Pomme::TAB

Can you imagine yourself doing your grocery shopping and when you arrive at the till, you pay only by putting your finger on a finger print reader?

According to this spanish article, there is a trial in Germany that seems successful enough to be extended to hundreds of stores.

Apparently the system is found useful by elderly people who don’t have to memorize pin number, or fiddle with coins and notes.

The drawback is that it is one more company to hold your payment details.
In other hand, being brick and mortar, they are not going to disappear the next day.

Source: faq-mac

I want this shirt when traveling the south of Spain

Ropa USB con ventiladores: para andar fresquito este verano: ”

(Via www.faq-mac.com.)

Kangaroo Men Tryptich

Originally uploaded by Rija 2.0.
I’ve spent Sunday afternoon in Little Venice taking photos with a friend.
While we were having fun around the Paddington basin, these two men came past us chit chatting with each other and moving themselves smoothly. But what they had on their feet was odd and the moved with a slight bounce. It was cool to see.

The only time I saw these things before was in an advert for Zurich insurance company.

I don’t even know what’s the name. It would help if I want to pursue the idea of acquiring a pair of them

This article reported by Slashdot demonstrates that William Gibson’s Cyberspace is less and less sci-fi and more and more reality:

Big corporations creating their own virtual worlds is the first step.
Interconnecting them all through Second Life and Croquet is the next one.
Then the troubles begins when World Of Warcraft, Lineage and Everquest joins the party…

Imagine Distributed Denial Of Service (DDOS) against corporate servers launched by army of orcs controlled by the mob in Lineage or corporate secrets exchanged in the dodgy alleys of NeoCron.

If I remember correctly(8 years since I read it), French author Jean-Marc Ligny explores the gaming aspects of virtual worlds in his sci-fi book “Inner City”.

IBM and Sun Launch Intranet Metaverses: “wjamesau writes ‘Sun and IBM have launched intranet metaverses designed for business and built to work behind their corporate firewalls, so their worldwide employees can use them to collaborate together. Most interesting to game developers, IBM (which also runs a private, no public access Second Life island as a development lab) created their intranet world from the 3D Torque engine from Garage Games. Will the metaverse actually be thousands of gated community metaverses?’

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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(Via Slashdot.)

UK’s CIS Solar Tower garners 390-kilowatts from the sun: “

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

We’re not entirely sure if Manchester’s CIS Solar Tower will be the world’s grandest solar tower, but in terms of buildings have moved beyond the drawing board, it definitely packs a punch. Reportedly, the flaky construction led to dilapidating walls, which were then replaced by a much greener solution — 7,244 Sharp 80W photovoltaic panels, to be precise. Curiously, only 4,898 of the modules are actually functional, but they still soak up enough sunlight to generate 390-kilowatts of energy, or in layman’s terms, enough juice to ‘power 1,000 PCs for a year.’ Additionally, the roof is home to two dozen wind turbines that generate 10-percent of the total power used in the building. Of course, such an endeavor did ring up at a steep £5.675 million ($11.4 million), but we’re pretty certain this solar panel makeover was concerned with matters other than dollars and cents. Click on through for a top-down shot.

[Via MetaEfficient]

Continue reading UK’s CIS Solar Tower garners 390-kilowatts from the sun

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

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(Via Engadget.)

This month has been rich in news/articles about solar technology in the blogosphere.

Below are two more links

• Sliver
• 3D solar cells

That’s great news for renewable energy!

Solar Power-Cell Breakthrough: “An anonymous reader writes ‘Researchers from the Nanomaterials Research Centre at Massey University in New Zealand have developed synthetic dyes that can be used to generate electricity at one tenth of the cost of current silicon-based solar panels. These photosynthesis-like compounds work in low-light conditions and can be cheaply incorporated into window-panes and building materials, thereby turning them into generators of electricity.’

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(Via Slashdot.)

At the beginning of the month Digg reported on an article on how to make your own biodiesel.

It’s quite interesting, especially since you can get waste vegetable oil from restaurants for free. It’s a pity the yield is not as great as producing biodiesel from algae, but then again algae is not that freely and widely available.

Alternatively you can also build your own nuclear reactor.

I found myself browsing Wikipedia a few times this week:

• First I got interested in toilet technology: what is a porta-potti and the principles of chemical toilets and composting toilets
• Then I became fascinated by bio-diesel which led to a site warning people of the environment risk of some bio-diesel
• Through an article on Digg, I landed on the wikipedia page explaining what is an Air car

I was looking for the Macintosh Human Interface Guideline on Amazon and found this gem (Newton Interface Guidelines)

Though it’s not available anymore, I’d be curious to know how valid it is when developing applications for nowadays PDAs.

Maybe one of the reason the iPhone will be closed to third parties it’s because Apple prefer to have enough experience in developing their own software, before writing an application design guide and open the handheld to external developers.

I think the environment in which the iPhone will evolve is so different than Newton’s.

Now, everything is connected, worms, malware and phishing also spread on mobile devices, on IM. PDA are now expected to be multimedia player while connectivity comes into multiple wireless flavours, all eager to drain the battery’s life (it was an excellent idea to put 2 batteries in the iPhone)

Also cautious users want snappy interface and the shortest time to completion for whatever they want to do because each second spent messing with the UI is another second of exposure to thieves in public transports.

That’s a challenge.

I think it’s a wise decision for the iPhone to starts its life closed to third parties software.