Multi-Touch Interaction Research

Everybody has to go watch this video right now. It has some ultra funky stuff on this experimental touch screen, lots of Minority Report kind of actions (no holographic displays, but the interface is there).

Link from Applegeeks

Finding my feet.

Well. It's been ages since I posted to either blog. Joe posted to his blog a couple times since finishing work, but apart from that we've all been rather poor at this. At the moment I am noting that my brother Joe is leaving the UK to return to Australia and my wife's brother and mum have just left Tokyo (after leaving Australia of course) to come up here for Christmas. Kinda weird and symmetrical. They'll even be arriving in Heathrow around the same time.

I'm just sitting here finishing a drink trying to type and listening to Rufus Wainwright's version of Hallelujah (an old Leonard Cohen song) and the Eels' I need some sleep. Over and over and over. Still not the least productive night I've ever spent.

I've been looking back over the Penny Arcade comics, and I think I can do that kinda thing, maybe not with quite the drawing skill (I'm really pretty poor at that) but I think I can manage something not too bad. I may see if Joe wants to join in too. I'll give getting one up a go in the next week or so. At the very least, if Gabe or Tycho (or Mike or Jerry) want to use one of my comics to make a real one, all it will cost is a Sony Erricson w800i.

I'm actually feeling kinda sad that Joe is going back to Australia. I'm really gonna miss him, even though he's been in London the whole time and I've been a six hour train ride away north. It's been nice having both my brothers on the same side of the globe while I've been up here. So it'll be just a little bit less nice without Joe up here. Speaking of Joe by the way, he's applied for a job at Blizzard, and if for some truly bizarre reason someone from Blizzard reads this, you'd be absolutely crazy not to hire him. If I ever get around to applying, you'd be crazy not to hire me either, but that's another story. Anyway, I am feeling a bit of a weird pang at the notion that he's heading back. I think the UK will be quite poorer for not having him here.

Anyway, it's getting late and my glass is empty so I'm off to bed to dream of the white Christmas I'm not going to get this year. Oh well, maybe next one.

A loss for the world methinks

Well, I must say that although I may not know much of the little intricacies of such matters, I think that this little piece of news is a bit of a blow for the international community.

Nissan Micra

Recently I rented a Micra for a weekender away in the borderlands of Scotland. I must say that after getting over the initial disappointment with the rather cheap blocky controls on the dashboard (being a compact rental and a cheap one at that, it's not a fancier model, but it did still have a CD player) it turned out to be a fun little car to drive, so long as you're not that worried about being able to overtake anyone at all on a hill (well, actually I did do that a couple of times, but you really have to work the gears to manage it). So if you have the choice, I'd say that it is an acceptable mini car, until I try a Peugeot 207 or 107 that is...

Reciprocal post

I got bored, so I decided to do dumb blogging things... enjoy!

Real Spiced Ham

I'm beginning to regret using ICQ again, I get a constant torrent of spam from it. And it's not unauthorised messages, they can just be ignored. Instead it's all system messages like "Please authorise me" or even more worrying is "This user has added you to their contact list" which actually requires my authorisation, so there must be a hack or a spoof happening there. Today I opened my ICQ at work and saw that I had 30 bogus system messages.

The worst thing is that whenever you go to shut down your PC, ICQ won't quit if you have unanswered messages. Windows will detect that it isn't responding, but won't automatically kill it. So sometimes Paul's laptop can be left on when I thought I shut it down because of some stray ICQ messages. Very annoying, might be a good reason to change IM.

PS2 for travelling

I'm sure Joe will be pleased to know that PS2 is now portable. Actually I'm sure he already knows and is probably already developing for this platform. For those who don't read slashdot and don't know what I'm talking about Ben Heck hacked together a PS2 with a battery and a screen to take PS2 on the road having already done the same with a SNES. Pretty interesting and ingenuative, wish I had that patience and time.

P.

Thunderbird - Reclaim Your Inbox

There's also Thunderbird, the Mozilla Project's email client. Version 0.9 was recently released, still a development release but very stable and could easily replace Outlook Express on your machine. Maybe not Outlook since there is no calendar, unless you want to try the Mozilla Calendar extension or even Sunbird (a standalone version which I haven't tried yet).
And if you like all of them, I guess you could download the Mozilla Suite which has them all in one application, plus a couple of extra things. Some people say it's bloat-ware now, I'm not so sure but I don't need the extra features all that much so I just use Firefox (and Thunderbird at work, ain't they grand using open source software in a comercial environment. How cost effective of them ^_^)