Futurismic

Although my aesthetic tastes tend toward the more retro versions of cyberpunk style (born in the final few years of Gen X, can’t help it), I’m still very seduced by the sheer pragmatic awesome of using your body as an input device for your portable hardware [via SlashDot].

Need to turn down the volume on your PMP? No problem; just jab a finger at your left forearm.

[... the] Skinput prototype is a system that monitors acoustic signals on your arm to translate gestures and taps into input commands. Just by touching different points on your limb you can tell your portable device to change volume, answer a call, or turn itself off. Even better, Harrison can couple Skinput with a pico projector so that you can see a graphic interface on your arm and use the acoustic signals to control it.

Projector, pah. A proper cyberpunk would get the controls tattooed on there instead.

Because I’ve had a busy weekend (and because I’m the ed-in-chief, and because I can), I’m going to kick the week off with a blatant no-context-necessary tech-geek “I want one of those!” post. No, it’s not a Barnes & Noble Nook (though if anyone would like to send me one of those, I promise to be extremely grateful!) – it’s the iKey AK-39 wrist-mounted keyboard, as flagged up at grinding.be last week.

Thinking about it, I’m kinda dating myself by admitting to that lust; a wrist-mounted keyboard is very much a cyberpunk1.0 fetish, a desire from someone who grew up around computers as clunky chunky beige boxes with frustrating limits on functionality, portability and availability. In less than half a decade, the physical keyboard will probably be a complete anachronism for any device with sufficient gee-whiz to be both desirable and useful. I know this intellectually, but kids growing up now know it instinctively. This isn’t your father’s Kansas, Toto. Insert further mangled “culture shock is no longer something that happens to other people now that I’m in my thirties” aphorisms here.

Another (shorter) changing-fashions point – isn’t it high time that the fad for branding products or businesses by grafting a lower-case ‘i’ onto the start of another word went somewhere and died quietly?

Looks like it’s not only the iPhone alpha geeks who’ll be able to feed their reading jones with their favourite piece of portable tech; Nintendo have teamed up with publishers HarperCollins to provide a collection of classic books for reading on the little DS handheld games console. [image by catatronic]

While it’s interesting to see more of these partnerships emerging, this one looks to be half win and half fail. On the plus side, getting affordable reading content onto a low-priced device with good penetration into the youth market and no additional fees for regular usage (in other words, the complete opposite of the iPhone) is a brilliant move; that’s exactly the demographic space publishers need to colonise.

But bundling up crusty old classics like Jane Austen and Charles Dickens? Where’s the kid appeal there? Plus most of those titles are so cheaply available in book form it seems pointless charging for them in electronic form.

HarperCollins might have been wiser to initially push out YA, chick lit and graphic novels; I expect those DS users who read fiction would be more likely to part with some money for something a bit more modern than anything by the Brontë sisters or Shakespeare. No amount of marketing speak about “broadening the user base for the device” is going to convince me otherwise, either.

The Guardian has this interesting snippet of an article that makes sense to me on so many levels. Professor Andy Hopper of the University of Cambridge has been looking at the power usage of computers and made an astute suggestion: locate large processing servers near sources of alternative energy like solar or wind farms. When the power is flowing through the turbine or photovoltaic, computers all around the world can tap into the processors of the server farm. When there’s no wind or sun in one location, the network can call on the processors of somewhere there is.

This kind of synergy is fascinating and I think it’ll be a major feature in our future working lives. Flash drives getting bigger, faster and cheaper all the time and programs like Portable Firefox run straight off a portable drive. I’m writing this post on my portable usb, using only the processor and screen of the laptop I’m borrowing time on. Sooner or later all our computers will be a usb-style stick with all our programs, data and settings stored on it. Plug it into a nearby screen (or project your own), whack out your laser keyboard and dial into any heavy processing power from an external server. Who needs a big computer tower in your room when you can fit it in your pocket?

[story via the Guardian, image by Brent Danley]