.mrt memo

Well. For everybody who loved Starcraft, here’s a whole new mindblowing experience. Actually for whatever RTS game, this would be an amazing experience. The fact that it’s running on Linux, makes it even more cooler. I want that

Here’s the info part of the video:
OS: Gentoo Linux.
PC: p4, 1.8mhz, 256mb, 40gb(hd).
Monitor: waytec 15”.
Video: Nvidia 64mb.
TouchScreen Device: penmount usb 8-wire.
Touchscreen opensource drive for linux: “evtouch”
Graphic system: xorg 7.1 + XGL + compiz

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYY-g6ionzM

Really weird and some useful ideas at freshome.com.

Feel Seating System looks cozy and the ceiling bed is very useful in tight conditions, although I somehow think it’ll fall down from the ceiling after pushing/pulling it like 100 times or so..

Ingenious comment on OOninja.com:

“OOwriter needs tab browsing like Firefox. Everyday I need several documents open at once.”

Update 20080405

Many thanks go to Andrew Z from OOOninja for directing my attention to OOo Tabs extension. It’s something similar to what I thought, but not quite.

• You cannot navigate through tabs with the usual ctrl+tab/ctrl+shift+tab
• you cannot close tabs with ctrl+w
• well also the right click menu on the tabs bar doesn’t give you the option to close a tab - you simply have to go File->Close
• and the tab titles don’t reflect the titles of the documents, simply “my windowN”
• I hope they learn from Firefox, fix the previously mentioned discomforts, also closing “X” would be nice
• and in the future I hope they also get to implementing Firefox’s FishEyeTabs, as I cannot live without it anymore :P.

Seems like Canada has the first reasonable big TV network, at least in North America, that is beginning to offer TV shows via BitTorrent. DRM free, simple torrents! “The show will be completely free (and legal) for you to download, share & burn to your heart’s desire.” Funny I don’t see Creative Common Licence attached anywhere near. I guess that would have been too much to ask. One step at a time.

The show’s “Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister“. Downloads via MiniNova.org. The show has it’s own channel on Youtube. For example watch the last year’s finale. But some videos are not available outside the Canada. Like this.

Now of course, if you’re not canadian, as me, then you’d go “Canada’s Next whadda wha?”, but is seems the show within Canadian borders is a hit, with as many viewers tuning in as an episode of House. (.oO how badass would it be to get legal episodes of House like that .. I love House MD.)

Info via various sources, among them Michael Geist, an Ottawa-based advocate of open sharing over the internet. There seems to be somekind of problem with Canadian ISP’s who are restricting torrent traffic in their networks, so basically the irony might very well be true.

“It would be ironic if ISP network management practices ensured that viewers outside the country enjoyed better access to the program than the Canadian taxpayers who helped fund its creation,” Michael Geist wrote in his blog.

More articles:

Guinevere Orvis at last100.com - Inside story: the making of a legal TV ‘torrent’.
Daniel Langendorf at last100.com - They’re not lying: CBC to release TV show for download, free, legal, and via BitTorrent
Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing.net - How CBC torrented a TV show

I read some tech news and found some great ones.

“Seagate may sue if SSD gets popular” - typical corporate legal BS. So Intel and Samsung have reached to 64GB with their SSD-drives and now they begin to resemble HDDs. They may kill Seagate’s business and what you do about that. You try to get some money from that newcomer as the new technology may kill your old one. Great job, Seagate!

Smaller and faster supercomputers by replacing wires with lasers. That’s the new project Sun is working and DARPA is financing. Fancy idea.

So nowdays probably the most significant gadget new wave seems to be “ultra mobile” little laptops which run Linux. Asus Eee PC and OLPC are just some of the examples. Now another one enters the battle for the consumers wallet. I hope Acer, Asus and all the others do well, because then we can perhaps get super-duper small laptops really cheap. It’s another “cheaper, better, faster..” news.

Oh and while I’m at it, Fujitsu contributes a 7200rpm 320GB 2,5 inch HDD. Thats great, but SSD is only 3 iterations away from there (64GB -> 128GB -> 256 GB -> 512GB). Well, unless Seagate sues their ass and they will have to pay humongous amounts of money and SSD will never get off the ground.

Those news almost make me feel that there is some hope yet and we can have cheap ubiquitous tech somewhere in the near future. Or they are very good at conjuring the illusion of advancement.

Google has released a Google Maps look alike for the sky, to all us amateur astronomers who do not have a telescope - Google Sky.

Also read the Ars Technica article about some highlights.

I was just reading about the molecular nano-machine that presumably could control 16 others and the future applications it may have. The most intriguing side of the news for me was the medical implementation as a no-cut-no-blood surgery machine. Think about it - you have a braintumor and your medicine would be a little capsule or a hypodermic syringe filled with couple of nanobots who simply go and destroy the hostile tissue.
Well, you could also think forward and perhaps the nanobots would enable some “magical” powers, like in the last year’s dystopian adventure Bioshock. There we had plasmids that you inject into your bloodstream and they enhance your abilities and provide new “magical” powers. Check out Bioshock, the storytelling was awesome.

See how 37signals is thinking out of the box. They’re experimenting with different “workplace hacks” to make peoples lives and specifically their jobs at 37signals more enjoyable and relaxed. A great effort. It’s my philosophy that your everyday work doesn’t need to be hard or challenging all the time. You’re not in this world to work, but to live and enjoy. So all the managerial types, cut some slack will ya!
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/893-workplace-experiments