Just a quickie

Since I've been a long time away from blogging, I'll take just some time to talk about Brasil's Synchronized Swimming Team or better yet, twins. Why talk about them? Are they the grand favorites for Olympic gold? Silver? Bronze? Anything? I don't think so, however, they are worth talking about.

That's all folks.

Wireless Energy

I want to talk about something that I've heard for a while now, but have failed to make it to our daily market shelfs. Wireless Energy Transfer.

Theory behind this technology was developed in the 1890s by Nikola Tesla, who managed to transmit 100 million volts of high-frequency electric power wirelessly over a distance of 26 miles at which he lit up a bank of 200 light bulbs and ran one electric motor! He claimed that only 5% of the energy was lost in the process.

Nikola Tesla


I am unaware of the difficulties regarding this process, but I believe that after all those years, our homes should already be free of much of their wired equipments. Currently there is a Consortium integrated by many of the most important manufacturers of home electrical such as Phillips, Nokia, Olympus and Siemens, aiming at delivering specifications for a standard for wireless energy transfer.

Some wireless powered appliances are coming slowly to commercial releases. And you can see some of them here: Wireless Power Consortium Webpage
However, I fear that I will still take some time before we can arrive home and automatically all of our appliances will start charging.

3D at home?

Since we are currently witnessing the 3D takeover of our nearby movie theaters I'd like to talk about this technology, its inner workings and what I imagine to be the future of 3D entertainment.

First of all, we need to explain the formation of images through the human ocular system. The perception of depth is possible due to the usage of some visual cues of relative depth between images, some of them are even possible through 2D pictures such as image overlapping, blurring of images and others that may be expressed on 2 dimensions. However, true perception of depth needs to include two other visual cues which are impossible to be expressed in this manner, which are:

1. the focusing capacity of the eye: our capability of focusing on closer or farther objects by changing the shape of the biconcave lens we have in our eyes;
2. binocular disparity: it is the slight difference between images acquired by each of our eyes, associated with the distance between them, which is also called stereopsis;

There is no current technology that fulfills requirement number one, while requirement number two is the one behind 3D movies.

Although different technologies may be used, all one of them, basically, allow us to acquire different images for each of our eyes which are processed by our brain, considering the horizontal distance between our eyes, therefore providing a fake but desirable illusion of depth.

It is rather interesting to understand the inner workings of 3D cinema, but what about home entertainment? When are those 3D gadgets going to reach our houses?

The answer is: whenever you can buy them.

A simple query on google for "3D monitors" will show you some already on sale 3D monitors for reasonable prices. Although buying one of them today is probably not a good idea, since big manufacturers such as Sony and Samsung already have those models under development, and will provide more reliable devices.

 Hyundai W220S - available on Amazon for $549,99

When 3D devices are made available, under mass production, for the home user, the entertainment market will shift producing 3D capable games, movies, TV shows and whatever suits the audience, bringing us to a new virtual reality, less distinct from the real one. However it is said that, due to the small size of this portable 3D experiences, users usually feel dizziness less often than on a 3D movie theater.

Mac OS X tunning tips

I am experimenting with some tunning strategies in my mac and, of course, will be sharing with you along some topics in this blog. For now, since I am still testing whether they are all effective, I'll be sharing just two simple tips.

First of all, install Snow Leopard. Upgrade is seamless, since I have Time machine configured, I didn't even have the trouble to back up stuff, and wouldn't have needed to restore anything, anyway. It finished upgrading and everything was working, no data was gone and all programs would still work. Kinda different from a Windows upgrade, surely. However, if you use Macports, you will have to through a process of upgrading it, take a look at this: http://syntatic.wordpress.com/2009/08/30/macports-snow-leopard-upgrade/

Snow Leopard initiates faster, sleeps and wakes up faster and occupies less space in my disk. Those are all the reasons needed for upgrading. But other reasons are 64bits, multicore and OpenGL optimizations.

The other tip is disabling the Spotlight. This one may not be applicable to everyone, but I never use Spotlight, so I find it really useful to disable those indexing operations that slow down my mac sporadically. If you also want to do that, go to the Terminal.app and issue:

sudo mdutil -a -i off

 The mdutil allows you to manage metadata used by spotlight.

Brain-computer interfaces

Since we have spoken about Ipad and the way that it's interface should revolutionize de world, I have decided to talk about what I actually think is the revolution itself, Brain-computer Interfaces.

We are actually talking about interfacing with devices solely by using your brain. Actually, research on this topic is often related to prosthetic devices, acquired blindness vision substitution and other benefits for people with special necessities. It is undeniable that this research may bring unmeasurable possibilities for these users, however, I can't stop myself from picturing future computer interfaces based on this technology. I know for sure that everyone has already seen the Monkey and prosthetic arm video.
I bet that Avatar stuff does look a little less impossible now!

One can only imagine the large number of applications and games that could benefit from such interfaces, however research is still some years away from mapping brainwaves perfectly and farther from doing so for different individuals and brainwaves patterns. Another issue and always worth considering is the price those interfaces would impose to our monthly low budget of tech gadgets. Shall we break our piggy banks for this ones?

Peter Crouch's

I want to take a pause in the topics that I usually talk about here, and talk about Peter Crouch's girlfriend. I am not sure if everyone here is aware of who is Peter Crouch. He is England's national team and Liverpool's center forward, nonetheless a really tall, lousy and ugly soccer player with a huge lack of physical coordination. Take a look at his girlfriend:

Which makes me wonder, for the millionth time in my life, about the weight money has in girl's decisions about whether hooking up with someone.

Ipad revolution?

Spokesmen from Apple have been saying that we are in for a real treat, meaning that Ipad should revolutionize the world. There have been both critics and passionate defense regarding Apple's newly born anabolized Iphone, I prefer not to keep a formed opinion and wait for the happenings, however it should be fun to try and picture some of the mind-blowing user experiences:

• The future all-in-one remote control for the intelligent house. Solutions for controlling lights, air conditioners, curtains and other home appliances should enable full control of your intelligent house using your Ipad.
• The final solution for video calls and voip. With integrated 3G and Wifi, Ipad is your final solution as a Voip phone. However, where did they put the camera?
• Portable gaming. Although one would argue that notebooks are more capable of gaming than Ipad will ever be, there is the touch screen capability and, mainly, mobility and ubiquitous connectivity, creating a new range of gaming possibilities. What about 3D acceleration, is Ipad capable of good graphics?
• Although Apple has argued that they do not aim at the netbook market could Ipad get some shares of this rising market. Remember that Google Chrome OS and even Android will supposedly be seen in netbooks more often. A Titan's clash!

We could go on about it for some more time, making the point about possible markets, however we would be taking the risk of emphasizing a device that could end up as an overpriced ebook reader! Let's hope not.