Posted on by lhl

so, i’ve been outta the loop on the pda front, but there’s supposedly a new palm, the m505 coming out as soon as the end of this month. what’s special about it? well, looks like a palmv w/ color screen and goodies, among them, sd devices. those of you who noice details, will note that the sd02.jpg confirms the form factor of the new palm.

unfortunately, while there’ll be a bluetooth addon (nice), and a modem, there doesn’t seem to be a cellular/wireless add-on built in. while, the new palm looks interesting and i’d like it to be a palm (palmv form factor rocks, have lotsa palm software) my next pda is going to have to have wireless internet, and paging (voice might be nice, but isn’t a dealbreaker).

Posted on by lhl

so i’m listening to some wheatus, and i must say that “punk assed bitch” is definitely my second favorite song. “teenage dirtbag” edges it out slightly because the video manages to make mena suvari look really hot. yeah, not many deep thoughts going on at 5:40am…

Posted on by lhl

voodoo extreme has some unreal ii info. i find this quote most interesting:

“The path from here to photo-realism is now incremental,” says Sweeney. “It’s still five or ten years away, though, because it needs huge processing power. We need more speed, more precision in color components to let us move up from 32-bit to 64- and 128-bit, but there are no major improvements to be done.

we’ll see…

Posted on by lhl

i’ve been thinking about this for a while, but i sort of crystallized while i was sitting in religions class this morning. i was thinking about e-paper, and how one day we’ll never know how we lived w/o it.

granted, i don’t doubt that the traditional book form will be with us for a long time, it’s cheap and easy to make, but if you have an intuitive, high resolution, tactile interface (epaper we’re talking about remember, not this ebook crap), you have something that’s as easy to read as paper, but with the advantage of, being able to create annotations w/ full and random access, as well as creates all sorts of connections, to other books (that can be loaded dynamically, etc. so, you can be carrying around your whole library (on media or w/ wireless access), which can be organized by as many views as you can think of (which can include timestamps of every action you’ve performed if you wanted it), with dynamic hyperlinking, annotation, and notes storage.

nothing particularly new about this thought (ted nelson‘s been thinking about it for the past 40 years), but i’m pretty sure that this idea of the epaper-ebook will come into its own in the next 10yrs. xanadu will still be vaporware 😛

back to work now. why the hell do i need to memorize 67 slides for art history? is this really the best use i have for my braincells?

Posted on by lhl

there’s a salon article on rotten.com. Dr. Michael Wong Chang, the pseudonymous proprietor of BonsaiKitten:

“The dichotomy between exploiting ‘distasteful’ subject matter in the guise of information and exploiting it as entertainment is artificial and hypocritical. Lurid details of human fault and misery are published in the ‘mainstream’ media for exactly the same reason that certain people exchange this material informally — to titillate the viewer.”

what’s interesting is that there’s a strong link here to a reading i was just doing for my art history class (photography and the politics of representation). an essay by carole vance on the attorney general’s commission on pornography seems especially relevant considering that the commission employed just this sort of titillation as a tool to further their own agenda.