Technosexuality: Robot Love

I watched a movie a few months ago about a guy who ordered a robot and dated it after failing at relationships with his human counterparts. It turns out that there is person doing this in real life. I can only guess that the movie was based on this guy. It's a very interesting concept and a bit disturbing. I recommend reading an intriguing interview between gizmodo.com and Zoltan, the technosexual.

Hijack Fast Food Drive-Thru Intercoms!

Holy Cow. Apparently this is old news, but the how-to guide is new. A few years ago, some clever prankster took the time to figure out how to take over the frequencies used by drive-thru intercoms to prank unsuspecting customers of fast food restaurants. I think it's hilarious, but the how-to is dangerous. You can literally take a simple component (a crystal) from any modern toaster and use it to replace the crystal in a cheap CB radio to produce a device capable of causing much havoc. While public frequencies like these are shared, I'm sure there are laws against intentionally interfering and worse, impersonating the employees. Sounds like fun to me in moderation. Now that this video is out, I'm sure we'll begin to see some segments about the threat to our laziness on our local evening news sometime soon. Have fun and be careful. Check out the video after the jump. from gizmodo.com

Dallas considers shutting off red light cams, since they're working too well and harming revenue

This is interesting and sad. Red light cameras installed in Dallas have done such a good job at curtailing red light infractions that the loss in revenue from tickets has the government considering turning them off randomly so that people will break the law more often and return the revenue balance!

from engadget.com: "There's just one, fairly ironic, flaw to the otherwise totally lovable red light cameras that adorn Dallas: they work too well. Turns out the cams have curtailed red light infractions by 50 percent, which in turn has put a budget crunch on City Hall. The city is now considering stopping its planned rollout of more cameras, or shutting down the cameras on a rotating basis -- upkeep when off is next to nothing, but the city pays $3,799 per month per online camera to its service provider. That sounds like quite a spendy broadband bill, but we're not the experts here. Just remember kids, your government wants what's best for you, and what's best for you is a well-funded government, alright?"

A Reason for Everyone to Dance

I've just come across a posting about an environmentally sound dance club exhibit. Sound strange? I thought so too. The most interesting part of the project for me was the idea of a dance floor that captures some of the wasted energy produced from the pounding of your feet upon the floor. It's apparent that researchers and engineers are looking everywhere they can to harness energy in our ever more environmentally aware society. What's next? Electricity generation from the box spring of your bed? Every time you roll over in the middle of the night, your night light burns a little brighter? Imagine the water cooler conversations of someone bragging about their sex life, "you wouldn't believe how much energy we returned to grid last night!" Check out the video at treehugger.com.

Evernote Destined To Be A Hit

Here's one of the most promising web applications that I've seen in a while. Evernote is a tool capable of detecting text in captured images and associating the text with the images in a searchable index. The uses are countless. Example, take photos of people wearing name tags at a conference for later matching of faces to names. I'm particularly interested in using it during my travels. When I'm busy trying to see every famous landmark in a new city without enough time to do so, I always regret not being able to read all of the interesting factoids written on various walls and signs. I tend to take photos of the signs to read later. I can just imagine using Evernote to convert this information to searchable text automatically. Sounds great. The service is still in invite-only beta mode. Bookmark it: evernote.com

Close Chip Bags Without a Clip

I'm a big fan of lifehacker.com and their top 10 lists. I discovered a great tip on one of their food and drink lists. There never seems to be a clip around when your half eaten bag of chips is in dire need of protection from the elements. Sure, you can tightly roll the bag opening and wedge it against something, but you'll usually return to find that the bag has contorted it's way out of the predicament. Enter lifehacker's video on a folding technique that "locks" it shut. I LOVE it.

Generate Electricity With Each Flush

You know there's a green revolution going on when you hear that not just the person sitting on top, but the toilets themselves will be generating power. Personally, I'm excited to see so much innovation in this area. It seems that everyone's catching on that solving our energy problems requires diverse approaches.

from gizmodo.com: "Energy Generating Turbine Toilet: Poop Saves the Planet: If the Benkatine Turbine by Leviathan Energy finds its way into homes, your bowel movements will be able to help generate free electricity. Using the same technology found in other hydroelectric devices, the Benkatine turbine uses the water that passes through the pipes in your home to produce power. According to the company, that means you could make use of the water flowing from any number of sources—including your gutter drains. It is a simple idea, but simple ideas are often the most useful. Plus, you pass off your excessive drinking and overeating as your little way of helping the environment."

Yes! Autonomous Solar Powered Lawnmower

One more reason to never leave the house.

from gizmodo.com: "That neighbor of yours thinks he is so badass with his top-of-the-line riding mower. With the Husqvarna's new autonomous lawn mower, you can sip a beer on your porch and tell your neighbor to suck it while he toils away on his yard. And the best part is that the mower is a solar/electric hybrid—so it will mow your lawn whisper quiet with nearly zero emissions."

RFID EVERYTHING: Reality vs Virtual Reality lines getting blurrier

I've been telling my father and friends for years that location aware technology is going to explode. Honestly, I was thinking more along the lines of GPS, assisted GPS, cell tower triangulation, and near proximity tech. I hadn't considered a more elaborate use of radio frequency ID (RFID). Google has begun work on a rather ambitious plan to allow the tagging of anything for the purpose of locating.

Read more from gizmodo.com

Massive Air Vortex Cannon

This reminds me of competing against my friend, Kini, in Hawaii to create an air ring that lasted the longest from about 85 feet underwater. Kini and his wife, Ana, were scuba instructors and I'd tag along every once in a while. When Kini had some free time, we'd lay on our backs at the bottom of the sea floor near a wreck off of Waikiki. We would remove our regulators long enough to blow a ring of air, similar to smoke rings. The rings would sometimes rise close to the surface before breaking apart. That has to be one of my favorite activities of all time. The longer we'd goof off, the more light headed we'd get from all of the bottom time. Kini always won. He had more practice, goofing off. ;( Check out the video on this page of a large air vortex cannon. Amazing!

from gizmodo.com: "Massive Air Vortex Candle Cannon Built: It Blows, Bigstyle:
Baking a cake to celebrate 20 years in business wasn't enough fun for sub makers Erbert and Gerbert, oh no— they decided to build a man-sized air vortex cannon to blow out its candles. What's an air vortex canon, you ask? It's one of those big gun-like toys that fires puffs of air surprisingly far across the room."

Visual Thesaurus

I just stumbled upon a very cool thesaurus at http://www.visualthesaurus.com/ . Unfortunately, it's not free, but they'll let you play around for a few minutes. I recommend checking it out for a fresh way of visualizing words and their associative meanings. Since our minds are very spatially tuned in terms of learning and memory, I could sense a much richer experience when seeing the words in diagrams. Very cool.

Postal Mail from the Comptuer via the Internet

In my quest to create a better address book of my current and past acquaintances, I've discovered L-Mail, a service that will send postal mail for you. Hold it!!! Lasso those thoughts about laziness and keep reading. I was looking for contact information online for an old elementary school friend and discovered a physical mailing address, but no email address. I'm reluctant to spend the time to hand-write a letter (I'm not near a printer currently), address an envelope (after finding one), put a stamp on it (after finding one) and then, finally, walk forth and back to the mailbox only to find out that I had the wrong address. Wait! Tighten the lasso on your laziness thoughts and start pulling ... there's more. I found three possible addresses for my friend. Now we're talking about hand-writing and addressing envelopes for the same content three times. The list of mental and physical obstacles to a reunion is growing longer. I certainly don't need this to be more difficult than it needs to be. As it is, I've not made an effort to get in touch with him for over 15 years. So, for whatever reason, I've already demonstrated a considerable lack of motivation. All of this work creating letters to be mailed out would easily tip the scale in favor of remaining out of touch. If you read my post about "The Personal Growth Manager 1.0," then you'll have an idea of how I feel about our reasons for staying out of touch.

This leads me to my point. Let's make it easier to reconnect with people. I don't have the desire to spend money on a personal investigator to hunt down my friends, classmates.com is still too new to be very handy, and I don't have a next door neighbor that's personally vested in my getting back in touch with old friends like Bill Murray had in "Broken Flowers" (great movie, by the way). So, if I can spend a little more money than the cost of a typical postal letter to conveniently and quickly send letters to these possible addresses, I'm down. It would be great to reignite a good friendship, find out what's been happening in his life and our mutual friends' lives that I've also lost touch, and to spawn any healing and growth personally. Lazy, no. Priceless, yes.

https://l-mail.com/scripts/static/features.php

Personal Growth Manager 1.0

Recently, I've become rather hyped up on maintaining the contacts in my address book. Despite the controversy, I'm a big fan of Plaxo (http://www.plaxo.com/). I only wish there were even more services to facilitate the creation and maintenance of contacts for me. To take the idea to an extreme, I'd like to have an address book with everyone that I've met throughout my life that I thought was interesting and/or effectual in my life. You never know when you might want to get in touch and, more interestingly, it could keep you in touch.

So many contacts and relationships become, shall we say, discarded. It seems like an awful waste. Perhaps it's natural and healthy, and perhaps not. Maybe it's really only a relatively new phenomenon in the scope of human existence. Just a few hundred years ago, I doubt that the average teenager was threatening to move out and take off to become an actor on the west coast of America. I'd bet that people were more inclined to have relationships that reached back farther into their past. I'd also wager that this tended to improve the quality of their lives.

Think of losing touch with people for no good reason as analogous to purchasing something and only using it once and then purchasing the same type of item again because you've forgotten or misplaced the first one. It's very uneconomical. Even more interesting, I believe the mind favors those that we've known the longest. There's a bond there that doesn't exist for similar, yet newer, relationships. So, I say stay in touch. I think there are a lot of rewards to be had in the realms of business and personal growth.

I think the advantages that you could reap in your business life are more obvious than your personal life. There are a lot of people that we probably never speak with anymore because we'd like to forget about the type of person that we were during that phase of our life or maybe something happened between us and that person that doesn't make us feel so great. I think it's sometimes better, actually most of the time I think it's better, to communicate and confront these fears that are typically irrational. It would force us to deal with our issues and become more in touch with ourselves. I can't believe I'm saying that ... yuuk!

"The Automated Address Book 1.0?" No, I think not. Try "The Personal Growth Manager 1.0." Combine this with a diary of embarrassing moments linked to people in your address book and bam!, you could have it bug you with pop-up alerts reminding you to spend some quality time with this acquaintance and patch up that emotional pot hole! Huh! Huh! Yeah, now we're talking.

Remote Control Postal Mail!

I've just come across a service that will handle your postal mail for you. This is interesting to me as I have begun spending most of the year in Hawaii and the rest either at my home in Maryland or traveling. There's always a certain amount of mail that isn't forwarded properly and I end up not seeing it early enough to respond. These guys will scan the outside of the envelopes and the contents if you make the request. It would kill two birds with one stone in terms of going paperless. http://www.remotecontrolmail.com/

An information revolution right under my nose ...

You may or may not have stumbled onto Wikipedia articles when you've performed searches on the Internet. I finally took a moment to read about the service. It turns out that it is an encyclopedia that ANYONE can contribute information. There's processes in place to mature the articles. There are downsides of misinformation due to the open access, but the upside is huge ... examples: no censorship, no corporate or political biases, multiple languages. I've been amazed at the information I've found. It's always so relevant and current. This approach to culling information together and organizing people is as noteworthy as the creation of the printing press, in my opinion. If you would like to read more about it, here's a link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About

This "Wiki" approach is also being applied to a dictionary, thesaurus, books, textbooks, manuals, directory of speciies, news, media, and more.

Now, I think "The Age of Information" is very appropriate for the time that we live.