Roundtuit

Gizmodo is reporting this product, which clearly makes “Ambilight for All” into a Been Done.

Did they get the idea here at Roundtuit? Guess we’ll never know!

Here’s another DIY version.

All my friends come up with clever T-shirt ideas. At least they seem clever at the time.

One of them bought a nice printer, and some good transfer material, and with a little work (well, alot of work) he printed some pretty good gear.

But, what I want is a printer that prints directly on the shirt. So I can just have an idea, wear it out that night, and find out that I’m not with stupid, I am stupid.

Contributed by Rob Smith

I love my Archos Gmini XS 202 music player. But there’s one feature I wish it, and all music players had. While I’m playing a shuffle or playlist, I’d like to be able to think "hey, that’s Warren Zevon. Love that guy, but I don’t want this song, I want the another by him" and then hit a button and get it. There are a variety of similar things I’d like to be able to do with the navigator button (see figure below):

Contributed by Rob Smith

Like every right-thinking person, I’m fascinated by the possibilities of AJAX, and I love Google Maps, and all the wonderful Google Map Hacks that spring therefrom.

A couple of interesting hacks are:
MyConcertDates, in which you can type a date, and get back a (nicely color coded) Google Map of concerts in the USA.
EVMapper takes in keywords and dates locations, and gives you events on a Google Map.

Of course, these two really should be combined. But what would be even more interesting is a tool which scanned the ID3 tags of MP3 files on your computer, giving you a multi-selectable list of artists whose show you might like to see.

This way, you could get the answer to “is there anything on (in this area and time frame) that would interest me”, without having to remember what things interest you. Perfect for those of us with broad interests and/or dysfunctional memories.

What were we talking about, again?

Contributed by Rob Smith

When I first saw the Philips Ambilight TVs, I thought they were the lamest gadget since the pet rock.

But then I saw one in person. And damned if it doesn’t work. Filling up the vague space of your peripheral vision with the right color really does make TV seem more real.

BTW, since women have better peripheral vision, I wonder how it is for them?

But why can’t anyone who has a home theater PC (or even just a regular TV) add on a couple of lamps (wired through a USB port in the HTPC case) that back light in the right color? Would this cause a patent problem with Philips, I wonder? If not, someone should make it, as I can imagine lots of people buying them, if they were at a modest price point.

So, you’re sitting in Starbucks, working on your iBook, admiring the girl in the Starbucks across the road (who is working on her iBook), and you turn off your iPod for just a minute, perhaps to answer your cell phone.

And, surprise of surprises, you find yourself toe-tapping to the public music swanking its way out of the coffee shop sound machine. Of course, Starbucks has the specialty CD on sale at the counter, but those shiny platters aren’t your scene.

Why can’t you just hit a button on your (wireless enabled) iPod, or your iBook, and just buy the currently playing tune (or the current CD, or playlist)?

This sort of on-the-spot buying may be the only way to get people to buy music anymore: tapping into that lovely moment when a certain song plays, and you realize the girl at the other Starbucks just smiled at you.

AI Guys (like myself) have been trying to get machines to play chess for decades. Personally, I think it’s a misplaced effort, in that it’s allied with the idea that rationale is the missing element in making machines more like natural intelligence. Bull-da-da, I say!

Computers generally play chess by doing massive look ahead to possible future game configurations. People don’t do this. Computers are also programmed to play chess, whereas we mere humans must learn the game. Chess is a very hard game to learn from experience, both for humans and machines.

Backgammon is very different. A machine has learned to play backgammon very well, simply from experience.

Why backgammon, and not chess? I believe it is because lots of game configurations can be accessed even by a novice player in the former, but not the later. In a sense, the randomness of the dice rolls (the noise) in backgammon makes it easier to learn!

To test this theory, I want to playtest what I call noisy chess. It’s like normal chess, but with the addition of a 6-sided die and a spinner:

Game play proceeds the usual way, but the player must roll the die after each move. If the result is a 0 (which happens half the time), the move stands. If the move is a 1 (which happens 1/3 of the time), the player spins. The player reads the spinner on the inner ring in this case (which has 8 slots, corresponding to the 8 squares around the place that the player has just moved to). The player’s piece is moved into the corresponding adjacent square (if it can be placed there, see rules below). If the die result is a 2 (which happens 1/6 of the time), the player spins, and reads from the outer ring of the spinner (which has 16 slots, corresponding to the 16 squares 2 spaces away from the square the player has just moved to). Once again, the player’s piece moves to the corresponding square from the spinner.

Additional rules are that a player’s piece can’t move onto a square where player already has a piece. A player also cannot move into check. If these cases occur due to a spin, the player spins again. One might also want to restrict bishops to appropriate diagonals, but I’m not sure about that.

I think noisy chess would open up lots of possibilities, including proximate attacks. But I theorize that it would make chess much more learnable, both by people and machines.

And I’m going to playtest it, soon as I get a roundtuit. If you do first, please let me know!

Contributed by Rob Smith.

I love National Public Radio, but I live in the UK. No worries, you can listen to almost all of the NPR programming online. And you can find out what items you’d like to listen to via the copious NPR RSS feeds. Brilliant!

But I really like to listen to these items on my PDA, free and easy. Unfortunately, the items are available as streaming media.

So, I did some research, and figured out how to download the media files that backup these streams. You can find it on my main blog “Truth Like The Dark”.

But what’s really needed is a GreaseMonkey script that does this whole process. In case you haven’t heard, GreaseMonkey is an amazing scripting language that allows you to modify how Firefox displays web pages. This is really deep stuff, allowing you to effectively reconfigure the operation of pages, even drawing data sources that aren’t on that page. For instance, the AmazonLinky GreaseMonkey script adds a pretty tab to all Amazon pages, so that you can get a pull-down with other bookseller’s prices, and libraries that might have your book. GreaseMonkey will change lots of web business models.

But it could also help to make any RealMedia streaming link have an associated “download” link. It’d be relatively easy to write, but I’ll never have enough time to get roundtuit.

Contributed by Rob Smith

I’ll never be rich enough to get this roundtuit. But if I were theme-park-owner rich, I’d make a Transformers roller coaster.

Think about it. You stand in line to get in a hot Shelby Mustang. You whiz around a race track, then transform into a fighter plane for a quick dogfight, maybe a speed boat for some splash filled chase action. And, finally, whirrrr-buzzzz you’re at at the heart of a mighty robot, for some fisticuffs with a Decepticon. I see a downtown setting, with mirror glass covered buildings so you can watch yourself Transform.

Right before you get off, I figure you’d want a victory dance.

UPDATE: The technical detail on this, as I see it, is that it has two tracks, one for each foot, running in parallel, but with twists here and there, and perhaps with some track switches in the line. The cart that holds the passengers is on an articulated frame, connected to the two feet, which enables the “Transforming”. Since their are already coasters with a wide variety of connections-to-track, the added degrees of freedom the double track and articulation would add seem natural. This is the real “meat” of this roundtuit. The Transformer angle is just exciting window dressing.

With today’s announcement of a live action movie of our Transforming Robotic Brethren, somebody will take up this roundtuit. Oh yes, they will.

Contributed by Rob Smith

UPDATE: Put this robocoaster on tracks, and you’re getting close.

You know those clever web gizmos that translate any web page into the linguistic style of Yoda, Smurf-speak, etc.? If I had the time, I’d write one that provided something like the following (example from another roundtuit):

As thou knowest, all ski bindings are pretty much mechanical, in accordance with prophecy.
Why does thou not mount two sets of 2 or 3 axis strain gages on a simplified binding that is electrically programmable, as it is written in the scripture?

Wish someone would pick this up. Hilarity would surely ensue.

Contributed by Rob Smith

Update: Been Done!