fit-pc slim – tiny and low power

I have been keeping an eye on the compact PC market for a while now, eying the pico and nano ITX form factors but they remain on the expensive side. The micro Fit PC has been slimmed down and will be released in September 2008 touted as worlds smallest green PC. A mere 6W and running at 12V allows for easy hook up to a car or solar collection system running from a self contained water resistant enclosure you can hold in your palm. It features on board components like soldered memory retaining a removable 2.5 inch disk.

Prices (USD):

fit-PC Slim Barebones (256MB, no WiFi, no HDD) – $220
fit-PC Slim Diskless (512MB, WiFi, no HDD) – $245
fit-PC Slim Linux (512MB, WiFi, 60GB hard disk with Ubuntu and Gentoo pre-installed) – $295
fit-PC Slim XP (512MB, WiFi, 60GB hard disk with Windows XP Home SP3 pre-installed) – $335

linkage: fit- pc slim

firefox 3 released

The full release in now available. If you get it today you’ll contribute to Mozilla’s World Record attempt if that sort of thing appeals to you.

I have installed it and apart from some plugins not being available all is well. A bug I’ve had since 2.x is still apparent which I was hoping would be fixed – an issue with my bookmarks toolbar which extends off the side of the screen. The bug is that the little double drop down arrow (the one that reveals the bookmarks that wouldn’t fit in the bar) still isn’t visible until I have clicked one of my bookmarks. It’s probably because my Stumble bar shares the line. Oh well the awesomeness of the awesome bar makes up for that!

linkage: download firefox 3.0

iphone 2.0 beta – includes activesync/exchange/cisco vpn support and an sdk!

Succeeding in staying a step behind Google’s platform Android, but releasing an SDK anyway, Apple will be opening up their phones for developers to generate apps for them free of charge. They have decided to take on Blackberry and friends by moving to the corporate market with support for Exchange and ActiveSynch and Cisco providing IPSec secure VPN tunneling over WPA2 Wifi encryption (That’s all good news if you were wondering).

I don’t know if we’ll see Outlook/LiveMail apps but it’s a possibility I guess

linkage: via apple.com, download SDK (you’ll need apple ID)

epoc thought senstive headset for pc’s

Now this looks interesting. The sooner we can loose the keyboard and mouse the better. Speech control has never really taken off so maybe we should skip that and go neural? With the demo at GDC (Game Developers Conference) of the Epoc headset by Emotiv (planned for late 2008 release) thought controlled PC may be closer than we’d suspected.

linkage: via kotaku.com

photosynth – multidimensional spaces created from global photo pool

The TED ideas web site has posted a great clip demonstrating Photosynth (and other visualization technologies) and application that composites 3d spacial renderings from the global pool of images tagged with metadata. The example of Notre Dame cathedral is truly boggling. They hyperlink to photos people have taken and posted onto sites like Flickr and position them in a model of real space on top, in front, or beside other identified images. The result is a composite of the real object. The implications are far reaching (unless Microsoft Labs who bought the company that created Photosynth a year ago) fail to deliver on it’s potential.

I think we will see composite software like this ported onto mapping software like Google Earth to model the world (and then the Universe) and forming the basis for a self creating and maintaining VR world. I can’t wait.

linkage: photosynth video demo via ted, try it yourself on microsoft labs

numenta and htm – has a.i. arrived?

It may not be what we were expecting after reading and watching sci-fi all these years. However Jeff Hawkins (of Palm and Treo fame) and the smart brains at Numenta may have developed the precursors, if not the first, true artificial intelligence. Based around Jeff’s HTM (Hierarchical Temporal Memory) model with four essential operations:

• Discover causes in the world
• Infer causes of novel input
• Make predictions
• Direct actions

linkage: overview of HTM via read write web, download the HTM white paper from numenta

google puts the brakes on development

Co-creator of Google, Sergey Brin, is championing a “Features not, products.” campaign through the halls of Google. They have come to the conclusion that their rapid growth has caused them to loose direction. Their countless applications have started to confuse users and detract from their core service, search.

australian researchers get measured success with bionic eye

Well while the rest of us were going about our lives a bunch of clever folk down under have been doing some human trials of their bionic eye. It isn’t about to record everything you see for later playback unfortunately, but it will allow some people to see again, enough so they can let their seeing eye dog retire.

linkage: australian scientists bionic eye on physorg

firefox 1.5 released

Sick of spyware? Sick of using Micro$oft products? Never fear!

One year after the debut of Firefox 1.0, and more than 100 million downloads later, Mozilla has released Firefox 1.5, the latest version of its acclaimed open source Web browser, available here as a free download.