Cameras embedded among LCD pixels
Now this is cool. Apple has filed a patent for an LCD display embedded with tiny “cameras” within the pixels. Since Apple is putting an iSight on the top of the monitors now, this could allow more natural looking video conferencing.
I wonder if this will be more of a privacy concern. This post describes how someone could set up their computer to “spy” on whoever is in front of the computer. It is easy to deter the this now, just by blocking the camera lens. But when the whole screen is the camera, it will be less likely that someone will even think of doing this.
[via Engadget]
Technorati Tags: Apple, iSight, patent
NetNewsWire and NewsGator
I saw that the NetNewsWire beta has syncing capabilities with NewsGator. This allows you to be able to read your subscribed feeds, even when you are not at your Mac. You could have done this by exporting your subscribed feeds as an opml file and subscribing to it in a a web based rss aggregator. The problem with this is that marking a article as read in one of the readers, will not make that same change in the other.
The NetNewsWire and NewsGator integration takes care of this for you. When you start NetNewsWire it loads the state of your feeds from NewsGator, an then when it quits it uploads it back up. I have found that this works very well. The only feature that I would like to see in this integration is the ability to sync the “My Clippings” items as flagged items in NewNewsWire.
Simplification … not so much
I know that I said that I was going to try to simplify things by getting rid of some hardware. Well it seems like that is not working out as planned.
A couple of days ago, I noticed that all of the network speed that we were getting going to external sites was pretty bad. It would fix itself when I rebooted the Airport Extreme. I noticed that the activity lights on the WAN side of the Airport express were blinking like crazy. I plugged my Linksys WRT54GS router between the cable mode and the Airport, and all of the problems went away. I am not sure if this was happening because the Airport was spending a lot of CPU cycles on filtering traffic, that it was slowing down the outbound traffic, but everything is working now.
Also, yesterday the host running this site was down for several hours. It seems that Tektonic is moving the management of the Unmanaged VPS unixshell#. I am not sure if my VPS will move with this company, or even what the cause of the problems were. But I do have the old server sitting in the garage.
Laptop love song
One of my friends asked me if I was going to get one of the new MacBook Pros. Even though I would love to, I am happy with my 800Mhz PowerBook Titanium G4. Then I heard “A Laptop Like You”, and it sums up my feelings pretty well.
Technorati Tags: Jonathan Coulton
iCarPlay
I mentioned how the the TuneBase FM for iPod didn’t fit my iPod when it is in my case. When I returned it to Fry’s Electronics, I picked up the Monster iCarPlay Wireless Plus for iPod.
I was unsure about how well this, or any other FM transmitter would work, with the interference from radio stations. But it works very well. I can hear the audio clearly, without much interference. In addition to letting you listen to your iPod, it also charges it.
The one thing that I need to get now is a cup holder stand for the iPod to keep it in east reach. I am sure that someone make something like this, but I didn’t see one at Fry’s.
Technorati Tags: iCarPlay, iPod
Mac mini / Front Row suggestions
We have been using our Mac mini as a media center for a while, and even though I love it, there are some things that I would like to see added/changed.
- To be able to change the ratings of tracks. On the iPod, which has a very similar interface, you can press select to get to a screen that will rate the song.
- To have a way to delete shows from a podcast, from within Front Row. I often listen to an audio or video podcast on the train coming home from work, so I don’t want to watch it again. With out going into iTunes to delete that track, the only way for it to be removed the next time iTunes updates podcasts is to play the whole track. (You can fast forward through it though)
- Just like iTunes downloads podcasts, I would love it if iTunes/Front Row would download all of the trailers into a local cache. Our kids love watching trailers, and it is pretty frustrating when network bandwidth is not keeping up with the bitrate of the the high resolution trailers.
Technorati Tags: FrontRow, iTunes, Mac mini
NSStringRegEx
A while ago, I mentioned that Cocoa doesn’t have built-in support for regular expressions. Johnathon S. sent me an email about NSStringRegEx (header, code), which is a method that performs regular expression matching. I like this better than a separate framework, as that seems like a lot of overhead.
The code itself has a Creative Commons Public Domain license, so you can use in all types of projects.
Technorati Tags: Cocoa, NSStringRegEx, regexp
Forced TV Ads
Episode 124 of the Digital Experience podcast, mentioned that Philips has filed a patent that would force users to watch commercials. Essentially, this means that there would be a signal in the video stream, that when sent a TV would prevent you from changing channels. With a PVR, this signal would prevent you from fast forwarding past.
Even if other companies license this technology, I don’t think that this will be an effective means for saving advertising. I, as I believe most consumers, would explicitly not buy any TV or PVR that used this technology.
Technorati Tags: patent, Philips
Firefox Flicks
I saw this video on del.icio.us, and I thought that it was pretty funny.
This is a user submitted video for Firefox. It looks like the Firefox team has setup Firefox Flicks where Firefox users can submit videos and compete for $5000.
Technorati Tags: Firefox, Firefox Flicks
Code Monkey
I just heard this song yesterday, and I have to say… I am a Code Monkey too.
Technorati Tags: Code Monkey
