Author Archive

Digital Drawing Board

Monday, April 9th, 2007

This is what I call innovation. Back in my day we used a blackboard and chalk but it seems that future generations won’t have to get their hands dirty. This digital drawing board it’s not only clean and easy to use, as you can se it acts as a environment with predefined rules. Besides being cool this is a huge help when teaching physics classes or when you need simple animations to show your point.

Though it might take a while until we see this kind of hardware in the schools near you, it’s sure that technologies like this or derived from it are going to make our life better. What do you say about it?

The future of mobile phones

Tuesday, March 13th, 2007

concept_phone.jpg

Click to enlarge

I was writing earlier about the Nokia 888 concept phone, that got me thinking. It would be interesting to take a look at the direction mobile phones are heading so I searched around the Web and here’s what I’ve found.

What you see above is just a concept phone designed by Tao Ma, but it just might be the future also. As you can see the phone has no display so no text messages or internet access, but it does have a integrated MP3 player. The way I see it phones like this will be created in the future, as science evolves.

Electronic devices become more specialized and for ladies such phones that can double for a bracelet could be the perfect choice. Also businessmen would choose a device able to perform their daily tasks, as Internet connection, performing office tasks, etc. On the other hand young people would enjoy phones with functions similar to PSP or other portable gaming devices. The way I see it, the future has a phone for each of us.

Nokia 888 concept phone

Friday, March 9th, 2007

The new concept Nokia 888 is design by Tamer Nakisci, the Nokia Design Award, winner. And I say the award is well earned as you as you can see in the movie below. The phone is fully flexible and can take any shape, it’s even designed to ‘remember’ certain shapes ( some sort of presets), for example you can send a message to your boyfriend/girlfriend and make his/her phone take the shape of a heart.

Besides you can use the phone as a bracelet, make it turn into a clip-shape to carry it easily or make it ‘wave’ when somebody calls you. To do all this the battery is liquid-based an the display is flexible and servers as a touchscreen. With these features the phone will serve as a GPS device, PDS, alarm clock, electronic wallet and many more.

It all looks nice and high-tech but this is just a short preview of what technology has in store for us, phones like this won’t be on the market for at least a couple of years if not more.

Uber-geek’s dream PC

Wednesday, February 28th, 2007

We all strive to own the coolest PC configuration. The coolest mouse, the coolest keyboard, a sound system to envy and so on. Well I was wondering what’s the dream machine for a computer addict and I’ve thought at something like this:

The main unit

We’ll start with the beginning, the case is supposed to be one of the main attractions of your system. There was a trend of highly sophisticated cases with neons and glowing fans, but that’s all over now. The new hype consists in components showing as much as possible, preferably mounted on a wall or floating in thin air as shown here.

102704-floating-pc-mod.png

The Keyboard

Now that we’ve got over that we should cover the basic input, like a keyboard. But classic keyboards have many a problem, such as dirt getting between the keys, you have to bother your fingers with pushing buttons all day, not cool at all. What you really need is a small, compact, easy to use and to carry, Bluetooth Laser Virtual Keyboard. It uses rechargeable batteries that last for 120 min, and it has a height of only 3.5 inches.

virtual_keyboard.jpg

The mouse

The mouse is not just a pointing tool, it’s the extension of your mind within the computer. Hence it must be perfectly adapted to your needs. Such mouse must be ergonomic, precise, and smart. The Logitech MX Revolution does all that and a lot more. It senses what application you are using and switches the scrolling mode concordantly, you can turn the wheel ‘click’ on and off and it has a neat Li-Ion battery.

sleek_mouse.jpg

The monitor

A monitor must be large. This is the rule when talking about monitors now-days, large, slim and bright. Well the Athens Flat-Panel Monitor sure is large measuring 5 meters in width (that’s 5 ‘normal’ monitors) and it supports resolutions of 19200×2400 pixel. That’s HD and pure visual enjoyment. On the other hand it seems that it’s not the best commercial product as the company making them went out of business, nevertheless this is a must for your supersystem.

athens_monitor.jpg

The Sound System

Last but not least the sound system is crucial for the ultimate PC. The sound must not be a addon, it has to be am integrated part of your system. It has to be all around you and it has to provide the clearest sound for you to enjoy. Such immersion can be obtained only with a machine as the one showed below, that’s capable of putting you in the middle of the audio storm. Grace to Alpine.

apline_supreme.jpg

There you have it, the base for the ideal PC, I’m sure that you can find better examples for each category, but the main idea is the same. Watch out for the supercomputer!

Google search URLs revealed or How to create your own search URL

Tuesday, January 30th, 2007
googleurl.jpg

We all know the Google Advanced Search page that lets you refine your searches and find what you need faster. But how many of us understand the complicated URLs the search engines generates?

Well I am not saying that I’m some sort of expert but here are some information regarding the URLs generated by Google. Let’s start by looking at one such URL:

http://www.google.com/search?as_q=nintendo+wii&hl=ro&num=10&btnG=C%C4%83utare+Google&
as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&lr=&as_ft=i&as_filetype=&as_qdr=all&as_occt=any&as_dt=i&as_sitesearch=

You don’t understand much and it looks quite long but it doesn’t have to be this way. Many of the variables included are not even used in the query. Here are the basics:

What you should know is that you always start with: http://www.google.com/search?. This tells Google it’s an advanced search and that there are some variables to come. Besides, remember that all the variables must be connected with ampersands (&; ex. as_q=nintendo+wii&hl=ro) and if you want to use more than one search terms just use ‘+’ (ex. nintendo+wii) between them. Speaking of variables here are the most important tags you can use:


as_oq -> This tells Google to find pages in which at least instance of nintendo OR wii is found
as_q -> This means that you look for nintendo and wii in the same page
as_epq -> Google translates this as a Google search of “nintendo wii”, searches the exact phrase ‘nintendo wii’
num -> The number of results you want displayed, it ranges from 0 to 100. If you set num to 0 you will get the ‘No match found” message
safe -> If you set this to active the Google Safe Search is on and the adult material will be filtered
as_eq -> Use this to exclude a term from your search
as_qdr -> Shows only results that have been updated in the given time interval. Possible values: y (year), m6 (6 months), m3 (3 months).
as_sitesearch -> Limits the search to a specific domain or TLD (.us; .gov; .co.uk; .ro; etc)
as_occt -> This is set by default to ‘any’ but if you change it you can search in: title, url, links

The goal of this article is not exactly for you to use from now on hand-made search URLs but yo better understand how the Google search engine works and if you please to create some URLs for yourself.
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Pro guide to Google searches. Part II

Tuesday, January 30th, 2007
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As I was telling you in the first part of this article, I am glad that we’ve got over the basics of Google searching so now we can look into more interesting search options.

First of all there is a part of Google’s syntax that allows you to tell it where exactly to search. This comes in handy when you know part of a URL or maybe a title but you can’t find the exact page.

You can use ‘intitle:’ to search only the titles for web pages, as many of the other functions that are to follow ‘intitle:’ has a variation, namely ‘allintitle:’ that includes all the terms that follow in to the title search:

intitle:”Santa Maria” boat -> searches in title for Santa Maria and does a search on the term boat
allintitle:pirate ships treasure -> searches in title for all the terms

I think you’ve got the idea so here is a list of syntax words that work the same way:

‘intext:’ works the same way only restricts the search to the body of web pages, excluding URLs or titiles
‘inanchor:’ a anchor is the description for a text link: <a href=”http://our-picks.com”>Our-picks</a> here Our-Picks is the anchor.
‘site:’ here you can use bot hosting and domain;this works well with the main page of a site (ex: cars site:co.uk)
‘inurl:’ searches the URL for sites, including subdirectories, it is highly recommended that you remove the ‘http:’ prefix before the search
‘link:’ this one is interesting since it shows you the sites that point to a specific URL, any page of the site not only the main URL
‘cache:’ returns the page from Google’s cache as it looked the time, useful when you want to find something on a page that changes frequently
‘filetype:’ works great with other syntax elements when you need a particular file type, like ‘.pdf’ or ‘.doc’ etc. (ex: planes filetype:pdf)
‘related:’ returns a list of pages that Google considers are related to one another
‘info:’ returns links with more informations about a given page, works well only if the page was indexed by Google.
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Pro guide to Google searches. Part I

Sunday, January 28th, 2007
googleuk

We all use Google every day, quite a few times a day even and most of us are very pleased with it. But are the results to your searches always that relevant!? Often you find irrelevant results and it takes you longer than it should to find what you want. But is this because of Google’s faulty search algorithms or is it because sometimes our searches can be ambiguous?


Well whatever the case after the Gmail search article I decided to expand the subject a little. I know some things you will find here you already know and some of them might be new for you. Anyway you can consider them as a reminder of what searching on Google really means.

I will start with the basic syntax that I am sure all of you know, but it’s the basis for further more complex syntax. For example:

You can search whole phrases by using quotes like “Rose Chappel” instead of plain Rose Chappel. The first query searches for the Rose Chappel and the second searches for the words Rose and Chappel.

I presume you also know about word exclusion, when you want to exclude a certain term from your search: PS3 -price. This will exclude all the results that contain the word ‘price’. You can do this with phrases also: PS3 -“technical specifications”. Note that there must be no space between ‘-‘ and the word to exclude.

What you must know is that Google excludes by default some common terms like I, of, the, etc. If you ever need to make Google include a given term all you need to do is put a ‘+’ in front of it: +the tower. Note that, when words like these are included within a phrase search they are automatically included like: “the tower”.

Now lets talk about some more complex searches whit ‘AND’ & ‘OR’. By default Google includes all the terms in the search but you can specify that one word OR the other should be searched. To do this insert the capitalized OR in your queries: expensive (red OR green) dress. You can also replace the OR with “|” the so called ‘pipe’ symbol. Needless to say that you can use OR with exact phrase searches: “complete idiot”|”total idiot”.

Speaking of synonyms you can ask Google to search synonyms of a certain word you search by using the ‘~’ key. For example: ~wood is going to search for both wood, woods, forest, etc.
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