Archive for the 'Rubber Buckets' Category

Table-top remote control

Published at December 9, 2008 in Rubber Buckets and Uncategorized. 0 Comments

I hate remotes. I hate that they have far too many buttons; that the buttons are labelled with indecipherable hieroglyphics; that despite the fact that manufacturers conform to a vaguely standard layout (numbers on top, cluster of directional keys in the middle, primary colours below and then “others”), they don’t conform enough to enable people to figure them out without peering at them for 5 minutes and eventually stabbing at random on the basis that they can only hit the wrong button 39 times.

I also hate that a typical livingroom has around 4-5 remotes, some square and utilitarian, some excitingly ergonomic, all ugly. Even aligned carefully on the coffee table, they look messy. Which is why women hide them in the magazine rack or under the TV guide, leading to irreconcilable breakdowns in relationships.

Admittedly, some have tried to tackle the issue with multi-function remotes that supposedly replace four, or seven, or 29 others, and are pre-programmed with the functions of every appliance sold in the last 15 years. Except for the hideous made-in-China set-top box that your cable provider forces you to use, and also to display in the most prominent position in the livingroom.

Seriously, do these people have no sense of style? For god’s sake, the average laptop or mp3 player has more designer elegance, without being the centrepoint of our homes.

So here’s the pitch. A table-top device around the size of a large book. A large, say 15cm, touch-screen, to control everything. Large clear onscreen buttons, which actually use words to describe their functions. (Manufacturers don’t like writing words on their hardware because of the expense of producing different models for every language. In software, it’s just a setting). As well as coming preloaded with a full set of functions for every existing remote, it would be possible to download new ones as they become available (and allowing consumers to write and share their own settings online). A slot-loading DVD/Blue-ray drive at the front of the device. (No more crouching in front of the TV jabbing at the player). A large built-in hard-drive to hold your entire movie collection, so that you can flick through them, iPhone-style. Wifi, to download further movies, and those configuration files for your new remotes.

As you may have spotted, this basically amounts to a computer, in a new shape. That’s why I know it can work, and be produced for a reasonable cost. I’m thinking around $500. Remember, this is replacing your DVD player and HD recorder. It’s not quite a Windows media-centre - it’s focused much more on the user-interface. It might run Windows though. Or Linux.

The one stumbling block I can see is cables. With current standards, it’s not cheap to wirelessly transmit a video signal across a room. And wireless power (of the magic induction variety) is still a few years away. So we can’t get away from a single cable, carrying both power and video signal, going to the TV. It could at least be made flat and come in a variety of unobtrusive colours; and some people will be able to hide it under the rug, or the floorboards, or build the device into their table and run it down inside the leg. No it’s not perfect, and it might not suit 50% of livingrooms. That’s still a large target market.

Lemsip café

Published at September 28, 2007 in Rubber Buckets. 1 Comment

A while back, I read an article in which a smoothie vendor in Dublin complained that business was rather seasonal. Given that Irish summers are short to non-existent, smoothie bars apparently struggle for trade for most of the year (hence the extortionate prices). The interviewee couldn’t think of much in the way of alternatives; coffee would be competing with existing cafés, and isn’t quite the same market, since it’s perceived as not particularly healthy.

What does a cold, wet city-centre Dublin commuter want in the wintertime? Something healthy but also with a feelgood factor?

Well herbal teas strike me as the obvious answer. Not the watery camomile stuff, more like ginger or cinnamon-based stuff, hearty pick-me-ups. But I can think of something even more welcome. Lemsip. Can you think of anything more desirable when you’ve got yet another cold, you’ve missed your bus, and you really don’t want an alcoholic drink to further weaken your system? Open a Lemsip café - with paracetamol-free alternatives (lemon and honey, lemon and cloves) in case you feel like staying for a second drink; and the smoothie trade will be a summer sideline.

The Internet of Virtual Worlds

Published at September 20, 2007 in Rubber Buckets. 1 Comment

This is a bit of a late rubber bucket, as I’m only pointing out that I had the idea, at the point when it’s starting to come true (maybe).

Virtual worlds, such as Second Life, are far too important to be left up to monopolies playing with vendor lock-ins. Second Life itself currently looks like what the internet would look like, if Tim Berners-Lee had been a bit more commercially minded. Sure it’s making money for its creators, but for most of the world its presence hasn’t registered.

So I proposed an open interface standard for virtual worlds. Free 3d browsers, your avatar stored as an XML “cookie”, and so on. Well I didn’t make a technical proposal of course… I put it in a text-file on my own computer. Er, in the form of dialogue, references and notes for a novel. Just one clip:

“BBC’s Newsnight… referred to “online virtual worlds [as] one of the hottest business propositions of dotcom boom Mark II.” Imagine in 1992 saying that websites would be “one of” the hot new business concepts of the internet.” From now on, this is the internet.

Slashdot | Standards For Interconnecting Virtual Worlds

Clothes shops for skinny people

Published at July 24, 2007 in Rubber Buckets. 6 Comments

No, not fashion shops.

Department stores and “typical” clothes shops cater for average people. Your typical department store jeans rack, for example, caters for a 32 to 40 inch waist. Sometimes they do go down to a 30-inch waist - but without exception, that’ll be with a 32-inch inner leg. In other words, they’re for small people. Shopping for trousers is a strain, for me. Forget about deparment stores. Zara and H&M might have some styles in 30/34 - or they might not. And to be honest, I’d prefer 30/36, which I only recently discovered do actually exist - online. As for t-shirts, I look forward to the day when I win the lottery and can get all my t-shirts tailor-made, i.e. without wings.

Now I am dimly aware that there are lots of small, painfully trendy shops around that exclusively sell clothes for slim figures. And I am also aware that the majority of the population have the reverse problem, and would dearly love to be able to fit into those slim clothes. That is not the point. Call me stingy, but I’m not prepared to pay upwards of €100 for every pair of trousers. I’m not fashionably-inclined. I just happen to be slim, that’s all.

And I’m not the only one. In fact I distinctly recall most of my college friends being skinny and untrendy. True, that’s because we were all geeks. Still, geeks have money.

There are high-street shops for extra-tall people, and for extra-fat people. Isn’t it about time there was a major chain of clothes shops for people who are skinny, but who otherwise just want to pay normal prices for normal clothes?

I hear marketing on Slashdot is pretty cheap…

Clickable links in internet video

Published at July 19, 2007 in Rubber Buckets. 1 Comment

I’ve never liked the fact that Youtube and all its competitors use Macromedia’s Flash plugin. Very dangerous to base a large part of the web on proprietary software. Still, one of the nice things about Flash is its interactivity. In fact, using Flash for playing plain video is a bit of a mis-use of technology - it just happens to work, and be hassle-free.

Still, it is very “old-media”. You sit, you watch it, and if you have the patience to watch until the end, you get offered a handful of vaguely-similar videos. That’s equivalent to having webpages that consist only of plain text; and at the end you’re offered a bunch of links generated by a search engine offering more-or-less the same information on another site. Or put it another way: it’s missing the whole point of the internet.

Why not allow video uploaders to add clickable links to their video? In the uploading process, the owner of the video clip would specify the link text, the time that the link appears (e.g. 1 minute, 20.4 seconds from the start of their clip), the length of time it remains visible, and a handful of formatting options (position: top/centre/bottom; transition effects; perhaps foreground/background colours)  The links might be to another video on the same site, but could equally be to a webpage (opening in a new window/tab), or a mailto: link, or initiate a VoIP call, etc.

So a video clip showing how to cook a certain dish might contain a link to a recipe page for printing out. A video clip advertising Volvo might link to a page of tech specs while referring to engine performance, then link to emissions information while discussing how green it is, then to a full list of safety features, and finally to a page showing their local dealerships based on geo-ip. The point is that the viewer chooses the information route that interests them, without being overly distracted by stuff they don’t care about.

How would this be profitable? There would be the temptation (for the hosters: Youtube etc) to charge per click on all videos. I would suggest this would stifle the market, because the majority of video uploaders are working for free. Viewers would then associate video-embedded links with crassly commercial pages, and learn not to bother clicking. Perhaps a better model is to allow embedded links for free as long as the video is viewed on the hosting site (Youtube etc); but if viewed while embedded in an external site, the creator would be charged per click.

OCR for mobile phones

Published at July 10, 2007 in Rubber Buckets. 5 Comments

Optical character recognition for mobile phone cameras. Why? Because, used in conjunction with basic machine translation or dictionary lookup,  you have real life, with subtitles.

Imagine this: you’re in a restaurant in a foreign country. They don’t have an English menu, and the waiter’s English isn’t great either. Pull out your mobile, switch on the camera viewfinder, hold it over each menu item in turn. As the phrase queso de cabra appears in the centre of the picture, an eggtimer appears in the corner of the screen, indicating that it’s attempting to recognise the words. A moment later, at the bottom of the screen in a shaded area appears the text queso de cabra in blue, and next to it, goat’s cheese in yellow. (The blue text confirms the original, so you can be sure it’s looking at the same words as you. The yellow text stands out more clearly as the info you really need.)

Optionally, it might also pronounce the original word and/or translation. Useful for learning the language.

Also handy for deciphering road signs, advertisements, notices in shops…

Advantages over electronic phrasebooks:

  • It’s software - no expensive qwerty keyboard etc - therefore huge price advantage over phrasebooks.
  • Enables easy downloads  - of updates, but also of additional language packs.
  • Could detect diacritical marks or potentially even other scripts (e.g. Arabic, Japanese), whereas many English speakers would not know how to input non-English characters on a keyboard.
  • Faster to use, more discrete, one less gadget to carry around or lose.

Potential issues:

  • A reasonably high resolution camera would make it more useful, by allowing the user to zoom in on distant signs while maintaining a good enough resolution to allow OCR.
  • A camera that could produce a reasonably sharp image down to distances of around 5cm, would be more useful. This would enable it to work with typefaces of preferably down to 12pt but at least 14pt. Smaller typefaces are probably unrealistic. This probably requires autofocus rather than the fixed focus lens found on most current mobiles.
  • It would be very elegant, from the user’s point of view, not to require pre-selecting a special mode to use this function. In other words, any time the camera is on, it is attempting to detect and recognise text. However this is probably not possible with 3rd party software; it might only be an option for the phone manufacturer.
  • It might be difficult to enable it to work on a live picture (possibly require image-stabilisation software?). Early/cheap versions might require the user to take a snapshot of the text before processing it.