Although I’m not a real programmer, I submitted a LEGO Mindstorms NXT project, and we ended up being the biggest team, with nine members!! Here’s the video:

And besides the project, I had two very unique experiences: first, meeting Mitch Altman and buying a TV-B-Gone kit and assembling it right there and then with his help, and the second, meeting the people from AltLab, Tiago who I had met before at Twittlis, and Catarina, who were demoing their Makerbot Industries open source 3D printer.

Putting 2 + 2 together, I managed to challenge Catarina to design and print an enclosure for my assembled TV-B-Gone, right there at Codebits!

TV-B-Gone inside an enclosure printed on a MakerBot Industries CupCake CNC.

If you have your own 3D printer, you can download the model files here, and print your own TV-B-Gone enclosure!

Kids, *this* is the future, and you probably saw it here first!

The problem with this is that the ratio between your “original” content and replies to other Twitter users becomes very low, and these so called “@ replies” have little value for people that aren’t in on the conversation.

Continuing my love affair with Yahoo Pipes, I’ve created a really simple pipe that will fetch your non-protected Twitter feed, and filter out all the @ replies. It will also remove the “nickname: ” prefix from the start of each tweet.  Just input your twitter username on the form, run the pipe, and choose the “Get as RSS” from under “More options”, inside the “Use this Pipe” section. Feel free to clone it and improve it.

You’ll need:

• The URL of your Google Reader public page, it should look something like this:

  http://www.google.com/reader/shared/09549915423433150590

• Your exact author name from your Google Account page, mine is “Pedro Pinheiro”
• The Yahoo Pipe I created to filter the shares without notes, and input the previous two bits of information on the form.  Feel free to clone it into your own Pipes space and edit it/re-distribute it.
• To click on the “Get as RSS” under the “More options” button inside the “Use this pipe” box, note the URL
• To create a feed on twitterfeed – it uses OpenID, but you need to supply your Twitter username and password (yes, I know this isn’t safe, but as far as I know, Twitter doesn’t provide a safer alternative yet).

That’s it! Once the feed is activated on twitterfeed, within the specified time-interval, your Google Reader notes will automatically show up on your Twitter stream.

Even within my geekier circle of friends I’m a bit of a rarity, having heard the most passionate defense of classical paper books from some of the people who otherwise use the sharpest of the cutting edge to live and make their living.

The jump to the immateriality of the commerce and enjoyment of other media like music and video has had a much greater acceptance (both legal and otherwise…), even among the non-geek.  Does this say something about the people who read books, or just about a mismatch between books and the digital world?  From my numerous discussions with dead tree lovers , their qualms have some relevance, particularly for non-linear research reading, such as being easier to navigate and annotate the texts.  But after all, hasn’t the practice of reading news online and digital correspondence become all but universal? Why not for leisure, linear reading?

The main points for their passion of paper are its physical properties and permanence.  The smell, the texture, the physical bulk as a representation of the information contained within.  That the book is enjoyable without any hardware beyond the human sight, that it has a instantaneous “boot time”, and no DRM whatsoever.

My stance is different, based on several reasons, starting with the question of elegance: why would you chop down trees, move them to the paper factory, make ink, move everything to the printers, and move all the finished books around again, when the goal of transferring the knowledge from a writer’s mind into your own can be achieved by only pushing electrons and photons around, using the devices you already have? (I currently read my eBooks on my iPod Touch – I don’t find dedicated devices like the Kindle appealing for my needs).

The lack of bulk for me is one of the great advantages, as it allows me to carry in my pocket all the books I’m currently reading without carrying any extra weight (that’s why dedicated reading hardware is not appealing to me).  Therefore, I can use any unexpected free time to read a little more, and I can take any books on  weekends and vacations without any forethought or hassle.  And if you have ever moved from one house to another, you know how heavy all those boxes filled with books are.  My reasons aren’t limited to the physical realm, two other reasons are very important: the instant gratification of buying an eBook online and being able to start reading it as soon as the purchase is made; and being able to reference any unknown words on any dictionary loaded into the reading software just by touching the word.

I still haven’t made the switch completely, as many publishers, either for fear of copying or by not thinking there’s enough market for it to be worth the trouble, still don’t have their titles available in digital format.

In the end, I think it’s just another cultural limitation – if you’ve grown up with paper, changing is difficult.

In this context, several new services have appeared to help us deal with this overload.  We don’t have a miraculous way to read or write faster, so the only way to get all this info in and out of our brain is to cut the overhead, to be much more succint.  One of these new services is blippr.com, which is still in closed beta as I write this.  Blippr is a bit of a twitter + digg mashup for reviews of books, movies, music, and games.  Each micro-review is called a blip, and it can be 160 characters long, plus a overall satisfaction vote.

I’ve been using it for the past few months, and I found out one important thing: I tend to not procrastinate writing up reviews because I know they’ll take around a minute to write.  This is not only due to being short, but also due to the wonderful integration that blippr has with outside sources of information.  If you’re the first one blipping an item and if it’s even not yet in their own list, it will show automatically what it is when you search, including covers for books, and trailers for movies, and give you an option to “…be the first to blip this item”.

Each item will then be rated based on the overall votes it gets.  It also boasts a social model, in which you can follow or be followed by other people, which influences the weight of the votes when you are browsing the reviews.  All in all – a clever idea, a simple interface, a powerful engine beneath the hood.  And you can output what you blip into your “lifestream” – the cacaphony of little blurbs that make up what you produce publicly online.

These are a few of the things that could become possible with a proposed new technology by Pulickel Ajayan et al from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York.  Basically, it’s the combination of cellulose and nanotubes, creating a flexible robust battery – with a twist.  It can be built in a way that it becomes a hybrid of a battery with a capacitor – able to hold the amount of power batteries can, coupled with the ability to charge and discharge as fast as capacitors are able.  Being flexible, these batteries could be easily produced in all shapes necessary to take the best advantage of any design.  Let’s see how soon this technology can be mass produced.

The world’s first commercially viable quantum computer was unveiled and demonstrated today in Silicon Valley by D-Wave Systems, Inc., a privately-held Canadian firm headquartered near Vancouver.

This is the first paragraph of today’s press release issued by D-Wave Systems. Visit their website for more information on quantum computing in general (in a very accessible language), although commercial “how do I buy it” information is not there explicitly,  they hint they’ll be selling capacity online. Let’s see if a) it’s for real, and b) even if it is, what will be the immediate and future impact. They don’t claim that quantum computers will replace conventional computers, explaining (plus here and here) which kinds of problems are better tackled by this technology.

Sometimes, evolution happens in small steps, but if this is true it might signal a true leap in what computers can do.  Lets wait and see.

A few links with both sides of the story, and more information:

• Orion into the future – The Quantum Pontiff
• The Orion Quantum Computer Anti-Hype FAQ – Shtetl-Optimized
• Quantum computer ‘Orion’ debuts – EE Times
  

First off, it’s completely multi-modal – meaning that you can update it or receive updates by several different channels – on your phone through SMS messages, through your existing instant messaging account, through your web browser, or through a dedicated client (the system is open, anyone can interface with it – and for now it’s free and they are footing the bill for the SMS messages the system sends you). I like this multi-modality, meaning you can reach it and be reached (or not) in the way you choose.

As with any basic and open system, people have been using/hacking it in interesting ways, finding new ways to make it fun and/or useful. The basic usage is to give the world (if you have your account public, or just your friends if you have it marked private) a status of your situation, such as “stuck in traffic”, “eating lunch @ so an so”, or “taking crap from the pointy-haired boss again” – which gives rise to interaction, as people in your list may respond (either to the “ether”, or prefacing it with “@name” so everyone knows to whom the interaction is directed), giving it a feel of a big pub conversation (in which many times you’ll “hear” just the half of the conversation from the person on your list). Some people have also created identities that are fictional (like Darth Vader telling you what he’s doing and feeling ), or useful hacks (such as RSS news feeds that you receive like regular twitts). Another useful aspect of it, as the Twitts are archived in your account, is to record little ideas or phrases in the collective memory that you can look up later (and that you don’t mind other people finding out about, of course). Meg Pickard has written a nice summing up of Twitter as she sees it.

This makes Twitter not a messaging system as such, but more of an interface for very short messages, be it between people, or connecting us to machines (imagine getting your server status as twitts, as another example, something not very complicated to script). It will be bought by Google like everything else (it’s probably being indirectly financed by the money this guy made when Google bought Pyra Labs/Blogger). They’ve got a blog where you can keep up with their evolution.

Not bad, not bad at all! I used the computer normally, reading and replying to e-mail, IM’ing, and browsing the web.