Ooh Linux cell phone + Bluetooth + UMA + WiFi + Camera

Here's a nice phone that Motorola just released. It's the A910 and it runs Linux, has Bluetooth, UMA for seamless access to GSM/GPRS over WLAN, WiFi and 1.3MP camera. And it's thin too!

Watch out Nokia, Motorola is getting back into the cell phone game. The Motorola Razr V3 is also a very nice phone, perhaps maybe I might get that. Don't know when the A910 will be released, so maybe I should wait for that? Ah, gadgets, you buy one, the next day a newer, better and cheaper one is released. There's so many nice gadgets I'd love. You can't keep up with technology, at least I can't, otherwise I'd be broke, I am a poor PhD student!

My blog is now listed in PhDWeblogs

I found this site called PhDweblogs that according to their website:

is a non-profit initiative to bring together PhD students' weblogs from all around the world. If you are preparing a PhD, and have a blog about your research interests, you can register it here. We also accept other research-related weblogs, even if they are not directly connected to a PhD.

So I've decided to register my blog here, and they just accepted me and added me to their list. So if you're a PhD student or just curious, check out PhDWeblogs.net!

Podcast awards

Vote for your favorite podcast at the Podcast Awards. Apparently, BlogTO is nominated in the Cultural/Political category. Who do you think will win at the Podcast awards?

Another mobile computing device from Microsoft

Just read that Microsoft is considering to introduce another mobile computing device that is smaller than a laptop but larger than a handheld. At the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC), Bill Gates introduced Ultra Mobile 2007 which is just that. It will be less than 2 pounds and run Windows XP or even Windows Vista (which before was called Longhorn). Apparently, Microsoft hasn't seen much penetration of Tablet PCs as they had expected, it's primarily just being used for specific applications and targetted markets.

Some people are saying that this is the demise of the Tablet PC. But Microsoft feels that there will be specific mobile devices for different needs, and so they will provide the operating system for all those type of devices. This is great, I can see this, the slogan will read "Microsoft. Which mobile device do you want to crash today?" hehe.

Technorati tags: Microsoft, Ultra Mobile 2007

Microsoft Windows Vista Beta 1 is out

Microsoft's next version of Windows, aka Longhorn, is now called Windows Vista. According to CNet Reviews, Windows Vista takes a page out of Microsoft's competitors of Apple's Mac OSX and Linux. Beta 1 is just a programmer's version, the 2nd beta will be out apparently before end of this year. And the release should be according to Microsoft, sometime in the middle of next year. Apparently, Microsoft is also saying that they are scrutinizing every line of code in Windows and will reduce the number of patches compared to Windows XP by 50%. Anyways, we'll see what happens. Most people still run Windows 98 and 2000, and since Microsoft has said they will discontinue support for 2000, does this mean people will upgrade to Vista when it comes out?

Technorati tags: Microsoft, Windows, Vista

Corporate blogging

Many people are blogging these days, some people get fired for blogging because they reveal the inner details of the company. Here's a whitepaper on corporate blogging that I discovered from Nancy White's post.

My CASCON workshop proposal was accepted!

The Interactive Media Lab will be organizing a workshop called "The Business of Blogging: Being Social in a Pervasive, Networked World" at the CASCON 2005 conference in Toronto, Ontario, Canada on Wednesday, October 19. It will be chaired by myself and Mark Chignell. More details as to speakers and the content of the workshop to follow later towards the conference date.

If you are in the Toronto area, you can register for CASCON, it's a conference sponsored by IBM and it's free! Hey, what's better than a free conference with intellectual minds, seeing new technology, blogging at our workshop, and free food!

Technorati tags: cascon, blogs

Get out of a traffic ticket using Google Maps

This article is neat, it's true application of technology in our daily lives. This guy used Google Maps to argue about his traffic ticket in court and he won! He whipped out his laptop, went to Google Maps, and showed the court that the traffic ticket was incorrect.

There you go, Google to the rescue in real life! Thanks Google!

Technorati tags: Google

Google scoops Microsoft executive to head Google research lab in China

Microsoft is suing former executive Lee Kai-Fu for breaching his agreement with Microsoft and working for Microsoft's rival, Google in China. While Google marches on and creates new software and applications at an unprecedented pace, Microsoft is scared in its pants, because it can't seem to beat Google.

Even Ballmer has advocated that in 18 months or so, that Microsoft will reach the same level in search technology with that of Google, somehow I feel that is skeptical. Microsoft alleges that Lee has "direct knowledge of Microsoft's trade secrets concerning search technologies and China business strategies" and his position at Google is "focused on the same set of technologies and strategies for a direct competitor in egregious violation of his explicit contractual obligations".

There you go, what to make of this? Microsoft will do anything to keep its secret sauce.

Technorati tags: Microsoft, Google

Google scoops Microsoft executive to head Google research lab in China

Microsoft is suing former executive Lee Kai-Fu for breaching his agreement with Microsoft and working for Microsoft's rival, Google in China. While Google marches on and creates new software and applications at an unprecedented pace, Microsoft is scared in its pants, because it can't seem to beat Google.

Even Ballmer has advocated that in 18 months or so, that Microsoft will reach the same level in search technology with that of Google, somehow I feel that is skeptical. Microsoft alleges that Lee has "direct knowledge of Microsoft's trade secrets concerning search technologies and China business strategies" and his position at Google is "focused on the same set of technologies and strategies for a direct competitor in egregious violation of his explicit contractual obligations".

There you go, what to make of this? Microsoft will do anything to keep its secret sauce.

Back to Palm again

PalmOne, the manufacturer of Palm handhelds, and originally called Palm before it got split into PalmOne and PalmSource, has returned to calling itself Palm. Palm also updated their new logo, it looks like the old Palm logo with blue but now it's orange (to symbolize energy) and the Palm font is a digital type of font to reflect digital content.

I never really liked PalmOne, to me it's like so there's PalmOne the company, as opposed to PalmTwo? The brand name Palm is what people know and associate with, why need to change something that has been so successful?

Technorati tags: Palm, handheld

IBM OS/2 is now officially dead

Remember IBM's OS/2 operating system? The OS that was supposed to be better than Microsoft's DOS and Windows? I remember using OS/2 when I was an IBM intern and installing OS/2 back in the mid 1990's. OS/2 was technically superior to Microsoft Windows at the time, in fact OS/2 was created as a joint effort between Microsoft and IBM, and Microsoft supported OS/2. Then Windows went off, and left IBM in the dust. IBM didn't really do much to continue OS/2. Now, OS/2 has been laid to rest.

OS/2 was a great operating system in its time, it didn't crash like Microsoft Windows did. It was great as a server OS with its multitasking and being able to run Windows programs in an emulated Windows environment on top of OS/2. As history has repeated itself, Microsoft didn't create a technically superior software (witness IE vs. Netscape and Mozilla, Windows Media vs. Real player, etc.), it's just that Microsoft with its marketing muscle has been able to beat its rival, a once dominant player. Anyways, long live OS/2.

OS/2: 1987-2005
RIP

Technorati tags: OS/2, IBM

Apple's iPod may not be the king of music players

What's this? Apple's iPod may be losing market share? Well, that maybe the case in Japan where Sony's MP3 players are taking a bite out of Apple's iPod. Sony really wants to beat Apple at its own game, cause Sony started the revolution in music players with the tape Walkman and then the CD Walkman. Sony has a Network Walkman, that resembles a cigarette lighter, which before could only play Sony's proprietary ATRAC format, but now can play MP3s. Personally, I would like to have an MP3 player like the Network Walkman that could have the battery life even better than the iPod and can store as much MP3s as the iPod. Mind you, the iPod is a hard drive based MP3 player and the Network Walkman is a flash memory based player. But the way I see it, unless you really need to take 20 gigs of music with you at a time (I suppose if you're going on a plane trip or a long trip that requires more than 8 hours), you won't be listening to that continuously. Because remember, every so often, you will change the music and upload a different set of MP3s to the player.

Right now, I have the RCA Kazoo which I like because it's small, however it only supports 64 MB internal memory, but accepts a MMC memory card. So I have a 64MB MMC card to give me a total of 128MB of memory for MP3s. I can probably load up to maybe 28 songs on the player. It's ok for a train ride. Mind you, I always have to recharge my batteries (using AAA rechargeable nickel metal hydride) every 2-3 days. Lately, I've been having problems uploading songs with the newest MusicMatch software, I've never had this problem before on the older MusicMatch software. I really want to now get a new MP3 player, I've had the Kazoo for about 3 years now. I am thinking, should I get an iPod Mini or iPod, or go for a Sony Network Walkman, or even the iAudio X5 (which I've heard some good things about).

I've also tried to play MP3s on my Palm Zire 71 (which is discontinued) too, but the quality is not very good. I use a software audio player called pTunes (similar to iTunes) which works great (I can play in the background and turn the Palm off), the only problem is that the audio quality sucks in that the default volume is very low. I can increase the volume by increasing the dB level, but that distorts the audio significantly. I think the Zire 71 has a hardware issue where it doesn't really do audio that well. So that's why I get a MP3 player. Some of you might say, get a converged device that can play audio, do Palm stuff, and cell phone. My response would be a converged device is not that good because you sacrifice on one of the features. It maybe a good Palm, but the cell phone features will not be as good. There will be compromises on a converged device to afford the convenience.

Technorati tags: iPod, Apple, MP3, Sony

How to podcast

With the emergence of iPods and blogging, one thing that is spreading like fire are podcasts. What exactly is a podcast? Think of it as an audioblog, someone talks about some particular topic, in essence, it's like your own radio show and others download or stream that audioblog. Why is it called a podcast? Because the idea is that once you have that audio, then people with iPods can download the MP3 file and play it on their iPod. It doesn't have to be an iPod though, it could be any MP3 audio player for that matter. Since the iPod is so cool and is the tech geeky thing, podcast is the technical term. It's very easy to create a podcast, if you want to know, look here.

When the blogosphere overlaps the real world

Now, here's an example of a pervasive computing application, how blogging can be used to coordinate activities in the real world and enable context awareness to match that in the real world. I never thought before blogging was anything neat, but now I realize the power of blogging as a social medium to communicate things in the real world. It reminds me of the power of smart mobs, as seen in my reply to this post.

New .mobi domain name for mobile devices

I've read about this before and now it is popped up again. It's about having a separate domain for mobile devices to access the web. The idea behind this is that many mobile devices (cell phones and handhelds) have the capability to access the Internet, but many do not because the web sites on the Internet are not designed for the small form factor and bandwidth limitation of these devices. Having a .mobi extension would differentiate these devices for use with mobile devices compared to desktops, laptops and tablet computers in hopes that a pleasant browsing experience will be experienced by the mobile user. However, the problem with .mobi that I see is that, can this be used for all mobile devices. Sure, it may work fine with cell phones, but maybe other rich multimedia devices like Pocket PCs and Palm handhelds want to have richer and interactive browsing.

How many of you use the Internet on your cell phone or handheld? I bet not many of you. First, it's slow, and second it costs you money for each KB you download. Especially, you don't want to use it for media rich web sites (ie. lots of graphics because those take lots of time and network delay to download on a puny screen like a cell phone). But people that do create web sites, don't really create ones for mobile devices, because it creates extra work on part of the web programmers.

Enter web content adaptation and transcoding. The idea behind this is to have one web site and then have some transcoder or adaptation module that will take the capabilities of the mobile device (represented as a device profile) and tailor the web pages towards that mobile device. Then if a new device comes in, all that is required is to create a new device profile, load it up in the system (as an XSL stylesheet for example), and then specify the rules to do the content adaptation. But even this method also has its own problems. You don't see very much adaptation of web sites, only in the research stage but not deployed.

So, will .mobi really take off? This means then that web browsers on mobile phones and handhelds will need to adapt to the .mobi extensions. If you know the URL of a particular web site, you will have to intuitively add the .mobi instead of .com. So, it will also cause a social shift since we're so always used to .com. This kind of also reminds me of WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) and it's answer as HTML is to desktops as WML is to mobile devices. But WAP really hasn't taken off, so will .mobi? How will the mobile world embrace .mobi?

Bloggers become amateur journalists

It's interesting how the mobile phone and blogging has become a social phenomenon. For example, witness the blogs that came out of the Live 8 concert and the London attacks.

It continues to amaze me how blogging extends human communication. Oh yeah, and why is it that some people can write so long postings on blogs. I find that I like to (if I can) to post maybe 1 or 2 paragraphs at most. I find out that if I see more than that, then I don't really read it unless it's interesting. I like to see short summaries. Of course, it depends on the type of the blog. If you're writing a type of article or something inciteful, then you probably want to write more. But if you're like me, that just read news and just make comments, then there's no need for such a long blog posting.

Technorati tags: journalism

Listed as #2 in Technorati!

I did a quick search for GadgetMan in Technorati, and I'm listed as the #2 top entry from the search results. It also shows my links to my Blogger blog (this blog), my MSN Spaces, and my home page which is from del.icio.us. But I don't see any tags for GadgetMan. I've created one just right now.

Taking your old gadgets and making jewelry from them

Any of you have old gadgets that can't seem to get rid of? Well, perhaps give them to Liz McLean Knight. She's taken parts from old gadgets and have made jewelry with them. That's one way of reusing spare computer and electronic parts.

Continuous Computing article in Technology Review

Wade Roush has published his article in Technology Review about social machines in continuous computing which is like pervasive or ubiquitous computing. It's an interesting read, it started first as a blog, and all the comments from various bloggers then went together to form his article. He used participatory journalism to write his article. It will appear in the August 2005 issue of Technology Review.

What do people think about continuous computing? It seems that we haven't realized Weiser's vision of computers embedded everywhere in the environment. It seems that instead of the computer anticipated and adapting towards your needs, it's the computer is not intended to replace you but to augment your human behaviour. Like for example, social software such as instant messaging and blogging. They do not replace face-to-face communication or conversations. They just enhance those natural communications into the web with others who are not within your physical proximity. They are just extensions of your personal aura or personal space.

Technorati tags: continuouscomputing, gadgetman, pervasivecomputing, ubiquitouscomputing

A test to test the web

As students, some of you have taken standardized tests in your lifetime, like the SAT, or GRE, GMAT, etc. Or you might have taken entrance exams into university. Now, there's planning to be a new test for students that tests their web skills, and how adept they are in finding stuff on the web. It's called the Information and Communication Technology Literacy Assessment. The 'Net is becoming so pervasive and so fundamental that lots of students lack the fundamental requirements of how to use the Web successfully for research. And apparently, it's not just all Google , Google, Google, and copy and paste. There's some additional higher level skill involved as well.

What do people think? Do you think there should be some standardized kind of test for using the web? Seeing that it is fundamental to doing research and getting information, just like how to use the library to find information for assignments and projects you are working on, it's become necessary.

Gadgets: Pepper Pad

No, it doesn't make you sneeze. It's a hybrid handheld and laptop called the Pepper Pad. Saw it on Slashdot. Ah yes, Slashdot for all you computer and technology geeks out there like me hehe. It runs Linux, and has Wi-Fi, it's meant to be used indoors around the house, it's lighter than a laptop but has a larger screen than a PDA. It kind of reminds me like the Sony Airboard or it's called LocationFree TV.

It's cool, but would any of you get one? The way I see it, I have a laptop and I use it everywhere in the house and I have Wi-Fi, and it suits me fine. I suppose for those who want to have style, fashion and cool technology, it would be nice to have a LocationFree TV. I suppose that something like this would be good if anyone wanted to use it in the house. Any possible uses for something like this?

Implants running Windows?

This article from Technology Review talks about how computers will be implanted into people. Kind of reminds me about that movie Johnny Mneumonic when Keanu Reeves downloaded to his chip implanted in the brain, while authorities were trying to get a hold of that confidential information. Even though the computer implants can be used to help the blind see and deaf hear, Bill Gates says implanting is not for him. What's that? Gates doesn't want to use computers in his body? Imaging how much more power he could control if the implants were running some stripped down version of Windows, like RFID tags. Oh no, people would start crashing. I don't think we're ready to have software put into those implants yet, we can't even get our own software on our machines to be that reliable!