DocBug

Anoto-based Audio Notebook 

Today's NYT has a blurb on Livescribe, the new company founded by LeapFrog's Jim Marggraff to turn the Anoto-based FLY Pentop Computer into a note-taking application for students. His application is basically Lisa Stifelman's 1997 Audio Notebook system but without all the extraneous hardware that was necessary back then: take notes on paper while the pen records the lecture. Tap on the note later and the pen recites whatever it recorded just before you wrote it.

As the article notes, pen-based input has had a long and difficult life, but I've always thought that if anything will be the killer app that brings it into the mainstream, this would be it. If their implementation is good, they've got a chance of really making a big splash.

Video of Sony's OLED flexible display 

In case you haven't seen it yet, here's video of the flexible, full-color OLED display that Sony unveiled at last week's SID conference.

Lifesized Mouse Trap game at Maker Faire 

One of the big demos at last weekend's Maker Faire was a life-sized version of the 1963 board game Mouse Trap, with bowling balls instead of marbles and a two-ton safe dropped from a crane instead of a cup dropped on a plastic mouse. They tried running it six times over the weekend, before finally succeeding on their seventh and last attempt:

Lightweight equipment gives narcoleptic hikers newfound opportunities 

Portable mattress technology gives new-found freedom to narcoleptic hikers on a recent visit to Castle Rock State Park (DocBug Exclusive)

Maker contests at Instructables.com 

Instructables.com (a Squid-labs startup founded by friends of mine from MIT) has three contests going for the best handmade item plus accompanying instructions on how to make it, something like $15,000 in prize money (not to mention bragging rights):

• Win a BrightStar Laser Cutter Contest: Publish an Instructable on any subject before June 17th. Grand prize is a BrightStar LG3040 laser cutter worth over $6000.

• Sew Useful Contest: Three categories: most useful thing that helps others in need, the best combination of sewing and technology and best Instructable tutorial. Winners in each category get a Singer QUANTUM® 9940 computerized sewing machine.

• iRobot Create Challenge: Build a robot to do something interesting / useful using the iRobot Create Programmable Robot platform (based on the Roomba vacuuming robot). Don't have an iRobot Create kit already? iRobot Corp. is donating 15 Scholarship Robot packages to those with the most interesting proposals. If you build the robot and enter the contest with it you get to keep the robot, even if you don't win. First place in this contest is $5000, second place gets a set of iRobot home robots worth just under $1000.

Torturous questions 

Republican candidates at last Tuesday's debate were asked about a now tired hypothetical:

The questions in this round will be premised on a fictional, but we think plausible scenario involving terrorism and the response to it. Here is the premise: Three shopping centers near major U.S. cities have been hit by suicide bombers. Hundreds are dead, thousands injured. A fourth attack has been averted when the attackers were captured off the Florida coast and taken to Guantanamo Bay, where they are being questioned. U.S. intelligence believes that another larger attack is planned and could come at any time.

First question to you, Senator McCain. How aggressively would you interrogate those being held at Guantanamo Bay for information about where the next attack might be?

As an editorial in the Washington Post points out, only John McCain got the answer right: when you torture your prisoners you actually make things worse, both in terms of world opinion and in wasting time on the unreliable information it produces. The trouble is, Hume's hypothetical is actually two questions: a surface question about torture and an emotional question about what the candidate would be willing to sacrifice in the name of security. Personally I'd like to see the second question made more explicit. For example, how about asking one of these:

• "Would you be willing to saw off your left leg with no anesthetic to stop a terrorist attack?"
• "If you could go back in time and murder the 5-year-old Osama bin Laden with your bare hands, would you do it?"
• "Would you be willing to repeal the First Amendment if it would stop another 9/11-sized attack? What about the Second Amendment? Would you raise taxes? Would you give up your immortal soul? How about your chances for re-election?"

Or maybe we should make the whole question less hypothetical. How about this?

"Gentlemen, on your left is Jerry (dressed in an Osama bin Laden mask), who is holding device that in one minute will send a million volts through the chairs of 10 random people sitting in our audience. To your right you see a switch that will disable the device, but will also drop poor Mrs. Grinwald here into this vat of hungry sharks. The decision is yours, but please be prepared to explain your actions.

Our TV audience will then vote for their favorite response via SMS, and the top 5 candidates will go on to the next round of questions."

They're not customers, they're a captive audience! 

My local Shell station has decided to augment its super-low prices of just $3.60 a gallon with some alternate revenue: automatic full-video and audio advertisements blasted at you while you pump gas.

At least there's some satisfaction in the movie trailer they were showing in the rotation — after being subjected to several annoying ads there's something satisfying about seeing explosions playing out on your gas pump.

When I am old... 

Seen yesterday in San Jose: a group of seven or eight women, all between 50 and 65 years old, all wearing purple with a red hat that doesn't go. And you know, they all looked fabulous :).