Check out this puppy. It sells for around $100 – if it drops to about $50-60 I will definitely pick one up, it would be very handy to have a little ‘grab a picture at the drop of a hat’ camera to carry around. I used to try carrying my trusty canon a40 with me, but it’s just too bulky despite its relatively small size. this thing on the other hand could go right on my keychain.

This piece is a non-technical overview of OLED’s, which many think will displace LCD flat panel monitors. The first consumer device with one built in shipped from Kodak recently. Here’s hoping they don’t suffer from the price and latency problems that LCD’s have.

There’s been speculation recently that we’re nearing the end of moore’s law, which describes the exponential growth of computational power that we’ve seen over the past 30 or 40 years. There are a number of issues, chief among them being heat – the silicon wafers that CPU’s are created from are approaching the point where the density of transistors on them is generating heat close to their melting point. One approach to this is cooling – ever more sophisticated cooling systems to handle the heat burden, but as a practical matter it’s probably not feasible to get a liquid nitrogen cooling system installed in those p5 systems Dell would love to sell you in a few years.

As a result this is an area of intense research. What may surprise you is that the holy grail of semiconductor research, at least according to most folks, is diamonds. Diamonds can handle the most extreme heat. But of course they’re exorbitantly expensive, and I don’t think diamonds 1 foot or larger in diameter even exist, and that’s the size you would need to slice wafers from to build semiconductors on. So what’s a researcher to do? Make artificial diamonds of course! Industry has already been doing this for decades but not using technologies which are economical or capable of producing those 1 foot wafers you need to build general purpose semiconductors.

Until now. To most everyone’s surprise, not one but two companies appear to be close to solving this problem. Already one of them is beginning commercial shipments of artificial diamonds to the jewelry industry that are largely indistinguishable from mined diamonds, and their intent is to use the capital generated from these sales to fund semiconductor-class diamond production.

This is fascinating stuff. Mind you, none of this is likely to lead to a diamond-powered p5 sitting on your desk next year. But a diamond-powered p10 is now within the realm of the possible, wereas if you had asked scientists about this 6 months ago almost all of them would have said it’s basically science fiction. This is one of those huge huge scientific breakthroughs that basically flys under the radar. No one will notice this has happened and yet it is very likely to cause a fundamental shift in our underlying computing technologies over the next 20 years or so. Cool cool beans, and 2000 frames a second in Quake 5 😉

If the subject interests you, wired magazine has a great in-depth piece on it.

Check out this mouse mod this guy put together. Builtin palm cooling for those clan deathmatches that go on for an hour and a half. Sweet!

Everyone, and I mean everyone with a PC needs to go grab a copy of feed demon. I am going to keep harping about how valuable RSS aggregators are until everyone is using one. Once again – simplify your internet experience and increase exponentially the amount of data you can cram into your head. Get started with aggregators, once you have the ‘ah HA!’ moment and realize how useful a tool they are you’ll never want to be stuck manually visiting your favorite news and info sites again.

Mac users are still fine with NetWireNews, nothing’s come out that’s remotely close.

newsmonster is another interesting cross platform (requires mozilla) solution, it’s coolest feature is how it is trying to tie the USE of content into a ranking system, ie it’s trying to help you figure out which content is worth looking into. I’m giving them more time to finish though, right now the concept is stronger than the implementation.

I’ll close with yet another appeal – go get started with aggregators. How many times in the past 15 years have I succesfully promoted techs that ended up being useful to the folks who read this weblog, from email to web browsers to instant messenging, even to 3d accelerators for crying out loud. This is the next ‘thing.’ Trust me, and go get one and actually spend the time to learn how it works, your head will be better off for it.

I’m mildly obsessed with bargain hunting. I probably spend a half hour to an hour a day digging through various online forums and websites looking for deals on tech equipment. Today I found a new site, techbargains.com that has a great selection of deals and links to stuff. It’s better organized than most of these kinds of sites too. Worth a look if you’re digging after deals all the time like I am.

The day has finally arrived where I can build my own tivo-like media playing box. Snapstream has released their new 3.0 software. It’s a great clone of a tivo with the added ability to stream your media to any machine on your lan (or on the net for that matter). Plus most importantly it can talk to my cable box with a little adapter, ie it can record from all channels, unlike my current setup where I can only record from the basic cable channels. Now I need to sell this G4 Mac I have so I can buy one of these and stick it in the home entertainment setup in the living room. Anyone want to buy a mac? $500, a bargain, comes with a radeon 8500, 768 MB of ram, g4 500mhz processor, mouse and several keyboards, OS X installed.

…writ large. Now this is cool. Grub is an attempt to use the world’s collective computing power to build a great search engine. It’s free to download and play around with (though you do have to register) and the potential payoff is there, imagine a search engine even better than Google.

For those of you unfamiliar with distributed computing, the idea is you use the cpu’s of machines that would otherwise be idle (like your office computer when you are home, or your home machines when you are at work) to perform computational operations. In the past I’ve noted projects like the iterations over common cold bacteria and the like; this is the first one likely to produce results I would use. Well, unless the SETI people find an alien culture or two 😉

check out Scripteur, a cool OSX only solution to media publishing. If you’re a mac only household and you want to share MP3, video and other files seamlessly across your lan to the other machines on your network, this may be good for you. It’s a clever use of Rendevous and Applescript. No Tivo-like recording functions or anything, this is only about publishing, but what it does it does well.

Rendevous is cool stuff and one of the cool things to be found on OSX. It’s based on Zeroconf, an international standard for zero configuration networking. Apple is as far as I am aware the first big vendor to support it, though some of the printer manufacturers are following along in Apple’s wake. The idea is network devices should be able to autodiscover network services, so you plug in a new PC and it finds the DHCP server and all nearby printers. You turn on server on that box, like FTP or HTTP, and any other machine on that network segment can see the server without having to know its address. It’s really pretty damned slick. Just cross your fingers MS gets around to incorporating it into windoze so apps like Scripteur can work seamlessly across platforms.

Now this is interesting. The developers of divx have released a beta of their new software which provides an easy way to play all your media files on all the computers you have. As regular readers know, I have been planning the construction of a ‘media box’ to hook up to my home theater system so that I can play my mp3 collection and the movies I grab using my tv capture card without having to hook my laptop up to the home theater. The basic idea is a sort of tivo/digital media box. Anyway I have been investigating my options. Lately I am leaning towards going with an Xbox because of the excellent xbox media player project, which I could have up and running for around $250 (as compared to the PC I specced out to do this, which would cost around $6-700). The downside is, no tivo functionality, the upside is, cheap! But Mastermind looks interesting also, I’m going to play around with it and see if it’s viable. the downside is it seems to rely on their centralized server, which I don’t like. I want to run the server on my own boxes, I have no interest in marketers building a usage profile on me.

More as I learn about this, over the next couple of months I will be installing something in the living room. What that something is remains to be seen 😉