Anderson Drones

Lego Autopilot first flight: "We tested stabilization, autonomous navigation (only using compass headings this time, although GPS is in the works), and the real-time video downlink"

Chris Anderson (Long Tail, Wired editor) has a new site up for his latest fun project -DIY Drones: - detailing the building and now flying of a Lego NXT based drone or self-controlled plane.

Too cool - goes to show how far you can get with the willingness to push the boundaries (and some spare cash, sub $1000 is still a bit for playing around)

Finally some more info on the Joost Widgets

Joost has launched a new sub-site for the soon (still...) release of the Widget framework, at dev.jooost. There is very limited information so far, but the one article there gives some insight in between the marketing buzzword:
Introducing Joost™ Widgets: "built the Joost Widget platform on top of the latest Web standards, powered by the Mozilla browser engine. Developers who are familiar with technologies such as HTML, XML, CSS, SVG, Ajax, Javascript and RDF will find an exciting new environment to develop their ideas"

Finally a step closer to realizing the promise of Joost - the best options from the internet, in the form of open-source based development acceptance (rather than leaving the users to hack for themselves with Greasmonkey or similar)

What do you want to do when watching video? How about keyword tags with linked Google search or News feeds? Geotagging for other watchers and in-show quiz? Multi-player Tetris?

Stay tuned? ;)

Multi-tv

Just turned of the "regular" television, as the Champions League final match in Athens has ended, and turned a bit more attention over to the laptop which has been running the latest updated version of Joost for some hours. Incidentally the wikipedia page is already up to date with the result - Milan getting it with a 2 to 1 win over L'pool

Now the shows have their own direct links, such as this for an introduction to drawing - sending you to a (rather empty) information page, along with a dedicated link to start the program in Joost (joost: protocol)

Also the sorting in the channel guide seems to work now - and that is a good thing with the number of available channels growing, even a small subset runs into 40 channels so sorting by genre or personal preference is nice.

Still it needs a bit more intelligence to "combine the best of the web"; like folders - just like Google reader let's you group rss feeds, the channel guide should be in levels, giving the option for packages and collections of channels and searches. That way all the animation could have one folder, the music another and the assorted sci-fi'ish stuff a third - making it easier to browse and jump between channels.

If the information and grouping was sent to the central servers it might also make it easier to predict next shows for pre-caching in the background thereby increasing the speed of swapping channels

And still no widget toolkit to play around with - might have to have a look at some of the forum post about possible direct hacks to the existing client to get a better feel of the options.


...and the sun gets up much to early in the summer...

Real toys and virtual playhouses

With the internet it is so easy to find information - and so hard to find the time to use it.

How many sites can you spend time on? How many YouTube videos and Facebook friends can you fit into a reasonable time online? Currently Norway is swept into a social networking frenzy, first by "Nettby" - from the largest paper (and the largest online site) VG. In a short span it grew from nothing into 150 000 users and high profile coverage during the captial markets day for Schibsted. And now Facebook has apparently passed 170 000 Norwegian users, up from 3000 in January.

I'm reading "Linked" (or for the full explanatory tagline title; "How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means") It is a book from late 2002 and at one point Barabási talks about the "six degrees" phenomenon and how "we don't have a social search engine so we may never know the real number". And now just a few years down the line we are pretty close. At least if it was easy (or feasible) to map the online part of the world by mixing MySpace, WOW, LinkedIn, blogs and comments (Technorati) into one large cloud of interconnected "metaverses". Something for Yahoo Pipes to do as their next proof of concept?

Second Life has also been in the news quite a bit, but it seems to have more value as a marketing buzz word than as a destination (send out a release about doing something in SL and get coverage, rather than getting the attention in SL itself). Like this post from 3point on Bunnies in bits... more than a month before the (possible/plausible) event or entrance kicking off.

too cute

Moving over too pure toys - and buzz machines - the Pleo robot dino just looks way to nice! It was covered in Wired and PC Mag has a interesting hands-on. The choice of dino species was adapted based on the need for all his new high tech innards - so stubby legs and a thick neck is a perfect match. Not to mention that it makes for a cute little critter. (Image from Ugobe, creators of Pleo)

Also in the cute category is the story of robot chicklets from NXTbot - coming from Sega (who needs to make a game console when you can get this kind of attention?)

NXT is the new version of the Mindstorms "make your own robot" kit from Lego - which at $250 is best suited for the slightly older geek. With the more "regular" pieces there is no problem making fanciful mech style creations - like this APU from the Matrix movies, or the Lego IP mecha setting called Exo Force. And here the power of the net as both a source for off line activities and for stealing time is quite visible; building instructions or browsing 30,790 creations?

As for NXT- it would be fun to pick up a set and make a small robot, but I just don’t see the time for delving into it properly on the horizon - too many other options and ideas. Like building that Exo Force combination model ;D

-
...and the sun is a postcard from tomorrow...

Got time? Save the world

"People wonder how Wikipedia magically arose from nothing, and how 50 million bloggers suddenly appeared, almost all of them writing for free" [Longtail]
Just like the mobile providers are hoping for a (continued) windfall from our 'fear' of boring pauses and mindless waiting, so Chris draws the parallel between online and connected people using their time and brainpower to create "free" stuff (yours truly included right now - coffee break posting).

Just like the online newspapers have in large part opened whole new markets for advertising - catching people during their workday, so now the social sites are reaping the benefits, in terms of eyeballs, advertising and hype. So people spend time reading articles about people spending time writing messages. And then they spend some time commenting on it - online. And the cycle lives on. The watercooler is dead, long live the "digital black hole for attention"

...and the sun was warm this morning, summer is sneaking up at last...

Joost gets a boost forward

NewTeeVee:
» Joost gets $45 million in funding: "Investors lucky enough to put their money in Joost: Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures, Viacom, CBS and Chinese tycoon, Li Ka-shing."

- so in addition to getting the cash for further technical development and infrastructure, they have also managed to get two "incumbent" players (Viacom and CBS) on board - probably only a minor share as a vote of confidence, but interesting for the next steps none the less.

No doubt that the video market is going online as, step by little step, convergence is finally just around the corner for the mass market - blurring the boundaries of PC and TV into a world of choice and convenience

Questions? That’s why we are alive

“The answer to the question ‘what comes after death’ is not suitable for bringing back to this life” – it is beyond our ability to grasp, to understand and to verbalize. Not sure that we would become any happier if we found out (Jan Schumacher, lecturer in Church History at the Norwegian School of Theology )

What I great way of saying we really do need a leap of faith – or as they put it in the Matrix; humans are unable of coping with total bliss, it overloads our base systems and impulses, misery and wonder, uncertainty and pain – all contribute to making us what we are, to making life and consciousness such a unique experience.

There are limits to what we can put into language, no matter how fluffed up we try to make it with abstract terms and phrases. Just as the Uncertainty Principle makes it hard to take down the full view of quantum particles (speed or position – as the observation influences the observed), so our mind is unable to clearly explore the depths of the Universe and what lies beyond while staying connected to our everyday frame of reference.



So, three high flying thought and beyond subjects almost straight on, just spaced up by some coffee. The post have been written up over the weekend, in Word and dumped in here for links and posting (on a sidenote I had to paste in the html mode rather than Compose to avoid overload of MS Xml markup getting in here as well) Now for some more hands on geek style subjects;

Wired has done a redesign of the magazine (just got the fourth issue with the new look, waited to have a better feel of the minors as well the more obvious adjustments) – and overall I think it has worked out pretty well. Some minor nuisances – but by popular demand the Colophon seems to have returned – however, the overall feel is good. One area that still needs some thought is the online – paper cross use. Wired.com/extras is a step in the right direction.(BUT... it seems you have to move fast as the link no redirects to the main page for the newest number and list the special features for those articles, with older items banished to some unknown state

One amusing thing in the new Wired; the letters pages (rants & raves) now only have an email chat@ as point of interaction - but the text printed in the magazine and online still has the basic legalese boilerplate:
"Submissions may be edited and may be published or used in any medium. They become the property of Wired and will not be returned."
What does that mean online? A no-bounce policy? How do you return an e-mail – sending it back will leave yet another copy on your outgoing server rather than removing it from your system. Good example of old tradition failing hopelessly in a digitized environment – where a product and a copy are identical, the cost of making another (or another million for that matter) zero once it exists in the first place.

Coffee goodness

A bit earlier (yes, behind on the blogging as always it seems – should probably change the tagline to delayed thoughts and musings on topics gone past) this spring I picked up a quart of El Danubio – which got a solid 15th place in the 2006 Cup of Excellence in Columbia. It was available at the small chain “Kaffebrenneriert” (with 15 outlets in Oslo)

Quote from the pack-note;
“El Danuibo is a BIG coffee that deserves it place among the top Columbians. We especially like the intense yet soft feel, the clear tones of marmalade, raspberry, sweet tobacco and pine kernels. The aftertaste is long and succinct with wonderful contributions of tangerine and grapefruit”

And it truly was a different, exciting and fulfilling tasting experiences – both in the Gaggia as a soft Espresso, and in the Bodum press pot (a cherished piece of kitchenware, we have two – both bought by my late grandmother and her sister in Copenhagen, Denmark in the late 80-ies, in what I consider to be the original style with a custom fit cork holder to put it on rather than the built in plastic of later iterations – offering a clear view of the pressed coffee grinds, and all four pieces of the plunger easily screws apart for cleaning)

Wonderful how coffee is starting to step into the territory marked out by wine – as a culinary delight, with a span in tastes and experience rivaling most other brews. Just think of how a simple addition of sugar or a bit of milk changes it over while retaining the base tastes.

Really big picture

Jostein Gaarder – wrote previously regarding his essay and the wikipedia debate, had a great quote; “Perhaps humans are the only living beings in the entire Universe with a universal consciousness. Then it’s not just a global responsibility to preserve life-environments on this planet. It is a cosmic responsibility”

Wow. That hit me right in the mental stomach – knocked my thoughts all over the place. What a way to make everyday issues like spring cleaning and washing the windows seem miniscule and insignificant. Perhaps we are not just here to take care of our neighborhood and the globe… but to care for the Universe in all its expanding, mystical glory.

And a short nod to EscapePod – their issue number 100 with the almost always brilliant Isaac Asimov, and the story Nightfall seemed almost pre-cognitient when looking back –as I had just heard it before the news of the “other planet” (see previous post) arrived all over the web.

Who are we to preach – about the sins of the fathers and grandfathers before them?

Just under 90 years ago – as my grandmother started school, women started getting the right to vote in our wonderful democracies. In the span of the last century we – the western world, Europe, the white man, has started off two major conflicts – so large they were labeled World Wars – killing millions, and maiming and scarring countless more.

Even today it is not a simple matter of one man one vote. Here in Norway a vote cast up north counts many times over more than a vote here in the capital Oslo. And in the USA “undesirables” such as past prisoners are past 5 million, with another 2 or more currently in prison – all of them stripped of having their say.

What would “we” say today if China said it was becoming a true democracy – just having the selected few men considered citizens vote? Yet that was the tradition in Greece and Athens – the cradle of democracy, and like the “Founding Fathers” they kept their slaves close and the women off to the side. And France, liberty and all that? They waited until their liberation from the Germans was at hand - 1944, so when they elect a president today it will be with 63 years of votes for all.

How long does something have to last before it becomes the only option? How fast can we condemn our own past mistakes by calling on others to follow directly in our steps- no matter how many generations they might need to take the steps we have already forgotten in the mist of time?

...and the sun is clouded over...