Monthly Archives: December 2008

GSM Watch Phones

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It’s GSM Watch phone week!

The first is the Phenom Watch Phone which features a 1.3″ touchscreen you can operate with a stylus and has a seperate keypad. It’s feature packed and also has an MP3 & MP4, built in microphone and speakers, digital and video camera, Micro SD slot and built in Bluetooth.

They have more of them too, such as the glam model

They’re not cheap, but being able to video call from your watch is of course hugely cool. Unfortunately I can’t find any reviews or videos of someone actually making a call on it.

Then there’s the lG-GD910 which is a 3G HSPDA watch phone. The screen is 1.43″ touch and uses text to speech technology.

Also no idea how stupid you look when trying to actually make a call with it though.

Sex offenders a US Subclass of human

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Showing that there is no limit to how far the US is willing to push people around, they’re now forcing convicted sex offenders to submit their online email adresses and passwords. They’re allready forced to walk around and tell everyone in their environment they’re sex offenders, they have limited movement and that after they’re supposed to have served the punishment for their crime. If you don’t find it enough punishment, then keep them in jail longer! If you do, then lay off them. Especially the 19 year olds who are branded sex offenders for having had sex with their 16 year old girlfriends. And if you don’t believe that serving time is a good way of changing someone’s attitude, then reform the penal system! But lay off these people. Treating them worse than released murderers and persecuting them like WWII jews just seems a bit harsh>

DIY adjustable glasses

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Some clever chappie (professor Silver) has designed a lens for your glasses that you can change the strength of the focal distance yourself – ie. no more optician!
He does this by filling a membrane with water. Using in syringe with a dial you can put in more or take out some fluid, customising it to your own strength.

Yes, they’re ugly, but they’re working on that. They want to sell these things in developing nations for as close to $1,- as they can possibly get.

Augmented Reality

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Augmented Reality is where you take a camera and overlay digital images on the picture. These pictures are then anchored to certain items, so when you’re looking at an object, you can see the digital addition, but if you move the camera, the digital addition stays with the object.

ARToolKit is a system to build Augmented Reality applications in. It’s available for windows, linux, macos and there are a whole load of extensions

Studierstube is a total rebuild from ARToolkitPlus which was modified from ARToolkit. This was first optimised for windows and is now optimised for mobile devices – ie. windows mobile.

Are we too afraid of touch?

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I’ve raised this issue a few times before:
Park attendants being told to question people in parks (especially men) if they have no children
or men in the US refusing to get near children in need due their being afraid of being branded a child molestor whilst in the UK everyone is banned from coming into contact with children without a government permit.

Now the Times asks whether maybe this hasn’t gone a bit far, with especially men refusing to volunteer to do anything having to do with children due to the suspicion and bureaucracy involved.
Are we too afraid of touch? – Times Online

UK DNA database deemed unlawful

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The European Human Rights court in Strassbourg has decided that the UK DNA Database, which keeps the DNA data of people in it regardless of whether or not they have committed a crime and won’t let you out once you’re in, is in contravention of the basic right to privacy. Too right! You can’t just tape people’s lives without their consent – it’s one of the things that’s supposed to differentiate us from the totalitarians!