New Tech

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Send Your Clones to Conferences Far and Wide

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Clone troops B&W

During the weekend of June 21st, two conferences occurred - Blogging While Brown in Harlem, NY and Netroots Nation in San Jose, CA. These are both conferences that cover issues that I am interested in, and I wish I could clone myself and go to both!

 I selected Blogging While Brown, but unfortunately I had to cancel due to a business obligation.  So here I was - two conferences going on and I wasn't able to go to either.  I was pretty pissed. The only solution was to use Twitter to follow the conference and essentially clone myself so that I could be in three places at the same time.

Technology to the rescue!  I used Tweetdeck  to watch both hashtags from the conference (#BWBNYC and #NN13). I also made sure to set up a separate filter for each hashtag and the word "question". This enabled me to watch for questions that people asked (so I could ask follow up questions), as well as find when questions were being thrown out to Twitter community to answer.  

I was able to interact with conference attendees so often that some people actually thought I was at the conference! My little Shareef clones attended the conferences and people actually mistook them for me! Check out the following tweets.

Good luck with cloning yourself and attending conferences from afar!

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3D Printing: Making Prosthetics at Home

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3D printers from companies like Makerbot are helping to bring home the dream of printing our own 3D objects. They currently are out of range for most consumers at about $2000, but this price will come down in a matter of time.  Unfortunately, this amazing technology only makes the news when it is used negatively, like printing guns to make political points. 

NPR has a positive story about using 3D printing technology to help children born without hands.  The video below shows a cute example of the final result.

 

Richard Van As, a carpenter who mangled his hand in a work accident, and Ivan Owen, a creator of bendable puppet hands, put their minds together to create a crude version of a mechanical hand prosthetic. After that, the article states:

He emailed MakerBot, a firm that makes 3-D printing equipment, to see if the company would help out. It did, offering both Owen and Van As a free 3-D printer. "Then there was no stopping us," Van As says.
What had previously taken the pair a week's time or more — milling finger pieces, adjusting and tweaking parts — now took 20 minutes to redesign, print and test.

They posted the design and instructions for Robohand on Thingiverse, a website for sharing digital designs. Anyone can download the plans and — with a 3-D printer and about $150 in parts — make a hand.

Thingiverse is a great example of using a social networking site to spread innovative ideas across the world. Props to Makerbot for giving the duo a free $2000 printer to help realize the dream. Such positive uses of technology should be celebrated and given as much news as negative ones. Especially since we're going to all need 3D printers once light sabers become all the rage, as shown in the video below.

 

This post also appears on TWIB.

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Death To Remotes! Consoles Should Run Your TV

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​Death to remotes!

​Death to remotes!

During the Xbox One reveal this week, Microsoft spent a lot of time on the console controlling the television and cable box. A significant amount of gamers fired back with "we don't care about controlling the TV, just show us the games!"

Once you try, you may not go back. I don't have an Xbox One, but Nintendo's Wii U is a good step in the direction of TV integration that I hope all future consoles take.

It's the simple things that I love about controlling the TV with my console, like changing the volume of a game when someone calls or is speaking to you.  I love coming home and turning on your entertainment system easily.  Having my favorite channels available at a push of button, without even needing to turn the console on, is a huge upgrade from the terrible interfaces that most cable companies provide.

The Wii U accomplishes the above tasks via button presses and the same infrared sensor that remotes use, meaning that you need line of sight to your cable box and TV.  If the voice control of the Xbox One works as advertised, it will be much easier to completely control your entertainment system without messing around with the ugly cable company interfaces. In addition, it will let you control your DVR and (possibly) On Demand cable functionality, something that the Wii U cant' do. 

Games will always come first, but don't discount the other media parts of the new generation of gaming consoles. Wii U took the first step, and Xbox One can really up the ante. Maybe even the cable companies will get on board and ​start to deign systems that aren't clunky.

Nah, that'll never happen.​

This post also appears on TWIB.

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Google Glass & Dynamic Textbooks

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Google Glass, an upcoming glasses / camera / internet hybrid, is finally in the hands of developers.  There are a few videos of people walking around and doing ... normal things, but the one that really caught my attention was this go kart race by Google's Josh Armour. This video shows off the smooth, high definition video that can be captured at decent speeds.

My imagination runs wild in terms of STEM education.  Imagine bringing a group of kids to a carnival and having a fun day of go karting. How about using a video editor to mark two points and time the distance between them, to calculate velocity? How about measuring the change in velocity between points to calculate acceleration?  Now imagine this with trains ... or roller coasters ... or airplanes!

How about having kids throw the ball around, and thing bring it back to class and examine the parabolic motion of a ball? How about showing that you can reasonably calculate the horizontal and vertical position based on how hard it was thrown and the time? This could also be used to show how equations are for ideal situations and that variables such as wind, humidity, etc can affect measurement. You don't even have to mention the term "projectile motion" for the kids to get it. - because it would be their own physical actions!

Opportunities are everywhere to teach our children how physics is represented in the world around us. This can all be done with current technology, but having the ability to easily create videos from our vantage points puts the stamp of personality that resonates heavily with the "me" generation reared on YouTube. Essentially, it's a dynamic textbook where the examples are tuned specifically to the student - a far cry from the stale books that bore most students today.

If technologies such as Google Glass can get into educator's hands and avoid the $1500 developer price, we all win.​

Check out other cool Google Glass videos on Gizmodo!

This post also appears on This Week In Blackness.

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Google Glass: Augment My Reality, Four Eyes

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​Robocop knows the law.

​Robocop knows the law.

My favorite part of any movie that features a robot is when they show the robot's point of view. They usually show menus popping up with give further information on what the robot is seeing - someone's emotional state, directions to someone's place, etc.  The cool kids call it "augmented reality".

Google is stepping to the arena with Google Glass, which will be released later this year for consumers. It's essentially a pair of glasses that allow you to access the internet, take photos, and record video with your voice.​ Joshua Topolsky gives a preview of the device on The Verge. It looks great, but pricey - Google is only promising it will be "under $1500". Yeah ... hopefully it's not $1499. If you can't see the video below, please click here.

Google is expanding on a concept that has existed with other pieces of tech that I've tried. The iPhone Yelp app had an awkward mode where you hold up the camera and restaurants with Yelp reviews instantly appear, along with reviews and distances. If you can't see the video below, please click here.

My Nintendo 3DS came with cards that, when viewed through the 3DS camera, came to life and flew around on whatever background the camera was focusing on. If you can't see the video below, please click here.

I'm definitely looking forward to the release of Google Glass later this year.  I'm saving up now!