Too Lazy to Fail

Taken a few months back on my camera phone.

Apparently my new firmware has Microsofts Voice Command built-in. Which means that I can say “Call Tracie” and it will call her. Other commands include “What is my next appointment?”, “What is my signal strength?”, “Read messages” etc.

Now all I need is an equivalent that is scriptable, and I will be able to rule the world through my bluetooth headset.

I’ve seen some of you poking fun at people with bluetooth headsets, and I’ve joined in from time to time, but I think I only did so because headsets were the popular thing to hate, like the 9mm or Pokemon.

It started last night. I was looking for a piece of Windows Mobile software I had been telling my uncle about, and along the way found a bunch of shiny new freeware playthings for my AT&T Tilt. One of them locked up my phone. Hard. So hard that I had to do a wipe of the system memory. Normally this is not a big deal since you’d have a backup of your contacts, etc on Outlook where you last synced the PDA. But I don’t have Outlook. I also never got around to getting one of those nice programs that backs up your contacts to your flash card.

So I uh, guess now’s as good a time as ever to do those firmware upgrades, huh?

Long story short, I found a program that tricks your phone into playing an MP3 over a bluetooth headset. I’m not planning to listen to the White Stripes over a mono bluetooth audio signal, but it seems like a dang handy thing for listening to audiobooks while doing housework or (maybe?) sitting at my desk at work. When a phone call comes in, it reads the name of the caller, and I press the button on my ear to pause the audio file and pick up the phone.

That’s a neat capability, but it’s not worth buying the $35 headset on its own. So why did I swallow my pride and get one? I suppose that the best way of putting it is that I have a certain technology fetish: a pipe dream that nobody is likely to make happen for me any time soon, but which I’ll still spend unhealthy amounts of time fantasizing about.

My tech fetish started way back in middle school when I read the Ender’s Game series (by the way, the first book is great, don’t ruin it by reading the rest unless you’re a diehard fan with low expectations). In the mostly bland sequels to the first fantastic book, an accidentally created artificial sentience named Jane communicates with Ender via a small device in his ear:

Jane is first introduced in Speaker for the Dead as an advanced computer program. She is extremely complex, capable of performing trillions of tasks simultaneously, and has millions of levels of attention, even her most unaware one being much more alert than a human. Jane is hesitant to reveal herself to humanity, because she knows that she is the epitome of humanity’s fear: an intelligent, thinking, computer program that cannot be controlled. She decided to reveal herself to Ender after she found out he wrote The Hive Queen and The Hegemon. She also “remembered” he was the only student to pass the Giant’s Drink, one of the many Fantasy Game situations.

A jewel in Ender’s ear allows both of them to communicate and for her to see and hear everything from Ender’s vantage point. She helps Ender with many things. For example, in the very beginning, she contacts an orbiting ship and pays $40 billion for it and the cargo. Ender’s reliance on Jane becomes obvious when she no longer helps him; he must ask Olhado to help him with his finances but Ender doesn’t even know what his own password is.

It continued when I recently read Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, which featured a logistics computer that became self-aware and was nicknamed Mike:

In Robert A. Heinlein’s novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966), the character Mycroft Holmes is a self-aware computer system entrusted with running the life-support systems, communications, payroll and many other things, in a penal colony underground in the Moon or “Luna”. Mycroft eventually sides with characters inciting a revolution to free Luna, and is instrumental in their victory against the Lunar Authority on Earth.

In both these books the friendly omniscient computer helped the protagonists by being their eyes and ears, handling things for them and allowing them to effectively be in several places at once. The computer was awake and alert when its human friends were asleep or distracted, it had a perfect memory, and access to a vast network of rapidly available public knowledge.

Why can’t we have something like that now? I mean, yeah, we’re not quite ready for sentient computers. But surely some clever scripting, some speech recognition, and some synthetic voice work could be combined to give a human being quick answers to specific queries, driving directions, email/SMS notifications, and access to news and weather. Maybe one could click one’s earpiece, say “What’s Jena Six?” and have the computer retrieve and read the first paragraph of the Wikipedia entry. Then one could choose to have the computer continue reading the info, or tag it for later listening, or tag it for later browsing in front of a proper terminal, or have it brought up on the screen of the PDA so it can be read without messing with navigating to the proper page.

So I’ll continue to listen to my podcasts between answering calls on the silly button attached to my ear. You can mock me, but I’m afraid that this is the price of progress. We got used to people flying through the air and being able to call up information about the War of 1812 in under five seconds and being able to propel a multi-ton hunk of steel and dead dinosaurs just to go get ice cream. So come on, tell me that a small headset in public is all that crazy.

…especially an unexpected dull evening, with the Emergency Party Button.

Way cool. You can hear the audio of the session, as well as seeing the transcript as it’s spoken line-by-line, including portraits of the folks who are speaking.

Thanks to Kit for the link.

First marital aids, now this?

Product Description
Radioactive sample of uranium ore. Useful for testing Geiger Counters. License exempt. Uranium ore sample sizes vary. Shipped in labeled metal container as shown. Shipping Information: We are always in compliance with Section 13 from part 40 of the NRC Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules and regulations and Postal Service regulations specified in 49 CFR 173.421 for activity limits of low level radioactive materials. Item will be shipped in accordance with Postal Service activity limits specified in Publication 52. Radioactive minerals are for educational and scientific use only.

This would be a great way to make sure that, should you ever get raided for any offense real or imaginary, the authorities would have to go to the time and trouble of getting a haz-mat team to come clear the premises. Don’t send me the bill for the stuff they break in the process, though.

No more “Mag Thumb”!

They can be ordered here for $40 a pop. Not unreasonable assuming they’re as well-made as the video would have us believe. I could be convinced to order a couple for range use, but for social purposes I’ll take the proven traditional design, thanks.

Hat tip to Tam.

Oh, and a note to gun accessory marketers everywhere: Testing a magazine on camera by emptying it from the hip makes you look like an idiot. Stop that.

If it seems boring, just humor me and wait for the demonstration at the end.

From Lifehacker:

$10 Police Flashlight Hack! - video powered by Metacafe

I make no representation of the soundness or safety of this design. Judging from my experiences with other CR123A flashlights, I’ll predict that the lens and/or body of the $4 cheapie flashlight will quickly melt under the intense heat. Also, the overvoltage on the radio shack bulb will likely shorten the service life. Still, I’d like for someone else to try it and report the long-term results.

If you’re looking for a cheap “tactical” (read: candy-bar sized but brighter than a Maglite) flashlight, but can’t shake enough pennies from your wallet to buy the $30 Surefire G2, I wholeheartedly recommend the Brinkmann Maxfire LX, which is available at Target. You’ll still need CR123A batteries, which I usually get at Surefire. Either way, there’s a head-to-head review of the two entry-level lights here.

Behold, the Trackstick II GPS logging device:

The Trackstick records its own location, time, date, speed, heading and altitude at preset intervals. With over 1Mb of memory, it can store months of travel information. The Trackstick is the perfect tool for individuals looking for a way to track anything that moves. Use it for recording the exact routes you take when hiking, biking or vacationing. Record the location of everywhere you went, import pictures and other information into Google Earth™ to offer an entirely new perspective of your journey. Includes GPX photo stamping feature for adding your favorite photos to you own maps.

The little doodad operates for about a week on two AAA batteries. The applications are many, with anyone from suspicious lovers to company fleet managers able to keep a log of the device’s movements (and stops) that can be downloaded to a computer an overlaid onto a map.

As PDB exclaimed when I showed him: We really do live in the future!

Click on the thumbnail image for a larger version.

Thanks, NASA.

From Brave Space Design:

A key detail of both the original 2D game and our 3D shelves is that front and back edges of each piece are beveled away from the interior surfaces. This bevel provides for an eleven-inch shelf depth while giving the piece an unreal optical quality when viewed from an angle. Reversible and interchangeable, these sturdy blocks will provide for endless stacking configurations and a lifetime of enjoyment.

These seem like a fantastic idea for a game room or dorm, but at $600 per piece, I think I would rather just invest a few hundred bucks into the proper carpentry equipment and spend a weekend making my own. Heck, I could find a buddy with the tools and expertise needed to do it quickly, hand him a couple hundred bucks, and get the equivalent to the $6,000 10-piece combo in an afternoon.

At last, I have something to use as an excuse for going to bed at 4:00 and getting up at 11:00.

A genetic mutation called the “after-hours gene” may explain why some people are night owls, it is revealed in Science journal today.

It could also hold clues for pharmacologists working to develop drugs to help people adjust to shift work or jet lag.

There are further implications for the study of causes of some psychiatric disorders.

The altered gene, named “after hours” or Afh, is a variant of a gene called Fbxl3, which had not been linked to the body clock that keeps our metabolism, digestion and sleep patterns in tune with the rising and setting of the sun.

By monitoring laboratory mice, scientists noticed that instead of following the typical 24-hour pattern some animals had body clocks that stretched to a 27-hour day.

It was then discovered that their DNA had the after-hours version of the Fbxl3 gene, one of a large family that controls the breakdown of specific proteins within body cells.