Posts by Category: general

general April 13, 2002 posted by

Japanese young fashionistas at play

Not really the sort of article that I would normally post, except for this one excerpt which seems to sum up the desperate search for identity – er I mean obsessive focus on fashion – of Japanese youth. If it’s true of course! ‘Another recent trend was wearing boots with twenty-centimeter platform heels. There have been at least five reported shoe-related fatalities, one involving a twenty-five-year-old who died after tumbling off her own footwear, and another who lost control of…


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general April 13, 2002 posted by

Text based Pong game

Just when you thought you’d seen it all, along comes this kind of thing, which quite frankly leaves one gasping for air. The text based Pong site is….well…just that. A site where you can play the venerable game of pong in a text version. You know – ‘the paddle has moved up, now it’s your move’ kind of thing. So bizarre it’s hilarious.


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general April 12, 2002 posted by

Voice Recognition coming along nicely?

This New York Times article (I’m sorry but it requires registration) is an interesting evaluation of voice activated home appliances and gizmos. One of the key points is just how fiddly it may become when/if we all start talking to our home equipment, the author cites a problem where the voice activated television started reacting to a particular newscaster’s voice and raising the volume autonomously. Kind of spooky really. Anyway worth a read. Also mentioned in the article is the…


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general April 12, 2002 posted by

Google Weblog

Well this is it really. Combine the two most popular phenomena on the Web and what have you got? Yep, the Google Weblog – a site dedicated to bringing you all the latest news on the Google service.


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general April 12, 2002 posted by

Impressions of the Segway

Technologist Dan Bricklin has been playing around with Dean Kamen’s new Segway. This report is something of an attempt to describe what it’s actually like to ride and use rather than a formal review, which makes it interesting. Example quote: “People on the Segways were about as intrusive as someone on crutches or holding a wheeled piece of luggage — that is, not much at all.” He also mentions high speed, super rugged versions being tested out by the US…


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general April 12, 2002 posted by

One for the techies only then?

Those venerable folks at Google have just released a set of APIs to let clever geek programmers create applications which use the awesome Google search engine. What does this mean for the rest of us? Who knows, but one thing’s for certain, there’s got to be some really interesting ways to use the 2 billion (and rising) documents currently indexed by Google from the Web.


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general April 12, 2002 posted by

While we’re on the subject of Web sites (we are aren’t we?) here’s a neat one – Things Other People Accomplished When They Were Your Age. Enter your age, and the site will pop up with all the brilliant things that other – obviously more famous – people had done by that age themselves. Er…not recommended for those with a weak or palpitating sense of inferiority. Note: This site does not mention the 5.x billion unkown and unremarked folk who…


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general April 12, 2002 posted by

A strange place this, the Bankers Repository Corporation Global Dispute Resolution site. Also known as the….wait for it….Resolutionizer 7000, this weird Flash powered site promises to ‘resolve highly complex disputes within a matter of days for a fixed fee.’ Submit your evidence and information and a 3 person impartial committee will contact your antagonist, review all the facts and give you a non-binding recommendation. The company claims to solve over 60% of the cases submitted to it, which sure sounds…


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general April 12, 2002 posted by

And now a series of personal self-help sites for your further delectation. No please, don’t mention it. I. Not sure who you are, or what you believe? Check out the strangely designed Select Smart site, where you can find out what religion suits your attitudes, locate your perfect type of pet, find out which kind of Internet access is right for you and a host of other useful thangs. You do this by going through a selection of multiple choice…


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general April 12, 2002 posted by

Hey, remember that �5.00 you owe me? No? Well maybe you should take a quick trip over to this Harbrace Psychology Student Center site and read up on this Practical Guide for Improving your Memory from Dr Ruth Propper. No really, you never know it might help.


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general April 11, 2002 posted by

Brace yourselves. Japanese giants Hitachi and Matsushita are planning on launching a range of network enabled home appliances this autumn, which will go beyond simple concepts of remote switch on and query. According to this report in AsiaBizTech, the new products, including air conditioners, refrigerators, washing machines and microwave ovens will have more ‘added value’. Not quite sure what that means exactly, but the executive did mention words like ‘home security’, ‘elder care’ and ‘health control’. So what, like a…


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general April 11, 2002 posted by

Two very interesting products from US company X-trafun. The first is a Bluetooth cartridge for the Nintendo Gameboy Advance. This little doozy will let GBA owners connect to up to seven other GBA devices in a local wireless peer to peer network. This should make for some rockin’ multi-player gaming and cool playground conferencing. The cartridge, which should be around the same price as normal ones, will also let l33t h4x0rs connect their GBAs to Web servers and access email…


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general April 11, 2002 posted by

Fuji Film has announced a neat little product designed to help people photograph items for things like online auctions. The ‘shooting kit ‘ includes a stand which holds the digicam and a special box which uses clear plastics and fluorescent lighting to obtain optimum quality digital shots. The price is 30,000 yen (around �125.00) and it’s available from May. I think that this sort of box could end up being used for a lot more than just auctions, I know…


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