SuperBoB

I think Wowwee will be the company that brings us toys like those in “Supertoys last all Summer”. Their Robosapien is awesome. If they start building toys like Ugobe’s Pleo, and it looks like they’ve started, then we’ll get cool toy companions instead of Teddy Ruxpin.

This article intrigued me. I think displaying pictures linked through a map of where they are taken is a cool presentation idea. It also would allow hacks like clicking a picture to bring up the relevant area in Google Maps. Apparently, a lot of the popular photo sites already have some support for this. I think the bigger use in my case might be to click on someone else’s pictures to see the surrounding location. It could also be used for cheap parlor tricks that are somewhat useful. Consider a hotel chain taking pictures of all it’s properties with geotags on the photos. Clicking on a photo adds the hotel property as the destination on Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, or some other route planner. Clicking on your own avatar that has tags for your home location plugs it in as the starting point of the trip. Perhaps planning a trip could be made by going through a list of interesting photos in a particular area. Clicking on individual photos adds them as waypoints on the trip. Hit print, and your driving directions are ready to go. Aside from “Click to Drive”, I’m not sure what popular uses this will be put to, but if this type of metadata takes hold, I am assuming that people will come up with some really innovative ideas. What would you use geotagging for?

Jawbone had an announcement at CES 2008 telling you to trade in your old bluetooth headset for one of theirs at the booth. This got me to thinking about what the next step is. I think active noise canceling will become more common. What would be even cooler I think is a cochlear implant. This would be functionally equivalent to an audio jack direct to your ear. I think the jawbone name comes partially from the idea of sub-vocalization microphones. Use the mike pickup from the implant, assuming it is still external or could be made so, and you have all the input/output you need for conversation. I could envision hooking this to a bluetooth transceiver for phone calls, but what would be far more interesting is a digital assistant interface. You could have access to a constant stream of information without those around you being aware of it. Consider a small computer hooked up to this as well as an unobtrusive video camera. Add a little face recognition and you could be prompted with the name of the person (or object) you are currently looking at. Perhaps, you could turn up the information level to get additional details. Cochlear implants are relatively new (only about 50 years old), but have advanced rapidly.

I like the idea of “enhancements” to my senses as well. A recent article describes other things that could be added. Most of these would only get more sophisticated and smaller/less noticeable as time goes on. I was very intrigued with having a magnetic sense. I’m curious what other hacks to our senses science can come up with.

It appears that Vista has support for a new filesystem geared for removable media. It appears that you may be able to use this driver on XP as well. Even more fun, ExFAT supports OEM extensions and transactions. My understanding is that transactional support allows for increased assurance of your filesystem not becoming corrupt without the level of extra writing needed by a journaled filesystem. I could be off base, and maybe TFAT doesn’t add journaling. In addition, TFAT is supposed to help protect against corruption when media is unexpectedly removed from the system without “ejecting” it. The latter was a concern relayed to me about not using NTFS on removable media. As with all things Microsoft, I assume that they will present this as an “open” standard, then fight tooth and nail to prevent anybody else from implementing it without their express permission or receiving of royalties. Nonetheless, it sounds like a good improvement, and if it starts with MS, it helps eliminate the issue of getting drivers for this on Windows. An overview of exFAT is here.

I’m not sure if our personal devices have to get smaller, but that is the current trend. A full qwerty keyboard is already a trade off. Either the keys are too small to be usable or the device is larger than it would be otherwise. Once we get down to just a number pad, even the 10-12 keys start to limit how small a device can be and take up valuable space on the device that could be used for displaying media or other input. Look at the iphone. They had to go to a touch screen just to get a decent amount of space. Of course the touch screen is pretty sexy, but don’t let it distract you from the fact that we are running out of space as devices shrink. This article, gives a few examples of voice into user input. My Motorola phone does voice recognition without any sort of training. Granted, this is a limited domain, so it doesn’t have as many choices to process, but it’s easily conceivable to me that increased processing power will keep enlarging the envelope until we can dictate to our computers without training them. Jott seems to do close to this already. It’s kind of hard to believe how powerful and flexible Jott is until you try it, but I would still rather have that power contained in a device I have control of. How long until my cell phone or mp3 player can do that on its own? Of course, I said voice recognition was the penultimate method, meaning there is still some room for growth. However, it does appear that progress is being made on the ultimate user input method. I can definitely see this opening up new possibilities.

Just when I open my mouth, someone tries to prove me wrong. Belkin is rapidly closing on a $99 price point for a wireless USB hub, thought it looks like you need to provide your own WiFi access point. Other units I have seen include a dongle that fills this gap. Consumer electronics companies are finally catching on as well. I always assumed have a single standard would save them money in the long run, and the companies in this article seem to be agreeing with that, at least indirectly through member organizations. I never considered the environmental impact before, because I assumed corporations wouldn’t care unless they were forced to by regulation, but I can see newer “green” influences affecting this as well.

Even though USB isn’t good enough for some people, and even though the top Google links have outdated information, the balance is tipping. Intel recently announced the plan for USB 3.0. Wireless USB is also getting a rev, which is somehow ironic considering that we still don’t have affordable wireless USB 1.0 gear. I would define affordable as under $100 and current prices for most hubs or adapters are hanging around twice that amount. There is even an argument that USB will take over firewire as more camcorders roll out with hard-drives instead of tape. I don’t like the idea of losing cable length (from 5 meters with USB 2 down to 2 meters with USB 3). However, I can’t think of a time that I used a longer cable. I’m not saying that some people wouldn’t have very good uses for longer cables, but I’m not one of them, and I suspect the majority of people aren’t either. Other than that, long live USB!

Fat32 is old. Why hasn’t it been replaced yet? I have files bigger than 4GB. I want filesystems bigger than 32GB. This Slashdot article gives some decent background, but doesn’t really come up with a winner. If we look at HFS, ext2, or NTFS, there are options for Mac, Linux, and Windows machines. Of course these options don’t include the journaling abilities of HFS+ or ext3. Does that mean NTFS is the only option? It used to be a bad idea to have a journaling filesystem on a USB key, which is one of the key devices that would need to support this. I don’t know if current wear leveling is good enough to deal with journaling, or if this issue is only an urban myth. Maybe the Mythbusters will take this one up. We all know that Linux will eventually get support for anything that is popular enough, regardless of legality. I don’t know if Microsoft has patents up its sleeve that it could use to attempt to shut down NTFS support on Linux, but it wouldn’t surprise me. That being said, I would think that Microsoft would prefer their filesystem to the other options I mentioned, and several I didn’t. As long as we are allowed to format devices we buy, any of these are an option yet. My current vote is for better NTFS support across platforms, but only time will tell. What do think would make the best FAT32 replacement?

It appears that miCARD will be able to use an adapter to fit into SD/MMC slots. I am assuming that these cards would still be limited to 4GB in devices supporting SD or 2048GB in devices supporting SDHC. So on second thought, the new memory format could be a good thing as it provides an upgrade path where memory could be reused in newer devices and supposedly the miCARD format tops out at 8TB (that’s terabytes).

I have tried to persuade, or perhaps badger, friends in family to seeing my point of view on connectors. I have a hard time understanding why the USB connection can’t be more “universal”. I assume that consumer electronics companies want to make money off selling accessories, and why would you buy a new power adapter if the old one works perfectly well. I got a Motorola RAZR and a headset (I think the H500) a while back, and I am much more likely to buy Motorola products now, because the power adapters for these two products are interchangeable. In other words, rather than a differentiator, the USB connector for charging and data has become a standard item to be checked off of a functionality list. In much the same way, I really like the low-light abilities of Sony cameras. I am also satisfied with the optical quality on the Sony camera and camcorder I have, although I understand that they aren’t necessarily great across their entire product line. However, I doubt I will buy another Sony camera, because I feel that Memory Stick is a dead end. I would rather deal with SD (and I’m even willing to put up with the mini or micro offshoots). As a consumer, I refuse to go along with manufacturers in their attempt to churn out a constant stream of proprietary connectors or memory formats. So when I read about the new miCard, all I could think was, “here we go again”. At least in this case, they are promising some benefits of speed and storage size, but it is pretty gutsy to call a product that has yet to be produced a global standard. I’ll reserve judgment for the final product, if it ever ships.