gadgets
The OLPC Laptop’s Interface Translated For Adults
A neat preview of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) user interface Aquatic Sugar, as well as an explanation of how it works:
(More about the One Laptop Per Child project? Click here for my posts on the topic.)
(Thanks for the hint, H.!)
Open Source Hardware: Buglabs to ship in Q4
Tired of your bricked iPhone? You’re not alone. (Ok, to be fair, iPhones aren’t even being shipped in Germany yet, I think. But anyway.)
There’s at least two new projects that are open sourcing not just their software, but also their hardware: They’re specifically designed for hackability. How awesome is that?
First, there’s OpenMoko, an open source […]
daily link postings: good or annoying?
As you may have noticed, I just included my daily links from del.icio.us. On one hand, I think it might add an extra bit of white noise in your RSS feed. On the other hand, I kinda like how it takes blogs back to what they initially were (or at least how this one started […]
Joost: Social TV as a campaigning tool?
Joost, the new social TV project by Kazaa and Skype founders Niklas Zennstrøm and Janus Friis, has just left the closed beta phase and has recently switched to (for lack of a better term) open beta.
One of the things announced is that there’s a developer kit in the making, which will allow hackers to come […]
Joost invites (want one?)
Now that Joost is opening up its beta testing program, I’ve got invites. Want one? Just drop me a line or leave a comment with your name and email address.
(In case you’re not familiar with Joost: The two guys behind Kazaa and Skype are launching a new TV-via-internet project which is (what else?) gonna change […]
Gender Genie: The Waving Cat is male
The Gender Genie uses an algorithm to predict the gender of an author by analyzing their texts. Sounds like a big load of crap? Well, it isn’t. Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology put together a nifty piece of analysis software here.
The Guardian has a pretty good […]
Sociable lighting: Communicate the act of coming home to your loved ones, remotely
Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino developed the Good Night Lamp, maybe the first take on sociable lighting:
As we move towards a society of single households, our notion of community will change. Keeping in touch with people will gradually become more than being “always on, sometimes off”. We will learn to share parts of our lives with our families, […]
These guys got it right (II): Impromptu meeting organized via Twitter-SecondLife-IRC mash-up
Christopher Penn describes a heavily mashed-up impromptu unconference that took place in Second Life - spontaneously agreed on via a wild mix of Twitter, IRC, Second Life, you name it:
As tastyblogsnack’s Justine saw it:
I noticed a few messages between Chris Penn and Britney Mason who were meeting on Jeff Pulver’s island, Pulveria. Within minutes, a […]
These guys got it right (I): The Beryl Project
About two weeks ago, I was (once more) trying to switch from Windows to Linux, but before I could wrap it up, I had to put the whole project on hold. To cut a long story short (and ’cause I, too, know that nobody really cares for this kind of user experience story), this might […]
100$ Laptop + Twitter = The End of Information Control
The chances that Nicholas Negroponte’s awesome One Laptop Per Child Project (OLPC, aka the 100$ Laptop project) offer for education are pretty obvious: Where there’s access to knowledge, there’s a better chance to get educated. It sort of levels the playing field, to some degree or another.
But with the capacity of those laptops to instantly […]
Anti-Lock In Law for web apps?
The more web apps we use, and the better they are, the more we trust them with our data. Apart from all privacy issues: Lock-in is becoming more and more of a problem. What happens to your pictures (and the way you sorted them) when you cancel your flickr account? What about Gmail, Google Calendar […]
Yahoo Pipes: Interactive feed mash-ups
Yahoo Pipes: Rewire the web lets you…
remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line.
This is really neat. With too many […]
Hacking device to go
Woah, scary. At this year’s RSA security conference, Immunity Inc. introduced their new portable penetration attack device Silica. Silica, as summarized by ZDNet’s Ryan Naraine, is able to
search for and join 802.11 (Wi-Fi) access points, scan other connections for open ports, and automatically launch code execution exploits from a built-in exploit platform.
For $3.600, you can […]
Moleskine PDA (getting organized, part XII)
It is said that Moleskine notebooks serve mainly to pose around in street cafés. Let’s just assume, they can also be used to scribble stuff into them. (Maybe even useful stuff, on rare occasions.) They are, after all, notepads. Or so Tara Hunt insists:
(…) truth be told, it’s a bloomin’ pad of paper. It doesn’t […]
7 Home Gadgets You Can’t Buy
This article is actually quite old - sometime around Dec 06 - but I just rediscovered it and still love it: 7 Home Gadgets You Can’t Buy (yet). Like the Comfort Sphere you can see above:
This innovative “Comfort Sphere” is basically a “self-contained audio and video womb which invites you into it innocently enough, and […]
My name is Peter Bihr. I live in Berlin, Germany. As a freelancer, I consult on web strategies, communities, blogging and social media. In this weblog, I jot down random thoughts, ideas and news. Hopefully, you'll find some are interesting for you, too. 