equipment to taste.
Paltar to choose a portable one well is necessary to have precaution in
verifying how the tastes of user to three basic parameters adapt: the
keyboard, the screen and the mouse, that with the programs that run is
essential.
On the keyboard it is necessary to say that a little out of place have some
keys, mainly the one to suppress, the one of beginning and the one of aim.
Model proven had keyboard English, which always incomoda a little, but more
annoying is to have to look for key to erase, which it is where it is
without leaf return, and is an infrequent place. By the others, it is
written wonderfully.
The screen is irreprochable. 12.1 inches, active matrix and a fantastic
angle of view. Sure the graphical card, that has much to do, is a PCI of 128
bits (pure lujazo), of most efficient. It allows a resolution of until
1024×768 points, although doing a trick of panning. That is to say, it
creates a virtual screen that ‘ sale’ of the visible screen and moves on
this one when the leader of the mouse takes towards the ends. Recommendable
and the appropriate thing is to use the resolution of 800×600, with HD
color, that produces the best visual results, without trap nor cardboard.
Like the small size of the iPod shuffle but wish it had a display? Today, Apple announced the iPod Nano, and the Mini has quietly vanished from the Apple site.
Oh, and there’s a Motorola phone with iPod functionality, but we’ve known about that for so long that it would be pretty unexciting even if you could get it from anybody other than Cingular.
It is the only phone I’ve seen with stereo speakers, though!
© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser
RSS feed
Recent Comments