September 2008 Archives
In this review, Popular Sciecne highlights new examples of high-tech gear, from the technology behind those ultralight Big Agnes tent poles to a new wearable water shirt from CamelBak. Another is the Aura harness from Black Diamond, made from a liquid-crystal laminate of all things:
Black Diamond introduced a new line of climbing harnesses; they've got what they are calling Kinetic Core Construction. What that means: a tri-laminate liquid crystal polymer fabric, also found in NASA spacesuits, is sandwiched between layers of taffeta, making the Ozone, Aura, and Chaos models more comfortable than any other harness ever made and among the sleekest and lightest harnesses out there, according to Black Diamond. It has foam padding and extra breathable and soft fabric that goes against your skin too, but the big news is the lightness, compactability, and strength of this harness.
Continue reading What's Next For Outdoor Adventurers | Popular Science.
http://tinyurl.com/6p9yyn
#1 iTunes Application download, 9/11/2008.
Lifehacker: Air Sharing, an iPhone/iPod touch app that's free only through Sept. 22, is a file storage application that works with Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux systems, as it uses the open WebDAV protocol to accept and share files through your file system or web browser. The app conveniently includes thorough setup and access instructions inside a tabbed Help section. Air Sharing adds unique icons to a whole lot of file types and can preview them, including images, Microsoft Office and iWork files, PDFs, web pages. Air Sharing is free for iPhones and iPod touches for two weeks past its debut yesterday, so grab it while you can. Read on for screenshots and a quick Windows connection how-to.
Great article. Excerpt:
It is easy to become unsettled by privacy-eroding aspects of awareness tools. But there is another — quite different — result of all this incessant updating: a culture of people who know much more about themselves. Many of the avid Twitterers, Flickrers and Facebook users I interviewed described an unexpected side-effect of constant self-disclosure. The act of stopping several times a day to observe what you’re feeling or thinking can become, after weeks and weeks, a sort of philosophical act.
http://www.wired.com/cars/futuretransport/magazine/16-09/ff_agassi?currentPage=all
Electric Avenues
AutoOS, the Better Place operating system, would transform the transportation grid. Here's how.- 1A special key fob linked to the car indicates the status of the battery. If the logo is throbbing blue, the car is fully charged.
- 2The driver unplugs and heads out. The software analyzes the first few minutes of driving and guesses the destination based on past history: "Work?" it asks. The driver speaks a response and the system determines how much energy is needed for the day.
- 3During the commute, the location-aware system finds and displays three open parking spaces near the office that are equipped with Better Place charging spots.
- 4An automatic arm extends to plug into the car. The spot then communicates with the control center, which anticipates the driver's energy needs so as to allocate power economically. It might, say, limit consumption during expensive peak hours. The driver gets a text: "80 percent charged."
- 5An unexpected meeting comes up. The driver enters a new route, and AutOS determines there is insufficient charge to get there. The driver orders a battery swap.
- 6AutOS finds the most convenient battery-exchange location and books a bay. The old battery gets lowered onto a hydraulic plate, and the car moves forward on a car-wash-style track. In five minutes, a fully charged battery is in place.
Google recently introduced new Picasa web album functionality that scans your images and finds face patterns, allowing you to tag them by person name. I tried it today and it is indeed effective, with spooky overtones.
The scary part isn't Google, whose service is option, but the potential for abuse of this technology for surveillance, government sanctioned or otherwise.
Look at the job it did finding all the facial variants of my daughter Avery. I noticed it was also very good at finding the facial similarities between the Grant or the Hammerslag side of my family - even linking facial patterns on that side of the family between adults and their related preschool pictures.
Daughter Skylar is windsurfing today in Muskegon. Here's a map of the windsurfing launches near the pier which make it an ideal spot in all kinds of wind and wave conditions.
The three spots, all conveniently very close to each other, are the main Lake Michigan beaches, the south harbor launch just inside the pier walk, and the small public beach on Lake Muskegon just beyond the Harbortowne Marina facility. The Muskegon Harbor.pdf download has the locations marked.
A condensed and effective UX summary.
Stephen Few provides a selection of twelve state-of-the-art dashboards, and gives a short history of dashboards, from executive information systems (EIS) in the 1980s to modern business performance management tools.
http://tumblr.twenty08.com/post/48490814/mobilechat-status-update
MobileChat Status Update We’ve spoken to a number of consultants who specialize in large scale enterprise IM installations and have issued an RFP to everyone we could possibly find. (If we missed your company, be sure to contact me!) We expect a solution to be in place at about the time that MobileChat 3.1 is approved by Apple and shows up on the AppStore. It seems as though our hopes of a “speedy” review were swiftly denied. However, I think our estimates of friday/the beginning of next week are still on target. This worked out in our favor as we have some “down-time” to work on our server setup, while we wait for an approval.
MobileChat Status Update We’ve spoken to a number of consultants who specialize in large scale enterprise IM installations and have issued an RFP to everyone we could possibly find. (If we missed your company, be sure to contact me!) We expect a solution to be in place at about the time that MobileChat 3.1 is approved by Apple and shows up on the AppStore. It seems as though our hopes of a “speedy” review were swiftly denied. However, I think our estimates of friday/the beginning of next week are still on target. This worked out in our favor as we have some “down-time” to work on our server setup, while we wait for an approval.
Tweetstats - Make Your Social Graph
Data visualization gets personal with Tweetstats, a free service that gives a nifty chart based on your (or anyone else's) Twitter posts.
Here's mine:
How about the effervescent blogger / microblogger Craig Cmehil of SAP?
You even get analysis charting:
West Michigan Strategic Alliance
Projects include projects with Wired West Michigan, which hired Steelcase colleague Phil Rios.
WMSA goals:
Create a Regional Mindset
Recent news....
WIRED West Michigan Catches Washington's Eye
Brent Orrell, Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment & Training Administration, visited West Michigan on Monday, August 4, 2008 for an in-depth briefing concerning two of WIRED
Both are excellent examples of how WIRED
