e-Clippings (Learning As Art)

If you love robots...you gotta watch this video

OK this site, Boston Dynamics, has some awesome robots. The pic you see is of BigDog - wait till you see this one get kicked, slip on ice and walk across rubble. I also think the RiSE and LittleDog robots are pretty cool.

Hey buddy, can you spare $1600?

...for a new keyboard?!  I know that sounds like a lot of money ;-) but look at it....the Optimus Maximus...
"As you should know by now this amazing keyboard features a tiny screen on each key... that's 113 screens in all. What can you do with these tiny screens, you ask? Well, each key can change its image dynamically depending on what you're doing. Hold down SHIFT and all keys go uppercase. Run Photoshop and you can set it so each hotkey has an image representing its function."

Oooohhhhh.

Audiko - Create Free Ringtones - even for the iPhone

(Webware story)

**I think I'll give this one a try...

"While I think ringtones of popular songs are largely annoying and superfluous, the tools to create them are actually quite fun. Audiko simply layers the entire track on one timeline, while giving you a magnified area for each minute of the song to manipulate up to a 40-second ringtone from the segment of your choice. The entire editor is overlaid on a waveform of the song, and you can toggle whether or not you want a fade on the in and out, which can be helpful if your phone doesn't automatically do it for you."

Great New PaperVision Examples - 3D in Your Browser

I've blogged before about PaperVision...in fact, its one of those items that still gets hits long after its been posted. Well you can check out the papervision blog but you should also check out these examples posted by  Dusan Writer:
Papervision sample I
Papervision sample II (nifty looking)
PaperVision Tutorial
Twitter Blocks: this is just silly cool...uses the public stream from twitter and papervision to create a 3D map of networks of friends....think of how this might look if instead of friends...these were your courses or career fields and then you could turn

PaperVision 3D - a 3D Flash Engine

That is a screen shot from PaperVision 3D. You can go here or here and see the demo live...that shark you see was swimming around my head and I could use my mouse to look around a 360 degree arc as well as looking up and down...all in my widdle ole browser.

From the "About" section:
"Papervision is the 3D engine I’ve been working on during the past months. It started as a simple way to transform MovieClips to achieve the 3D illusion. By changing their position, size, rotation and skew you could almost forgive the lack of perspective. But the latest version, fully optimised for Flash 8 Image API, uses triangle tesselation to distort textures. Now we can render complex objects in “real 3D”!"

Did I mention that it is open source and that it will be available for download soon? Sweet huh?

Chatbots...The Covert Workflow Learning Agents?

Chances are you have either AIM (the IM app from AOL) or MSN Messenger on your computer. Have you added any of the chat bots to your buddy lists? On my AIM list (AIM bots), I have the bot from MovieFone that let's me IM with it to find movie times in my area. I also have SmarterChild (which also evidently powers MSN's Encarta Chat bot) - this one I can IM with and get all sort of general information like weather, traffic, etc. I also have one called MAKEBot from the folks over at MAKE Magazine. This one allows me to automatically get IMs that send me the latest headlines from MAKE - I can set the frequency and even use the IM to do keyword searches on the magazine's Web site.

Now over on MSN (story about MSN bots)I have one bot that allows me to access the data from the Encarta Encyclopedia via an IM. Just type in a word or phrase and the bot will start bringing you facts, figures - and if you are accessing it using the actual MSN Messenger client (and not a Web-based app like Meebo or an IM aggregator like Trillian) then you can click on links in your IM chat and a really cool display of data from Encarta. I also have this interesting one from a site called FeedXS that allows you to build your own RSS feeds. Well their chat bot allows me to post items to this feed using the bot. So I just open an IM chat, type in whatever I want, hit send and that gets pushed out along my already established feed to whoever is subscribing. So where does that get us? These are all commercial apps and can't be altered right? Yes and no.       

"The 50 Greatest Gadgets of the Past 50 Years" (PC World)

How many of these do you have in the garage/basement?

Dektop sharing with no client download!

Now this is nifty. This is GLANCE. You download the Glance application onto your computer and then it allows you to share your desktop with up to 15 users with no additional download on their part. It looks like it sets up a URL that they just logon to and you just go from there. Very slick.

Review of $500 Laptops

(WashingtonPost.com Story)

"Is the idea of getting a capable notebook from a major vendor for just $500 too good to be true? Not if your needs are modest. Although such deals involve definite catches, our tests revealed that new bargain-basement models work well if you want a machine that handles e-mail, Web surfing, word processing, and other run-of-the-mill productivity chores."

TVexe.com - I don't know, but I'm going to try it!

I just saw this and I haven't even installed it yet but I'll give it a try...here is some the verbiage from their site:

"TV is an extremely easy to use application and anyone can find their own favorite stations on TV. Music, News, Educational, Sports & Shopping channels are sorted in a very easy to find way, together with TV in English, Spanish, German, French, Portuguese & Arabic sections."