Things have been quite hectic to say the least! I got a new position at work and it has no slack time – there is always something to do. As such, no time to write things here.

I have found an app for my iPod Touch that will directly interface with this site, so there may be more content yet!

Army Mechanic’s Garage Tinkering Yields 18-Foot Mecha Exoskeleton

Now that’s what I’m talking about!

I’ve talked about how I wanted to be Iron Man before, and this guy is doing it. This Aussie should team up with Bear Suit Guy and his MJOLNIR-reminiscent Trojan body armor so they can create something truly spectacular.

I’ve also been following the HALproject for awhile. This one is a man-sized suit that increases the strength of the wearer several fold and it all runs on battery power. Super slick, and I’m not surprised it’s being developed by the Japanese. What’s hilarious and unnerving at the same time, is the company that plans to produce these units is Cyberdyne.

I’ll be back

Edit: Here are some links – I haven’t viewed them, but I’m sure they’re content-tastic.

• Here’s a really short video of it in action
• Here’s the designer talking about it
• And here’s his website (under construction, but with some technical info)

I stole these links and even the intro text from a slashdot comment.

A long time ago, I said I didn’t care about the environment, and, don’t get me wrong or lying here, I still think the same way, but I feel the urge to clarify some of my hatred for helping Mother Earth.

First, I don’t actively hate the planet; I simply have no regard for it. It is simply a massive chunk of rock floating in space that we, as humans, live on. If there are terrible things that must be done to get the things I need and want like beer and condoms, so be it.  The Earth be damned along with any other obstacle. That pretty much sums up my previous rant in different words.

To continue, I am absolutely willing to participate in ’save the whales’ escapades as long as I, personally, benefit from it – or if the indirect benefits serve the ends that I believe in like space travel, robot bodies, or something like that. Solar power immediately comes to mind, but that’s not the best, simplest example, and I’ll get to that. A good example is Xeriscaping.

If you’re not aware of what Xeriscaping is, it’s a method of landscaping your yard in a way that matches the local biosphere. Xeriscaping is pushed harder in drier climates where water is more scarce. The goal of Xeriscaping is to conserve water because you don’t have to water the yard at all and it still looks like it’s supposed to: total shit. I’m not sure what the tip-off was that I don’t like it, but it serves as a good example because it saves me yard work.

Also, I like the move away from paper forms and such. A lot of things can be done online and a major selling point is that it saves paper, which, in turn saves trees from the lumberyard. I don’t give a shit. I like paperless systems because it means I don’t have as much crap stacked up in physical file folders. Digital is so much easier for me.

Solar power research deserves its own rant though, so I’ll try to be brief here. Actually, once I think about it solar power research doesn’t really belong in this rant very much, but it might. It could belong here though if the resources required to fabricate solar cells harms the planet in some way. Personally, I don’t know – but if it did, I’d say “so what?” It furthers my interests.

I’ll participate in your gay tree-hugging parade and it may looklike I want to make the world a greener place, but no – I just want more and cooler stuff to make my life easier. I want my Xbox!

The Kindle from Amazon is a super-cool device and I want one simply because it’s a gadget. For now, I’ve got my iPod Touch though and that’s good enough for me (so no, Ame I don’t really want one!). Also, I say Kindle, but I really mean all e-book reader devices. The portability is amazing, and, I know I hate the environment, but the paper-savings are enormous (a quick sidebar though – for all the R&D placed into the Kindle, is there really a net-gain?).

I’ve not used or even seen a Kindle in person, so all I have to go on are reviews and hearsay, but I hear the display technology is what puts it over the top: it looks and receives light like real paper with real ink on it. The only problem is there’s one page and, for all intents and purposes, nailed to the device.

The device I want is very simple to imagine. In short, it is the only book you will ever own. For the purposes of this discussion, I will describe my favorite book and backtrack later – it’ll make more sense this way, I promise.

Imagine a nice-sized hardcover book at about 250 pages – not too thick, not too daunting, but just right. Each of these pages is a double-sided version of the Kindle’s superpaper technology and looks, feels, bends, and even smells exactly like paper (extra credit for bits of pulp thrown in). You can start any book you like on page one, and flip through to the end on page 250 without pushing a single button.

Well, not quite no buttons, but close. You can select which book you want to read, by using the touch interface on the front cover. To keep the aesthetic value of this book high, no touch-screens as we know them like on an iPod, but an optical projection with adequate sensors to detect what choices  are made (very much like those laser projected keyboards out there). Storing text is trivial and flash memory is ridiculously cheap and falling dramatically on top of it, so space for books is effectively unlimited.

Some questions immediately arise though. First, what if the book you want to read is not exactly 250 pages? The weasel answer is of course, “it’s up to you,” but there are some options: Have the book’s software typeset the text for you; shrink or enlarge the text to fit the space; or if there’s more than 250 pages in the book and you reach the end, place a bookmark and simply close and re-open the book to an earlier physical page and resume reading (which leads into the next point, even).

Physical bookmarks are problematic. If the text of the book can fit in those 250 pages and that is the only text you read, then a bookmark will suit you fine. You can place a bookmark, close the book, and resume reading later – just like a low-tech book today. If you change texts, the bookmark will be on the wrong page – or will it? Again, options: Changing texts when a physical bookmark is present will simply move the words to accommodate the bookmark, so when the book is opened, the last page you were on (or even the first page, if you never opened it before) will show; Ignore the bookmark and display the text to whatever page is opened – this seems a more likely and elegant solution. To elaborate on this second point, the book likely doesn’t care where you put a bookmark – it has no way of knowing what a physical bookmark is. What the book does know is on what page you were last. I submit that is all that matters to the reader; picking up where you left off.

That’s just my book though. Yours might be a paperback, or be like an unabridged War and Peace. The number of pages doesn’t even matter – it could be as few as one or as many as 10,000. The important part is there should be pages you can turn and touch. The interface and storage don’t necessarily have to be in the book itself, but certainly helps for portability. One possible scenario is the book has no interface or long-term storage, but simply an antenna with which to receive the appropriate data.

I said it would be the only book you will ever own, but really, where’s the fun in that? Sometimes you want a large hardcover, other times a magazine format. Maybe you want to scatter your house with them so you can pick up and read wherever you are. Portability is a selling point to be sure, but hey, “what if?”

I’ll leave marketing departments and focus groups to the name of this device, and you know it’ll be something stupid like Kindle. Yes, I said it. The name Kindle is terrible. You’re Amazon of all things! You’re named for a rainforest! Pick a tree that grows in the Amazon Rainforest and make sure you pick a cool sounding one! That’s enough rant for now, but I want my damn book!

I feel like I have a lot of catching up to do around here. I neglected the site, but I made it more mine by hosting it myself on my own space.  The ads are gone, but I imagine I’ll put them up again. It’s not terribly attractive though because Google doesn’t pay out unless there’s at least $100 accrued to the account. I may put that operation on hold unless I get enough traffic to even be thinkable.

School will be starting up soon – that’s right, school. Just a quick recap, I got my BA in Arts & Technology at UTD in 2006. I want to go back to school and eventually be a physics guru or professor. Really, the goal is to be like Tony Stark.  Aside from the womanizing and alcoholism (and whatever vices he has), becoming more like the “mild”-mannered businessman behind Iron Man is a pretty sweet gig. It sounds like a childhood fantasy, but frankly, if you remove the fantastic elements from Iron Man’s world, it seems doable – and I count the flying suit as fantasy… for now.

Part of my Iron Man-ification is learning electronics and welding as well.  The physics professorship would be like Indiana Jones’ day job as a *yawn* archaeology professor, but by night I can make doomsday devices and power suits. Ame really wants a death-ray, and I think I could oblige her on that eventually.

This website is also an endeavor of mine, I want to continuously make it better and offer more, almost always with in-house code, or at the very least custom CSS.  CSS seems a simple concept to learn, I just need to master it so I can wield it properly. I leanred HTML by myself many years ago, so this shouldn’t be too difficult.

There are my game design projects too. These may end up purely academic, but I really do love it, even if the industry is as cut-throat as it is. Maybe I can make some games on the side as well as being a super-villain – especially cool would be if they were good and people liked them! I was dabbling in Flash about this time last year, and I have a few simple designs around collecting dust that wouldn’t be a bad idea to build upon.

And it’s not all technology either. I have my art that I really like doing and I really think I have reached a level of quality that makes it marketable. I look at art available out there for sale on speculation and commission, and, in my own biased self-hating opinion, I think I am at least no par with the offerings. I don’t do medium on media (not out of disdain, I just don’t have the talent for it), unless pixels in Photoshop counts. A great inspiration of mine is Brandon Bird – and I have some hilarious ideas, I just need to create them and make them available.

So, there you have it, the latest and greatest on… things. Too bad vocabulary takes a hit.

Brain the size of a planet.
- Marvin, the paranoid android, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

I am not a huge Star Wars fanatic, and as such, I don’t really know or care about all the minutiae of the politics and timelines. I’ve only briefly encountered the “ABY/BBY” way of keeping track of time in the Star Wars universe, but it is mostly the same as ours. I like space battles, my favorite sequences are anything on speeder-bikes, and I love lightsaber battles. Most of the reasons I love Star Wars are why I love science-fiction, physics, and space in general. It pained me though when I realized the Star Wars universe makes no sense. Some of the physics and tech seem unfeasible, but that part is perfectly acceptable to me.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”–Arthur C. Clarke

Done. I’ve just obliterated almost all the arguments saying this or that is scientifically impossible. “But what about…” Nope, sorry. They figured it out with their magic-like technology. The part that makes no sense though is the rate of advancement: It is excessively slow. The six films depict about, what, 50 years time? I know there are important, exciting things that happen after Star Wars: The Return of the Jedi, but for our purposes, it starts with Anakin and it ends with Anakin. I can buy the fact that the technology hasn’t advanced much in this time frame. It even makes sense that the technology behind the Rebel forces seem cobbled together because well, it was! A rag-tag, fringe group of dissidents simply doesn’t have the resources The Empire has access to.

The real problem for me was when Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic was released for the X-Box in 2003. This game takes place 4000 years before the time of the Skywalkers and Obi-Wan. The technology is not significantly different. What gives? That would mean there was little to no innovation for thousands of years! Looking at our own history here on Earth, there was a very similar period of stagnation and even decline called the Dark Ages. The problem with this comparison is we were in a horse and cart phase of technology and it only lasted about 500 years. After The Renaissance, humanity flourished for the most part, and technology is advancing at a tremendous rate. With the Dark Ages ending by the close of the 9^th century, I can’t even imagine what our own technology would be like in the year 5000, let alone starting at Star Wars-level tech and then advancing 4000 years!

Lightsabers can only be constructed by those trained in the use of The Force because the components are too sensitive and volatile to be handled by a machine or someone unskilled in their use. Bullshit. I think over 4000 years, someone would have figured it out, especially a Dark Side user of The Force who wanted to arm his minions well. This is just one example, as there are countless other “stagnations.”

So, Star Wars is cool and has some great things to strive for as far as sci-fi tech goes (FTL, Repulsor Lifts, Lightsabers), but the universe in which it is set is at a stand-still as far as innovation is concerned.